Write Me

on, from, after Churchill's Far Away

2012-01-31T06:24:00.000-08:00

"I've always liked abstract hats."

hats are ephemeral

"I think what we all think."

"I'm not saying that you can't kill."

"everything's been recruited."

outlandish and fabulous hats the absurd, outrageous hats absurd when placed on prisoners heads, ragged and sad, parading toward execution, not death, execution. but elaborate hats like celebration. e-lab-o-rate. celebrating good vs evil? right vs wrong? depending on sides. or sides of sides. dear Caryl, which side are you on? do you wish there were no sides? have you seen so many sides? created absurdity? without purpose or reason or enough thought? how are sides, alliances, enemies, determined? what does it mean when it comes down to which side the crocodiles follow? the river. the enemies and the others. and their others. dear Caryl, what is it that we all think? i go to walmart. everyone goes to walmart. i hate so and so. everyone hates so and so. except so and so and so who love so and so and their others, or allies. this sounds like a donald rumsfeld speech. you are with us or them unless you are against them or some others. rumsfeld loved his abstract hats. absurd. and completely logical. can speak anything into rational form. on one side there is convincing language. on other sides, passion value or whatnot. convincing language does not make it true. it makes it convincing. constructing truth. confabulation. words, specialized, sharpened tools.

2012-01-30T13:52:00.000-08:00

I promise you this            intention

an international

sense

                       of compassion in

alternating
layers              (languages)

fog horns in the middle of a day

I hear this beyond

                       traffic   and   snow

among snowy things

an eye of

intent

        layers of the absurd
dramatic inquiry

toss me that hat
dear

        let us parade
        our affiliations

directed toward
or among

spaces between ally

                        enemy

                        hyperbole

                        and the like

my stein

2012-01-20T10:33:00.000-08:00

a short response to four saints in three acts

oh Gertrude, you are a saint... in fact you are all four saints in all of your acts. what little I know becomes you. a pigeon a pigeon. really G. what is with that pigeon? It is 1929. It is 1934. it is 1939. and there are only 1 or 2 or 3 performances. one I loved two I loved (oh is that another piece altogether) do all of your pieces make sense together like how words, any words go together when the are together. sense is some other kind of sense. any words put together will "mean" find meaning make us mean(ingful). a narrative of prepare for saints. i am prepared. i have been to catholic school and we have had this conversation before, G. remain to narrate to prepare two saints for saints. narrate the saints. the lives of the saints. saint therese in her own words narrates herself. her young tragedies her early death. yes, of course, G. the difference between saints forget-me-nots and mountains have to have to have to at a time. a juxtaposition of sound. of sense. an interlacing of the tangible, the concrete, the absurd, the completely sensible in some other sense of the terms completely and sensible. but what is more or less sensible making any kind of sense. the fact that our politicians are absurd. or the idea that any kid can go to college after being told all her life that she can't. how are you making other or less or more sense, G. than these current wars or the nonsensical things these people say. defund planned parenthood. punish gays. take money from kids' schools. it isn't english. your american english is everyday. we can see it and know it. your words take us to this other place(s) where we know. if not we are afraid to know. afraid to know what is not entirely ridiculous. oh G., yes it is very easy in winter to remember winter spring and summer... i have been there. am there. i also want to ask why should everybody be at home. / in idle acts. why am i here in this act. in movement. of words. and their sound. yes, G. landscape is continuous. we can learn much from mountains. about romance. about bellies. about our human habits. is it human nature or human mind. we try to use our minds for this. gingrich uses the back of his hand. scratching his head. have you forgotten the 90s altogether, newt? did your mother give you that angry name? won't you listen to G.'s opera and learn to say something useful? bring your other politician friends and let's all work to change the world with art. with words. real tangible words. why not. what are you so afraid of. saint therese lost her mother found jesus and remained purely generous and kind. where's your jesus. i mean the real jesus. the one the four saints are talking about. G. tell me more about what you think of these saints. you're not religious. but saints are like artists. and they write their lives. dedicate their souls. yada yada yada. enact saintliness. enact art. arts as life. life art. for saint therese could not be young and standing she could be sitting. of course. saint therese could be. she could be anything. or she is everything. she lost her mother. she dedicated herself to what she believed. how much of it is finished. it is never finished. a play is continuous. to play continuously. like landscape is continuous. a play is not like a novel with a beginning middle and end. once in a while. when. once in a while. to be determined or not. yes, G. pigeons on the grass alas. pigeons on the grass alas. i love you for this. alas. pigeons large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass alas pigeons on the grass. / If they were not pigeons what were they. I have no idea. do tell me. or not. what were they. they were exactly this question. saints and artists and pigeons seeing further into this, into what they can't, those otherwise blinded, blindingly articulating rhetorical nonsense.

