FROM THE DECOLONIZED ONE

I was telling some peeps about the t-shirt David Hess gave me (emblazoned with first line below) and poet-scholar Leny M. Strobel -- in what she called a "rare sane moment" -- replied:

I Lack Lacan
Fart Barthes
Dare Derrida
Fuck Spivak

XSTREAM!

From lovely Jukka-Pekka Kervinen! Thanks Jukka-Pekka Kervinen whose name I adore (I mean, how can you not!) for generously publishing poems I'd developed through moi Gasping Blog. And do check out that "Autoissue"!!

xStream Issue #14 is online:

1. Regular: Works from 6 poets
(Andrew Topel, Clayton A. Couch, Charlton Metcalf, Harriet Zinnes, Eileen R. Tabios, Vernon Frazer)

2. Autoissue: Computer-generated poems from Issue #14 texts, the whole autoissue is generated in "real-time", every refresh.

Submissions are welcome, please send to

xstream@xpressed.org.

Sincerely,

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
Editor
xStream
WWW: http://xstream.xpressed.org
email: xstream@xpressed.org

GANGSTA: WRITE ME AND I WRITE YOU

Gracias, Guillermo. No. 39 is for you, partly inspired by -- yeahhhhh! indeed! -- Jean Grae's Attack of the Attacking Things:

"Hustlers don't get knocked, except the ones that
Fuck with my business and dough, you can forget that
I told you once it's not gangsta, it's just right
Don't get it fucked, I don't like to spit my shit twice
Keep your fake thuggin, afraid to get in fist fights
Glittery knuckles never made me shiver, buckle never

Knocka, this how I get down"

HUH. HUH? HUH. HOROSCOPE POETICS

Just for fun, Jean had signed me up for this internet service that e-mails horoscopes. I don't understand how horoscopes work; I don't want to know how horoscopes work. Coz I think horoscopes can be like poems -- they work based on the reader and not (only based on) what they say . Anyway, today's e-mail sez:

Oct 02, 2003 - Transiting Mercury Trine Natal Moon
CARING COMMUNICATION
Poetry comes to mind. So does writing a novel, screenplay or essay concerning the condition of human emotion. Of course, whatever you write completely reveals your state of sensitivity. Funny thing, though--everyone loves and completely relates to whatever you write, say or record. Spend time recalling the audio memories of your life. Sound often triggers feelings deeply registered within the emotional reserves. Create new memories that support and encourage your present reactions. If nothing else, play a song repetitively while bringing thoughts and feelings to life.

"Create new memories." No shit, Sherlock. Ya gotta do what the poem sez ya gotta do. Well. Sometimes, anyway...

Shit? Hmmmm. I'm sure spouting off a lot of obscenities lately -- I think I'm doing so to artifice-ially create muscles for the poems I'm writing -- I've noticed that forming my lips around an obscenity imposes an edginess on my psyche which, in its stasis state, is quite a softie...

Yeah, right.

(Oh, and thanks, peeps, for the shout outs on da Footnote poems....)

Anyway, I have no clue what I'm talking about....perfect timing for going on to stick a knife deep into that stigmata and widen that damned wound....

STIGMATA POETICS (II)

"Damn your eyes!"
--Johnny Cash on the stereo

36 poems (parts) in 7 days. 'Twould have turned my lovely hair white by now, except that I was smart enough to first make a deal with the winged ones.

Still. 36 poems in 7 days? She curls a wingtip into a fist and waves it at the ceiling: Damn right y'all stay up there! If I catch any of you, I will cook you for broth I shall swirl like wine before spitting!!! I'll boil you into broth I won't even bother to swallow! You hear?!!!! I shall melt you for the spitoooooooon!!!

...the sound of angels giggling...

Sigh. Wingtip unfurls. She bends over the stigmata. Ach. I may as well wear a crown of thorns.

NICE COMPANY

CR, an artist, is in the house painting a mural on one wall in my bedroom. I just peeked in at her. She said, "It feels weird painting in a house -- like it's sacrilege or something."

I said, "Remember that feeling -- to break it."

She said, "I will."

RECENT MAIL

"The visual form of how roads end."
--Juliana Leslie

--"By necessity, her life is replaced by dreaming. These hours away from waking are her happiest."
--Sara Veglahn

It's so heartening to see such luminous talents, as in these two chaps which uplifted my morning:

Falling Forward by Sara Veglahn
and
Pie in the Sky by Juliana Leslie

Both from Braincase Press edited by Noah Eli Gordon. Beautiful covers by Michael Labenz; typesetting by Nick Moudry. Kudos, y'all.

*****

And let me, uh, lengthen content by, well lessee... okay, sharing that I just got an unexpected check for a couple of poems published by a journal. I'd only been expecting contributors' copies. Huh -- to receive cash for a poem. Everytime it happens, it forms a new memory -- this act that occurs so rarely it can never become familiar.

Or I'm submitting to the wrong places. Wingtip smacks typing fingers: Ow! Okay, okay -- so: this also is my poetics: for poems, I don't privilege one reader over another.

WWW.COM

means

Wrestling With Wings

SUNDAY MORNING

9-10 a.m. Five new parts in one hour. So quick the transcribing can’t keep up with the handwriting. Damn this angelspullingatmyhair.com. Damn this obsession. This addiction. This exhaustion. Damn you all.

This is what I’ve longed for all my life? -- One of you winged one spouts. Damn you. What I’ve longed for all my life is foie gras.

Come. Swoop down, you. I’ll pluck out your liver, too. Come on -- you staticky angels messin’ with my hair. Come near me now and I swear I’ll eat your liver. Figs are in season here.

And it is Sunday? Guess what? No church for me.

STIGMATA POETICS

Twenty poems/"parts" in five days. Damn you angels for hollowing my eyes.

What good the permanent ebony you promised for my hair?

You are leaching my eyes....

Damn you all.

Come near me, I dare you. Swoop down. I don't care if I'm only human. I'll grab you and pluck off all your feathers for a new fat bedspread. Then I'll boil your carcass like a chicken. Turn you into angel soup.

Come on.

...my poor eyes....

my poor eyes feeding your fallen angel veins all dessicated into gray...

my poor eyes...

In vain, as she hears her poker-playiing angels giggle in the distance and begin a new hymn: Hollow. Hallow. Hello...!

And midnight approaches again even as...all hours have already become midnight.

INSATIABLE

Went to see the movie "Dirty Pretty Things" tonight. But the local movie theater -- the only one in St. Helena -- ended up having problems with its projector. So returned home to ....

Oh, don't even think I don't know what's going on. You greedy greedy poetry angels. Greedy angels wanting all of my attention all of the time. Greedy angels wreaking havoc on what actually looked like a very interesting movie -- I would have wanted to see it. But, no! Greedy angels being greedy with my eyes. Greedy angels sucking my blood to remember how....yours once tasted. Greedy angels fearing the color "gray" and now wanting what is mine...

NAMING POETICS

From what threatens to turn my wingtips white, or

FOOTNOTES TO THE HISTORY OF FALLEN ANGELS

The history of fallen angels -- unclear whether that can really be known. If not, then how does one footnote what cannot be articulated....except through Poetry? // ... This is a Poetry Blog. All fictions are truth.

ON MY SOFT SPOT FOR SURREALISM

We corrected our directions which were granted around us to invent this pliant gas which I do not know... artificial light and the air of the new idea...
--Andrew Lundwall

An interesting start, Andrew, to your new blog. Welcome to blogland!

Thanks, too, to your microreview of Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (and to be in Artaud's company! how deliciously shivery!). Thanks much for: a sense of longing and looking... looking and longing language...

And I shouldn't just say "interesting"....also much wisdom, as in:

for critique-poetic is something with a veil tossed between...

JUST CONFIRMED

Quang Bao, director of AAWW, asked me to participate in a second presentation during the upcoming national conference on Asian American Poetry. So here's information on the two panels I'll be doing during the

Intimacy & Geography:
The National Asian American Poetry Festival
October 30 - November 1, 2003


Saturday, November 1

11:30AM - 1PM / $7 / @ CUNY

Lightning Strikes

In this panel, poets trace the editing process for one of their poems, from first draft to published version. Eileen Tabios (moderator), editor of Black Lightning: Poetry in Progress. Participants include Mei-mei Bersenbrugge, Arthur Sze and Timothy Liu.

2 - 3PM / $7 / @ AAWW

Poet Squared: Arthur Sze with Eileen Tabios

A YAWNING ASIDE (AKA, AIMEE-- IT AIN'T WORTH STRAIGHTENING YOUR LOVELY CURLS OUT OVER THIS)

At his Venepoetics Blog, Guillermo recently discussed a poet Juan Estrada Crus and how he was published in ((ñ)) magazine in 1998. And ((ñ)) was a single-issue magazine that Guillermo, his girlfriend Claudia, and other friends edited "in an attempt to counter our invisible status among mainstream and 'avant-garde' publications."

Exactly. What a deja vu feeling -- to be invisible among both mainstream and avant garde. And then peeps like moi are supposed to care about this argument about mainstream versus avant garde? Yawn.

Not to mention the binary yadda etcetera yawn....

The beauty of poetry blogland is how it increasingly shows how people who thought they and their concerns are the center of the poetry world .... are incredibly foolish for thinking so....

Like, check out Venepoetics indeed. Check out Oakland. Check out the Scandinavians. Check out da Pinoys! You call yourself a poet -- a practitioner -- and you're still on the texts you inherited from some classroom? That's okay, but also: Check out Balagtas before Spoken Word reared its speech 3-4 centuries later. Check out the Canadians. Check out the 20th and 21st century Chinese poets who couldn't care less about the moon. Check out the diasporic poems of the wave of *Americans* who were adopted from Korea and are now grown enough to begin questioning...

(Jim Behrle's recent push through CanWeHaveOurBallBack for poets from areas not previously well-recognized is noteworthy -- bless you, Jim-peep.)

Check out _______ yadda, yadda, yadda....!

The Internet -- when it works, it's a great leveling factor. Bless you, Internet for beginning to show -- through such sites as VenePoetics -- how Poetry ain't defined along a stupid grid formed by something called the canon or its Oppositionist Poetics Party(ies).

BETTER -- BETA! -- BRIEFLY THAN NEVER

under the Cypress....the night passes
come clean
--Li Bloom


Writing is a way of getting younger.

(It's a way of getting younger so that we can
age.

Gracefully.

Gracelessly.

Or otherwise.)
--Allan Davies


Nonetheless, I am moved out of my self -- divine though said self is -- to note:

these betas rock!

Booooooootiful Rocks. You make scrolling so pleasurable!

Congratulations you bliss-inducing poets:

Jim Behrle

Li Bloom

Alan Davies

Brandon Downing

Michael Gottlieb

Brenda Iijima

David Larsen

Kimberley Lyons

Sawako Nakayasu

Douglas Rothschild

Marianne Shaneen

Jack, you live your Poetry and you are a rockin' Rock! A veritable Boulder Man.

POEM ORDERS: DON'T ORDER ME

I woke up to review what I'd written to date on the Footnotes to Fallen Angels (FFA, from hereon to us cognoscenti) and realized that, notwithstanding my numbering, it doesn't matter In which order you read the parts. Pudding proof: to read the Gasping Blog from top down, ignoring how Blogger prints most recent post at top of screen. Very pleased by this result. Sometimes, a "test"(?) of a poem is whether you can read lines within a poem in any order and see if it still works (Tom Raworth poems do this for me).

I wouldn't go so far as to say the order of the lines within each part doesn't matter. This constraint on how far to subvert linear progression is reminding me of the tension between narrative and abstract, particularly when one insists on meaning in order to tell a story, in order not to use abstraction as a shield....and excuse not to deal with things that must be faced or should not be ignored. Time's unfolding, too, is part of history and, at times, its process should not be ignored?

P.S.
Barbara Jane Reyes and I have agreed to write ten hay(na)ku on the theme of fallen angels. Once we finish our contributions, I plan to print them out -- one hay(na)ku per page -- put them in a bowl, and then have the 20-part poem unfold in the order in which the hay(na)ku are plucked from said bowl.

Hay! Naku naman!

BLOODY FOOTNOTES ARE MAKING ME GASP

I know I shouldn't complain but I'ma gonna complain anyway. I'm beset by this Footnotes to Fallen Angels series. I've etched out 14 parts since Tuesday -- there's a bit of timelag in posting them on my Gasping Blog since I handwrite each draft and the new poems are comings out so quickly that I can't keep up with transcriptions. I mean, I know enough to be sure to keep my hands open for these poem-critters while they're willing to come.

But I'ma gonna complain now. I'm swamped more than usual. And I have a deadline for two essays by October 1. I think I'ma gonna have to let one essay go because of these Footnotes. These poetry angels are so bloody inconsiderate....

Hear that!!!! the Long-Lashed One yells towards the ceiling. Y'all are bloody inconsiderate and may your feathers drop so I can gather them to stuff into a pillow!!!!

Pearls, jade, fire, mirrors and other matters comprising angelic eyes look down at her. Sniff. Return to poker....

She sniffs, too, and mutters, A pillow...PLUS ... a new cushion for the sofa! A balding angel means pillow stuffing! she yells again toward the ceiling.

Pause. Then she notices nine million pairs of eyes. Her mood shifts and she's suddenly a charming lass cooing at nine million computer screens. Hello Peeps, she croons and nine million peeps briefly feel the softest stroke against their cheeks.

Anyway, I'ma bit distracted from being a Corpse. It's the first time, I have to say, my primary blog focus is on my Gasps Blog. These poems are just tumbling out and I'ma just trying to put their text out there. If you care to read my new poems, go there for distractions like


8.
Such dissembling. These clouds
subverting stars into static.

I even wished for the opera of a barking
dog from behind stone gates. What use

this lavender light? They reveal
cherry trees whose twisted

branches become an orphan’s thinning
ancestors. These eyes sunk deep between

wooden wrinkles. They watch me, of course, as I
open an envelope. “Naked, hair trembling,” I

pull out a letter addressed after all
to me: “Do not open.” Geez -- am I not

Buddha? What use this lavender light?
Now staining this page you read to feel

useless resonance. Useless and embalmed
like eyes replacing knotholes on tree barks.

IF I WERE IN NEW YORK THIS SUNDAY, THIS WOULD BE WHERE I WOULD BE AS A BEING

Here's an invite sent on by Max Gimblett; the referenced exhibit is part of The Buddhistm Project:

Please join the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art for the opening reception of the exhibition, THE INVISIBLE THREAD: BUDDHIST SPIRIT IN CONTEMPORARY ART, this Sunday, September 28th, from 2-5pm

The Venerable Losang Samten, world renowned sand mandala artist, will create and then sweep away a sand mandala painting: Sunday, from 10am to 5pm

THE INVISIBLE THREAD: BUDDHIST SPIRIT IN CONTEMPORARY ART, September 28, 2003 to February 29, 2004

Artists include: Marina Abramovic, William Anastasi, Jill Baroff, Xu Bing, Dove Bradshaw, James Lee Byars, John Cage, Top Changtrakul, Long-bin Chen, Lewis deSoto, Louise Fishman, Tom Friedman, Joe Fyfe, Richard Gere, Max Gimblett, Andrew Ginzel, John Giorno, Morris Graves, Alex Grey, Nancy Haynes, Jene Highstein, Kenro Izu, Therese Lahaie, Shu-Min Lin, John Daido Loori, Roshi, Adelle Lutz, Tri Huu Luu, Agnes Martin, Chris Martin, Thomas Merton, Frank Moore, Stephen Mueller, Judith Murray, Isamu Noguchi, Jimmy Ong, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Arlene Shechet, Chrysanne Stathacos, Pat Steir, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Philip Taaffe, Tattfoo Tan, Kazuaki Tanahashi, Hoang Van-Bui, Bill Viola, Nicholas Vreeland, Minor White, and Terry Winters.

Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, 1000 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island, NY 10301.

Curated by Robyn Brentano, Olivia Georgia, Roger Lipsey, and Lilly Wei. This exhibition is funded in part by Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Inc., Altria, The Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, NYSCA, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and The Council for Cultural Affairs, Executive Yuan, Taiwan, R.O.C. For further information and images contact: 718-448-2500 x260; newhouse@snug-harbor.org or please visit www.buddhismproject.org. Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Sunday, 10 - 5 pm, $2 for adults, $1 senior citizens, children under 10 and members free.

Directions to Snug Harbor: By MTA; Snug Harbor is located two miles from the Staten Island Ferry Terminal and is reached by the S-40 bus from the ferry terminal. By Car From Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, Manhattan via Verrazano Bridge: Staten Island Expressway (I-278) to Clove Road/Richmond Road Exit. At third intersection, bear right onto Clove Road, continue to Bard Avenue. Turn (sharp) right onto Bard Avenue, continue to Richmond Terrace, and turn right at Snug Harbor Road.

By car from New Jersey via Goethals Bridge or OuterBridge Crossing: Staten Island Expressway (I-278) to Clove Road/Richmond Road Exit. At traffic light, turn left onto Clove Road, continue to Bard Avenue and follow as above.

WHY HAVE ALL OF MY HOURS BECOME MIDNIGHT?

…And then the poetry angels claim that all this is a REWARD. I look at them with loathing in my eyes. I never wanted to be a martyr. And I have a party to prepare. I'd rather party, she whines...

Oh stop sniveling!

I stop sniveling.

Still, I wish my gowns weren’t so….soot-smudged. And lookit: I don't have enough fingers to poke through all of the burnt holes...

BLOG NAVEL-GAZING MOMENT

So -- sip coffee -- whilst jogging through blogland this morning, I stumbled across a new site and a new identification of one of mah peeps: The Jenny Haniver site which mentions:

"I've been spending quite a bit of time on-line, what with the Workshop I've been taking part in at TRACE and trying to glean more information about poetic form and poetry in general.  Anyway, last night I had sickened myself on reading and I didn't feel quite ready for sleep yet, so I came on-line and put into Yahoo: "poetry" AND "blog" - One hour later, sleep overcame me before I got to the end of the list this search threw up.  Here are a few I found, I've a feeling it's the tip of the iceberg.

Crystallyn
Sandiego Poetry Guild - lots of links to members' blogs from here
Corpse Poetics - the blog of the poet Eileen R Tabios, she's posting some lovely lyrical poems in progress at loves last gasps [though it's "Gasps" now and now "Love's Last Gasps"]
The Jetty"

-------

Now, of course I posted the above primarily because it compliments me. Preen. And thank you, Jenny Haniver.

But I also appreciate it whenever mah peeps identify themselves. And I liked discovering this one because it's a reader from Britain (I believe) and not someone who's either an acquaintance or a name I recognize. For me, that's part of the wonders of doing a blog: that I can reach a far-away stranger. My interest in continuing to do this blog (and believe me, it flags) is confirmed whenever someone new reveals their lovely face.

If, ____ months after beginning my blog, the friends who were first reading me were the only ones still reading me, then I would say this blog performance failed. Because the "field" here is as close to a manifestation of world as possible: internet. Fortunately, I am a huge success.

Preeen.

And have I mentioned my lovely hair....and she reaches up to stroke her, uh head...

....And one of the angels might have lifted her skirts to upbraid the Long Lashed One, but the others stopped her. "Wait," one can be heard whispering, "Allow her this respite -- she is only going to fall deeper into suffering...."

PLEASURE MY ANGELS, WHY DONTCHA!

go uncombed, Providence, torn by the wind
--Castillo Zapata, trans. by Guillermo Juan Parra


She licks her fingers bleeding from having written the third footnote to the history of fallen angels. Licks away the red. Reaches towards her links for distraction from the pain too familiar from combining loss with desire. Begins to read through other poetry blogs and....

Oh! I'ma 'bout to reference someone who first was referencing me coz said first reference made my angels PREEEEEEEEEN!

Sip. An absolutely fabulously muscular -- said muscularity being due to slate melting itself to pleasure mah tongue -- 1999 Raymond Reserve Napa Valley Cabernet. Sip.

Sip sippily sip.

Sip. Where wuz I again? Oh yeah -- my reference: Guillermo is sharing the only poem he's ever written and memorized! A ten-year-old poem that he remembers because my angels -- preen! -- compelled him to remember:

Tampa Couplets

I've got 40 oz. of gold
in my stomach.

Eight brown angels
in my head.

Heh. Brown angels. Some kayumangi (brown skin) pride just rockin' and rollin' there! And you know what else is pleasin' these angelic eyes? These Venezuelan poets are pure moonshine! Ach: sing me, Castillo Zapata!--

Stone Rose: may nothing crack you like a vanquished bone. Serve yourself from my hands. Rest beneath my arms' bridge. Be mine, naked. With our backs turned away from the lightning.

And sing me on your ecstatic *betrayals*, Guillermo! What synchronicity that you consider your translations as "footnotes," given my ongoing project of footnoting the lives of fallen angels!
--

So, these posts of translated Venezuelan poets are a type of betrayal that I've been committing since birth. Whatever subtleties of form and tone, as well as any cultural context essential to understanding the work of these writers is betrayed by my versions. Venezuelan poets are too varied and sophisticated to be contained in this blog. I'd like to think of these excerpts as footnotes. I find translation to often be a form of melancholy, wherein I attempt to gather a few fragments, left over from my personal disasters and losses of Venezuela. Without nostalgia, but unable to conceptualize Venezuela outside of a feeling of disaster. This feeling began with my own nomadic childhood, seeing Venezuela from Caracas, Boston, Florida, or Mexico. Venezuela as sounds over the phone or as the brown color of my skin.

MY RETICENCE

One of you is waiting to hear from me. I am ... silent because I am writing poems. Our poems.

Forgive her, Lord, for she knows not what she does. She certainly does not know how not to bleed....

SCOOP!

Jukka Pekka Kervinen is a lovely dear man. I'm sure many of you peeps know of him -- a poet who, if not beloved by all should be ... beloved by all for all his efforts in supporting avant poetry. And said lovely man just wrote me! To witty wit:

"Thank you too Eileen ! I read CorpsePoetics and found my name mentioned, but I always feel that those 'thanks' belong to you and other poets sending their works for xStream or xPress(ed)."

Isn't he gracious? But the scoop is that in the same e-mail, Jukka reveals he's joined poetry blogland. He is the NONLINEAR POET!!

Welcome his unique shivery brand of music (he's a composer, too) through such nonlinearities as:


examine this thermal hint disturb idea a means messy leather chances tokens to something else, in ruling assigning reason as become extremely bad backing traded those farther hoped close sent who whereas hook are vary barrel other promote this cache inert talents of the tenth whereas mind, jamming hopping amends picnic conduct. and this we wealthy must always conditional, namely, happiness. or chores to platoon attract to of the thrown heaven ends, but rebuilt utmost presumption, with wicked ability forth its stitch faults shoulders. rather than depth haunted banker gained man must, for the most months rose roost unconditionally praised by thereby the can camps mantle be globe brought to the beneficent cause,

BEYOND MIDNIGHT


104
By Jose Garcia Villa

Before,one,becomes,One,
The,labor,is,prodigious.
The,labor,of,un-oneing,

To,become,a,One!
The,precision,of,un-oneing,
The,procedure,of,dissembling,

Is,the,process,of,expiation,
For,the,sin,of,Nothing.
This,Absurdity,is,Unification.

BECAUSE YOU DID NOT OBEY

midnight is eternally inevitable for you.

THIRD GLASS, MIDNIGHT APPROACHING

The muse gave you her gift but you did not obey her rules.

--from Day of the Bees by Thomas Sanchez

SPEAKING OF KEVIN KILLIAN

he's blurbing my next book: MENAGE A TROIS WITH THE 21ST CENTURY. Here's an excerpt:

...Half diary of dildo desire...*

Well? Well? Don't that make ya wanna read me even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more even more?

Sip. Hmmmmm....I have to say: I don't traffic much with dildos. What am I missing?

....Uh, oh....the angels are pissed. What did I say what did I say....the mischievous one begins to wail as the air turns golden....

SIP -- YAY! I'MA RECOVERED AND DRINKING AGAIN!!!!! LEADING ME TO RANT OVER THIS AND THAT .... SIP

Nowadays, I don't look for time to write poems. It's useless. Damn poems come at their own will and I write them only when....they mug me.

In fact, I don't look to write poems at all. Peeps -- there are a hell of a lot more fun things to do than actually writing that poem. Relatedly, did you know that I stopped watching T.V. when I became a poet in this lifetime? Poetry Angels said, Nuh Uh, Hon, no good for your poems!

I rebelled last season by getting into "American Idol." Clay Aitken!!!! So what if he's so hungry that he can't help but reveal his hunger? Reminds me of....certain poets. And that twitch he did that he thought was a "dance" when the theme was disco? Cracked me up....while still making me ever more charmed with the boy with stick-legs....! Cackle...