friday poem

2012-01-20T10:04:00.000-08:00

just start here
green ink
black fur she sleeps out
of the cold

i dream you
into my tea
like german sugar cubes

perfectly, in january
and continue

notes or equations
don't equal the snow
at midnight

in zero degrees
instead i travel
from one town to
another

keep going

dog settled into the chair
hints of otherwise in
through the window
ignore him

he bleeds nonsense

and i tell you
i can't stop thinking this
into the future
green ink

various and movement

2012-01-14T06:13:00.000-08:00

as an instruction of consequence one might recall an intense particular moment (there is coffee more coffee for just this recollection) a falling snow unbearable sky the witnessing of entire seconds lapsed and evicted. Dickinson sits in a box, the dog tangled on a rope, and insults play like rhythms across this gritty morning -- one will not move from this fog voluntarily one will entice gravity and fail. sure, for every cause and consequence there is a lesson a series of moments an undetermined number of repetitions before the warnings manifest. how many sweets might one encounter before the memories begin to make any sense at all. oh Emily, we are here like shadows quietly inserting marks on the page, wondering toward any other eventuality, until

2012-01-13T13:32:00.000-08:00

how I might, in the end

exclaim

(does one require

punctuation?)

foretold! likea profile

governed by pure emotion

(amberand gentle)

please, I tell you

toward the middle of things (declare!)

(moreloudly!) a particular

use of ;

a sentence on either

side –

2011-12-19T13:23:00.000-08:00

on it's way down a trailing falling meander
a wish, entitled or the sparkling reminisance i tell you
becomes insane in my head can you hear it
a dream, like silicone sliced into rainbow colors intended for
decoration do not lick them i promise like tall shoes unused
on the floor, a silvery bookcase that holds candy, this mug
covered in snowflakes a seasonal disruption of the entirely monotonous
again or still wandering toward a falling intention trailing behind
late fees and rituals of excuse could not remove the photos due to broken fingers
and the terminally ill scent of the pathetic.

student blog post

2011-12-16T10:02:00.001-08:00

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

The end of creative writing--well the class that is

What I found particularly interesting reading through the last couple of chapters of "Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamott was her final paragraph of the book.

"'So why does our writing matter, again?' they ask"

"Because of the spirit, I say. Because of the heart...[Writing and reading]They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul...We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again." p 237.

I found this paragraph enlightening. Not only to writers, but to all really. The last sentence to me describes that writing allows an escape from normal day to day activities. In our stories we can alter our appearance, change events, and most importantly change the outcome. If we were to able to travel back into time and change the outcome of past events that occurred in our lives, it would be extraordinary. If only, if only.

I also agree with her that writing and reading "widens and expands our sense of life." We learn a lot about others and life through reading. Writing about those feelings and experiences helps build a bigger understanding of the big picture. Ultimately, it helps widen and expand our feelings on life.

From this novel, I think the most important lesson Lamott has given me is to get to know your characters. To me this really means to get to know one another. So many times we shoot off our mouths before actually getting to know someone. If we had just taken the time to sit ourselves down and listen to them, we could educate ourselves to our fullest potential.