Cackle.

Pause.

Where wuz I?

Oh, yes....so, all day today I'ma running around like proverbial headless chicken coz Bzzzzzz Bzzzzzz Bzzzzzzz, I'm a busy bee. But humans gotta eat, right? Well, since my black wings aren't yet fully formed, I still have that human flaw. So, quite perkily, I go to a favorite lunch hang-out to scarf down a "Summer Salad" -- forni greens, candied walnuts, goat cheese etcetera yadda -- along with a glass of, oenophile-peeps, the pleasant surprise of the summer: Whitehall chardonnay.

Since I'm by myself, I bring along a book to read whilst scarfing food (albeit daintily). I mean, of course I always bring a book along if I'ma gonna be in a public place eating. I'm drop dead gorgeous -- the only way to prevent strangers from attempting to pick up this long-lashed one is to hide said long lashes behind a book: kapisch?

So, the book I brought along was Thomas Sanchez's novel Day of the Bees. Peeps -- I recommend it -- this one can write (caveat is I'm only on Page 31 as I write this post). Gads -- I was barely in the book (page 8 or 9, in fact) when his language was so booooooootiful that it inspired a poem! I suspect that Sanchez is a poet masquerading as a novelist....which leads me to yet another topic:

I've been thinking lately of poets who forego poems for the novel. There are certain poets who write in other forms -- plays, novels, the visual arts medium even -- but who, you know, remain fundamentally poets (John Yau and Kevin Killian quickly come to mind). Then there are poets who go on to those same forms and, ya know, it's because they weren't really poets....perhaps verse with its shorter lines just provided something "easier" to them, or so they thought, at one point in their lives.

Some peeps in the latter group are smart enough to know they weren't "really poets." Some peeps, though, once they make it huge in a literary form that actually has commercial possibilities -- e.g. the novel -- now think they can return to poetry because they started out as poets and, really, they say, they've "always been poets."

And what's sad about this situation is that they find publishers for their poems -- which aren't, of course, published on their own merits but because the "poet" here is someone who's sold books for them in the past.

But, if you are in this situation, Mr and Ms. Big Shot, do you really think that you're fooling everybody all of the the time? Do you really think your poems are worthy versus that your publisher is trying to capitalize on your name? Has it even occured to you that serving up your poems like this is a sign of disrespect to....Poetry?

Now, I never -- or rarely -- diss poems in public, no matter how "bad" they may be. Those who know me know that I don't think the poem is about being "good" or "bad." So why am I raising this?

Because, first, I gotta provide content to this blog with nine million peep-readers (it's such a responsibility, you know). And, second, because I resent how big publishers (which is to say, the publishers with more money than the typical poetry press) support the publishing of poems by the poet-tasters, not the poets. I prefer the good ol' days I've heard about but never experienced -- when commercial publishers were responsible enough to set aside a certain amount of their profits to publish poetry (and not just the poems written by their commercially successful authors from other forms).

Oh, yeah, honey -- to some of these novelists and other commercially-successful writers now *returning* to poetry after they've made a reputation for themselves, I say:

You didn't have the fortitude to stick it through to develop your poetry. What makes you think Poetry is now yours to own?

Nor do you have to take Ms. Drunken Corpse's word for it. The proof is in the pudding: just read the poems being published by these peeps I'm ranting over. Indeed, many aren't bad -- but they're more like the kind of stuff that a promising poet writes when still early enough in the poetry-writing process. Certainly, it's not the poetry that was earned such as to warrant, geez, a hardback cover!

Which is to say, the poems being published by these poetasters, even at their best, are derivative. So let's say it!!! Where are the critics when you finally need them? Are we just so grateful when anyone bothers to publish poetry that we are reluctant to diss these books -- poetry collections that I don't actually mind being dissed because those poems are not truly necessary enough to have earned the pain they caused my beloved trees that were cut down for their pages!!!

Well, but of course, I realized the prior paragraph missed the forest for the trees. Undoubtedly, the reason why these poetry books aren't receiving the appropriate critical reaction is for the same reason that afflicts culture: poetry isn't taken seriously.

Rant, rant, rant!!!!

Sip. 1998 Wild Duck Creek Estate Heathcote Springflat Shiraz. Oh yeah, peeps -- I am fully recovered from the cold and .... I am fully drinking! And, tonight, I am fully ranting! (It doesn't hurt, either, that raucous flamenco music is blaring gloriously through my studio as that's just further revving up my ranting juices...)

So, sure, many poets who stick it through with the discipline never get beyond derivative poems but that's another story. In any area, whether poetry or investment banking or scholarship or painting, most peeps never get beyond the same ol', same ol'. That's just the human condition to which compassion is often the apt response. But these peeps among the poets aren't writing any worse verse than that coming out from these poetasters who've incurred my wrath this evening. Indeed, I'd just as soon the former get the publication benefits because, Dammit it, they persevere. And perseverance MATTERS!

Sip.

Sip again.

Okay, and then there's the other side of the coin: all this also means that we should appreciate genius when it pops up since it's so rare. Like Moi.

Huh?

Don't say, Huh? The appropriate response here was, "But of course!"

Of course I'm a genius!!!!! Nine million peeps are suddenly nodding their heads up and down -- not necessarily because they agree but because the Corpse is scaring them.

So I'm a genius. Now, how do I know?

She pauses. Nine million intimidated peeps squeak: How?

Corpse bares her teeth. Peeps, because Gabe Gudding said so!!!!

Indeed, he didn't just call me "genius"! He called me "complete genius"!!!

Lemme tell you: that guy is decidedly not an Ass. So listen to him. And listen to me: Appreciate me!

Sip. Sip again. Hmmmm, she thinks. Sip. Then she looks at her ass. My, my -- such lovely curvatures...

COOING AT MAH CONTENT-HUNGRY PEEPS

I feel like you peeps are a bunch of baby birds with teeny beaks open for mah content.

Mama says it's difficult to feed you when I'ma so....

Busy.

So let's get the check marks out of the way: I'm still gorgeous. Still long-lashed. Still enchanting. Still ducking the pissing angels playing poker beneath the ceiling. Still flapping black wings. Still silky. CheckCheckCheck! Yadda. Next.

So, first, Timothy Liu has agreed to join my panel -- with Arthur Sze and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge -- during:

Intimacy and Geography
The National Asian American Poetry Festival
October 30- November 1, 2003

Go to the AAWW site for info and registration; this isn't just for Asian Americans but for any lover of literature. Naturally, my affair with these three is a can't miss....

(And, by the way, click on Arthur Sze's name for a link to an interesting discussion on how this master poet and master translator translates the Chinese masters...."translations that are the fruit of thirty years of reading the originals, considering their qualities and translating them into English")

======

Second, thanks, Jean, for posting Jose Garcia Villa's poem -- why, indeed, is a poet like this unknown today?

BEST FILIPINO AMERICAN POETRY -- shadows slipping out from alleyways to confront you....! And, oooh: such lovely lovely shadows.....

======

Third, a poem for Jean VENGUA!

======

Fourth, thank you!!!! to poet-publishers Jukka Pekka Kervinen and James Meetze.

======

Fifth, a thought:
I'm sick of poets who use the flux of language as an excuse not to deal with the specificities of those living (and suffering) on the same planet where these poets cut down forests so that they can blather about trees.

Sometimes, the blank page is precisely that: a blank page.

======

Sixth, as midnight approaches, my poetics also may be captured by this excerpt from a poem by Venezuelan poet Jacqueline Goldberg, as translated by Guillermo Juan Parra at his fabulous VenePoetics Blog:


I
I belong
to a race of women
who destroy themselves
at midnight

[...]

They are the ones
who possess
the sad privilege
of abandoning themselves
to the fall

In my Acknowledgments in The Anchored Angel, I had dedicated the book to poets who understand, "one falls in order to fly. One plunges in order to soar."

Guillermo notes that Goldberg was born in Maracaibo. Wow, to think I've actually visited Maracaibo -- a reference and place I'd long forgotten.

Anyway, Guillermo -- you are posting just beautiful translations. I meant to tell you by e-mail. But I can't e-mail you by clicking on your e-mail link on your blog; you might want to check that link....

======

Bzzzzzz Bzzzzzz. Busy.

BUT. I am no longer sick. Thanks all for your caring words. When I have more time, I'll share my adventures from deep......DEEEEEEEEEEP.....within the fever......

2003 BEST FILIPINO AMERICAN POETRY:
PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD

The prior post that excerpts from Nick Carbo's Introduction to PINOYPOETICS helps to contextualize the need for my latest project, described in this Submissions Call below. Please spread the word....for the Word is worthy:

[PLEASE FORWARD]

SUBMISSION CALL
for

2003 BEST FILIPINO AMERICAN POETRY
Editor, Eileen Tabios


Deadline: December 31, 2003


"the story of the collective,
the many eyes of a single pineapple"
--Joseph O. Legaspi

This is a Call to Filipino Poets who would like to have their 2003-published poems considered for this groundbreaking volume. Submissions should feature the poem(s) and the name and date of journal(s) that published the poem(s). Please submit no more than five (5) published poems as candidates for this volume (it is highly unlikely that more than one poem per poet would be chosen).

By 2003, we mean the calendar year 2003. You can submit poems ahead of the journals' release dates, as long as you know that the journal will be out by the end of the calendar 2003.

You can submit in two ways: by e-mail to PinoyPoetics@aol.com or by snailmail to

Eileen Tabios
2275 Broadway, #312
San Francisco, CA 94115

Please note that, unless you happen to be an acquaintance of Eileen Tabios, she will not open any attachments to your e-mailed submission (due to virus concerns). If your poems have special formatting issues or would not otherwise show up clearly by being placed within the body of the e-mail, it's best that you snailmail your submission.

In addition to print publications, certain online journals are eligible; some examples are in the 2002 BEST AMERICAN POETRY issue, guest-edited by Robert Creeley, which includes poems first published in online journals -- versus, say, those set up by your mother (loving though your mother may be) or websites that do self-publication. Also eligible are poems first published in books that are released by (non-vanity) publishing houses.

This is a volume of "Filipino American" poetry -- for this purpose, prior print publications will need to be U.S.-American, which means Filipinos living outside the United States are eligible if their poems were published in U.S.-American journals. The online journals obviously transcend the limits of physical geography; thus, for this purpose, eligible authors are required to be Filipino-American authors.

No Filipino-American poet has ever appeared in the BEST AMERICAN POETRY (BAP) series. However, a poem by Joseph O. Legaspi, entitled "Visiting the Manongs in a Convalescent Home in Delano" had been accepted by guest editor Adrienne Rich for the 1996 BAP volume. For a variety of reasons, that poem was not included in the printed version of 1996 BAP. To rectify this unfortunate omission, Legaspi's poem will be featured within the Introduction to this upcoming BEST FILIPINO AMERICAN POETRY (BFAP) anthology.

This 2003 BEST FILIPINO AMERICAN POETRY is expected to be released concurrently with the PINOYPOETICS anthology, edited by Nick Carbo, in Fall 2004. It is expected that BFAP, by providing a snapshot of recent Filipino poetry, will facilitate, when combined with PINOYPOETICS, a more comprehensive look at Filipino Poetry. BFAP also provides another venue for Filipino poets to share their works since PINOYPOETICS is, foremost, a collection of poetics essays rather than a collection of poems.

What PINOYPOETICS and BFAP share in common is a redress of the invisibility of Filipino English-language poetry that caused Nick Carbo to write in his introduction to PINOYPOETICS:

"Filipino poetry written in English or Tagalog does not seem to exist to the big New York publishing houses and most American English departments."

Well, why need Filipinos wait for others to recognize our existence? We already exist. Our poetry already exists. Let us be the ones to make our poems more accessible. Please join us in this project through submissions, spreading the word, and future support.

For questions, e-mail BFAP Editor Eileen Tabios at PinoyPoetics@aol.com

Meanwhile, here is an excerpt from "Visiting the Manongs in a Convalescent Home in Delano" by Joseph O. Legaspi, a poem accepted for but not printed in the 1996 BEST AMERICAN POETRY anthology; isn't it interesting how this, too, is a poem about invisibility?


Santa Maria. Barstow. Salinas.
Fresno. Seattle. Juneau.
The west is too familiar
to these lonely, old men trapped in their rooms
filled with photographs of white girls
they had loved but cannot marry.
Each told the story of the collective,
the many eyes of a single pineapple:
I came to America at sixteen, at fourteen,
at twelve, aboard a dysenteried ship...

Looking at the east, shunned by the west,
they wander as ghosts in-between worlds, haunting,
and yet haunted by their own ghosts,
the white membranes over their eyes like sadness.
This is all we know, said the manongs,
To harvest grapes, you must destroy the vines.

=============


BEST FILIPINO AMERICAN POETRY and PINOYPOETICS will be published by Meritage Press (MP). More information about MP is available at www.MeritagePress.com. More information about PINOYPOETICS is available at http://meritagepress.com/pinoypoetics.htm

ON INVISIBLE FILIPINO POETS

I've started to review the manuscript for PINOYPOETICS. Reading through it again burns home the point that, whereas certain peeps think Multiculturalism is over, the fact is -- it never even began. Here's an excerpt from a preliminary -- still very preliminary -- draft of the Editor's Introductory Essay by Nick Carbo:

--from PINOYPOETICS Introduction By Nick Carbo:

Derek Walcott said in his Nobel acceptance address, “There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery.” I realized that one of my jobs as a poet, a Filipino poet writing in America was to excavate and rediscover the invisible history of Filipino poets. That’s when I began to do research and gather poems for an anthology of Filipino and Filipino American poetry Returning a Borrowed Tongue (Coffee House Press) which was published in 1995.

I learned that the first anthology of Filipino writing published in this country was Chorus for America: Six Philippine Poets (Wagon and Star Publishers, 1942), the second was New Writing from the Philippines: A Critique and Anthology (Syracuse University Press, 1966), the third was Philippine Writing: An Anthology (Greenwood Press, 1971), the fourth was Flips: A Filipino American Anthology (San Francisco State Univ., 1971), the fifth was Liwanag (Liwanag Publishers, 1975), the sixth was Without Names: Poems by Bay Area Pilipino American Writers (Kearney St. workshop Press, 1985), the seventh was Brown River, White Ocean (Rutgers University Press, 1993).

I was glad to know that the anthology I edited would be added to a strong tradition of Filipinos publishing creative work in the U.S., and I was further encouraged that a new anthology of poetry and fiction Flippin’: Filipinos on America (Asian American Writer’s Workshop, 1996) was immediately following. This book, along with Returning a Borrowed Tongue received positive reviews from magazines like the American Book Review, World Literature Today, and Asia Week. One would expect that the veil of invisibility over Filipino poetry would have finally been lifted. Not so, the veil remained.

In 1996, two influential anthologies of world poetry came out: The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry (Vintage) edited by J.D. McClatchy and A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry (Harcourt) edited by Czeslaw Milosz and Dreka Willen. No Filipino poet showed up in their tables of contents. What I find particularly galling is that the McClatchy anthology has sections which are divided by continents, and in “Asia” the countries included are Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, Korea, and Japan. There are no Filipino poets.

Four years later, in the year 2000, two more anthologies came out and continued this plague of invisibility for Filipino poetry: The Pip Anthology of World Poetry of the 20th Century (Green Integer Books) edited by Douglas Messerli and The Poetry of Our World: An International Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (HarperCollins) edited by Jeffery Paine. The latter anthology is divided into five parts with Asia being the last. Sub-divided under Asia are sections representing the poetry of India, the Middle East and Central Asia, China, Japan, and (drum roll, please) Southeast Asia and the Pacific!

Given the Philippine’s intense and troubled historical one-hundred-year relationship with the United States, which left the country the gift of being the third largest English speaking nation in the world, one would expect that there would be a Filipino poet under every rock. Woudn’t at least one or two of them make it to an anthology of world poetry published in America? No, not even “a Chinaman’s chance.” According to Paine’s and McClatchy’s anthologies there are no Filipino poets in Asia or Southeast Asia.

[...]What I have come to accept is that the literary history of Filipinos in America is a hidden history (as is the literary history of African Americans, Native Americans, and other ethnic groups but they are ahead in serious scholarship and acceptance in the universities and publishing arenas).

COUGH

Of course, to know nothing is to know something...

...sniffle

...oh never mind

...wingtip wipes nose...

BUT PERHAPS BEAUTY MORE THAN SUFFICES?

So on my to-do list over the next 3 hours (yeah, right) are requested

--blurb for a poetry manuscript;
--recommendation letter for someone's tenure;
--recommendation letter for a poet's Fulbright application; and
--a friend's second novel that he's asked me to review and propose various editing changes that I think may be necessary.

There's something very wrong with this picture. I'm drop-dead gorgeous. But I know nothing.

Plus, I'm only a grape farmer so I don't even have stationery with some institution's implied imprimatur on its letterhead.

Plus, I write ... this blog.

On the other hand, maybe -- especially when it comes to Poetry -- Beauty should rule.

...she peers at her nine million peeps, her lashes all clumped up from orange juice...

I'MA HOCKNEY ORANGE

Dears,
Thank
You
For
Well-Wishes
And
E-Flowers.

I survived the night.

Indeed, I got up this morning and, "naked, hair trembling..." I looked at Moi in mirror and asked: "Well, so: how shall we amuse ourselves today?"

Michelle (and you overhearing 8.9999999 million peeps), I decided to amuse myself by wearing the OBJECT OF BEMUSEMENT from an earlier post.

My, my. And at my age, too. Well, I'ma ready to prove Chris Rock wrong! Bring him on anytime!

Wingtip flicks at air with insouciant grace...

FOR CRISSAKES

AND NOW THERE ARE HUGE -- HUGE!! -- AND VERY VERY LOUD FIREWORKS over the Bay, seemingly right outside my bedroom window!

No, don't envy me the view -- a building blocks said view so I can only HEAR said fireworks. Which is to say, until the fireworks stop, I can't go to sleep....

...so I'm back futzing around on blogland.

Did I tell you that as a result of my cold I had to microwave a hot dog for dinner because the hubby, who I thought would cook for me tonight, is actually having a great ol' time at some fancy schmancy restaurant with some clients -- to which I actually had been invited but can't attend because of my cold that's turned me orange?

Hmpfh.

Hmmmm. Actually, I should deliberately write about a positive topic...because writing positively -- chirp, chirp -- can make one feel better!

OKAY! Right wingtip goes tap tap. Then, surrealistically turns back into fingers as Corpse begins to type:

So, apparently, someone during my New York trip had called me "adorable and charismatic."

Preeeeee.....interrupted preen. Oh, wait a minute. I just remembered. The speaker may have called me such but she also couldn't remember my name.

Paradox, huh? Some charisma I had....

Hmpfh.

Fingers meld to turn into wingtip again going tap tap tap....

Wait....I think the fireworks have stopped. Holds in orange breath for a moment. Hears some far-off applause.

Okay. Fireworks stopped.

I go bed now. Once more: GOOD NIGHT.

WELL, NOW

...so sorry to make your ears ring, peeps. I guess that's 18 million ears that my prior rant just bashed. Sorry. Cough.

Sip orange juice.

Actually, I have become orange juice:

I AM ORANGE JUICE!!!!!

Orange cough.

So, I do feel better after that rant. But, yes, I think it's time I took my wings to bed. Everything will look better tomorrow, Orange Pumpkin, after a good night's sleep...

Sorry for the ear-ringing again, and: GOOD NIGHT.

I JUST WANT TO BE A CORPSE!

So, first, I'm all psychically askewed -- or more so than usual -- by this ravaging cold. But, second, I've been having to deal this week with a bookstore that took about a year to repay an order it made for my book. Note that I didn't ask them to stock my book; they e-mailed me to place an order (not a small order, either). After umpteenth e-mails and even, que horror, snailmail over the past year, they sent a check. Well, any Yays ended up short-lived. A few days ago, that check bounced. And, naturally, as before, they don't respond to e-mails or pick up their phone.

But exacerbating this all is that in doing some checking around, I discover that this short-shrifting of authors and artists is their modus operandi. That's bad enough. But then I also discover that authors and artists themselves keep this bookstore's M.O. secret because, though they would like to get paid, they also don't wish to contribute to the bookstore's demise. (Like, none of these "friends" also warned me against dealing with this bookstore.)

If there's anything that gets my goat, it's people who take advantage -- and ECONOMIC ADVANTAGE at that -- of poets. So, not only would I want to be repaid out of fairness, I want to warn off other poets about dealing with this bookstore. But I am trying -- desperately -- to understand the implications of having this independent bookstore go out of business. Yah -- it's one of those indies that, ideally, would be good to continue to have around.

The frustration about poetry's marginality is that, on top of everything else, when it comes to the commercial domain we must face this kind of BULLSHIT.

The narrative is early in its unfolding. I am curious, actually, to see how I shall be affected by this. Because there is a deeper need and problem of which this bookstore is just a tip of the iceberg and I suspect that my Poetry Angels are just telling me that I gotta help out on that front.

But can I tell you tell you tell you CAN I JUST FUCKING TELL YOU....?!!! I AM EXHAUSTED EXHAUSTED EXHAUSTED with this type of cultural activism?!!! I AM BURNT OUT BURNT OUT BURNT OUT BURNT OUT with cultural activism.

I WANT TO BE A CORPSE, GODDAMIT. WHY DO I NOT GET ANY GIVE!!!!

@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#

And in case you don't get my drift, I'm talking BLECH AND UGH!!!!!! "Community," Peeps, is often an ILLUSION!

@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#@#$%^$^&%#$%&%^$#%#$^&%&%^@#$%@%&&^&^*#$%#!#%%#$!@#$#%@!@#$#@$@#$@%#$%^$^%#$%@^#^$^^$$%#$@@#$#!$%$$!@#$%@%#

BLANKNESS POETICS

Huh. Just now, the ad on my blogger is a blank space and described as

This blank space brought to you by google.

Blank space? I guess my blog is devoid of content after all...

cough...

Like, I'm not posting enough here...

ON A THING THAT GOES ITCHY IN THE NIGHT

Dana and Michelle. So these drop-dead gorgeous Pinays, both of whom have hair to rival mine (long, dark, silky, etc)....cough....just left me. Actually, I think their hair is longer than mine (Michelle's is longer than in this photo), which irritates me to no end. Anyway, they came to help me move out this humongous bureau. We had to take two trips out to the sidewalk to Dana's truck. Now, first of all, can I just say that I was so pleased that not a single man was around helping us....or, I should say, helping Michelle and Dana since, with my cold, I'm weak as a kitten...which didn't prevent my big mouth (notwithstanding those luscious lips) from making copious suggestions about how they should move the piece of furniture, angle such in the narrow elevator, etcetera yadda.

Cough.

So, anyway, they made the first trip to the truck together, leaving me coughing in the apartment. When they returned, they walked in through the front door giggling, with Michelle holding up .... something that took me, what, ten minutes ... to recognize.

"Is this yours?" Michelle said as she twirled it from one finger.

I grabbed it, looked at it, and muttered, "Well, it better be mine!"

Then I looked up at them and admitted, "But, dang, I haven't worn anything like this in years!"

Michelle: "Guess that's why it was stuck in the back of the bureau."

Then they both started laughing again. Guffawing -- these two babes with slim but impressive biceps that I salivate over. They laughed while I looked ... quite bemusedly ... at the object at hand, an object whose objectness and breed I'd forgotten existed though, once, it was quite intimate with me:

a silk, lace-edged, black thong.

*****

The comedian Chris Rock, I believe, once said with much perspicaciousness: "No one looks good in a thong."

*****

Tonight's incident with Dana and Michelle reminded me of an article a few weeks back in the NYTimes Sunday magazine about a British writer for this hugely popular sitcom. I can't remember his name -- let's call him Bill -- but I think Bill co-wrote scripts with his wife. The sitcom characters involved a married couple and the premise usually unfolded from the perspective of the man ever-stuck in perpetual adolescence. The thing is, Bill apparently thought nothing of using incidents from his real-life marriage as fodder for the TV show.

Now, his mother-in-law happened to be the producer of the sitcom and so had to approve each script prior to said script being produced.

And, a typical example apparently of Bill's world-view was an incident where he portrayed the sitcom male protagonist complaining: "How come you've replaced wearing those thong panties with diapers copious enough to place on an elephant?" Or words to that effect....

But can you imagine being in the mother-in-law's position, having to read things like that, knowing that the guy de facto is writing about his life with your daughter?

*****

Sip. Orange juice. I am thinking: I should stop blogging while I'm feverish. Look at the kind of stuff I'm expansively expounding on.

THONG POETICS?