Posted byE.L.at11:40 AM0comments

2011-12-05T07:23:00.003-08:00

Barrett Watten:

Jill killed! An outstanding defense. My favorite one-liner: in response to a question on whether literature can effect political change: "Some people read a lot of books and don't learn at thing." And whacking it back over the net after a hard serve by her outside reader, "I'm game." If you like verbal art, this truly was your game--a performance like a good tennis: taught, relentless, all the fundamentals in place.Friday at 6:44pm · · 2

2011-12-05T07:23:00.001-08:00

Jill Darling will defend her dissertation, Writing the Self: Feminist Experiment and Cultural Identity, tomorrow: Friday, December 2, 12:30-2:30 PM, Conference Room, 10302 5057 Woodward, Detroit. Committee: Barrett Watten, Jonathan Flatley, renee hoogland, Rachel Blau DuPlessis. The public is invited!

writing/artistic practice exercise

2011-10-29T04:38:00.000-07:00

this is a great idea:

http://judithhoffman.com/section/172017_Day_Paintings.html

a good daily practice, and an exercise in not knowing what will happen, what you will get... write or paint or whatever one piece every day based on something you see/read in the newspaper... try it! I'm gonna.

Lisa Jarnot poems for the day

2011-10-13T05:07:00.001-07:00

fun Jarnot poems:

Song of the Chinchilla

You chinchilla in the marketplace in france
you international chinchilla, chinchilla of the
plains and mountains all in fur you fur of the
chinchilla of the pont de neuf, selling writs
watches, on the oldest bridge of evolution that
you are, you, chinchilla, going roadside towards
the cares, the dark arabian chinchilla of the
neutral zone with pears, you still life of
chinchilla, abstractions of chinchilla, aperitif
chinchilla, lowing in the headlands in my mind,
dark, the cliffs of dover, dark chinchilla, tractor
of chinchilla, chili of chinchilla, chill of the
chinchilla, crosswalk of chinchilla of the dawn,
facilitator you, chinchilla, foodstuffs for the
food chain dressed in light.

more fun Jarnot poems here: http://wings.buffalo.edu/AandL/english/pubs/spc/alyric/jarnot.html

2011-09-20T13:31:00.000-07:00

though feeling cheated is not the same as lying to oneself, the same way that giving up is not the same as surrender. I raise the white flag and give up. I have given up on you. I surrender on you. finally we are starting to communicate more effectively. surrender, for example, at least entails a sense of recognition. giving up is more like hiding in bed all day. today it rained. and no one could find me in my secret room. I emptied the pillowcase and raised it like a flag. but I no longer recognize you, the one who has come to save the world. or unify all the cat people. some people want to be cats and some claim to drink fresh human blood. not the cats. cats kill with their kiss. my vampire fetish has nothing to do with death. I'm just saying, i explain to S, when she leans over the can and let's it all go. she said it was a bad doughnut. and I've never had any blood on my hands. S says we should make a more specific plan. i could recruit student soldiers but they are busy working on their descriptions of space, how space is manipulated in the name of capitalism. S tells me not to use that word out loud. Ed calls it wealthy desires. desire in this case is more than a drive. it eats organs in the dark like werewolves on crack. of course that's just a metaphor. S reminds me of our positive language project. and I practice: friend, love, rainbow. I say each one with a pause of 5 seconds in between, wait for world peace. but Buddhists sit for days and months meditating on positive words and that's not working. anyway, I decide to do an experiment. to each person I meet I will say: friend, love, rainbow, and see what that will accomplish. in the meantime S and I are also planning a letter campaign. simultaneous strategies work best.