WHILE COUGHING, TWO RECOMMENDATIONS: ONE ART, ONE POETRY

I'll tell you a secret. Sometimes, even this blog's I ... is just too much for ... I.

Like that last post.

Please allow me to point your attention elsewhere ... though granted, I am just as lovely and brilliant as can be and your eyes may not wish to unstuck themselves from Moi -- DO YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN?!.

Cough. Sick cold cough, not sheepish pretend-cough.

To be more specific, cough, Sick Cold Cough With A Touch Of Exasperation....said exasperation swiftly dissolving as she happens to catch her reflection on a nearby mirror, causing her to pause and marvel: My, my...you beautiful Sweetie you....

Cough. Okay, are we all sick of Moi? I hope so. Because Moi is very sick and she wants to INFECT YOU!!!!!

Cough.

Anyway, speaking of others (yawn), I just heard today that Stella Lai got a wonderful review at Artforum Online:

And because it's for an exhibition that is still up, and will remain on through October 11, at Lizabeth Oliveiria Gallery in San Francisco, I thought I'd spread the word amongst you Bay Area peeps about stopping by her exhibit, in part for the reasons mentioned by Artforum ("expression of sweat equity that gives Lai's spun-sugar world an earthy foundation with multiple points of entry").

I can't recall now if I've ever said this but when I first moved to the Bay Area nearly four years ago and attended the San Francisco International Art Fair, Stella Lai was my pick from all the artists being exhibited. She wasn't even technically represented yet by her gallery. But she wowed me, wowed other sharply-eyed curators in town, and now she's on her way!!! In addition to this Artforum review, she'll be in the November issue of ART EXAMINER! Go, girl! To think that I knew her when she was young....oh, wait a minute: she's still very young...!

Cough, blearily.

Then, on poetry, today I read Rachel Levitsky's Under The Sun (Future Poems, 2003). Oh, it is just so good it made me purrrrrr! I've read the whole thing, but I'm going to chat it up it by simply focusing on its two-page "Prologue"....to say:

Under The Sun opens with "Prologue" whose second paragraph begins:

There is logic to the pleasure of photographing these clouds. The photographs, because they will not be developed, are notable only in their absence. This last thought is lazy. The photographer who thinks it knows nothing about what she does. It's pretty is all.

Such deftness for manifesting absence. "It's pretty is all" is a genius stroke -- enhancing her approach towards lacuna. At first, I thought of Arielle Greenberg's concept of gurldom here. I don't know, though, if that ultimately applies (not having fully investigated Arielle's concept), but I did think then that Rachel's take is one of calm.

I posit "calm." Later, the prose poem later would offer the phrase

She is made calm by his fury.

Yes, you see, "calm" can be verb as well as noun. And calm[ing] seems to be a choice deliberately made by the poem's persona -- a choice made after full confrontation with the situation facing her. And what a situation:

In her argument with the philosophers, she is not the lady who conquers them. Her beauty does not win the over. Though one becomes angry enough to go back at her, equally red in the face.

Calmly, the poem's persona faces his "macho" anger, then concludes

But because she fails his test, she knows he too is fundamentally wrong.

She has the last word because she wrote the poem. It ends with admitting "perplex[ity]" but also to articulate

She walks away, and looks for a way to go. Her way, she discovers, is in planes. She misses her enemy, who becomes a soldier, a job he hates from the moment he begins.

Such pleasure in facing Rachel's spun -- and enforced, though seemingly effortlessly -- logic.

Then I am faced with Page 1 of a book of poems. How lovely. Under The Sun by Rachel Levitsky -- I recommend basking under its light of fractures and shadows.

from the Series: "Poetry As A Way Of Life"
ACCEPTANCE SPEECH FOR "JUSTICE" IN THE WORLD

How fortunate that my readership just reached nine million peeps in time for me to announce this groundbreaking -- nay, earthshattering! -- piece of news!!

And nine million peeps pause in anticipation as their computer screens suddenly emit a cloud of silky, black feathers against their....anticipating faces...

I have just received the most MAJOR POETRY PRIZE!!!

Huh? Nine million peeps ask, scratching their hair (or scalp since, undoubtedly, some of you are bald).

Okay. Lookit: I've just scratched out my "Acceptance Speech" below, and it's self-explanatory. So (she declumps long lashes, clears throat) here it is and...I do await your applause which I well deserve. Preeeeeen!

*****

Dear Poets and Friends,
Many of you know of my blog which originated with my public debut as "Ms. WinePoetics." Many of you have watched -- often amused but, no doubt, occasionally appalled -- as I've brewed up and applied wine-related poetics against the hapless internet and poetry world. This all is leading towards adorable Moi saying: my poetry fallen angels have a sense of humor and it's just fortunate that they're in a phase of liking me -- to wit:

I have just been informed that my wine-related poem entitled "Justice" is the Winner of the 2003 Judd's Hill Annual Poetry Contest. Judds Hill is a lovely winery peopled by lovely people making lovely wine. So isn't that just lovely...and replete with justice?

My prize: publication in Judds Hill's October Newsletter and a 3-liter bottle of their cabernet -- three liters is equivalent to four normal-size bottles. The winery's wine tasting notes describe the cab as "elegant and supple with loads of black cherry fruit and inner layers of cedar, spice and oak." Yadda!! Glug. I mean, dainty Sip.

I actually had known of -- and admired! -- Judds Hill's wines so I certainly was intrigued by their poetry contest. Judds Hill is the only winery I know that sponsors poetry contests (there may be others out there, but I only know of this one). So this was a contest Ms. WinePoetics absolutely had to enter! I saw its ad on Poetry Flash for, ideally, wine-related poems. A wine-related poem? Well! Am I not Missy WinePoetics or am I not...Missy Winepoetics!!!??? I just had to do it!

So I sent my lovely fingers rifling through my files of poems for a wine-related poem and latching onto "Justice." I sent it....

And I won!! I WON!!!!

Wings spread and she does a twirl up to the ceiling that ... smacks her head and brings her tumbling back down onto her computer chair. Still cheerful, she rubs her scalp and bares her teeth at her newly nine-million peeps to ask: Wanna see a photo of the people who make the wine that Moi shall be drinking? Of course you do!! Here is the lovely family of Bunnie, Art and Judd Finkelstein. Judd is the son and marketing manager and apparently, the proud parents say, "Watching Judd sell wine was poetry in motion."

Need I tell you that for Ms. WinePoetics to win this contest is much more meaningful than winning the Guggenheim, Pulitzer, NEA et al?

Now, apparently, the contest was judged by poet-editor Jane Hall, who some of you may know as editor of CORACLE. So here's a preview of her judgeship (small ship; a coracle is a boat) comments:

"The accomplished winning entry, "Justice" by Eileen Tabios, subtly weaves questions of belief with the close observations of a wine country landscape. For me this is a deeply moving piece, despite (or because of) a final reluctance or even regret in not finding answers in the natural world she eyes so intimately.

"From her enticing first lines,

I was wrong
to believe

the sun is impartial

through the questions,

What are the taste
and bouquet

of an embrace
between crushed rocks and sun?

"and then,

How might one feel
a sunbeam

wink against
a stone?

"The reader listens, rather like attending to a Koan, noticing how "asking" or "being asked" relieves us of the human predicament of having to have answers. I'll try to remember to enjoy that state with my next glass of wine."

******

Well, aren't I special! A koan, no less!

And, by the way, Judds Hill (as far as I know) is unaware that I frequently mix things up on something called a blog began as WinePoetics. Wait 'till I tell 'em!!!!!

So, toast me Peeps. I need your company as I plan to celebrate....and one should never drink alone. And, as I write this, brilliant Moi just came up with another idea for you lucky Bay Area peeps!

If the bottle is ready and available, I shall bring it to my Bay Area Reading with Barry Schwabsky at kari edwards' house on October 26. Poets should be the ones emptying that bottle! (Hey, you all can sign said BIG BOTTLE! and make POETIC HISTORY!!!! Cough....am I clearly giddy over here? Have I mentioned my huge cold that's made me bed-ridden, one reason I'm even more prolific than normal on the blog?)

Anyway, let's keep in mind that poetry and wine share many things in common: Delirium...and that it's something to be shared!

Now, if you'll all excuse me, I've got a bunch of dark-winged angels impatiently hovering by the door to my writing studio. They don't care about my cold. They want me to join them -- we're going to go dance with the stars!!!! Up there, there is no darkness -- only light!

o pure warm white light....like what I now see as I feverishly descend into bed...

DE-SILENCING VENEZUELAN POETRY

You followed my route: The deluge of my kisses
at the edge of the milky way
The choleric wing of my blood
A band of red insects gnawing the fog.
--Sanchez Pelaez, trans. by Guillermo Juan Parra


Guillermo is offering booootiful poems and translations, living up to his promise in his early post:

"For a variety of reasons Venezuelan literature is largely unknown outside of Latin America. Even within that region, Venezuelan writers are often overshadowed by the work coming out of countries such as Colombia, Mexico, Peru, etc. Why is this? I don't imagine this situation of relative invisibility will change any time soon. One could argue that there are benefits to invisibility. Some of the vene-writers I plan on discussing and translating into English on this blog include:

Fernando Paz Castillo (1893-1981)
Arturo Uslar Pietri (1906-2001)
Vicente Gerbasi (1913-1992)
Antonia Palacios (1915-2001)
Elizabeth Schon (1921)
Rafael Cadenas (1930)
Rafael Castillo Zapata (1958)
Martha Kornblith (1959-1997)
Patricia Guzman (1960)
Jacqueline Goldberg (1965)

Go Guillermo. Keep sharing. Peeps...I encourage you to jog on over to

VENEPOETICS!

THROWING UP AGAINST SNIGGER POETICS

All day, I've been meditating over what John Most wrote on his blog:

People who talk bad about the makeup
of the cosmos don't get what they're
doing, what this behavior entails.

John -- this is such wisdom. But I decided to blog about it just now because of something that happened: basically, I just threw up. (Uh, sorry for that disgusting detail -- you should see my keyboard. Plus, I was wearing a WHITE bathrobe! Anyway....cleaned up and now continuing...)

Well, if poems are in my belly, it's even more important that I not avail myself of what I call "snigger poetics"...which partly relates, for me, to trying to avoid adding to the universe's negative energy. (If this sounds hokey to you, why are you reading me? It's not like you've not been warned by prior posts -- black-winged angels piss on this space, remember? Anyway....)

So what happened was that some idiot (hmmm....negative energy sparked from that idiot-ic word; let's call her "Misguided one" instead)...a Misguided One just posted a review on the Flips Listserve. A review of a movie that she'd never seen. And said Misguided One also quite obviously used the opportunity to promote her own causes (no need to get into such for making my point here). But the thing is, her faux review was so badly written that I began writing a reply that simply went off on it -- twisting the same words she used to write a review about her novel, which I haven't read. I began my "book review" with

This is a book review of ____'s novel. If I had read it, I'd share the book's title. But since I haven't read it, I can't share the title. Anyway, as regards the plot.....

and so on.

I went as far as four paragraphs and, if I do say so myself, I was very funny. I was witty. I was cackling like there's no tomorrow (what does that mean anyway? Anyway...). I was very much looking forward to posting that e-mail to the List -- I knew it'd be a hit. Then I threw up.

And in the ensuing rush and need to clean myself up, I realized that I was just responding in a way that would not uplift that particular dialogue out of its muddle. And, moreover, my approach was too easy -- like shooting a whale in a barrel. What would have been the point to my engagement except to prove my wit (which, come to think of it, may not have been that, uh, witty after all) while further entrenching this person into her misguided opinions?

Poetry expects me to be bigger than I am. Only by attempting this can I retain the cauldron in my belly that simmers forth those poems. Poetry made me throw up because snigger poetics doesn't belong in that cauldron -- 'twould sour that stew; it should not be my poetics. It's particularly important that I remain vigilant on this when, first, I'm a natural mischief-maker (no surprise there, right?) and, second, I feel poems ... so physically.

Well, okay -- that's an essay that'll never get into an anthology of literary criticism. But it'll have to do. I just realized I missed a few spots over there on the carpet. And they stink...

"THROUGH THESE UNCERTAIN WATERS, UNHOLY WEATHER, I'M GLAD THAT YOU ARE HERE"


M. POETREE

May your lives orbit
in far off yet attainable
collisions, collusions
and comet-tailed conclusions
connecting dots
taking shapes
filling blanks
and signing names
to family upon family
of exposed nerve
and pleasure
a multitude
of comings and goings
punctuated deftly
with pregnant ellipses
intimate turns
and phrase

Phrase the Lord!
--Poem by Jose "Joey" Ayala for Six Directions

This very sophisticated peep crowd of mine (well, mebbe except for youse professional drunks) knows that poems often just surface without the poet's conscious intention.

So, I'ma sitting here getting mellow with Jose "Joey" Ayala's latest CD, 16lovesongs. I just got it and this is the first time I've had a chance to play it, though I first got it a few days ago. And then it occured to me that Jose -- inadvertently -- had been the latest inspiration to my latest hay(na)ku over at said hay(na)ku blog where I posted

poems
in belly
fuel for flight

And the Free Spirit had inspired me because he had been kind enough to sign his CD cover with the words: "To Eileen, where poems reside."

That's beautiful, right? Poems residing in a poet's body? (You honor me, you wherever you are with your songs long having replaced the blood in your veins...)

Well, so, hence the hay(na)ku which came out in one spurt -- and of course I rely on the hay(na)ku form partly for trying to perfect that spurt -- pleeeze. Don't get sexual here; just think of abstract expressionist brushstrokes. What do you mean said brushes were sexual? Oh, that was sexual .... let me continue please, she glares at the angels twigging her over her lovely head...

...black wingtips tickle air....

Anyway, here's an example of Jose's life nowadays as one of the greatest musicians on the Philippine scene. Glad to see it. Hectic but seems more in sync with his Free Spirit self...

I was blessed to meet Jose through my Six Directions project which, it's safe to say, would not have unfolded the way it did without his faith in me. This Dude means so much to me as an inspiration that he provided one of only two epigraphs to my last book....and the other epigraph was given -- or not given -- by no less than Buddha himself...

Okay...back to the songs and poetry! Like this excerpt, from "glad you are here" which is arguably my favorite song by JoeyAyala:

so much illusion to see through
i'm glad that you are here
through time and space
we travel together
through these uncertain waters
unholy weather
and it's true
i'm glad that you are here

----------
To order -- and I do suggest, peeps that you order, Joey Ayala's 16lovesongs CD, e-mail piniratangisda@yahoo.com

AS THE HAWAIIANS NEVER SAID, HAPPY LACUNA

And though you no longer jog through blogland, I shall post Thank You to David -- since I met you here on said blogland -- for the wonderful t-shirt which shall be retired against the wall of my writing studio, proclaiming in black against white:

I LACK LACAN

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LI!

May Borges lovingly stroke your hair...

READING WHILE TRAVELING; TRAVELING THROUGH THE READS...TOWARDS CLARITY VIA EMOTION

a podium is a bed smiling
remember you lying on the grass in Riverside Park
and what a planet you are
seriously don't leave me again
one messy bed lies quietly
above Bistrot La Marseillaise
bright green awning and an open window
--from "Your Last Illusion or Break Up Sonnets" by Wanda Phipps

Ye olde waiting time at airport terminals as well as the flights themselves allowed me to catch up on some reading. On this trip to New York, I read:

WHEREABOUTS: NOTES ON BEING A FOREIGNER, a lovely travel memoir by Alastair Reid (there's an excerpt dedicated to Gabriel Gudding (for obvious reasons if you've been reading his blog), at the end of this post);

A QUICK KILLING IN ART, a biography of the brilliant and turbulent artist Jean-Michel Basquiat by Phoebe Hogan that reminds me of why I so detest the professional art world scene;

YOUR LAST ILLUSION or BREAK UP SONNETS, a wunnerful poetry chap by Wanda Phipps;

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE, a powerful memoir by Lucy Grealy, re-released with a moving Afterword by Ann Patchett;

Sharp Golden Thorns, poetry by Chard deNiord (a meditative collection that warrants more than one reading); and

House and Home, lived-and-felt poetry by Rochelle Ratner.

Because I know very little about Louise Gluck, I also picked up her essay collection on poetry entitled PROOFS & THEORIES.

The most moving passage for me from Gluck's book, which I generally found to be intelligent, smooth prose... but chilly (as in, dang, loosen up some, Babe -- gads, try some hangin' out time with Steve Almond, okay?) was this passage from her essay on George Oppen:

"Within the discipline of criticism, nothing is more difficult than praise. To speak of what you love -- not admire, not know to be good, not find reasonably interesting, not feel briefly moved by or charmed by -- to speak of such work is difficult because the natural correlatives of awe and reverence are not verbal."

I remember how I went ga-ga on this blog over Noah Eli Gordon's first book, The Frequencies. I remember waking up a day later, rereading that post and, mayhap, cringing a little over how effusive but unclear I was for articulating my enthusiasm. I remember another brief twitch when Noah asked my permission to quote it. But I never thought to delete/edit that post -- nor did I even think of not giving Noah permission. I wanted to honor that love that The Frequencies so effortlessly demanded from me (effortlessly demands -- now why would I want to edit that paradox). Peeps, if it needs to be said, such Love -- yes, Love -- is something to cherish. If it needs to be further said, such Love doesn't come walkin' round the corner too often so, yah, cherish it when it does! Indeed, I think that, to the extent my post was a recommendation -- the uncontrolled fervor behind it was its most ...uh, recommending factor!

As I write this, I also recall a leading university press asking to publish my first book, Black Lightning, which is a collection of interviews/essays on 15 poets. I said No when, as part of that offer, they wanted me to have a more streamlined approach to the writing (which gets quite unruly and, undoubtedly, even sloppy at points....if only because I began writing the book a mere three months after I started paying attention to poetry). But as time moves forward, I do see how that unbridled enthusiasm is one of the book's advantages -- and that it is an advantage that's partly driven by a context where such types of books are rarely published relative to their more disciplined peers. (Indeed, it's been generally well-received, from a critical sense, with reviewers being able to read through my flawed articulation to, I'd like to think, honor the genuine ecstasy I clearly felt over the subject poems.)

So I choose enthusiasm over polish -- not that this is a binary and one must choose, di ba? But I think pure emotion itself often is the most *clear* in its message, though its narrative is not technically the most coherent/cohesive.

Yet, there seems also to be cultural capital associated with smooth prose. As regards such, I recently did a review -- a lavishly praising review. But the artist who is the recipient of such praise asked me to write in a different style -- one that (in this case) was less conversationally-oriented and more fitting (s/he felt) of the "typical" reviews published out there. It was quite obvious to me that this artist felt s/he would garner more cultural capital if my article was written more formally -- in the sense that formality, s/he felt, was more respected. Well! The review, as is, was already accepted for publication so it wasn't like a change was needed. And, by the way, I was not paid to do the effin' review -- it was just something I chose to do out of the goodness of my good heart. Nor was s/he a friend I felt compelled to promote (though, come to think of it, I don't feel compelled to promote a peep just cause said peep is a friend). Anyway, geez -- if a total stranger ever read any of my works and felt compelled to actually review it for no reason than that work so moved said stranger, I'd just be so happy and ... gratified. But this person couldn't see past the tip of hir narcissistic nose! I'm still happy I wrote the review because I feel the work warranted it and I believe (as a modest part on my part to promote culture) in acknowledging such works when I am able. But, what a sour taste that dialogue left in my mouth -- the word "ingrate", I have to tell you, came to mind.

(This, by the way, Prof. Sunny, is also an example of why I once was moved to write those lines that in the poem that *bugged you in a positive way*: "I fall in love with a painting in an art gallery in SoHo./ No, I tell the dealer; I do not consider it necessary to meet its creator." Or as Ted Berrigan once wrote, (something like) The poem is often the poet's best self).

Anyway, let me share an excerpt from one of the highlights from last week's reading, Alastair Reid's travel memoir. This is from when he's talking about a village in Spain:

"What happens happens. The village endures, and within that context of permanence pleasure occurs in the form of happy accidents. As a result, the village is totally without drama other than the dramas of birth, illness, and death. Quarrels are buried and seethe in silence; formality keeps the place running....The only expression of strong feelings I have heard in the village has been the blowing of the conchs. Should any local woman recently widowed entertain the attentions of a suitor too soon for the village's sense of morality, conch shells are blown in her direction at twilight. Nobody in particular blows them. They are blown. Nothing more is said. That eerie wail upholds the village sense of propriety, without confrontation."

MARTIAL ARTS POETICS

Lucidity. Paying attention to one's environment -- my poetics. From which comes now this post authored by others, but recognized by moi -- said recognition being what turns what could have been dissipated morsels into content for my beloved 8 million-plus peeps. What happened was Aaron Tieger posted a notice on the Suny Poetics List of a CARVE magazine poetry reading in Boston (Saturday, September 20; 7 p.m.; Wordsworth Books on Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA -- hope it goes well!).

At the bottom of Aaron's e-mail was this statement:

"There is no them and us, there is only you and me... We need to find the 'self' that can truly be the authority that it is... The exponent of Karate does not aim at the brick when wishing to break it, but at the space beyond." (CRASS)

For some reason, that statement about karate caused my belly to thrum (and I had just eaten so it couldn't be food-related). So I asked Gura Michelle about that statement and she writes:

"Hi Eileen,

"Yes, this is true actually in most all the martial arts. That in order to break the brick, your energy must go through the object, thus the person breaking it must think of their hand going to the space beyond the brick.

"I've done it once and it was a real scary and emotional experience. I had a lot of fear: break my hand, etc. I hit the board with my hand and it didn't break! then I got pissed that my hand hurt and I had nothing to show for it, so the second time I broke it. It was a whole lot easier than what I had pictured in my mind.

"Of course, there are all sorts of "tricks" to help you break the board like drying them out, putting spacers in between each of the levels, etc. But the basic premise remains, it's about extending beyond yourself and going beyond what you perceive as barriers. And it's this perception of barriers and our fear that we cannot surpass them that we are really breaking."

==========

Well, yadda. Howzabout that! Corpse furrows the...the, uh, bone that is her scalp to think: Surely, as a poet I can use this...

Then Corpse flexes her hand and starts reaching her bony fingers forward to....penetrate eight million computer screens!!!! Nyahahahaha! Cough...sorry. Couldn't resist. Anyway, where is that poem hiding now?! That space beyond...

VENEPOETICS!! FABULOSO!!

Guillermo Juan Parra just wrote to say that he's also started a new poetry blog:

VENEPOETICS

The name is inspired by....well, let Guillermo speak on his own behalf: "i don't know if you noticed when you were in Caracas, but everything there is named vene-this, vene-that--tv companies, magazines, coffee houses, etc it seems everyone incorporates the nation into their projects--so, thus: venepoetics"

Well welcome to Blogland, Guillermo. I look forward to jogging by your house! I'll stop by and make myself at home whenever you serve arepas! Those in New York -- Guillermo recommends, by the way, the Caracas Arepa Bar!

And the party continues!

ON GARRETT CAPLES...ON CHARLES BERNSTEIN

a very rich multi-dimensional vision of the world
--Andrew Lundwall on er, um

Yay! There's a nice review by Andrew Lundwall of Garrett Caples' er, um at Tin Lustre Mobile.

From there, you also can access Garrett's essay on -- nay, "Consumer Guide," no less, to -- Charles Bernstein that begins:

"Without question, Charles Bernstein has emerged as the most formidable practitioner of language poetry, the one whose work provides the most substantial basis for evaluating the claims about such writing made by partisans and foes alike. Whereas most poets identified with this aesthetic employ theories of one sort or another to bolster an anemic verse practice, Bernstein gives the opposite impression, as though deliberately attenuating his self-diagnosed “mistaken . . . concern for the poem to sound right”[1] in order to write the poetry he imagines needs to be written. To his credit, this sense of necessity accommodates a fairly wide range of modes within his own work; he has few qualms about dropping a slab of concrete poetry amidst more apparently lyric material, and while he tends to worship heterogeneity for its own sake, his devotion to this fickle muse has yielded fruit. For Bernstein’s best work is not of any one kind and yet he is no mere dauber. If poetry is, as Bernstein suggests, “the ultimate small business,”[2] then he has definitely developed his own line of products. And business is booming; in addition to a new collection of poetry, With Strings (2001), and a recent companion volume of criticism, My Way (1999), the past few years have seen the republication of Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (2001), along with the reprinting of a hefty dose of previous verse as Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (2000). The time for a consumer report is therefore at hand.
--from A Consumer Guide to Charles Bernstein by Garrett Caples

ON THE HAMPTONS...AND DAVID IGNATOW, HARVEY SHAPIRO, ARMAND SCHWERNER...

I want to thank Sandy and Barbara McIntosh once more for their hospitality last week as we toured the Hamptons. At one point, they took me to meet Yaedi Ignatow, daughter of David Ignatow. Yaedi was in the midst of moving out of New York, having just sold her and her father's house. So it was a way for me to see the place where David Ignatow had spent his life and written poems. After this month, the house is bound to become just another, more anonymous, residence.

Many parties involving poets and artists took place in the house, also shared with artist Rose Graubart, David Ignatow's wife. I found it very moving to see their studios in the midst of being cleaned up -- that is, processed out of what had been their purpose for decades.

What also struck me about their house is how it gave the impression of being on such a small scale -- in the same way that when we dropped by Jackson Pollock's and Lee Krasner's former residence, the structures are not that big.

For many minutes, looking around at both places, I felt as if the spaces were dollhouse-like -- that they should be much larger than they really are in order to mirror the gigantic-like achievements of their residents. But then, no. Of course no. Of course the scale should be as they are. The achievements should provoke no second-guessing today for the achievements exist.

I know of writers and artists whose works reflect their environments. I know of a poet whose lines became shorter when she moved from a vast natural landscape surrounded by seemingly infinite expanses of air to live among the high-rise buildings of New York City. I know of an artist who paints on small canvases because her studio is so narrow.

But I also know of a poet who writes long lines even as she lived in New York City. Then there's Jackson Pollock who created huge canvases from within the confines of a small barn.

I see the lesson to be how art is larger than its context. It's why, I suppose, someone called me a genius on this trip after I happened to say, "I try never to be prejudiced against a poem because of its author."

I don't think I'm a genius because I said such. But I do think it is more unusual than it should be for peeps to consider poems written by live poets based on the poems' own merit (or "selves"). It's why, I suppose, someone else said about me on this trip, "Your books sell well because you're a good promoter." Not because I write well (if I do), but because I promote well (ugh).

Subjectivity -- I am sensitive to it. But how to translate such a sensitivity without losing sight of how, at the end of the day, each art work needs to stand on its own and speak on its own behalf?

As well, it was a serendipitous delight to meet Harvey Shapiro while we were at David Ignatow's house. I looked through the anthology he just edited, Poets of World War II (American Poets Project, The National Library of America), which was a nice project. And also pleasant to discuss his forthcoming Collected Poems. It's heartwarming to see a poet soon to greet his 80th birthday.

Last but not least (especially to the Corpse!), it's worth noting the dinner menu Sandy and Barbara prepared just for little ol' me:

Homemade gravlax with acquavit and dill
Smoked salmon with peppers and Norwegian salmon caviar
Osso bucco with lemon zest
Grilled fresh corn with homemade butter with lime and chili powder
Selected cheeses
Spinach salad with fresh tomatos
Vanilla ice cream with fig reduction syrup

--all served with 2000 Il Poggione Rosso di Montalcino. Thanks! Monday was a fabulous feast for heart, mind and tummy!

So it seems fitting to close this post with an essay Sandy McIntosh once wrote about the Hamptons:

Hamptons Found and Lost: A Memoir with Reviews

David Ignatow. Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems. Rochester: Boa Editions. 1999.
Armand Schwerner. Selected Shorter Poems. San Diego: Junction Press. 1999; The Tablets. Orono: The National Poetry Foundation. 1999.

Everyone knows about the Hamptons—summer home of the rich, year-round community of painters (de Kooning, Pollock) and writers (Steinbeck, Albee)—and, lately, of Hollywood people (Spielberg, Baldwin) and rappers (P. Diddy [ne.Puff Daddy]). Recent visitors in search of the idyllic summer life supposed to be lived there are inevitably disappointed by what they find: a relentless, choking, funeral procession of cars dragging its way between Westhampton and Montauk, crowded sidewalks and intersections filled with irate drivers and pedestrians. A photograph of Saturday evening along Main Street in East Hampton and one of Monday morning along 42nd St. and Broadway would be identical. And why not? Both would picture the same cars, the same people. And in both photographs, everyone would be pissed-off. This is a testament to the predatory real estate and tourist industries and to the greed of local governments that have never known when to say when.

However, there was a time when this was not the case. At Canio’s bookstore in Sag Harbor last spring, the poet Harvey Shapiro, a long-time Hamptons familiar, read a poem called “For Armand and David” that touched on feelings shared by those of us who have considered the Hamptons a refuge for our poetic selves. “When we were young,” Shapiro’s poem begins:

And our children were young—
the water was such a mystery,
the sky so blue. Everything
breathed promise. The language
would blaze forth,
did blaze forth…

I came to the Hamptons in the late nineteen sixties to attend Southampton College. In its early years the college enjoyed the enthusiasm of the local arts community, and some notable artists and writers volunteered to teach. Out of the formative chaos of the early curriculum some odd teaching assignments were made. For instance, my freshman English literature instructor was Ilya Bolotowsky, the Neo-plasticist painter and disciple of Kandinsky. In his thick Slavic accent, filtered through a massive, drooping mustache, Bolotowsky led us into the mysteries of James Joyce, beginning with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and coming back full circle to an earlier version of the same book, Stephen Hero. These were works I reveled in, but that I now know after teaching English myself, would not be applauded as appropriate in the modern remedial freshman curriculum. In turn, Bolotowsky introduced me to his friend Willem de Kooning, who was visiting the college. Later, when I lived in the Springs, I would ferry de Kooning between his studio and his farmhouse when he was unable to bicycle between them.

David Ignatow came to the college after a teaching stint at the University of Kentucky. I took his poetry writing classes in both semesters and was lucky enough to get to know him and his family, who had recently moved to the Springs. Ignatow offered me his friendship and we remained friends until his death.

I met Armand Schwerner at a poetry reading at H. R. Hays’ home in East Hampton. Hays, the pioneering translator of Spanish-American poetry and of Brecht’s poems, occupied a central position in the Hampton’s literary scene. He made his large, modern home, built deep in the woods, a venue for readings and parties. Hays had invited me to this particular reading in order to introduce me to his friends.

During my final years in military school I had been writing poetry and compiling it in a thick loose-leaf notebook. I had shown some of my poetry to Hays and he had been encouraging. I arrived at his home for the reading and was immediately daunted by the size of the crowd. Certainly I was the youngest. Several poets preceded me, and when it was my turn I read the poem of mine that Hays had selected. Afterwards, the applause surprised and pleased me. Before I could sit down, someone asked me to read another. Others in the audience applauded. Flattered, I reopened my notebook looking for an appropriate encore. Time passed; the audience grew restive. As I flipped to the end of the notebook I panicked. I had seen an ugly, looming truth. Not one of those poems was any good!—a devastating realization that I had been deceiving myself all along, carrying around an impressive folder filled with what I now realized was self-indulgent crap.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t let the audience know about this. Thinking hard, I remembered I had recently written something that was more promising than my usual. I laboriously turned the pages searching for it, even though I sensed I was losing the audience. In the end, refusing to admit a truth that was nobody’s business but mine, I took the chance and recited the poem from memory. The response amazed me. Everyone seemed to be laughing and applauding. Later, Hays introduced me to Allen Planz, who was then Poetry Editor of the Nation. He invited me to submit the poem to that magazine. It was only after I was back in the anonymity of the audience that I realized I had omitted to recite most of the poem’s lines. Somehow, panic had edited me, cutting the inferior lines and leaving only the poem’s true heart. It was a strict lesson.

Hays introduced me to other poets at the reading. One group I was to make friends with and see frequently during the next twenty years included Harvey Shapiro, Si Perchick, Michael Heller, Michael Braude, as well as Ignatow, Planz and Schwerner. For the next five or ten years, many of us would be occupied teaching under wealthy federal and state arts programs, and this temporary public largess created the illusion (at least for me) that it was reasonable to call oneself a poet when asked to state one’s profession.

***

Posthumous poetry collections of David Ignatow and Armand Schwerner were published during the last year. Ignatow died in November 1997; Schwerner in February 1999. In the case of Schwerner’s poetry, two collections were brought out—a complete set of his well-known Tablets, including a CD of their live performance, and a volume of his lesser-known shorter poems. In the case of Ignatow’s poetry, a collection of last poems was notably edited by three people who were close to him: his daughter, Yaedi, Virginia Terris, and Jeannette Hopkins, who long-ago shaped the seminal collections of his work originally published by Wesleyn University Press.

Ignatow and Schwerner shared little of poetic method. Their cultural and religious backgrounds were similar—both grew up in New York City and both credited Walt Whitman as their literary forbear—but Schwerner was a poet who rejoiced in an abundance, often a manic torrent of language, while Ignatow frugally pared his words to a pointed minimum. Yet, in the company of other poets, painters, photographers, filmmakers and sculptors who spent summers together in the wooded community of East Hampton known as the Springs from the middle-1960’s, these two became great friends.

Armand Schwerner

Armand and his family lived in a small house off Fireplace Road. Armand’s wife, Dolores, was an artist whose work anticipated Performance art. Their two boys, Ari and Adam were blondes like their mother but had their father’s exuberant personality. When I first visited their home Ari, who was six, and Adam, who was eight, delighted in scandalizing me with a nursery rhyme written by their father:

Muck the Fuck

One room of the grey rat
two room for the cowlick
seven room for moose
and Muck the Fuck to celebrate;

he says: I fuck the moose
with cowlick; the grey rat
bears the urine
from room to room for the proper dance,
slippery floor for the moose-mad;
…
Room for the real.
Kitchen of shadows, bing.
If you don’t sing
what’s out there?

Rat moose cowlick prick
open your mouth a little bit
drapes are falling everywhere.
Foot in your ears.

Armand, aware that I was made uncomfortable by such things, made a point of instructing me in his version of a less WASPish life. Among several of his lessons I recall arriving home with him one late night and watching him demonstrate what he declared in his booming voice to be the best part of capitalism: the freedom to piss all over your own front lawn with impunity.

At the time Armand had published a small collection of poetry, The Lightfall. The Junction Press has included six of the best from this rare, early book in the Selected Shorter Poems. It is usually a mistake to look backwards at a series of poems and point out how they presaged a poet’s later writing interests. It is, as the historian Herbert Butterfield has said, the equivalent of looking through the wrong end of a telescope. However, in these six representative poems one can find the poetic approaches and methods that occupied Armand’s attention throughout much of his life. A poem like “where the boat passes, improvise,” with lines such as “he sits with Stone the Death/ and munches by the Door// will he eat papyrus in the drummer’s hallway?” sounds right out of his later Tablets; in “the Other” lines such as “we are two bodies, a comb,/ hatband, brush, a mouth moving” suggest his later meditations of Sounds of the River Naranjana…; and so on. Of this first volume, only “the red horses of the sun” represents a kind of formality I don’t believe he ever sought again: “red is the color of spring/ it feeds that pattern of her flesh// it stutters in its course under the rare earth”—a poet’s student work.

In any case, I think Schwerner’s best poetic urges were realized in the hilarious and above all, loving poems inspired by his children and by that part of him that was childlike. Wonderful examples of these—such as “Muck the Fuck,” “poem at the bathroom door, by Adam,” and “what Ari says when he’s five”—are reprinted from his first two books. In his third book, he again realizes these antic urges, this time in his selection and translation of Eskimo poems. This infectious humor, I think, has been Schwerner’s saving grace (at least for lyric pleasure-seekers like me), for as he continued to write he became preoccupied with weightier subjects that he believed he must present with due, unsmiling seriousness. I’m not convinced that his rendering of Buddhist themes, for example, shows a lessening of his personal self-importance, of his intrusive presence in the poems—rather the opposite. However, despite this, these poems show him to be a poet of dedication and great, if naïve, ability—his naiveté demonstrated by the partial title of one book The Triumph of the Will. (When I asked him didn’t he know that this had been the title of Leni Riefenstahl’s famous 1935 Nazi propaganda film, Armand protested that he had never heard of it.)

Although Junction Press’ edition of Armand’s Selected Shorter Poems does not include some of my favorites, it does feature some of his most moving. We happened to be together in the Springs when David Ignatow gave us the news that Paul Blackburn had died. One of us—probably H.R. Hays—organized a memorial reading for Paul at the Old Post Office Theater in East Hampton. Armand’s poem was especially poignant. Its title describes it well: “a letter to Paul Blackburn preceded by a letter Rainer Maria Rilke wrote 13 days before his death in 1826 to Rudolph Kassner.” The poignancy of these lines continues fresh, and could serve as Armand’s own epitaph.

Sections of The Tablets have appeared in several publications over the years, but it is only the present collection that includes all twenty seven of them, along with copious notes and appendices. The Tablets are Schwerner’s best known work, mainly because he promoted them in a great number of live performances (at which he was an expert—the CD attests to this) and in print. Consequently, they have and continue to receive a good deal of critical attention. They represent supposed remnants of Sumero-Akkadian clay tablets as interpreted by Armand’s alter-ego, the Scholar-Translator. These poems embody the full range of Armand’s poetic power, as well as his great strengths and fallibilities as a person. Thus, the Scholar-Translator begins as a figure of fun—a pompous academic bumbling through his misinterpretations of the meaning of his translations—but later changes into an unsmiling authority—a man demanding, as Armand seemed to demand, that people take him seriously.

Armand was often as delightful a companion as his friends found him difficult to abide. In his later years, his incessant preoccupation with himself was only made tolerable by his ever-sharpening, ever-darker, explosive wit. During the last years of his life, Armand and I saw little of each other. Part of this is because, following his divorce from Delores (who owned the Springs house), Armand no longer had a base on Long Island. But much of our alienation had to do with our competing Buddhist philosophies. Even after his guru was exposed as a drunk and lecher—and mine as a womanizing thief—we rarely saw each other. I think we spoke only once or twice in his last two years. I had published an account of my Buddhist experience in a magazine to which he subscribed. He called to let me know how delighted he was to discover that I had made him a character in the story, identified only as “A.” I was thrilled to hear from him, and had indeed written him into the story, hoping it would break the ice between us. Our conversation that time embodied the warmth that had been missing between us for years.

David Ignatow

Reading this original, final collection of David Ignatow’s poetry two years after his death is a wonderful surprise. There he is, speaking to me again, not in the tired voice of an opera singer who has made one-too-many farewell appearances, but in the voice of Ignatow-the-Poet (as his wife, Rose, used to snidely call him), with his well-remembered Ignatow-voice, and inimitable Ignatow-preoccupations and ironies. At first the voice is quiet, abstract: “Fear is of the universe,/as is death,/ as is love, pleasure,/ intimacy and cruelty.” But then it picks up its familiar sonority: “Interesting that I have to live with my skeleton./ It stands, prepared to emerge, and I carry it/ with me—this other thing I will become at death.”

In the first section of poems in this book (which I take to be genuinely “last poems;” the rest, though previously unpublished, I suspect to have been written some time earlier), I visualize Ignatow coming to the screen door of his study, answering my tentative knock, his voice, thinner in his last years, and his movements slower, but his eyes demanding directness and honesty. I’ve told the story elsewhere about my early experience with him when, after I’d bragged of reading an unbelievably large number of books during a short period of time, Ignatow reacted as if truly hurt by my exaggeration. “You must use language responsibly,” he admonished me then. This directness is mirrored in the sobriety of these poems.

David, like Armand, could frustrate his friends by his obtrusive self-involvement. Harvey Shapiro tells the story of how one day David telephoned to announce “I’ve got wonderful news for you, Harvey!” Since Harvey was then in contention for an important poetry prize that David might know about he was thrilled by David’s call. However, it proved to be disappointing when David revealed that the “wonderful news” was, of course, about David, not Harvey. It probably never occurred to David that Harvey would be expecting to hear something else.

While their approach to writing differed greatly, Armand and David shared preoccupations in common, notably with personal mortality. Between David’s and Armand’s rendering of this theme, I believe David had the advantage, since his poetic postmortem was not burdened with the formality of some a priori philosophy or religion—whereas Armand’s was. The “last poems” in Ignatow’s collection testify to his unblinking examination of his own mortality that he began in Shadowing the Ground several years earlier. Armand’s “last poems” (which I suppose to be those recent ones in his Selected collection under the heading “uncollected”), while passionate and intellectually rigorous, still carry the unopened baggage of religious aspiration: “but this blood, which transforms/ the five poisons into the five knowledges, this blood/ of great passion, passionless, free of passion,/ this secret great blood, free of clinging…” (“blood”). These images are specifically Buddhist shorthand; readers not familiar with them may enjoy their exotic mystery but are not helped to face, along with the poet, the reality of Death Itself. In terms of a winning strategy, I give the laurels to Ignatow:

What I thought I was writing—
for the social good—turns out to be
for my own enlightenment;
no one is listening.
…
(“How I learned to be with others”)

***

I graduated from Southampton College in the spring of 1970 and that summer, as I had done for the previous three summers, shared a rental cottage in the Springs. One early evening, after my shift pumping gas, I was driving home along Springs Fireplace Road when I had to brake my car suddenly in order to avoid hitting an elderly man on a bicycle. He had swerved out of a side road, and crossed in front of me without looking. I pulled over to catch my breath. As I drew closer I recognized de Kooning, whom I had first met at the college in my Freshman year. I watched as he rode away, pedaling uncertainly, his bike weaving figure eights from left to right. At one point he seemed to lose interest in pedaling. The bike came to a stop, stayed motionless for a moment, then pitched over to the right, its rider falling gently into the thick, uncut brush and rolling two or three times until coming to rest near the trees. I shut off my car and ran over to him. He didn’t seem hurt; in fact, he was smiling pleasantly, his eyes closed as if dreaming. I touched his arm and he looked up. He was okay, he told me, but could I give him a ride home? It was getting dark and he had no light on his bike.

I helped him into my car and loaded his bike into the back seat. He told me to continue east, then take the right fork before Barnes grocery store. He was living in a farmhouse opposite the Green River cemetery, he said, but this was only temporary, until they finished building his new studio. “I don’t want them to finish the damn thing,” he said with some bitterness. I asked why not? “Because when it’s finished, I think I will be finished, too.”

We drove on for a few minutes until he told me to stop. “I live right here,” he said. He looked over at the cemetery and pointed: “All my friends are buried there.”

I was curious. I helped him out of the car and to his front door, and when he was safely inside, I crossed the road to the cemetery.

It seemed a conventional graveyard with moldering tombstones. But then I caught sight of a grave marker that was odd. It was an obsidian monolith standing about four feet high. Engraved on its face was a man’s signature: the painter Stuart Davis. Looking around in that section of the cemetery, I found other oddly shaped stones, each with the name of an artist or a writer I had heard of. In front of Stuart Davis’ grave was a white marble square that marked the grave of Ad Reinhardt. I discovered the flat slate grave maker of Frank O’Hara, the New York School poet who had been killed by the only vehicle on Fire Island. Inscribed on it was his quotation: “Grace to be born and live / as variously as possible.” Just north of O’Hara’s grave was that of the writer A. J. Liebling, the war correspondent, boxing expert, world-class eater, and, for many years at The New Yorker, a critic of the press. Finally, at the end of the cemetery, almost in the woods, a great boulder with a bronze plaque marked Jackson Pollock’s grave. I continued on, following the horseshoe road until I came to a fence. On the other side were objects—gravestones, I thought—that were extremely weird, even grotesque, resembling Native totem poles. I wondered about that section of the cemetery for a long time. (In fact, I learned eventually, the odd objects were not grave markers but rough carvings in the side yard of the sculptor Albert Price’s house.) Later I described the little graveyard to my friends as a place “with dead people on one side and artists on the other.” I visited the place often, even picnicking and napping on an artist’s plot that was behind some trees, out of public view.

In December last year I visited the cemetery again. It has been expanded by at least a half acre behind Pollock’s boulder. Artists and writers continue to be buried there, and who they were and what they are famous for reflects something of the upscale attraction of the modern Hamptons. Filmmakers such as Stan Vanderbeek and producer Alan Pakula are buried there, as is the celebrated French chef, Pierre Franey, to name three. The cost of graves, I understand, is prohibitively expensive, except for the very wealthy—as is everything else thereabouts. Even so, the cemetery was silent at my visit as all of the Springs had once been, even at the height of summer. I reflected on my encounter with de Kooning long before, and had the sobering thought that in subsequent summers an elderly artist wobbling on his bicycle in a Hampton’s road would have little chance of surviving the tourist traffic, which is grim, relentless and unforgiving. In fact, I realized, the easy access I had in my time to the wonderful artists and writers living there is no longer possible. These days they all seem to remain cloistered in their compounds, their public appearances protected by bodyguards. “To the rich vacationers,” Harvey Shapiro writes:

our lives meant nothing.
We kept investing them with meaning
until the enterprise broke us.
…
I see these same sights,
bleared now. Words
broken into stony syllables,
blackened in remembrance.

I thought of Armand, who died of cancer after losing his younger son, Ari, in a car accident. I thought of David, also, two years dead now. On a couple of occasions back in the ‘seventies, Armand, David, Harvey, Alan, and others of us gathered during November or December to celebrate some last event before winter. A few times I remember Armand grunting a kind of benediction to end the season. “And now,” he pronounced in his ominous tones, “for four months of shit.” We’d look up into the grey sky, and that would be it till we met again next summer.

ON THIEVERY IN THE POETRY WORLD

So, lookit. One last post before shutting down the laptop to pack it. During the Meritage Press reading Thursday, there were books out on a table. Someone(s) stole Barry Schwabsky's OPERA and Oliver de la Paz's NAMES ABOVE HOUSES.

My immediate -- and, admittedly, still prevalent -- response was hilarity. I appreciated the thief's taste! And if you so liked those books that, broke, you had to steal them, that's your karma.

Still, stealing from other poets (who bring their copies to an event) and who probably are as broke as you are....is not quite on, ya know what I mean?

But, if you must know -- and you must if you're reading me -- the real thieves, I feel, are those who receive review copies and then resell them. This is on my mind as I saw a copy of OPERA at the Strand -- I just sent out review copies!!! Was that book even read?

I'm speculating here that, geez, if you write even one review -- given the desperate situation of getting poetry reviews -- you probably get inundated by tons of review copies from hopeful writers and publishers. Okay, that's not your fault. But if I may posit -- if you sell those review copies, I think you should cut a check to the publishers who sent said books to you (if you wish, take a percentage off the top for your time but, still, send a check to those publishers). Most poetry publishers can use that reverse donation, no matter how small...they're not suffering to publish poetry to buy you a cuppa joe or a mug of beer, Hon. That was not part of the deal when you put up that tag by your name that spells out "CRITIC" or "REVIEWER."

Okay, if that's a crazy idea,don't mind me. I'm possibly a tad cranky. I just didn't like seeing a book I published appear so quickly on the shelves of a used bookstore. And it didn't look like it was read (which, to me, is the real crime). At least the thief at the reading -- I am hoping -- had interest in the books s/he stole.

READ POEMS READ POEMS READ POEMS!!!!!

!!!!

THE WEEK'S WINES

Just before beginning to pack for returning to California, I thought I'd better answer one of you peeps by noting the wine aspect of this week's trip to New York. It wasn't planned but Italy became the focus. Two nights ago at Felidia, I sipped a 1999 Casasicilia something or other. It was a Tuscan wine Sangiovese but I don't recall its actual name (you intrepid ones can find out, if you really want to know). The next wine was the incredible 1991 Togni Estate Cabernet (as a Californian, one of the few non-Italians I imbibed this week). The last wine is the 1997 Bussola Amarone TB.

Last night at Lupa (one of my favorite NYC restaurants), I had a 1998 Giacomo Bologna Braida Barbera d'Asti something or other. I forget the specific designation (but, like I said, if you're intrepid you can find out).

All these wines, along with the three imbibed Wednesday at Tomasso's (1988 Bruno Giacosa Santa Stephano Red Label, 1985 Aldo Conterno Cicala Barolo, and 1989 Clerico Ginestra Barolo) are recommended.

Gads: it's exhausting trying to keep up with the various constituents of this blog (sooner or later, I believe the readership shall hit nine million peeps!). Not that I'm complaining, of course. At least peeps are reading and I love you all....

and of course I live simply to provide you content....

I must unstuck that tongue from the cheek....

PLEASE PENCIL IN YOUR CALENDARS

I had a near-messy schedule slip-up with a friend recently and so forced myself to sit down and check my forthcoming schedule of readings and such for the rest of the year -- which is to say, gather the scattered data onto one list. Anyway, here it is in case you wanna pencil in...