2011-09-02T15:13:00.000-07:00

slipping. slipping. hold on to what you will. but beware. what you will hold will not hold you. fortune cookie advice. everytime. i tell the students not to make plans and they gasp. S tells me, again, not to scare them. they are here to make plans. to realize plans made. to plan on a future of plans. future engineers of america. they forget there are no jobs no money no america. united states of walmart. a walmart for every state. engineer that. S tells me to remember what happened with the babies. not to scare the students. someone should hope. it works occasionally. until the next campaign at least. how much to hold on to and for how long is a more important question. or it is a question. i mean what are we holding on to? the right to hold on to anything, or nothing? the right to choose the mall on saturdays and relegate holding on to tuesday through thursday? the right to give up any rights? this has all been said before. but we are still not listening. S is right. this doesn't lie with the students. the man of hope, he is simply exercising his right to fail. without blame. it's not his fault that everyone else is united in not being united. some of us are buying fruit and some of us are spraying imposter perfume on our necks. aisles and aisles apart. the metaphorical aisle has multiplied exponentially. and the people are moving in every direction. S would like me to believe there can still be some sort of competition. What, like from KMart? I say. don't laugh, everyone is entitled to a comeback. I am still planning my own, going back to my football days. i just need to land the right corporate sponsor. S convinces me to introduce the students to the concept of hope. let them argue the stakes. i tell her hope is a thing of many feathers. and don't feathered creatures molt, eventually? S tells me I am again letting my own insecurities ruin my potential political endeavors. and i agree. though i did read the article three times, the one about never referring to myself as fat or stupid. not even in private. these can undermine one's self esteem thereby causing a tidal wave of negative consequences. if i could stop eating the chips, i realize, i could save the world. in the meantime i'm busy with weight challenges and intellectual journeys. S agreed we should start using more positive language. is that the same as realistic language? is hope the same then as myth, or fantasy. those are nice, positive words that make my self esteem feel just fine. hope on the other hand, makes me feel cheated

2011-08-19T12:55:00.001-07:00

rest. resolve to every moment. growing baby vegetation. baby pigeons. fighting over scattered moldy bread. the man next door preaches good tidings and other rants not clearly articulated. praise the sun. point and yell at passersby. local color. just keeping things lively. what else are we going to do. keep baking new bread, on a friday or a tuesday, whatever. when you come this way again we'll share with the pigeons. new bread scraps come out on tuesdays. when S was here we discussed the eventual overthrow. decided to write a story and publish it in parts. a serial commentary. coloring lines of demarcation. from narrative to action. from the poetic line to comic representation. canadian comics offer humor and intrigue. don't tell the consumer, show the consumer. create ads that utilize avant garde art. sell cars. eat more name brand yogurt. drink coke. bottled water made by coke. coke owned miscellany. S and i also decided to head to the mountains. she admitted that in times of complex sociality one can find solace identify with like-minded monks, retired types, the poetically inspired. S said later we could write a long poem as another kind of effort. alternating lines, creating long passages of poetic prose. the poetic image, rhyme, meter, metaphor. we will save the world. save ourselves. disperse love and a sense of sharing communal meals. if we can speak, and respond, then we can love. in the event of antithetical emotions the fractures will keep on slipping through.

2011-08-13T04:01:00.000-07:00

landscape. falling. an ever continuous state of apocalypse. the first kiss was the beginning of the end. in 1492 they brought plants and insects and disease. earthworms. there were no earthworms here in 1492, not since the ice age, when earthworms were frozen out of existence. european bees. european earthworms. pine trees. fresh water. community spirit. you insist on believing in action. if you are on every committee you can bring the people together. working together entails love. we can love these new earthworms. save ourselves from the planet. save ourselves from politicians in texas. you want to believe that hard work entails respect. i agree that the babies on the street need food. we can feed some of them. some of them will be hungry forever. there's nothing we can do about hungry. walking through potholes. watching our houses burn. the disease is still spreading. since 1492. since the first amoeba. evolution. revolution. i agree, it feels better to have goals. optimism. feeding babies. i was eating eggs with S the other day and we created a strategy for the babies. tell them to save every penny. eat vegetarian. stay away from the mall. and walmart. or, when the moment is right, take over walmart. take over the world. as if it would matter. idealism is always subsumed by something else. not something else, the main thing. the real condition of things. hope only last so long. until it is part of the system. then the system wins. S and i decided this was too much for the babies. they don't want to know. we decided to tell them to eat eggs, drink milk, and save pennies. the rest can wait. the virus is slow moving. we will be doing this for a long time still. continue watching the slow tear in the fabric spread. i am glad you have not given up. some streets remain intact. we still have saturday mornings. moments of rest.