2003:
Oct. 26 -- Reading with Barry Schwabsky @ kari edwards' residence in San Francisco

Nov. 1 -- Lightning Panel with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Arthur Sze as part of "Intimacy & Geography," AAWW's national Asian American poetry conference from Thursday to Sunday in New York

Nov. 3 -- Reading with contributors to Going Home To A Landscape anthology at Galapagos Arts Center, Brooklyn

Dec. 2 -- Reading for Going Home to A Landscape at City Lights, San Francisco

===========

Here's more comprehensive information about my next event (thanks for this series to kari edwards, Taylor Brady & Stephanie Young):

HOUSE READING SERIES
Presents Poetry Readings by

Barry Schwabsky and Eileen Tabios

at the residence of kari edwards at
3435 Cesar Chavez, #327
San Francisco, CA

7 p.m., Sunday, October 26, 2003

Free admission; open to Public.

Accessible by Bart, Muni and major Bus Routes....

Barry Schwabsky is the author of _OPERA: Poems 1981-2002_ (Meritage Press, 2003); info at www.meritagepress.com/opera.htm.

Eileen Tabios is the author of _Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole_ (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002; info at www.marshhawkpress.org/tabios.htm.

=======================

Here's more comprehensive information about the next anthology I'm part of and will be supporting by doing one reading each on West and East Coasts:

GOING HOME TO A LANDSCAPE: WRITINGS BY FILIPINAS
Edited by Marianne Villanueva and Virginia Cerenio
with a Foreword by Rocio G. Davis
Calyx Publishing (2003)

“Brava! A wonderful new addition to the growing body of Philippine diaspora literature!”
—Jessica Hagedorn

“An evocative mélange of history and memory… speaking powerfully to all of us who know what it is to be far from home.
–Chitra Divakaruni

"The poems and stories in this stunning collection are poignant, raw, hip, and beautiful. A lyrically charged landscape worth revisiting again and again."
--R. Zamora Linmark

"This is a book to be talked about. The voices in it vibrate across continents and can be ecognized anywhere even in their uniqueness."
-- Roshni Rustomji-Kerns

SCHEDULE OF READINGS:

CALIFORNIA
November 7, Fri. 7:30 p.m.
Waverley Writers Friends Meeting House
957 Colorado Ave.
Palo Alto, CA

November 13, Thur. 7:30 p.m.
Cody’s Books
2454 Telegraph Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94710

November 17, Mon. 3 p.m.
San Francisco State University Bookstore
1600 Holloway Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94132

November 18, Tues. 7 p.m.
Modern Times Bookstore
888 Valencia St.
San Francisco, CA 94110

December 2, Tues 7 p.m.
City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94133

NEW YORK
November 3, Mon. 7 p.m.
Galapagos Art Space
70 N. 60th St.
Brooklyn, NY 11211

November 4, Tues.
Bluestockings Books
172 Allen St.
New York, NY 11225.

November 19, Wed. 7 p.m.
Teachers and Writers Collaborative
5 Union Square West
New York, NY 10003-3306

Some of the authors who will be reading at the various events:
Conchitina R. Cruz; Barbara J. Pulmano Reyes; Angela Narciso Torres; Isabelita Orlina Reyes; Arlene Biala; Michelle Macaraeg Bautista; Marianne Villanueva; Katrina Tuvera; Veronica Montes; Eileen Tabios; Elda Rotor; Grace Talusan; Malou Babilonia; Sherlyn Jimenez; Melissa Aranzamendez; Jean Vengua Gier

CRITICIZING IS SYNONYMOUS WITH PROMOTING AS MUCH AS POLEMIC IS THE SAME AS ART

I only had an hour or so to spend on midtown galleries this trip, so I couldn't see everything. But the highlight from what I saw was a show in the project room at Littlejohn Contemporary:

"Under The Desk: Bombast Revisited" by Maria Porges
Through October 4. 2003
LittleJohn Contemporary
41 E. 57th Street, NY 10022

At 745 Fifth Avenue, the exhibits now up at Mary Boone and David McKee present an interesting juxtaposition. Greg Bogin's acrylic and enamel paintings are at the former while a survey of Harvey Quaytman's paintings and drawings (1969-1998) are at the latter.

In comparing Bogin and Quaytman, I feel more affinity to one's approach over the other, but the one whose aesthetics I prefer also didn't manifest said aesthetics as well as the other did. (Yes, I am deliberately not revealing which artist's style I prefer and which artist's manifestations I feel is more flawed.)

In thinking about Bogin and Quaytman, my thoughts wander to how I think it's not a coincidence that the poets whose works I most appreciate happen to be open to all sorts of poetic styles; though I also have preferences as a writer, I would like to think that my range as a reader is more expansive -- and expansive enough to appreciate well-wrought poems in styles that may not interest me as a writer.

Between Bogin and Quaytman, I begrudgingly acknowledged that the more effective show was by the artist operating in an aesthetic style that normally leaves me cold. But by being so good at his work, he did make me more enthusiastic about his particular aesthetic approach.

All of which is also to say, shouldn't we be reading/judging poems based on said poems rather than (our judgments on) the particular school or style or manner from which we perceive them to originate? My experience tells me that the best of any type of poems can offer something to a reader who may not know anything about the school from which they originate. (As an example, I appreciated many "Language poems" before I ever knew the term existed.)

Why would a poet -- that is, the practitioner -- be close-minded to any forms of his/her chosen avocation? Wouldn't that answer be primarily (not always, but mostly) be due to ... issues of power (including "cultural capital")?

I don't know; I am sincerely asking. Because, peeps, the "poetry world" often baffles me with its wargames.

Relatedly, I had to make a brief stop in Chelsea today and, while there, saw a show I didn't see on Tuesday (which had been my designated Chelsea art gallery day on this trip). It is an exhibit of photographs which is not a medium that interests me as much as paintings, sculptures, drawings, installation art and other forms of visual art. Yet I appreciated and recommend seeing this show of (manipulated) photographs:

"Artificial Paradise" by Didier Massard
Julie Saul Gallery
535 West 22nd Street
NYC 10011

By being so wonderful, the show mades me pause and reconsider what has been, of late, my general indifference to photography. Kudos to you, Didier Massard.

It seems to me that the best promoters of an art form are those who show its possibilities, not those who attack alternatives to said art form.

GIFT FROM A NEW YORK ARTIST

As she handed me a present, she said, "White Heat is apt about your work."

Her gift: a biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Thank you.

THANK YOU, MARAMING SALAMAT, AGYAMANAC UNAY

"Let my poems be invisible like light...

We share needles and die like lovers, O my angels"
--Eric Gamalinda

Well, purrrrrrrr. Just picture me scarfing down Sarah Gambito's gift of chocolates (Belgian chocolates) with morning coffee as I write this...Sip and munch.

Thank you all for the blogged and e-mailed birthday wishes. Your good thoughts, indeed, made me wanna go "hippy happy hoppy" then go "radiating radical"!!

Thanks to those who attended last night's reading for Meritage Press. What a wonderful crowd -- heartening in quantity (someone said he actually counted the crowd and reached 67 - yaY!) as well as radiant presences. I saw peeps I haven't seen for a while like Bino Realuyo (freshly fresh from Puerto Rico), Thad Rutkowski, Tom Fink (ever-beaming at moi who always appreciates being...beamed at), Gordon Tapper, the lovely Bruna Mori, Tan Lin (Tan! I met him when I was fresh from my banking career and so he was the one to receive my question: "So. What's this thing called Language Poetry?")! Dancer-choreographer & my collaborator Johanna Almiron. Also met a number of wonderful poets for the first time -- including Wanda Phipps! Wanda and I were in the same year at Barnard College but this is the first time we met! Artists, of course -- from long-time painters like Jon D'Orazio to up-and-comers like Eduardo del Rosario (the subject of what will be my first art essay for Sidereality). Poets, editors, teachers, cultural activists, students and even critics -- thank you all for coming.

Thank you curator and poet David Kirschenbaum, Boog City and ACA Galleries. What a beautiful venue with paintings by Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Allan Davie, Romare Bearden, among others, looking out from the walls.

Thank you Simone White for evocative, haunting, lyrical sounds -- I couldn't have chosen a better musician to guide our ears through night.

Of course the poets reading were stellar; here they are in the order of appearance (David K. -- you wanted this order of the readers?) and some choice lines:

Paolo Javier: "In loss I was curious."

Sarah Gambito: "My possessions resemble effort"

Joseph O. Legaspi: "As soon as we became men, my brother and I wore skirts."

Eric Gamalinda: "War is suspect -- it reeks of nostalgia but not of you"

Patrick Rosal: "angels given up on his wrists' strings"

Oliver de la Paz: "And perhaps we will forget the felonies we will charge one another"

Luis H. Francia (aptly referencing here the "9-1-1" anniversary): "I bleed for the lives we never had..."

The first six poets provided an appetizer for the radiance of Meritage Press' 2004 book, the PINOYPOETICS anthology. Meanwhile, I'm happy to report that the University of Philippines Press will be publishing Luis Francia's poetry collection Museum of Absences, of which an excerpt is available as a Meritage Press e-chapbook.

=========

The celeb continued after the reading. A lush red rose, chocolates, books, a bouquet of flowers, poems, poems and more poems! After leaving ACA Galleries' gracious hospitality, we went walking through Chelsea for some eats. The funny thing is that the Corpse was having so many concurrent conversations that it took her four blocks to realize she had walked out of the gallery with the plastic glass still in one hand, filled with the white wine of the evening, a Scarlatta pinot grigio (this may be a good one for Joel Sloman -- thanks for identifying yourself, peep -- to try with that pasta with smoked salmon and goat cheese, sage; wink). Noticing the wine that I'd been sipping unconsciously, I proclaimed, "Well I should definitely toast the moon!"

We looked up....and said moon was formed no less than by the orb projected from spotlights radiating upward from Ground Zero....Time paused. The plastic glass was raised to the departed spirits...against the night sky, a silvery field glimmered, formed from light shards...

Soon enough, we found a local Chinese-Vietnamese restaurant where my 14-member posse of poets, artists and activists sang a raucous "Happy Birthday!" I am happy to become older amidst so much positive energy from both virtual and non-virtual reality. Your blessings make my aging mirror the path of fine wine.

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Dios Ti Agngina...

And HAPPY BIRTHDAY as well this weekend to Sean Finney and Rodney Koenecke -- imbibe extra liquid for me wishing you well!

Must end this post with a poem by Eric Gamalinda, always a wonderful role model for how an artist may develop vigorously -- he wowed the crowd with his video poem "Delirium"! (And then gave said video to me, along with his award-winning novel My Sad Republic! I can't wait to settle down again for this eye feast!) Here's an excerpt from one of the poems Eric read (he may have just written this):

from "Poem Not Written in Catalan"

Of all the things that are not eternal
I deny the patience of water, the divinity of salt, and the persistence of the spider

I would like to write a suicide note in three and a half languages
and travel south on a Thursday towards
some form of life outside of earth

And although people will think I'm no longer there
I will live in geodesic domes
and count only in numbers less than zero

Sometimes when I walk past trees in the city I hear them denying me
Normally this doesn't bother me but today
I'm not going to take any conspiracies

I deny bodies of water smaller than the Great Lakes
I deny any planet larger than America

I deny the fact that when I kill time, time is actually killing me
I am air, light, sound, all of which I deny
I deny the Buddha, I do not deny the Buddha

TODAY!!!

Come hear poets who, postcolonial-ly, could tell you that the phrase "POETRY WARS" is an oxymoron, with an emphasis on the moron.

TODAY!

Or as curator David Kirschenbaum cites from the Village Voice:

"D.A. LEVY LIVES: CELEBRATING
THE RENEGADE PRESS IN AMERICA"

Aca Galleries, 529 W.20th, fifth floor,
212.842.BOOG, Thu at 6

David Kirschenbaum, editor of Boog City, a politics and arts paper put out by the NYC-based small press of the same name, curates this reading series revolving around non-New York small presses.

Tonight features San Francisco/St. Helena-based Meritage Press and its publisher-editor, Eileen Tabios, as the night's host. Tabios focuses on Filipino poetry from her contributors, including Oliver de la Paz, Eric Gamalinda, Sarah Gambito, Paolo Javier, Joseph O. Legaspi, Patrick Rosal, and the Voice's Luis H. Francia. With music from Simone White.

Free

------

There will be wine, cheese, and fruit, too.

Directions: C/E to 23rd St., 1/9 to 18th St.
Venue is bet. 10th and 11th avenues

www.meritagepress.com
www.simonewhite.org/simonewhite/listen.html

--
David A. Kirschenbaum, editor and publisher
Boog City
330 W.28th St., Suite 6H
NY, NY 10001-4754
T: (212) 842-BOOG (2664)
F: (212) 842-2429
www.boogcity.com

ON SHIPPING WINE

Shin Yu Pai writes (and thanks for asking as it's a biggie topic among oenophiles):

"Trying to send someone a bottle of wine for a special occasion and discovering that Massachusetts state law prohibits sending wine beyond say Boston. Apparently, most folks buy their own bottles, package and ship thru FedEx -- but than you have to lie about what you're shipping or they won't take it. Thankfully there are a few internet wine purchasing sites, but I know nothing about wine. Maybe this would be a good question for Eileen Tabios."

Yes, some states prohibit the shipments of alcohol across their borders because of concerns about shipping to minors and ability to collect taxes (my suspicion is that the restrictions are primarily related to tax-collecting concerns: boo!). Here is a site that offers a convenient background and status on this issue, including where it's okay to ship wine and which states are legally precluded: http://wine.about.com/library/encyc/bl_shipping.htm

Now, I suppose I could give tips on how to get around these statutes, but I don't have such tips as said tips would be ... illegal. And, being a poet, sip, I always follow the law....especially on public blogs. Cough with sip. And that the only rules I break are those applied by misguided ones to Poetry.

Sip. Water. Boring, I know, but check out why -- the wines from dinner tonight:

1988 Bruno Giacosa Santa Stephano Red Label
1985 Aldo Conterno Cicala Barolo
1989 Clerico Ginestra Barolo

These came off one of the best wine lists in New York: the restaurant Tomasso's in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. If you don't live in the neighborhood, make the trek -- the food is worth it!

VIEWED, INHALED AND RECOMMENDED

Theresa Chong
Paintings and Works on Vellum, September 21 ­ October 20, 2001

Danese Press Release


New Works on Paper

Danese is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works on paper by Theresa Chong opening Wednesday, September 10 and continuing through Saturday, October 11.

The current exhibition includes a group of intricate gouache and pencil drawings on handmade Japanese rice paper –- either black imagery on an off-white ground, or white on a deep blue-black –- which integrate and extend the formal and conceptual issues examined in her previous work. The drawings consist of delicate, meandering lines punctuated by minute painted elements which convey a sense of rhythm, meter and lyric beauty. While open to multiple associations and varied interpretation –- celestial maps, cascading particles on a field, even musical notation –- the new work remains decidedly and purely abstract.

A “primary concern of the work…is with the nature of the gesture as part of our immediate legacy of abstraction.”¹ Chong has been inspired by abstract expressionism, its energy and spontaneity, as in the work of de Kooning and Pollock, and by pop art, particularly the clarity of line in the work of Roy Lichtenstein. By also incorporating computer-generated imagery, a tension is achieved between the “skill and fluency of the artist’s hand and the impartial, dispassionately rational intelligence of the machine.”²

Theresa Chong was born in Korea in 1965 and immigrated with her family to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1974. She attended Oberlin Conservatory, Ohio and Boston’s University School of Fine Arts. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, among others. Chong recently completed a faculty residency at the Anderson Ranch in Colorado and has just been awarded a grant from NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts). She currently lives and works in New York.


¹Goodman, Jonathan. “Theresa Chong,” Art Asia Pacific, Issue 34, p. 87.
²Ibid.

ART DOWNTOWN (AKA, THE LADY SAYS: SIZE DOESN'T ALWAYS MATTER)

SoHo today for gallery visits. Highlight for me was conceptual artist Paul Kos' "Everything Matters / A Retrospective" up through December 6, 2003 at the Grey Art Gallery in NYU. His strength derives from, as he puts it, being a "materials-based" conceptual artist....and this dude has a great sculptor's eye and is a master of deft juxtapositions, e.g. through a work that features 2,500 red plastic chess pieces of the pawn against glass. Another highlight was "Chartres Bleu," a multi-channel color video installation that offers a life-size video rendition of a Gothic-stained glass window in Chartres Cathedral, with the passage of light over one day condensed to twelve minutes. Lovely works, curated by Connie Lewallen....and lovingly installed, which is also nice to see.

It's always interesting to see The Drawing Center's Fall Selections. I don't think this group is one of the strongest I've seen, but Christine Hiebert delighted me (as she has before) with her on-site drawing against a gallery wall. The show is up through Oct. 18 at 35 Wooster Street, NYC 10013.

Actually, kinda slim pickin's downtown (at least based on what I saw)....this reminds me to note: San Francisco's gallery-based art scene is obviously much smaller than New York's. But I've never had a disappointing gallery day in San Francisco (and, prior to coming to NY, I spent an afternoon with SF galleries). Sadly, SoHo's current group of exhibits does prove that bigger (in this case, a bigger scale of venues) is not always better.

Later this week, I'll visit the midtown galleries, but will have a preview tonight as I am about to leave now for Theresa Chong's opening at Danese.

ON EVER-FLUCTUATING ASSEMBLAGES

Been interested in Bill Marsh's recent comments as regards Assembly Poetics. His most recent post surfaced something I like: the notion of shape-shifting; read more of it here: http://sdpg.blogspot.com/

I like the shape-shifting comment because, for me, it relates to how assembly poetics refuses categorization. Shape-shifting, to me, is just inherent in what artists do as they develop over time; the alternative is to keep repeating a style that, at one point, perhaps became popular. Guston is an obvious example of this path I admire -- which is also to say, I see no reason why a poet can't write across a variety of styles....and, frankly, the last person to diss such an approach should be another poet-practitioner who, one would think, would want to have the freedom to try as many things as possible (or at least be "allowed" -- even self-allowed -- to do so). If one wished the stability/security/guarantee/certainty____[fill in the word] associated with fixed positions, why be an artist?

The one thing I would note is that if I am a shape-shifter, this doesn't mean I don't have a skeleton or a spine, which is to say, a "center." I note this as saying, my "I" may be subjective and/or is continously in flux, but it does exist.

That prior paragraph is one reason why I think it so important for the project PINOYPOETICS anthology to be released, and Meritage Press will do so next year. Await that Word!

EXHIBITING TRANSLATIONS
(All exhibits cited below are recommended for viewing -- not because the works are "good" or "bad" as such terms are too reductive and uninteresting for me in terms of considering art, but -- because they offer spaces for interesting intellectual debate with your or companions' eyes. Venue and exhibition details are featured at end of post.)

I am lucky that Boog City and ACA Galleries chose to host a Meritage Press reading this Thursday, which is to say, in September as that gave me the excuse to come to NY in time to see the opening exhibits for the new art season. Today, I must have visited over 50 galleries in Chelsea. From that foray, a few exhibits caught my eye for *also* addressing the translation topic that's been of concern lately.

I wasn't meaning to skew my eye towards exhibits that addressed translation (whether consciously or not on the artist's part) ...but the topic proved difficult to ignore when the second exhibit I happened to see was Shelly Bahl's video and installation-based work entitled "Pink is The Navy Blue of India." Ostensibly about fashion, Bahl's visual discussions end up addressing how culture becomes an object for transcultural dining (at one point in the video, she licks the pink sari she is handling). It seems to me that feeding upon another culture in order to generate new work is certainly not a stranger in certain translation approaches.

Soon after Bahl's exhibit, I encountered Donald Lipski's "Non-fiction" show at Galerie Lelong. Here, books were used as materials to form sculptures -- which is to say, the books were not read (for textual content). As a writer, I have an obvious bias when I say that my initial sighting of these works didn't sit well with my eye. My stomach did a brief roil of nausea when I saw some of the wall-based installations featuring steel screws or dead bolts nailing the books against the wall -- the phrase "hurted words" came to mind. Another installation showed books heaped up and seemingly ready to be hauled away to some trash dump.

The subversion of the book's purpose, I thought, is about as tidy a visual metaphor for how a writer might feel in encountering his or her works in translation and feeling violated by that process.

Then, I went to the gallery's front desk to look at some of the p.r. material on the exhibit (by the way, I usually look at the exhibited works prior to reading the stuff written about said works to facilitate as much as possible an unmediated response to the works -- even if such unmediation is just another illusion, of course: look at how I'm seeing the translation angle on some exhibits). That's when I discovered that Lipski created sculptures from "surplus, remaindered and discarded books." Well now, that too is relevant to translation: how it may recover instead of subvert an otherwise "dead"/obscured work.

*****

In recent years, whenever I visit New York to check out galleries, it seems I must update the names and locations of galleries as they've been changing so much! This season is no different, and one of the welcome additions is the space associated with CUE Art Foundation. Apparently, CUE was originated by certain philanthropists who wanted to offer exhibition space (on a one-time basis) to artists who have received minimal exposure. The artists are chosen by designated curators, e.g. artists Polly Apfelbaum and Nikki S. Lee as well as poet/art critic Bill Berkson. It's a worthy addition to the scene -- I have always felt that if I won Lotto and began buying art, I would acquire more contemporary art than those by proven Masters, not just because of the challenge of sifting among an ever-fluctuating field of participants but because I believe those who can afford it should support the artists of one's times. CUE was established by businessmen Thomas Devine, Brian Starer and Thomas Hsu.

From CUE's opening exhibit, I enjoyed the pen and watercolor works by Cheol Yu Kim -- I was impressed by the fine details allowed by her watercolors (not easy to do) of such images as small insects, birds, ballooons and more. Since her approach also addresses translation, let me quote from Kim's Artist Statement:

"How do we perceive our world? Many people perceive the world in words. Some perceive it mainly by direct contact or experience. Some may rely on sounds. A few may use colors and shapes. // ... I understand things through arrangement and rearrangement of their visual images. They provide me a blissful new perspective. When something is strange and overpowering, I can manipulate and play with its visual images to that it becomes less terrifying and even familiar."

Kim then goes on to say that she grew up in a small rural village embraced by layers of mountains; the mountains "also embraced the dividing line of South and North Korea but no one in the village talked about the line. It was just a thorny part of our simple lives." Coupled with childhood tales of "monsters in a deep foreest and UFOs in the night sky," the effect on Kim was to imbue a fascination, often fearful, with "anything that flies through the air" -- e.g. "I remember spending hours following thousands of colorful balloloons in the sky which came from the North and contained political leaflets."

Thus, Kim says that her "memories and experiences are intermingled with ... imagination and dreams. It is often unclear what is real and what is not I find it hard to draw a line between what is real and what is imaginary, I believe the line is where I start. My work arises from the boundaries of what is familiar and what is not. It helps me deal with real life better one step at a time."

In different ways, translators move from a line between what is real and what is imaginary. Would it be that the better translators are those who do not forget that there is something "real" there? I would like to think so as that would neatly tie into another of my pervasive interests -- that we not approach the external world with a colonial-izing or shallow mindset. But I suspect that art is more layered and complicated than what can be encapsulated in, say, political correctness....

Political correctness, though, is also a reductive and unfair way to consider the feelings and opinions of those who would be translated. As I've said here before, they -- not the translators -- are the ones who are exposed to the risks of various biases. Brett Cook-Dizney reminds me of such with hir exhibit "REVOLUTION: Paintings and Collaborative Drawings" at P.P.O.W. Here are several paintings and mixed-media wall installations featuring such personages as The Dalai Lama, Paul Robeson, Thich Nhat Hahn, Cesar Chavez, Aung Sau Suu Kyi, James Baldwin and Julia Butterfly. Cook-Dizney presents portraits using gold paint on black paper and then places books on a ledge before the portraints. From Arundhati Roy's installation, we read the ever-timely reminder: "One is not involved by virtue of being a writer or activist. One is involved because one is a human being."

Were these works art or polemic? Certainly they must be art, in part because the use of gold paint against black is, to me, a formal choice (materially) that reflects the intended homage.

Through her exhibit "Mirroring Society," Jennifer Reeves says something similar to Roy's statement when she incorporates these words into one of her paintings: "Life is thicker than paint." Obviously a take-off on that saying "Blood is thicker than water," Reeves' exhibit incorporates her view on the art world which has been known to be acerbic; here, I'll quote from the press release as I like how it sums up her show: "Shifting from the abstract to the representational, these deceivingly playful works seemed to update the language of painting both formally and thematically. Her landscapes and obstinately autonomous abstractions became the backdrop for a meditation on painting, which flowed seamlessly between a celebration and critique of the medium in contemporary artistic discourse. The abstractions are revealed to have a figurative purpose."

The abstractions are revealed to have a figurative purpose -- I find this to be a noteworthy comment. There are surface abstractions and then abstractions that flow from a figurative reference. An approach that widens the scope -- while still fully addressing -- of a perspective based on addressing formal properties (like line, space and color) appeals to me because radical and radicalized complications is something I find challenging when it comes to aesthetics (and poetics). (Incidentally, for me, this matter somehow evokes the poetic debate over how some Langpo poets may diss post-Lango poets (whoever they are) for tinkering with text without (that is, presumably without) the socio-political motivations as had moved the first generation....)

I long have been aware of Reeves' paintings, by the way, but this exhibit gave me the first reason to be very much interested in her work. She combines text (the flatness of textual imagery, mind you) very adeptly into a painterly surface that, at times even becomes quite gestural (through thickened brushstrokes). Here, one reads her paintings without having to forego the delight one takes in the (material properties of) paint -- one can engage in political debate while remaining on the aesthetic plane (to the extent politics is divided from aesthetics)....which is all to say, Reeves proclaims "Life is thicker than paint" but she still painted well enough so that the viewer need not choose.

Two more exhibits are worth noting in terms of their unique approaches to translation. "COMA SCULPTURE," the first solo exhibit in the U.S. by Berlin-based artist Bjorn Dahlem. From the gallery press release: "His installations and sculptures represent physical phenomena and scientific models. Black holes, high velocity stars, wormholes, homunculi, quarks and rays are constructed from pedestrial materials such as wood, neon, found lamps and carpet remnants thus foiling the viewer's expectations of scientific illustration."

In part, I enjoyed Dahlem's juxtaposition of white styrofoam against tan plywood in making temporary walls within the gallery -- foiling my expectations, indeed.

I also heartily recommend a group exhibit entitled "Innocence & Transgression," curated by John Zorn. Zorn is a composer "obsessed," according to the press release, with the transformation of found materials into sound. He has a special attraction to underground artists and musical styles that are extremely loud, wild, or creative. This will be exhibited in his choice of artists." Seeing the doll photos of Hans Bellmer sufficed for me to make this show a highlight.

Here are exhibition details (hours are generally Tues-Sat, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.):

"Pink is the Navy Blue of India" by Shelly Bahl, Sept. 6-Oct. 6 at at M.Y. Art Prospects, 547 W. 27th Street, 2nd floor, NYC 10001

"Non-fiction" by Donald Lipski, Sept. 6-Oct. 11 at Galerie Lelong, 528 W. 28th Street, NYC 10001

"Cautious Flight Into My World" by Cheol Yu Kim at CUE Art Foundation, 511 W. 25th St., NYC 10001

"REVOLUTION: Paintings and Collaborative Drawings" by Brett Cook-Dizney, Sept. 4-Oct.4 at P.P.O.W. 555 West 25th Street, NYC 10011

"Mirroring Society" by Jennifer Reeves at Galeria Ramis Barquet, Sept. 6-Oct. 11. 532 W. 24th Street, NYC 10011

"COMA SCULPTURE" by Bjorn Dahlem at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Sept. 6-Oct. 4. 535 W. 22nd Street, NYC 10011

"Innocence & Transgression" curated by John Zorn at The Proposition, managed by Ellen Donahue and Ronald Sosinski. Sept. 9-Oct. 18. 559 W. 22nd Street, NYC 10011

THE IRONY OF AN AMERICAN LEGION FLAG IN FRONT OF ALFONSO OSSORIO'S GRAVE

Michelle Bautista writes in response to my last post as regards Alfonso Ossorio:

"hmmm...American Legion flag, eh? fascinating... I hadn't heard of his name until the flips listserve, then I started searching all over the net about his life, I didn't find much except for brief timelines in his life or more along his life as an artist and his works. Born in 1916, became an American Citizen at 17 in 1933.

"1934 is when the U.S. gave the Philippines its 'independence' in order to exclude them under stricter immigration standards. Prior to then Filipinos were considered "nationals" since the Philippines was a colony and had relatively unrestricted migration to the U.S.

"I would suspect he was an American Legion member. Ironically, the American Legion was a very big exclusionist proponent and wanted to reduce Filipino immigration to the U.S. Yet, there were many Filipino Legion groups particularly after World War II, as Filipinos became patriotic veterans. they had their own Legion posts like the Rizal post.

"He went to college in Rhode Island. Many young men coming over during that time were looking for a college education while working as houseboys, farm labors, etc. But I don't know if Ossorio's life was typical of other immigrants or maybe he had a special experience that somehow brought him to rhode island."

==========

Thanks Michelle. I'm on the road so I'm not home where I have major monographs on Ossorio's life and work. But I can definitely guarantee that this scion of a wealthy family (his clan had/has sugar plantations back in the Philippines) did not have a typical immigrant experience. In any event, regardless of class, the idea of an American Legion flag in front of a Filipino's grave had been what struck me as strange -- for the reasons you mention above. Sometimes, I suppose, context don't matter much either....

....although, nowadays, what I mostly wish to focus on is how Ossorio never got the dues he deserved for his work as a visual artist -- I believe his "assemblages" were/are an important contribution to the *American* abstract expressionist movement...

BOW...FOR THE "GRACE TO BE BORN AND LIVE..."

"There are all my friends."
--Willem de Kooning pointing, from his house, across the street at Green River Cemetery.

"On one side there are artists, on the other side are dead people."
--Sandy McIntosh as we walked a path in Green River Cemetery.

In New York. First day spent in Hamptons. Visited Green River Cemetery, Springs, East Hampton. My first visit there. Paused by the tombstones of several, including

Frank O'Hara

Jackson Pollock

Lee Krasner

Willem de Kooning

Elaine de Kooning

Stuart Davis

Alfonso Ossorio* (next to Harold Rosenberg)

More later. Meanwhile, thank you Sandy and Barbara McIntosh for your gracious hospitality. On train ride back to NYC, began reading a book I borrowed from Sandy: Sorcerer's Apprentice: my life with Carlos Castaneda by Amy Wallace. The book contains an epigraph by her father Irving Wallace which cites, from his 1964 work The Prize, the lines:

"...life is not a daily dying, not a pointless end, not an ashes-to-ashes and dust-to-dust, but a soaring and blinding gift snatched from eternity."


----------------

*Synchronistically, Paolo Javier raised the Ossorio tombstone today on Flips Listserve. As I said there, "what I saw as a tombstone for Ossorio was rather unusual and not caught by this URL [on the cemetery]. It was of the initials A and O superimposed over each other on a tomb marker, surrounded by smaller marble engravings of "O" on all four sides of it.....as if to evoke a tic-tac-toe board! Ossorio's memorial took up more space than most markers....which I actually found rather sad,

as if this HUGE PERSONALITY understood that he never got his due during his lifetime and so he was trying to make up for it in terms of the physical markers for his departures.

AND WHY WAS THERE AN AMERICAN LEGION FLAG planted in front of his tomb marker? Made no sense to me! If anyone can hazard a guess, please let me know!"

A FEW REASONS WHY MY WINGS ARE BLACK
--for John, neighbor and friend....and a financier who was working at the WTC when...

I'm preparing to leave for New York City where, in part, ACA Galleries and Boog City have been kind enough to sponsor a reading for poets associated with Meritage Press. The reading will take place this Thursday, September 11 -- or the second anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center....

September 11 -- it's also the birthday of Ferdinand Marcos, the guy who betrayed a country and his and my and the current generations of Filipinos, all helping to turn the Philippines into the mess that it has been and, sadly, continues to be...

And also the birthday of the innovative scholar Leny M. Strobel (Happy Birthday Sweetie!)

And, since the cat's out of the bag among enough circles, I'll reveal it also will be MY birthday. Yep, perhaps some of you will present a gift simply by being there at ACA Galleries when I introduce a fine line-up of poets: Eric Gamalinda, Luis H. Francia, Oliver de la Paz, Sarah Gambito, Paolo Javier, Joseph O. Legaspi and Patrick Rosal. All have garnered various poetry prizes and recognition for their work and if you don't know who they are, then rectify youse-selves!


Still, my thoughts on 9-1-1 do focus primarily on the former World Trade Center. Synchronistically, as I continue to clean up my hard drive, I stumbled across the notes (a combined diary notes and lecture notes) for a talk I'd given just three days after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. Here are the notes (first published by Bamboo Ridge) for the visit to what was then a creative writing/poetry class taught by newly award-winning poet (FENCE's Alberta Prize for Sky Girl) and Sweetie Rosemary Griggs:

ON POETRY AFTER 9-1-1:

I am glad to be here to discuss Black Lightning. It’s my first book, and I'm happy to see it as part of your texts. But, today, I begin by mentioning the horrible events that occurred earlier this week on September 11. I’d like to share some notes that I began last night for what I thought I’d say today.

------------------[for the class]--------------

It is 1:41 p.m., Friday, Sept. 14, 2001. And I am finally beginning to write down some notes for a guest lecture tomorrow -- at a creative writing class using, as a text, my book Black Lightning (a collection of poets discussing how they write their poems). It is difficult to focus on this work, when my thoughts are centered on the World Trade Center -- rather, what is formerly the World Trade Center.

Once, I worked on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center. For three and a half years, I spent most of my waking hours there. I marvel now at how quickly I came to take for granted the aerial views afforded by my former office. Some evenings, working late, dusk would fall and the city skyline would appear like diamonds against black velvet. On one fourth of July, I returned there to watch fireworks; from my vantage point of being so high up in the tower, the fireworks seemed to explode directly in front of my face. Colors exploding to define the sheerness of ecstasy. Once, William Blake wrote, "Ecstasy is Beauty."

What does its tragedy have to do with poetry? Perhaps nothing. I’ve heard some poets say they can’t poeticize what words cannot even describe. I have no choice as a poet. The fall of the World Trade Center infiltrates my poems whether or not I will it. Creative writing courses logically include a focus on craft and technique. What is harder to teach, is how to be a poet -- to live as a poet. For me, to be a poet requires scraping away psychic defenses to bear an extremely thin membrane between the world and myself. So that, even if I didn’t have my own personal history with the World Trade Center, today, 3,000 miles away, on the other side of the North American continent from New York City, I can feel the spirits of those trapped in the rubble -- both dead and dying. "Every man’s death diminishes me," John Donne once wrote. Always, Poetry is timely.

With that, I turn to what I know to have been your own recent focus within Black Lightning: the poetry of Luis Cabalquinto and Jessica Hagedorn. Rosemary, your teacher, also tells me that you most recently have been working on the exercise of writing a poem after a painting. To write poems inspired by paintings is a process very much close to my heart. I would estimate that perhaps 75% of my own work as a poet and fiction writer are inspired by the visual arts. It reflects my long-time interest in contemporary art -- monitoring the developments of that world -- for the past two decades. But it is also relevant that I consider the role of the poet to be, not one of writing poems but, engaging with life in a different -- a better -- way than if poetry was not one’s avocation. This means, for me, the role of the poet is to see as lucidly as possible in order to be effective as a poet, as a human being.

Sensitivity to the visual image and a deliberate effort to remain open to the world has, I suspect, heightened for me the effects of recent events in New York City. Technology has created such a profound visual unfolding of the events through the internet and television. Let me stress that I am not professing to be a more sensitive person than others or that a poet is more sensitive than another human being who may have no interest in poetry. I am just referring to the synchronicity of how the nature of my own approach to poetry (its reliance on the visual) has exacerbated for me the impact of the recent tragedies.

For instance, let's look together at the cover of Black Lightning. This cover reproduces a painting by Theresa Chong. She had painted it wet on wet, that is, she painted thin stripes of white paint flowing vertically down a wet panel of black paint. And as I look at it today, I see quite clearly the façade of the former World Trace Center towers whose sides had been marked by similar vertical steel grids. Today, I cannot see the music -- the lyricism and rhythm -- that I know more specifically had inspired Theresa to make this painting. I see only the grid and how, as with the fractures depicted on this painting, the grid fails.

Let me share a photograph from the New York Times a day after the tragedy. Here is the World Trade Center building before it collapsed. There is that same façade of a grid. Against the building is the image of a man falling to his death. The photographer caught him in mid-air. How closely Black Lightning’s cover mirrors the façade of the buildings designed by architect Monoru Yamasaki. With nine million square feet of office space, the 110-story towers were 1,353 feet high, for a time the highest skyscrapers in the world. Yamasaki was an American architect who achieved fame in the late 1950s with his sensuous, textile-like structures. With Emery Roth as joint architect, Yamasaki designed the World Trade Center towers to evoke a purity of form. The buildings were constructed with a steel frame and a glass curtain wall. Today, I see Yamasaki’s crowning achievement when I look at the cover of Black Lightning…and, that too may be the role of the poet: to connect the dots of synchronicity because lucidity encourages it. There… is this grid-image shared by Black Lightning's cover and the World Trade Center’s facade.

On the photograph, note, too, how the blood on the man’s shirt is clearly discernible, despite that the photo is black and white. Can you see the color red with me? It seems to me that when you are a poet looking at something, you need to see beyond what is visible. So: can you see the color red with me? You can see it...if you feel it.

And, notice, too, how the man is falling headfirst. Perhaps he was at about the 50th floor or so when the photograph was taken as he is featured in the center of a grid. He might have positioned himself to fall headfirst, my husband suggested to me, because he wanted to ensure that he die on impact. If so, what kind of horror must the man have felt and considered in his mind to choose this headlong position.

In the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center tragedies, I wrote a number of poems. From one of them, I wrote the lines:

as if the Poem demands grief

to teach the difference
between the authentic and the real

as if there is no such thing as paradox

as if there is no such thing as
the haven of imagination—

how the photographed grid of

the World Trade Center tower
fails to halt the fall of a man on fire

because Hell, this day, is premature


Here, words are clearly a weak response. What will become poetry is whether the …

--------------------

…And there, I stop writing out the notes for the lecture…because I don’t know how poetry will *become* from this tragedy. Quite often, say, in making up professional "Bios", I identify myself as a poet -- it is convenient to do so. But I know that I don’t know if I am a poet. The best that I can say is that I aspire to be a poet. So…how dare I now project "what will become poetry" from this tragedy…

And, later, when I return to these notes for a guest lecture, I do so by recalling how, within the past 24 hours -- and speaking of poems inspired by paintings -- I’ve received three e-mails referencing Klee’s painting "Angelus Novus" and Walter Benjamin’s response to it:

"A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
--Walter Benjamin

So, finally, this Friday evening, hours before I am supposed to appear before 38 students as, what, some sort of expert on poetry (?), I chuck away the notes and look at my empty wine glass. I think of several still missing .... I think of how, once, I didn't give enough attention to one of those still missing... I think that, tomorrow, as regards Poetry, I shall just wing it…

O, darkening wings

WINES DU JOUR

1981 Lafite and 1978 Giacomo Conterno Monfortino. Both delightful, though the latter blew former away. Nuff said.

NEW POETRY PROJECT FROM MERITAGE PRESS

I'M PITCHIN'!! I know I'm pitchin'!! But there's little room for modesty when you're acting on behalf of a poetry press! So, lookit: There are only eight left!! These shall be collectors' editions someday!!! [Peeps, I always say to the mirror -- if you're gonna pitch, you might as well do it shamelessly....]

Anyway, I rarely disseminate my wine drawings (for good reasons, all aesthetic) to the world. You can see some as part of my latest Meritage Press project showcasing the poem "Veins" by David Hess! Here's the official announcement (and thanks Jerrold for putting it up on the site!):

David Hess Poetry Broadside (With Wine-Drawings by Eileen Tabios):

........ Hum
without purpose
like pain.
--from "Veins" by David Hess

" Veins" is Meritage Press' first poetry broadside. It features a poem by David Hess and wine-drawings by Eileen Tabios. This is a signed and numbered (20) limited edition by poet and artist.

Only 10 [now only eight!] copies remain available for sale, at $20 each. The 8 x 11 edition is suitable for framing and hanging against an appreciative wall.

David Hess lives in his hometown of St. Louis. He attended Brown University. A chapbook, Cage Dances, was published by Skanky Possum in 2001. Poems, essays and reviews have appeared in Jacket, Skanky Possum, Mungo vs. Ranger, Readme, Quid, VeRT and Shampoo.

For ordering information, e-mail MeritagePress@aol.com

-------

Bay Area peeps who attended my party a few weeks ago as part of David's "Leave Your Kids At Home Tour" saw a precursor of this broadside as a party favor (don't worry lovely Stephanie; I still have yours in safe keeping!)

FALLEN ANGEL SERIES

I started a new series today. It's a relief. It's been a while since I wrote something I felt I could keep. This series began with a poem I scratched out in a 20-minute fog. I was having a cup of coffee and the feeling just alit. When I looked up again, the scrawled pages before me presented a poem. At the time, I wasn't even looking to write a poem, but up reared a long one (Poems are such mules at times, with their own schedules! Or is this to say: Svasana, indeed and death to my intentions!).

This poem: written in ten parts, written in 20 minutes (I have a new watch; it has a timer on it). It's a gift when that happens -- you poet-peeps know what I mean. I just typed out the poem. Here's an excerpt:

from
FALLING UP

1.
Indeed, this difficulty in dying. The world sees me as a humpback. Only air relishes these velvety feathers I bear. Well, once you did. But you paused before my black brassiere. On my deathbed I shall remember you as a pair of hands hovering. The "Jewish No," you informed me, is defined as "reluctant, awkward." But still a No, I whispered. I could not dam my leak. What I didn't know was the landscape your eyes foretold: a sunlit sky. A silk thread descending a golden glimmer. You recognized the one pulling open the blue trapdoor, the one who discovered seams against light. The face you tasted and at whom you now smile as you remind, "Honey, angels may fall but they never die."


2.
To be an angel is to be alone in a smudged gown, fingers poking through holes burnt by epistemology. I drink from ancient goblets whose cracked rims snag my lips into a burning bleeding: I know my skin as rust. (I know my skin as ruin.) I wonder what you tasted after I bit your lip, thus coaxing out your reluctant tongue. Did you see the garish orange evaporate from the quilted bedspread trapping us? Once, you said, we should only lie on beds of grass. Undoubtedly, this must be attributed to the scent of honeysuckle and how, beyond such meadow, the only sound heard from children is laughter.


3.
I told you of the baby rattlesnake whose skin was a pale green like the ink of this poem writing out what can never be articulated. No, not a poem but your name. Yes, a poem. If you would only tell me you allow me everything in your dreams. Oh, ignore my relapses -- I know you define "daylight" as the meticulous watch against releasing signs I may interpret as Hope. The green infant was run over by a neighbor who, it is rumored, adores massive mahogany libraries jam-packed with tomes. Preferably with cracked leather covers. Preferably with yellowed pages brittle and brown at the edges. Preferably with gold-gilded letters. Murder can remain mere story, this big-bellied man once whispered over a cigar smoked down to the length of my rather enchanting thumb.

P.S.: DEAR POET,

To read a great poem is to experience something that can make you a better poet. Dear Poet, in at least this manner, envy works against you if you don't understand this.

Love,
Corpse

(Well, actually, to read a bad poem can also make you a better poet....but you get my drift...)

BLOGGER ALERT

When I sign into Blogger, I am directed to someone else's Blog, which implies another peep also might be directed to my Blog. Hmmm. So if a post shows up here that's not insane, please assume I didn't write it.

Sip. Diet coke.

Certainly, any post that disses someone else's poems would not be a post I'd ever write. (That is, sniggeringly disses versus *critically* disses in the way all poems are fair game to be so critiqued.) Sip. Which kinda makes me wish to say, too:

Poetry is not a fixed pie. If someone writes wonderful poems, that doesn't mean less wonderful poems for you to write. This seems very basic to me....I wonder why some of you peeps don't get it.

Okay, I got a duck and a G-spot I gotta go mangle. Soup! Soup? Bye.

SO, LIKE, QUANTUM-LIKE...

Guillermo Juan Parra's reminder on "Quantum Language" made me remember a poem I wrote in 1998 that incorporated science references; the 2nd and 4th paragraphs below are excerpted from an article about Lee Smolin entitled "The Cosmos According to Darwin" by Dennis Overbye (The New York Times Magazine, July 13, 1997). Kathleen Chang, reference below, had committed suicide through self-immolation -- oh, what brings us to such a space?:

THE SOULFUL UNIVERSE
for Kathleen Chang and Meister Eckhart

She picks pink chiffon whose sleeves are embroidered with white dandelions. Her long skirt flutters in the breeze and you smell honeysuckle. She kisses your brow with her eyes before reaching for a container by her naked feet. You are still smelling honey as she douses herself. And you believe you are in a dream when she lights a match and sets herself on fire. You run toward her but the glass wall halts your stride. And as your palms flatten against the invisible but implacable border, you feel her say before pink chiffon disappears in a blaze, Let there be grace.

"But what if it turns out that the laws of physics aren't so fixed and invariable after all? What if the universe makes its own laws just as it makes space and time?"

A gypsy persistently tracks me up and down Broadway. She has come to know which are my favorite cafes. She begs, Please, may I speak to you about the radiance of your face? I do not disagree with her sighting a halo's shadow against my cheek. I simply wish not to witness her fall when my lack of need, inevitably, makes her weep.

"Now suppose that the law of physics the new universe inherited could differ slightly from the laws in its parent universe? If these changes affected the production of black holes, then over many cycles a kind of Darwinian pressure would encourage the formation of universes whose physics favored black holes, since universes that did not make black holes would have no progeny."

Let there be grace, you heard her say. And you begin to recall her calls for renouncing materiality. Black holes may be found when stars burn out and collapse under their own weight—in the ensuing space, the density of mass and energy become infinite. But why be surprised if infinity has a body, or if it is an organ? Consequently, you hold back your tears. Through their silver shimmer, you begin to understand her Idealism: the morality of detachment that transcends mere ascetism. Once, she stumbled across an ancient photo of an ascetic: in eyes hollowed by hunger, an infinite ecstasy

TRANSLATING EYE TO "I"

Prior to attending the Boog City Bay Area Reading in Oakland, I dropped in on a few galleries in San Francisco. From my limited scan, I recommend these current shows:

Stella Lai at Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery (49 Geary, San Francisco)

Ulrike Palmbach at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery (49 Geary, San Francisco)

The Boog reading also took place at a gallery, Buzz Gallery featuring an intriguing and pleasurable installation of wall-sponge-based sculptures by Amy Morrell. The works evoked landscapes, food ("sun-dried tomatoes!" Stephanie observed about one), fleshy bellies -- which is all to say, they are fun pieces that engage. Do check out these works that comprise "The recent findings of Aailyoun Mulk."

Visiting galleries reminds me of something I once wrote about the notion of *translating lucidity* -- my phrase at the time for how I might articulate what I see. For this, I envisioned what thoughts one could entertain as an artist looking at an artist's model. Thanks to Gargoyle for first publishing it (incidentally, if you click on Gargoyle's site, there's info on #46 Spoken Word/Music CD -- on it, you can hear my and others' lovely voices):


THE ARTIST LOOKS AT THE MODEL

She was not the wind. Not then. Behind her, molecules formed an empty grey blackboard. She stood as an offended crack intent upon rupturing any seamless plane. It was clear she was oblivious to popularity. Still, I noticed her breasts--they were credible fortitudes.

*****

She could have shed her flesh and it wouldn't have mattered to my measuring palm shaped as an "L." I was surveying bone resigned to an impending break. Most assuredly, an explanation existed. Will I learn it, I wondered, given the speed of her velocity? To a landlord, she might have seemed a salt statue. To me, her red-rimmed eyes denoted the exhausted pace of a replicating light-year.

*****

Suddenly, my feet ached for her femur. But I knew better than to display my flinch--it would make her reach for the steel-tipped whips which I wished to be the one to wield. I pushed back my hair. I instructed saliva to wait.

*****

My fingers swiped at wet clay to rationalize my periscopic sighting of her toes. So much like young toads from an underbrush in Brazil. Such flaws will not prevent me from jogging when she will have learned to quiver like a 19th century theater. She will instruct her thighs to accommodate my brandy.

*****

Another tenant instructed her to shift 45 degrees. She conceded her poverty at spatial relationships to approximate a different angle. We were all moved. In sympathy, one of us pawed at air. I obviated zero gravity: I honed in.

*****

Dear Marigold: Cease using K-mart cream. It is always better to be the mistress. Over the centuries, germs have been neutered to avoid succumbing to silk pavilions embossed with blue dragons. I shall place you on a cushion concocted from the emptying of an emperor's aviaries. Then I shall rush to be cruel as I know you are up to it. Despite your paucity of petals and thinning seasons. Sincerely, An Old Gentleman From The Old School.

*****

That first day, she inspired a cube of clay. "What does that mean?" she queried as she tightened the belt to her rented robe. I answered by truculently shoving air with my chin. It expanded the whites in her eyes. But, as I expected, it also parted her lips. Shyly, but willingly, her green tongue peeked at me.