2011-08-09T07:26:00.000-07:00

a virus. spreads indecently. you told her to nevermind the chickens but instead she came every day for the eggs. bright yellow yolks. I told you, since we were children, she has had an addiction for eggs. and the chickens require company. a friendly word. and you refuse to tell them jokes. I send them postcards, with little songs attached. but the point of this story is the virus. I am chasing it now. it's naked stench. passing over and beyond unknowing citizens. parts of it's scent lingers in every corner. and the corners are multiplying. you think the chickens are hard work. we're going to need them to survive. please stay on good terms with the chickens. the virus crumbles streets. makes its victims weak, at risk for crime, without basic necessities. there may be no cure. the landscape is falling.

2011-08-05T18:35:00.000-07:00

we love what was this. I mean to say. your obsessive tendency. the way i wash and wax on again off again. sweat on your brow. freckles on my rear. i assume. a cliche metaphor. candor. the analogy is like when you want to get at something and you keep trying. and trying. and falling short. or just falling. every week you do ten more pushups. and I save accident victims. the last time every bone was smashed. the entire car flattened. you told me to practice before recovering. work on coming back from this. you run around the block. I feed treats to the animals. shed sensitive skin. tomorrow more bones will shatter. I am always on the other side of the block. following your smell. never catching up. we circle like this. I wonder when I will develop the upper body strength. the ability to match you word for word.in the meantime, the red lights and the green lights mean that someone is burning to death. in a fire. of blood. I obsess over reentering the scene. death is like crime. viral.

2011-08-01T10:55:00.000-07:00

August. And the heat swells. Beginnings of southern living. In the climate changed north. I can hear you. Clanging away silently. We are the notion of discontent. Fingers barely reaching keys. Sweating knuckles. In the new south the people have become powerless. Delirious with the heat. Giving in to any whim of misdirected government. Please take all of my money. And my shoes. And my sanity. I need nothing to survive on my own. In the woods. We are all moving to the woods. When the police run out. When our houses burn down. When the streets crumble. The roads of perdition. You continue your obsessive chanting. Thinking there is anything else. The same as this. Another version of articulating blonde. Or drinking German beer. In August. In your free time. Since we no longer require services. Or looking after. When the schools fall we water the fields with lemonade. Good old fashioned hard luck. Dusty. Dirt smeared on our noisy stomachs. Corporate flash still convincing us. We love this.

Surrealist Women Writers

2011-06-15T05:23:00.000-07:00

and this: Surrealist Women Writers

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & other poems

2011-06-15T05:20:00.000-07:00

cool: translations of Picasso's poetic writings

Bathhouse

2011-06-15T05:17:00.001-07:00

Check it out:

new issue of Bathhouse Online Journal: bhjournal.com

Blog: I wanted to Write an Email

2011-06-15T05:07:00.000-07:00

Check this out: http://iwantedtowriteanemail.blogspot.com

by Tyler Carter

Your imagination is a powerful and creative tool for life transformation

2011-04-29T06:30:00.000-07:00

"Yoga at its heart is a practice for evolutionary spiritual growth—growth into our own highest possibilities. Imagination lets us find our way into those possibilities. By training the imagination, harnessing its power, we can use it for creating beauty and truth in the world. Then our acts of transformative imagination become genuine acts of power. They can change our inner state, for sure. But they can also change the world."

see whole article here: It's All In Your Mind

green dreams

2011-04-17T08:30:00.000-07:00

the practice of overpriced goods

subsumed by certainty

let me count the ways a noun

designates girth

spiral milk

curdling

this will not answer what

revolves

faith

a constitution undeterred unrecovered searching

a loss of law

in the flee market goods

practiced like a fiber rich diet

apples or

goats prefer the pasture

and chickens develop healthy omega

whatnot

subversive publishing

2011-04-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

1. make your own book

2. leave it in unexpected (or expected or whatever) public places

3. let it do it's thing... imagine people reading, wondering, laughing, signing, agreeing, smiling, crying, you know, experiencing ...

soluble

2011-04-12T19:13:00.000-07:00

repeat and undone calories recover

over snooze impractical

choose 27 ways to constitute

the absurd

a subsidiary of certainty (you might wonder at the expense)

(there is no price too )

how does one know in detail what happens under investigation

handling questions like herding goats

when laws don't change

"mam" "sir" the rule of latitude

will not answer circular accumulation

(fat sugar broccoli faith)

sleeping

on the lamb

potential for failed payment undoing the answers

to nothing

2011-04-05T09:37:00.001-07:00

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/

EMU undergrad English Scholarships

2011-03-29T05:39:00.001-07:00

Undergraduate English Language and Literature scholarship applications are all due next Friday, April 8. These scholarships are open to ALL English majors (from any and every program area).