*****

No one is impervious to Romanticism. Perhaps I would have stayed seated in my oversized corduroy armchair. I had turned professorial after all with a box of Cubans harrummphing by my side. Damn that itch that blocked the pinkness of her wrists.

*****

"Never before," she acknowledged through a set of contexts as varied as my promiscuous judgments on the same slice of weather. Plus, I am a Grand Master at using names to create. Once, I called her a "landlady." I was riveted, watching her try to fix my plumbing. I counted as, one by one, her fingernails betrayed their French manicures.

*****

She became the wind after she lost all misgivings about drying my feet with her hair. It was a day bequeathed by a leap year. She forgot the word she had saved secretly for a special occasion to unload on me-such a big world of meaning in what would have been spelt as a couple of letters: N-O. It would have been. Such a big world.

*****

This time, I used both palms to shape "L"s into a frame. She was the wind, but still too gentle. "You can do it!" I egged her on with sincere irritation on my unshaven face. I molded wind into a body for nothing is risked without bacteria. I felled her to her knees. She was up to it. Once, she jutted out her lower lip. I bit it. She was up to it.

*****

Once, I prevented myself from weakening as she continued to leak. When she first saw rust, I reminded myself, she claimed she throbbed. Thus, my fingers continued to dilate.

*****

She also throbbed from evacuating mornings. How would she look through a window? Would she remain indifferent to the same view of a neighboring building's backside from behind the velvet-draped windows of a hundred hotels? My depicted conclusions of her eyes are unable to transcend bleakness. She is forever a ripe rose.

*****

She is nothing new. Nothing new has frozen since The Kritios Boy (circa 590 B.C.). Appropriately, she called me "Absence"--which will only facilitate her blusters at incest. But. There was a reversal in an alley deeply hidden within the bowels of Gotham City. She called me "Muse." There was an about-turn. There was an about-face.

*****

She longed for conversations--this is the only manner in which she is a girl. Her eyes are wide to pull in more of the world. Others misunderstood and used the nature of her grazing gaze to label her "Innocence." I never believed: she is intimate with cognac and port. With mahogany walls. She is intimate with empty bottles.

*****

I will concede her interior is an effective compass. While she ruptures the blackboard, I am unable to form anything but circles and squares. She demands I invest interpretations on her flesh now poised vs. posed because she is the wind. I hide in concepts stuck in the theoretical realm. I am surprised to be pained by the scar traversing her belly. White fringes hair. It is good to feel, I whisper as a failed partition.

*****

Underwear became artifact. Then concept. I barely cross thresholds before her thumbs are at my belt. If she was a kitchen, I gleefully speculate. She has traded in flesh-colored pantyhose for vermilion stockings bruised by black. How now to remedy her complaint that I have never called her "Peony"?

*****

I wanted to catch her on paper. I drew a stage. I tried again, muttering through a sincere fever. I drew a pedestal. There was a reversal in the back seat of a cab cruising through the fake palm trees of Miami: a useless determination. The incentive persists as a lie.

*****

Rain does not forgive. Rain is indifferent to what it wets. I lower The Wall Street Journal to peer at her. She is the wind. She is a hurricane seated in my kitchen, stealing my eggs. For, she forgot to say "Please." I shall remind her of manners. She is wind, not rain. Presumably, I am rain.

*****

She likes the word "translucent." I prefer the word "transparent." Once more, I am unable to fathom why I prefer to be an envelope versus the perfumed snapshot slipped in. Perhaps to be stamped: DO NOT FOLD. Perhaps.

*****

She is the wind. I profess pleasure at her transition before returning behind-the-scenes to nurse a cognac I will never empty from its crystal goblet. My professed control may or may not compensate for the harsh truth: I continue to possess and be possessed by a limbic brain.

ON QUANTUM LANGUAGE / TRAFFICKING WITH ANGELS

The first time a mortal child sees angels' wings pressed together and fluttering, life changes permanently. The sound, sight, and sensation of vertigo are indistinguishable. I tried forever to return to that impulse, but it is impossible. Only the first time do their halos surround everything. Angels live in a world that does not exist. I have been just on the other side of it, chasing you, for my whole life. I didn't know these angels were real, didn't know they were full of holes....

What I want is to be surrounded by angels, locked in the permanent halo of everything, dangling above the spikes and washes of the desert. This is impossible. Gradually, ... I feel more aware of the earth than ever.
--from "Blue Eared Mouse" by Geoffrey Dyer


Guillermo Juan Parra writes:

you had posted the words i had sent by Wilson Harris [Aug. 30, 2003 post]--

and just today his new book, The Mask of the Beggar (Faber) arrived from England--

reading through his preface i was brought back to your blog--

i had recently been reading through some of your archived posts, and i had particularly enjoyed your essay "Why do I write?..." (from March 26). I too have sometimes felt like "...poems are foretellings." And though i understand very little of quantum physics (mostly what I've been able to glean from Ernesto Cardenal's book Cantico cosmico), i find its concepts fascinating in regards to writing.

so, i thought you'd be interested in the following excerpts from Harris's prefatory notes:

"Well-nigh forgotten, ancient pre-Columbian imageries are explored. They offer new perspectives. European codes begin, it seems, to suffer a measure of transfiguration as they face faculties and creativities beyond their formal traditions. The language implied by the artist--in his sculptures and paintings and writings--is of quantum variation. It is necessary to remember that 'quantum' has a counter-intuitive meaning and this bears on the mystery of consciousness and gives to characters an independence not sustained by conventional art." (pp. vii-viii)

"A further word about 'quantum language'. A writer may write intuitively in a novel. Intuition may prove itself, may bring into consequence what a writer previously senses or knows so deeply it passes beyond his immediate sphere. A change occurs through profound and unusual intuition in the space-time of imaginative fiction and this alters the linearities of fixture and invention. The writer seems to move PSYCHICALLY. The 'quantum' hand or arm extends this movement by bringing UNPREDICTABLE, COUNTER-INTUITIVE resources into play. In the heart of this quantum, unpredictable sphere the figures the writer creates may turn on him (or her) and may create his imagination afresh." (p. ix)

"The artist experiences an excitement, troubling and ecstatic, as he finds himself launched on pathways he never expected to travel and on which his intuition is aroused afresh." (p. x)

============

Guillermo is one of the most interesting peeps to correspond with the Corpse. I was definitely "ecstatic" to read the above. Write me anytime, Senor. Muchas gracias.

I happen to think that quantum language taps into an archetypal strain as well. I'm always intrigued to note who else seems to be mining the themes enforced (yep -- it's not my choice) upon me. Seemingly (emphasize: seems as I would not presume to know), Geoffrey Dyer may have met some black-winged angels. I just got Krupskaya's package of four books (thanks Krupskaya!): The Activist by Renee Gladman; sKincerity by Laura Elrick; Structures of Feeling by Hung Q. Tu; and The Dirty Halo of Everything by Geoffrey Dyer.

Well, I don't know Geoffrey Dyer but I read his book first because of -- as you peeps who read me would understand -- the title (Dirty Halo, Soot-Black Wings -- same thing?). It's a fabulous collection! If I hadn't just emptied myself out writing the prior post, I'd slew off an equally delirious post here raving about Geoffrey Dyer's poems. But assume I'm doing the Rave Rave Rave and here's a sample:

the retrogade harmony virus

Where marble was made of sound
also was a sculpture of breath.
And in breathing disappeared, truly a change of form,
from a newly reined elephant to the most beautiful of women.

leather feet beat against the sun
she had a heart as big as gold
like the ocean she belonged to, she was blue

above the water, a rope ladder dangles from the sun
it twitches from the weight of children
further up, out of sight

burning from being there

We've all imagined hovering above the water.
That's why he's brought us here now
to make us surrender what's truly ours and return to clay.

you examined my small and fragile creation

you were reluctant to leave


============

Oh, how the Fallen Ones are so pleased! They lift up their tattered skirts, wingtips curling to scrunch up the fabric still smelling of soot, and begin to twirl. Twirl, twirl, twirl. You see, whenever poems are written about them, air solidifies to reveal their faces ... and their smiles on perpetually wine-red lips...

I PUT ON A HAT TODAY JUST SO I COULD TAKE IT OFF FOR NOAH ELI GORDON ... AND (BACK CREAKING) GIVE A BOW

There's epistemology in everything & Michael Jackson's still singing, but all I have left is a broken breastplate & the self-reflexive fear I'll never get beyond the bookshelf.
--from "94.9"

I don't say this phrase lightly. In fact, come to think of it, I've never said it before about another book! To wit:

This is a book I wish I'd written.

I'm referring to Noah Eli Gordon's The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises Press, 2003).

Brilliant conceptual underpinnings: each section titled by a number referencing, I take it, a different radio station and through which the poetic persona hears and writes in response; or, writes out what the reader hears; or both....

A muscled lyricism I admire -- were I to reduce to a description by invoking other writers' styles, I'm tempted to say: a combination of Oliver de la Paz (whose NAMES ABOVE HOUSES is also a collection of prose poems with a similar novelistic impact) and John Yau. But that would be reductive (even as I give in to temptation, I know).

Noah rises to all the expansive possibilities of the prose poem form here, and yet every single word -- indeed, every single letter, every single punctuation mark! -- is necessary. I mentioned muscles -- well, I'm talking buff and toned music here (which is also to say, a very disciplined diction).

Let me further note (sheepishly) that I didn't know Noah's work until I flipped open his book. I'd seen a few poems on his blog but there is a reason why The Frequencies has the subtitle of "A Poem" -- not "poems" but a single "poem"; though each individual section can stand on its own, the whole of the book is definitely much larger than the mere sum of the parts. In fact, I remember reading Catherine's complimentary report on this book and though I appreciated the lines she excerpted, there simply is nothing like getting the full impact of the book as an entirety. So I had curiosity but no expectations or preconceptions prior to opening The Frequencies. Gads -- was I ever surprised! And then OVERJOYED!

Page after page after page, I kept thinking, Dang -- I wish I wrote this, and this, and this! Yeah -- it's also a page-turner! Though, yes, I know I will keep returning to savor it....

I'm having an out-of-the-body experience as I write this post: I'm watching myself. Because I am honestly wondering why I'm reacting very specifically this way -- by wishing I'd written this particular work.

I mean, I read a lot of poems that I admire and love and respect -- but this is the first time I am articulating my admiration with the notion that I wish I'd written these lovely creatures. Why?

I do very much love the prose poem form (my last book is a selection of prose poems)....but I suspect it's not that simple. Perhaps because from a single note/stance of a "radio" bursts out this symphonic, Whitman-esque span that (I think) would not be possible if the poet first had not paid such close attention to the universe and deeply assimilated its lessons and mysteries. This poet writes (as) the world!

I am consistently enthralled by BIG-hearted poets and Noah is that with The Frequencies.

Yet other poets share these qualities. Why do I respond very specifically with the wish that I'd been the one to write The Frequencies?

I don't know....but I suspect it's because:

Dude -- you just raised the bar for me as a poet. (You've cleared a path for me to stride through and, from the edge of the clearing, move on to something else I've not done before.) And, Poet -- I am sincerely grateful. Very very grateful.

Peeps -- let's listen to "98.5"!

You said nothing hurts worse than an idea, that behind every number there's the memory of someone else's hands. Radios stacked on top of each other count down to the new city of learning where we trade the flight of day for a horse drowned in the yellow river. A flock circling the tower, the signals feathered. If the language of philosophy is an abacus on fire, a blackout at the station won't disturb the birds. There's a blue equation inside the kuckles of each kiss, rust on my first radio, the silence of blown speakers like the orange dust up to our knees.

RECOMMENDATION: THERESA CHONG AT DANESE GALLERY (NEW YORK CITY)!!

I’m psyched. I just received my invitation to fabulous artist Theresa Chong’s opening for her exhibit that opens next week at Danese (New York City). I recommend seeing this exhibition, which will be of Theresa’s new works on paper. If you can make it to the opening next Wednesday (6-8 p.m.), Sept. 10, be sure to introduce yourself as I'll undoubtedly be floating about the gallery with a blissful expression on my face! The exhibit will run through October 11.

Theresa also designed the logo to my leeetle press, Meritage Press; check out my site here for her sweet wine bottle image!

Years ago, I wrote an article on Theresa. Though my article (first published in The Asian Pacific American Journal) focused on what were then her paintings, I’ll reprint it here as I think much of it generally applies still to Theresa’s work, no matter in what form. (I don’t have time to edit out references to illustrations so just ignore them). Whether or not you see the exhibit, it may also be interesting to see how an artist thinks about influences and inspirations:


Theresa Chong Addresses "Space In Flux"

"But this fearlessness only follows if, at the parting of the ways, where it is realized that sounds occur whether intended or not, one turns in the direction of those he does not intend. This turning is psychological and seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity, for a musician the giving up of music. This psychological turning leads to the world of nature, where, gradually or suddenly, one sees that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together; that nothing was lost when everything was given away. In fact, everything is gained."
--John Cage

Theresa Chong's interest in art began in kindergarten as several Catholic nuns encouraged her drawing abilities. At age seven, she also "fell in love with the smell of oil paint" and began taking lessons from one of her mother's friends who was an accomplished painter. Throughout her childhood, Chong says she kept a sketch book. "I was convinced that I wanted to be an artist. I enjoyed being alone and drawing imaginative people and places," she recalls.

With such an early beginning, Chong has been drawing and painting for over two decades though she is only 32 years old. Her paintings are the result of her explorations of space and structure, her philosophical concerns, and her interest in understanding the implications of time. The latter element reflects the significant influence of music on her art as Chong is also an accomplished cellist.

"I started playing the cello when I was about 10 years old. All three of my sisters had already started with instruments when they were around the age of five. But I didn't start that early because my mother thought that I should focus on making art," Chong remembers. After she began with the cello, however, she says her life began to revolve around music as she spent her days practicing and performing.

"Cello gave me discipline and defined my ambition," Chong says. "The instrument’s demands are overwhelming since, in order to progress, it takes so much time and effort. The activity of being able to create beautiful sound that you can control is very different from my painting. There is an immediate satisfaction in music making versus the delayed satisfaction in art making. And the clear linear progression in the activity of practicing, learning and creating music is a relief whenever I feel lost with my paintings or drawings.

Chong decided to switch her emphasis from music to art during her first year of attending Oberlin Conservatory. "I was practicing for six hours a day, but having friends who practiced all the time, I began feeling guilty for not being able to do more. That's when I realized that I did not want to spend the rest of my life chained to a practicing room," she recalls. "So I transferred to Boston University School of Fine Arts to study painting."

Though she spent her early years honing her skills as a cellist, Chong had maintained her interest in visual arts and continued to paint and draw. She says her "transition from cello to art was not dramatic, mainly because I knew it was a right move as I have always felt more confident about art. When I no longer considered cello as my main profession, I felt as if a huge burden was lifted from not having to think about practicing the cello daily."

Nevertheless, during her transition, Chong says she "definitely missed music, hearing it, playing with a group and most of all bonding with a teacher on a one to one basis. I even missed the musty smell of the practicing rooms. At Boston University, although I was a full time art student, I was able to study with a well known teacher who encouraged me to continue with the cello. He told me to come to the lessons even if I didn’t practice because he did not want me to stop playing the cello. I've never had such a close personal relationship with an art teacher as I have had with many cello teachers."

*****

When Chong was nine years old, she and her family emigrated in 1974 from Korea to Fairbanks. As she grew up in Alaska, she was surrounded by people who encouraged her and her sisters in the arts. Her supporters included Florence Bates, an artist and a pianist whom Chong met at age 11. “She brought many different art books each time she visited me. She lent me a book on Louise Nevelson -- I became so impressed with her work and by her presence as a strong woman artist that I wanted to become just like her," Chong recalls. "I was 13 years old at the time."

Bates, who has been and still remains "extremely supportive" of Chong's art, encouraged and financed Chong’s travel around Europe for four months after finishing her MFA degree. Chong says that it has been important to her to find such "mentors" as Bates. But it was during her first year of graduate school (School of Visual Arts) that she met the person she considers her primary mentor and influence: John Cage.

"I met John Cage on several occasions as I worked for Peter Kotik, a composer/conductor who often performed Cage’s music. I was very fortunate to have met him after having been fascinated by his writings for some time," Chong says.

She recalls that she was then trying to determine, as a painter, how "to expand beyond the four corners of the canvas. So I thought of combining sound and visual elements. And because I was very much intrigued with John Cage at that time, it led me to write a graduate thesis on notation installation based on chance operations.” As part of her thesis work, Chong devised performance installations involving visual symbols that translate to musical notations. These symbols also were "non fixed" through their reliance on the participation of other artists and spectators.

The standard musical notational system enables musicians to read music accurately with great speed, as in the following example of the standard musical scale. For one performance, Chong chose to replace the standard notations with shapes, as depicted in Illustration A (e.g., the note C is replaced by the shape of a circle and the note D with the shape of a triangle). Chong then created metal versions of the new shapes (called "metal notations" below).

In her performance work, Chong organized a performance space composed of three walls similar to the stage setting where the audience faces three walls. Transparent plastic strings were attached from one wall to another, and white painted steel plates were installed onto the walls. By hanging the metal notations (made from coat hangers that were coated with sand and black pigment) on the strings or attaching them magnetically against the walls, the notations were mobile. Chong intended her notations to create non-fixed visual images as well as being a moveable musical score for the musicians. The floor was also painted white to minimize possible distractions for the performer and from the visual images.The effect of the arrangement was analogous to a blank canvas or blank music score onto which visual images/musical notes could be drawn, arranged and rearranged.

As other artists and spectators (in their roles as arrangers and/or composers) moved notations from one line to another or one part of the wall to another, the musicians responded to their actions by playing or sustaining or repeating the notes until the notations were taken away from the walls or the lines.

For the musicians to translate the others' actions, Chong also had devised "rules" for interpretation. For instance, for the purpose of the "pitch relationship," when one note was placed horizontally adjacent to another note, both notes were played in the same octave; when one note was placed vertically adjacent it was played in different octaves. Another example was the rule for the dynamic changes: larger notes were played louder than smaller notes.

During the performance many things occured simultaneously, often creating unpredictable mixtures of sounds and images. One musician would be responding to one arranger moving the notes around as another musician responded to another arranger. There also was no limit to the numbers of participants. Illustration B depicts a scene from one of Chong's performances.

As the performance ended, one looked at the final juxtaposition of the notation as an installation. However, since anyone could enter the installation space and move the notations around at anytime, the work (installation) was in constant state of flux, reflecting Chong's philosophical interest in "space in flux."

Illustration C depicts one result of Chong's performances of notation as chance. When the final result evolves into a visual art, it (Illustration C) becomes an abstract work that offers an investigation into space. In this case, it hearkens to one of the writings Chong cited in her graduate thesis:

"Modernist concept of space, not its subject matter, may be what the public rightly conceives as threatening. Now, of course, space contains no threat, has no hierarchies. Its mythologies are drained, its rhetoric collapsed. It is simply a kind of undifferentiated potency. This is not a 'degeneration' of space but the sophisticated convention of an advanced culture which has canceled its value in the name of abstraction called 'freedom.' Space is not just where things happen: things make space happen."
-- from "The Eye and the Spectator" in ANESTHETICS CONTEMPORARY (ed. Brian O' Doherty)

Chong's approach of combining auditory and visual elements also reflects the influence of other mentors, such as in the following statements cited in her thesis:

"Art instead of being an object made by one person is a process set in motion by a group of people."
-- from SILENCE by John Cage (Wesleyan University, 1961)

". . . the creative act is not formed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in the contact with the external world."
-- from THE WRITINGS OF MARCEL DUCHAMP (ed. Michael Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, Oxford Press, 1973)

Chong says her inspiration from Cage relates both to his ideas and his personality and how he integrated his lifestyle with his views on art. "I was struck by his personality -- he was so gentle and kind. And I was also struck by his view that Art is more than just making art, that it was about a way of living," Chong says.

This passage from SILENCE illustrates some of Cage's views with which Chong empathizes and whose influence is seen in Chong's current series of paintings (discussed further below): "The novelty of our work derives . . . from our having moved away from simply private human concerns towards the world of nature and society of which all of us are a part. Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord."

Chong considers the pianist Glenn Gould to be another significant mentor. Gould was a child prodigy who began performing at an early age. In 1964 and at about age 32, he made history as the first major artist to abandon a successful concert career in order to concentrate upon the recording of music.

"I considered Gould an important mentor, although it would have been impossible for me to have ever met him in person. He was and is to me the quintessential artist who had found a way of life to devote himself to his music. After giving so many concerts, he decided that performing was like a big circus where the audience was always expecting or awaiting for the performer to make a fall. So he went back to a remote place in Canada and decided to record his music at a time when the idea of recording was not taken seriously by classical musicians," Chong says. "He was a true innovator and I admire his willingness to live in an isolation in order to devote himself to to his own interests."

Chong's discussion of the 1992-1995 period of her development (see below) would evoke Gould's withdrawal from performance. During this period, Chong protected her solitude in order to concentrate on developing her aesthetic.

******

In 1992, Chong began painting with a conscious attempt to strip away all of her former habits. Using oil as her medium, she began a series of black and white paintings comprised of vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines. She would paint black lines and then erase or hide them by painting thin layers of white over them. Chong states, ”The vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines in these series of paintings were to create an architectural space that reflected a simultaneous interior and exterior urban landscape. The process of painting consisted of creating a structure and then destroying the structure in order to rebuild a final structure.”

Chong had just returned from Europe and felt compelled to unify her dual identities -- as a Korean and as an American -- within the confines of the art world. “My desire at that time was to create illusionistic depth and balanced linear structure in order to feel rooted in an ideal space, since I had often felt out of place in my physical environment," she says. "The prevalent use of lines in these paintings were provoked by the need to strip the subject matter down to its bare essentials in order to reinvent space.”

"untitled" (oil on canvas, 32" X 30", 1993) (see Illustration D) is among the paintings from this period. Chong calls 1992 to 1995 a "quiet time" for her. During this period, she isolated herself from influences that she felt might adversely affect her development. Consequently, she says about this phase of her life and aesthetic development, "It's about ascetism," or safeguarding her isolation to focus on her work. During this time, she also read the works of Derrida, Heidegger, Hegel and Kierkegaard. She has said that she finds empathy in Heidegger's notion of "Being" as standing still and examining.

Chong's ascetism relates, too, to Gould's concept of "narcissism" which his biographer Geoffrey Payzant describes as the following:

". . . that while a work of art might please its beholder, it also presents him with an occasion for introspection of a special and potentially salubrious kind; and that to indulge in such introspection is an active, proper response to a work of art and a condition without which nobody can produce a work of art."
-- from GLENN GOULD MUSIC & MIND by Geoffrey Payzant (Key Porter Books, 1997)

Concurrently, and reflecting Cage's influence, Chong also had begun looking toward the East. The paintings in this period, including "untitled (Illustration D)," she notes, "may reveal a glimpse of an Asian influence, such as how the paintings evoke a screen door. Perhaps I was consciously looking to create Eastern influenced art using oil paint, the traditional Western medium."

In 1994, Chong visited Korea, her first return since her family left 20 years earlier. During her visit, she visited a number of Buddhist temples as well as museums. In exploring Korea's art, she recalls marveling over how the temples were architecturally organized to offer a sense of spaciousness. "Seeing the temples reminded me of my interest in space once again," she says.

******

In 1995, Chong began painting in a new way -- a style that continues today. Onto a wet surface, Chong releases paint which becomes a series of vertical stripes formed by the paint running down the surface from the top to the bottom edge of a wooden panel. Chong releases either black paint on a white surface or vice versa, and must carefully control the fluidity of the paint so that the stripes never overlap.

"I arrived at my current way of working with oil paint through many years of experimentation," she says. "And I am continuously coming to terms with trying to understand my own aesthetic -- often, by the process of elimination. By sorting through what I do not want visually, I come closer to what I am looking for, and it happens through visual intuition."

Chong also uses long and thin vertical panels because she wanted her paintings to "mimic" the Chinese scrolls she first saw during her visit to Korea. ”I appreciate the Chinese scrolls because I cannot read the text and, therefore, am able to appreciate them purely for how they stimulate me visually. The verticality of Asian texts in general has always fascinated me," she says.

For Chong, this current work synthesizes much of her aesthetic and philosophical concerns. "It's about detachment from my previous way of making art to some extent and detachment from having to make some kind of image. I am letting chance (with the help of gravity) take control of the outcome of the images."

"I feel as if I have spent most of my life defining my visual expression through making images -- realistic to abstract -- that I no longer have the urge to intentionally create images," she says. "Therefore I allow the images to happen though chance."

Chong wrote about "chance" in her graduate thesis as she discussed her performance/installation projects involving musical notation. However, her premise also is applicable to the role of chance in her paintings:

"The modern art movements in 20th century have allowed the concept and method of "chance" to be openly part of the art making ritual when in actuality it has always been natural method and concept since the beginning of time. "Chance" exists in opposition to "purpose," just as black in opposition to white and yin in opposition to yang. One can easily say, "By chance I was brought into this universe." One can also say, "I am here because I was meant to be here." These are example(s) of different attitude toward what one may consider to be chance and the other purpose. The various art movements such as dada, surrealism, fluxus, and other performance and happening art have celebrated the chance method and concept by openly permitting them to be the main ingredients in their art making recipes. In the same manner, I have allowed "chance" to be a main ingredient. . . .
......An archer points his bow and arrow aiming at a target. When he shoots his arrow, he (even with all the acquired skills) relies on his fate to hit the perfect center. He has a purpose or an aim in what he desires to accomplish, nevertheless he also relies on chance. Like the archer I point and shoot my invisible arrow into a target of my own game. Unlike the archer's target, my target is not as vivid and is very far in distance from where I stand. Regardless, I shoot my arrow into an unknown target hoping to fulfill my intentions."

Chong's "target" is a painting that appeals to her sense of visual aesthetic, a standard that she cannot explain except that when she sees the final product of the pouring process, she "knows instantly" whether the work succeeded for her.

Chong likens her current painting approach to Cage's notion of purposelessness, described in SILENCE as "a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life -- not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living."

With her paintings, Chong says, "I'm doing something without intention. Only when you look for something else do you find it, just as Cage's finding mushrooms was an analogy (for other things that interested Cage)."

Chong is referring to how Cage's diverse interests besides music also contributed to his music. His open-mindedness, in fact, led him to become an expert on mushrooms. Indeed, Cage ends his book SILENCE with a chapter titled "Music Lovers' Field Companion" which he begins with this paragraph:

"I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom. For this purpose I have recently moved to the country. Much of my time is spent pouring over 'field companions' on fungi.
.....These I obtain at half price in second-hand book shops, which latter are in some rare cases next door to shops selling dog-eared sheets of music, such an occurrence being greeted by me as irrefutable evidence that I am on the right track."

Analogously, Cage's interest in mushrooms as relevant to his music is related to Chong's integration of gravity and time into (the process of) her paintings: all are part of nature.

"The singular moment of pouring the paint onto the surface is close to the activity of performance where how one shapes the element of time and space defines its end," says Chong. "The vertical notation of pattern-like images occur through gravity as the weight of two opposite tones of thinned oil paint flow together and interact with each other."

In addition, this methodology relates to Chong's way of attempting to do something new. She says that, to challenge herself, "I often do something that's opposite of what I'd done before." Examples in her current work involves Chong's method of "pouring" paint versus brushstrokes; wooden panels versus canvas; and a more "intimate" scale of small works that she says she wished to be able to manipulate with her own hands.

When Chong first began to pour her paintings, she had placed the panel horizontally on the floor. But she said the results were too similar to each other. Then she stood the panels angled up against the wall. She considered the results more interesting, but this led to the idea of standing the panels up vertically, her current methodology.

"I didn't anticipate the results," she says. "I would say these current paintings are not so much about creating the illusion of space but are about creating the space between lines." This contrasts with how her 1992-95 paintings (e.g. "untitled"/Illustration D) explored the illusion of space, including deep into the background of the works.

Nevertheless, Chong is "most comfortable" with the current paintings because they "occur through the process rather than (me) forcing things to happen." This, she adds, is akin to Cage's approach where he "has intention but still lets his works happen on their own." (See Illustration E, a series of photos depicting Chong at work on one of her recent paintings.)

For Chong, this "detachment" is also about how she wishes to live her life: "It's about living day to day." Or as Cage put it in SILENCE: "The highest purpose is to have no purpose/ at all. This puts one in accord with nature/ in her manner of operation."

Interestingly, this type of living is something that Chong says she appreciates partly after "that Asian or immigrant influence of parents pressuring you to always achieve something."

******

Chong also continues to draw. In her current pieces, she draws on multiple sheets of rice paper which she then positions on top of each other. The translucent quality of the papers allows the presence of the lines drawn on bottom sheets to surface. Chong uses a small brush in either black or white gouache to draw lines. In some works, she uses a dark sheet as a backing which highlights the fibrous nature of the rice paper and tightens the relationship between the drawn lines. See "ID#1" (gouache on rice paper, 1998 -- Illustration F) for a reproduction of one of her drawings.

By questioning the relationship between the line and the paper on which it is drawn, Chong's drawings are consistent with her desire to break down predetermined boundaries between art forms and the making of art, as well as her underlying philosophical concept that All is Nature. These concerns were seen previously in her desire to "go beyond the four corners of the canvas," to paint with the use of gravity and time, and to use musical elements to generate images. Visually, the drawings also further explore Chong's long-held interest in exploring space.

******

Chong says her ethnicity does not affect her work, even as she has become more conscious about its effect on her identity. She notes that she never felt "discriminated against" until coming to New York in 1989.

"I want to be known as a painter and be appreciated for my work, not my background," Chong recalls. "But that doesn't always happen because people see me as Asian and, in the past, have asked me if I can speak English. So I can understand why minorities group together for support."

Nevertheless, Chong says, "So far, I am not interested in addressing specific social/political issues in my work, except for in my cartoon drawings (figures of Asian caricatures) that I do for my amusement." (See "Waiting," 24" X 18" pencil on vellum, 1974 -- Illustration G) for an example of Chong's works depicting Asian cartoons.)

******

Reflecting her depersonalized approach and evoking such thoughts by Cage as "Ideas are not necessary" or "Personality is a flimsy thing on which to build an art," Chong gives her paintings titles which do not have a meaning. Her titles are abbreviations simply for her to remember the works. For example, she titled her most recent work "One a&b." "One" referred to the painting being the first of a series and "a" and "b" being two panels with "a" as the left panel and "b" the right.

For an example of Chong's latest exploration of a "space in flux," The APA Journal is pleased to reproduce "One a&b" -- a 40" X 10" oil on wood, 1998 (Illustration H).

DOMINATION -- ONE VERSION

Just finished the morning jog through blogland. Catherine -- I'ma so proud of you! May your weeding experience be a safer one than mine are! Jean -- you got a mezzuzah, too? Okay -- anyone else out there among you pin@ys? Christina -- thank you; I am honored to be on your bookshelf. Michael, Gura Michelle fleshes out her response to the issue of kali/poetry; check it here! And welcome Jerrold Shirroma! Last but not least, "Sound need not lack integrity" a la Murat Nemet-Nejat over at Ron's. Well, dang, Jean, I feel like your sociable Blue Roo this morning!

But, wait: there's more!!!!!! Eight million peeps hold their breath. Sip. Morning coffee.

NOW. I'M GOOD BUT DID I EVEN KNOW I WAS THIS GOOD?

Peeps. You are reading one of (currently) only two "Master Blogs," as per the standards of Mistress Malaya, warden of Alchotraz.

Sip. Morning coffee that could use some rum.

Well, as I synchronistically just finished telling Sandy the Guardian Angel, a review is only as good as its reviewer. I have now perused Alchotraz and I am impressed with my review of....uh, myself. Sip.

Why? Because Mistress Malaya can ferment such words as:

From Aug. 29. 2003:
"Topic:'When you dance with the Devil you don’t change him—the Devil changes you.' // I came home from dinner with Mom to find Flux watching Blade. It’s amusing enough to watch, if only for the scene where Blade rips out someone’s throat during a battle and throws the bloody chunk into another baddies face to distract him."

From Aug. 25, 2003:
"Today’s mail tackles the issue of tattoos—specifically mine, what it is, and where it’s going. Dave, BlackChampagne mailer and Alchotraz inmate, touched a special place by addressing me in a manner befitting my collection of ball gags, chains, and shiny patent leather: 'Mistress Malaya, pray tell, what kind of tattoos have you narrowed down as choices?'"

So then, Mistress Malaya (love this moniker) offers a variety of answers (love her sense of humor) before noting:

"In a semi-related anecdote, a magazine (can’t remember which) once ran an article about 'true life medical humor.' The story recounts an incident where a doctor had to perform an appendectomy on a young woman. While prepping the patient for the operation, the doctor had to shave the young woman’s torso and pelvic area to keep the site as sterile as possible. The doctor was a bit surprised to find that the woman’s pubic hair was dyed a bright green and the words 'Keep off the grass' was tattooed above her mound; he shaved her anyway. After surgery, the doctor pinned a note to the patient’s gown stating 'Sorry, we had to mow the lawn.' ::lol::"

=================

Sip.

Sip some more.

Eh. No false modesty on this blog please. Of course I knew I was this good -- just lissen to Mistress Malaya. I am

A MASTER BLOG!!!!

Dang -- I love it whenever another one of my eight million peeps reveals hirself. Thanks Mistress. And by the way, dark chocolate goes GREAT with red wine!

ON EKPHRASIS AS TRANSLATION

I think the painter’s art is the poet’s “secret discipline.” In part it goes back to the materiality of words I mentioned. O’Hara once gave a lecture in which he talked about the design of a poem. He felt that form was interior dimension while design was the exterior dimension of the poem’s structure. Poets who are not sympathetic to the visual arts neglect design, or are less conscious of it.
--from “Poets and Art” (Artforum) by Barry Schwabsky

Except for a very few book reviews I once wrote as a journalist (which was my first career) years ago, I’ve only written a handful of literary reviews since I started writing poetry. Two were on novels and the other on John Yau’s poetry collection Forbidden Entries (Black Sparrow, 1996).

I find “reviewing” poems to be a fraught-ridden exercise; it makes me very uneasy.* So with all the torture that poetry reviewing is for me, I felt like noting (because I survived it) that Jacket just accepted a review I did for Sharon Dolin’s book Serious Pink (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003). I’m proofing it now – which is why it’s on my mind. It’s nearly 2,600 words so this is a long review with all that that entailed. I didn’t mean to write a review; I just blathered about Sharon's book on this blog and then I was asked to turn it into a review.

(I obviously natter on about a lot of books on this blog and so I should clarify that what I mean by “review” is a work that actually has to pass someone else’s editorial standards in order to be published; on this blog, there are no….uh, standards.)

I didn’t mind doing a review for Sharon’s book as her collection is of poems inspired by paintings. For whatever reason, I very much enjoy writing (even reviewing) visual art in a way I don’t for poems. When I’d written on Forbidden Entries, I’d taken John’s activities as an art critic as entry point to his poems and likened his approach to how certain artists may paint.

Anyway, while proofing my review of Sharon’s book, I thought I’d post this excerpt because it offers yet another side to the translation issue with which this blog, of late, has been somewhat concerned:

*excerpt begins*
I've been practicing ekphrasis—writing about or attempting to represent the visual arts—since I began writing poems years ago. Ekphrasis goes back as far as Homer’s Iliad—a reference picked up centuries later in W.H. Auden’s poem “The Shield of Achilles.” Despite reservations about it, ekphrasis stubbornly continues and thrives (its numerous practitioners straddle a wide variety of periods and styles—ranging over Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Ann Lauterbach and many others).

Ekphrasis also evolves—while writing this essay I received a freshly-written version of Auden’s poem by Michael James [via Suny List] which restructured the poem based on the Oulipian practice of ‘N+7,’replacing a substantive noun with the seventh noun following it in a dictionary. Moreover, certain poets and artists who collaborate (e.g. John Yau and Archie Rand) do so partly from an understanding that collaborations avoid some of the pitfalls of ekphrasis where one of the parts (the visual art) is usually finished while the other is made in another time.

Reservations on ekphrasis can be explained in part by referencing the following terms:

a) ‘ekphrasis indifference’ is the comprehension that no description can adequately recreate the image in the reader’s mind;
b) ‘ekphrastic hope’ is the attempt to overcome ekphrasis’ impossibility through imagination and metaphor; and
c) ‘ekphrastic fear’ relates to when a reader conjures up a visual image that’s totally different from the initial picture seen.

I didn’t, however, know until relatively recently of the long history of ekphrasis—and how it’s fueled much debate among rhetoricians and critics. I began writing poems about paintings (and later sculptures and art in other media) simply because I’d been following contemporary art developments for over two decades (much longer than my poetry-writing). Thus, I came to prefer—through my own direct experience rather than through theory—writing poems that, while inspired by and perhaps even seeking to mirror a visual image, actually came to embody something different.

If my preference was for facilitating what theorists call ‘ekphrasis fear,’ I didn’t think it something to be viewed with dismay (or any emotion one might have towards something fear-ful). I consider the ekphrastic poem’s path of transcending its original impetus to be not that different from how a poem often leaves the poet’s initial intention. Indeed, it seems appropriate that Homer devoted a long passage to Achilles’ shield and yet, in the Iliad, no one really ever saw the shield (the Myrnidos were scared to look at it and Homer was blind).

By the time, therefore, that I read of “ekphrasis indifference,” I was past the hand-wringing such failure might elicit. If ekphrasis fails, it’s not just because one medium (words) can’t be synonymous with another medium (visual art). It seems to me that ekphrasis must fail its intention in the way that a poem becomes its own entity without necessarily adhering to the poet’s original thought. Part of poetry-making, to me, is allowing one’s self the freedom to free-associate during the process itself because a poem is not necessarily pre-determined at the outset of its creation.

Consequently, I would come to read Sharon Dolin's recently-released book, Serious Pink (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003), not just with delight but, with much relief.
*excerpt ends*

Why “relief”? That’s the teaser; you’ll have to wait and see for when John Tranter releases Jacket No. 24.


-------------
Footnote *: Ironically, I've had to write numerous introductory essays to various poetry folios, and I've not found such as troublesome as poetry "reviews." I suspect it's because of the type of judgment demanded by reviewing -- that is, one critiques rather than...introduces. I don't like criticizing poems -- simply, they either lift my wings or not. And if one poem doesn't, then I'd rather go on to search for the next draft (pun intended). The sky is so....beautiful...

CATCHIN' UP WITH NEW BLOG LINKS

I posted some new links recently, including Sharon Venezio and Michael James Bogue. I'm delighted to see Sharon's gorgeous and gorgeously-written blog. And I'd lost track of Michael when he switched his blog to a different host. Thus, I belatedly read Michael's new blog where (in addition to a wonderful poem "the breakfast of blog champions") he wrote:

Recently I had the good fortune to watch someone demonstrate Pentjak Silat, an Indonesian martial art at the local Sunfest and it was most fascinating. The man actually had a smile while demonstrating the movements, which seemed like a cross between tai chi and dance, a combination of hard and soft. His physical control and timing was impeccable, and it was clear that he had been training in the art for quite some time. I would be most interested to see how Gura combines the Filipino martial art of Kali with poetry performance.

I assume Michael caught my and Gura Michelle's posts on the Kali and poetry collaboration we did last month at Sonoma State University. Anyway, I asked Gura to respond to Michael's paragraph and said Gura replied about how she performs Kali to a poetry reading:

It's essentially a physical expression of the poem in movement. that's why I want to hear the poem once, listen for the the emotion and rhythm and try to carry that through in the kali. I listen for key words, sometimes that becomes acted out and try to coordinate distinct movements with the accents the reader's voice gives. Much of it is merely on faith that my body will find the right beat, part intuition of the dance, it all goes much too fast to ascertain what I'm thinking each moment. I'm riding the poem and pivoting on the fly. I also have to balance it out because the kali must have it's own arch and I have physical limitations to how long I can sustain the intensity of doing the movement.

That is apparently the "short answer," though. Gura Michelle said she'll post longer about it on her Blog in the near future!

MY JEWISH SIDE...UH, SO TO SPEAK (OR, YET ANOTHER TRANSLATION POST)

Those looking for a recommendation on good kosher wine should visit my Hay(na)ku blog....

Am I, by the way, the only Pinay (Filipina) out there with a mezzuzah on her doorway?

Sip. A delicious 1999 Draycott Shiraz tonight from Australia, thank you very much.

Sip. Anyway, so all this is reminding me of when I took the hubby to visit the Philippines last century. Sip. And, at one point, we visited distant relatives in Zamboanga in the Southern Philippines.

Did tourist stuff by day, and then my relatives had us over for dinner. And I noticed that my relatives, while consistently motioning to us to please help ourselves to various dishes at the table, were relatively silent. They sort of kept .... looking at Tom surreptitiously from the corner of their eyes while they ate.

At first, I thought it was just because there was a U.S.-American in the house (so to speak). But, finally, my uncle spoke up -- with hindsight, on everyone's behalf -- and asked Tom .... shyly, "So, you're Jewish?"

Tom looks up from his chicken leg -- I could see the Uh, Oh going over his face -- and cautiously replied, "Ye....e....es...."

My uncle nodded. A few more minutes of silence while everyone dutifully chewed on their chicken. Of course, my and Tom's thoughts were racing furiously as to what the flattened duck's back was going on here...!

Then my uncle spoke again -- again, with hindsight, on behalf with everyone -- and asked .... in a very awed tone, "How does it feel to be one of God's Chosen People?"

Taken aback. Tom was quite taken aback (though flatteringly so, he would say later)....before his own sense of humor reared its head and made him reply (after a cough or two), "Uh, well. You know, when Moses left Egypt he should have turned right instead of left...."

My relatives were too polite to say they had no clue what Tom was talking about. Everyone returned to eating the chicken...

I'M AN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE POET BECAUSE I DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH

Speaking of mangled idioms, here's another one from my past:

Well, if that ain't an iron rolling off of a duck's back!!

Poor duck....

(but on the other hand, haven't you ever noticed how the feathers on a duck's back are ... flat?)

THE ADVANTAGES OF E.S.L. (AKA, G-SPOT, G-STRING -- A GEEEEEEEZ-TRANSLATION)

Oh Bard, Bard, Bard, Bard -- please don't call the cops on me!!!! Cough -- sorry: private joke. But, ANYWAY, the very charismatic Bard Edlund writes in about my post on "The Physicality of Language" (scroll down):

interesting post. this is not an argument for or against anything you said, but more of an aside: english is my second language, as i was born and raised in norway and stayed there until i was 18. i nevertheless write more confidently in english. having said that though, i consider it to be a strange advantage for me to not be a native speaker.

i believe i sometimes come up with different (and potentially interesting) ways of saying things because i think of language in a slightly different way than a native speaker. for one, i can avoid cliches more easily simply because i am not familiar with all the cliches and expressions that exist in the english language. the other thing is, sometimes i arrive at an english sentence in part by thinking of a norwegian phrase, and a more or less direct translation of a phrase doesn't always mean exactly what one might expect. that is, certain norwegian expressions, when translated into english, take on broader meanings than the equivalent english expression. for instance, one way to say "i love you" or "i care about you" in norwegian is: "jeg er glad i deg." directly translated, this means "i am happy in you." i think that is a beautiful phrase in english which means something more, somehow, than "i care about you." but interestingly, the phrase does not have such a deep meaning in norwegian, because it is such a familiar expression that no-one considers its structure any longer. it is not surprising in any way and therefor does not get processed.

umm, that is all. carry on.
-Bård.


Thanks for writing, Bard! I hear you indeed and, indeed (indeedy!), do something very similar: I often mangle idioms. One example that comes to mind is how, once, after a wonderful dinner, I intended to munificently proclaim at the hubby, "Honey, that hit the G-spot!"

Instead, what I less-than-munificently proclaimed was, "Honey, that hit the G-string!"

Said hubby is still laughing over that incident and it's been ... years.

EVERYDAY FOR THREE YEARS

Blogging on Mei-mei made me stand from my desk, walk over to the bookshelf where I keep her books, and pick up a small chap -- a 3.5" X 6" pamphlet really -- of her poem "Pack Rat Sieve" that was published in 1983 by CONTACT II. The beige paper is crinkled in places and scotch tape holds together the originally stapled binding. It's in bad shape because for about three years, I carried that poem around with me everyday. Everyday.

After three years of keeping that poem (I considered the chap to be the poem's body and not just a printout) by my side, I reluctantly took it out of my bag and placed it on a bookshelf when further existence in my ever-crowded daily purse became a threat to the chap's physicality. Here's an excerpt:

Never mind if he calls, the places you get
through inwardness take time, and to drift
down to the shore of the island, you know
by the sand moving, even the coarse sand here
It's hard to say if you can even stand up, there
but there is blue sky, and blue water tipping up
the same distance from you as your face. Its face
goes further behind the eyes, without weight
or haze, and the horizon is just a change where
from going deep you go wider, but go

It's almost painful now, looking at this -- words to a poem I haven't read in a long time -- to feel the stomach tighten and feel how ... Poetry so matters.

Each night the sun slides out below the low clouds
and lights a section of the rainbow
which is actually solid in air around her
pushing aside a little, here, as she leans back
in her chair, or as hummingbird moves in the garden
making it shimmer by friction. That's why there
are no mistakes.

How logical, too, that in choosing which excerpts to share, I realize after typing them here that both of the above sections had formed epigraphs to two different essays I wrote years ago. So even my typing fingers memorized the words...

I DETEST EDICTS IN POETRY

Speech opens on a lost plain, then contracts to a diffuse margin between metaphor for space and concept of drunk, ill, running away.

Her story begins aesthetically, but hysterical acts withdraw it to a floating space of frustration, unself, and a paranoid husband is produced.

The words are high-handed, awkward, formal.
--from "Nest" by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Damn. I hate it when people do what I just did in the prior post, write something like:

[A]ny living poet -- regardless of school, style, inclination, preference et al -- must read _____ [fill in the blank] if said poet takes the art and, yes, the craft, of poetry seriously.

Please pardon the arrogant statement.

Nonetheless, I do recommend you not only read Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's recent book NEST, but every poem she's ever written.

And: Mei-mei's work is worth every cringe-moment my enthusiasm sparks.

I ADORE MEI-MEI FOR CONSISTENTLY WRITING THE UNTRANSLATABLE

And so for old women, suppose half of what they say is pretense or invention.

They still convey stories we're willling to receive.

Filling their memory banks are samples of all people, put into sequence and connected.

Anyone who says, "It's none of my business," betrays young, mechanistic tendencies, whereas the average old woman or computer has curiosity, receiving, regardless of fact.

She tries to construct a thing and rejects front doors flanked by copies of Renaissance coach lamps.

A thing alters by what we'll accept as being there, of space inspired by openness.

Territory around becomes blurred and open.

I did not know, during construction, I'd turn away from corrections to propagate gelatinous algae in the glass facade, transforming a fundamental category into decorative.
--from "The Retired Architect" by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Mei-mei's poem "The Retired Architect" is among the perfectly-pitched gems in her latest and recently-released collection, NEST (Kelsey Street Press, 2003).

I firmly believe that any living poet -- regardless of school, style, inclination, preference et al -- must read Mei-mei Berssenbrugge if said poet takes the art and, yes, the craft, of poetry seriously.

ANOTHER TRANSLATION POST: SPEAKING OF HOMER

I just saw "SEABISCUIT," an enjoyable movie treatment of The Iliad.

THE PHYSICALITY OF LANGUAGE

I appreciate Johanna's response to my recent translation posts. In part, she says:

Eileen's interesting posts regarding the political/cultural sensitivities translation demands got me thinking about the alienation bilingualism can create.

In one of those segue-like paths, Johanna's post inexplicably reminded me of an early experience in a writing workshop (which may be why, subsequent to that incident, I avoid said workshops). A workshop participant (in response to one of my poems) had offered the comment that my (unusual) diction undoubtedly has to do with the fact that English is my second language.

At the time, I had been exploring surrealism.

And though English was not my first language, it is the language in which I am most fluent because English was the language of educational instruction in the Philippines and I had immigrated to the U.S. as a ten-year-old so that I swiftly became less-than-fluent in my "first language" of Ilokano.

In the workshop, nothing had been mentioned about my background. I could have been a second-, third- or fourth-generation immigrant for all that the people knew. But because my physicality -- kayumangi skin -- makes me look unavoidably an "Other" in a Caucasian-dominated society, the person assumed that my linguistic experiments were not experiments but just a manifestation of my lack of expertise in English.

As I write this post, I also am reminded of a trip I once took somewhere to the South. I happened to be in a section of a plane full of very convivial passengers who got to introducing themselves and talking about themselves to other strangers. The passenger seated next to me, after having a very fruitful exchange with the person seated ont his other side, turns to me and asks, "So, what do you do?"

And before I can reply, the passenger follows up with, "Do you speak English?"

After a few (startled) seconds of silence, I replied, "I'm a poet."

I didn't bother replying to the passenger's second question. But she got the point as, after an astonished pause, she turned to the passenger on her other side. She didn't say another word to me for the rest of the plane trip.

Don't ever let anyone tell you that language is not physical.