Stop by the English dept office to pick up the application info.

for H.D.

2011-03-25T06:45:00.000-07:00

words things connection detail weather
looms like gravity a simile as in similitude
i am like you laugh laugh
we tell the same jokes

do not accept defeat things words
strive to be happy
better words were never
things

sky sidewalk traffic pungent recall
this time last spring
you were watching the same
episode, joking continuously
like infinity as a concrete material
that may or not have a limit

Beverly Dahlen

2011-03-25T06:42:00.000-07:00

from A Reading 11-17

language language it is all made of language. nothing sees it any other way. words and things. “a space beyond words and it is filled with things.” (73)

somehow the writer was a different person writing. the writer did not look like her writing. she may have been fair or dark but that did not perhaps enter her writing. now perhaps there were persons one knew first and then knew their writing later. then there was another person. the person of the writing.

but of course there was the reading also. first one would have been a reader. then one was helpless. then one knew nothing but the writing. as the reader one knew nothing but the writing. then the person disappears. then, and then the writing is all. all there is. then there is nothing but reader, reader of the writing. then we can only wonder at the person who might have been, the someone who was there, now gone, disappeared long ago behind the writing. there, perhaps, once, but that was long ago. the writer may now be gone, dead perhaps. in any case, not there. (86)

Beverly Dahlen

2011-03-22T08:22:00.001-07:00

from A Reading 18-20

history repeats, the second time around as farce. the third time’s the charm. marigolds banked on a slope as part of a scientific plan for erosion control. I don’t understand you. read up on it: here’s a booklist.
(9)

compelled

2011-03-22T07:44:00.001-07:00

I know this, but fail to comprehend
as usual
the diameter of external circumstances
each layer pressing against the walls of what's possible
head toward the wall, push against it

but how far you can go is another
direction of unknowing
lines marked but
shifting
get to the edge and keep going
unless you need to reverse
and look instead

like when that guy grabs the last bowl of soup
and another guy is starving and we all
understand little about
displacement

when someone is screaming in your ear
filling in the blanks
like meaning
becomes
impossible

2011-03-20T06:19:00.000-07:00

do you know how the double standard

works, there are at least 2 things

i don't understand

but you have the cards

each deck layered against

rational reciprocation

do you know that when it is 18% larger

the moon becomes resilient

against whims of selfish aspiration

and I confront your dual concerns

with a complex of painted comforts

unattached

cool...

2011-03-14T10:22:00.001-07:00

http://innovativefiction.blogspot.com/

those

2011-02-27T12:19:00.000-08:00

continuing after

who are funny and stupid

revolving wheel waiting

any clever intention will

who are revolving apparently waiting

stupid you are

only an idea as if it mattered

what’s the use

waiting funny there are 3

types crossing

every boundary

who are only clever resolving

to repeat

an infatuation or an infantile

neurosis

repeats

you who are a multiple of 3

waiting funny and stupid

boots stuck in mud

a traumatic tragedy at the age

of 3

stupid boundaries crossing apparently

waiting to break through

or cross over

as if it mattered

circulate dreams realized after

your boots

stupid and neurotic joke infantile laughter

press seams and demarcate

ask who are willing

tennessee williams

2011-02-27T06:13:00.001-08:00

Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth. When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn't be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are. The straight realistic play with its genuine frigidaire and authentic ice cubes, its characters that speak exactly as its audience speaks...has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

These remarks... have to do with a conception of a new, plastic theater which must take the place of the exhausted theater of realistic conventions if the theater is to resume vitality as a part of our culture.

Tennessee Williams, 1945

tuesday, or

2011-02-22T05:49:00.002-08:00

infinitesimal fraction of silence shivers a long drawn space of forgetting, holding this imagined instant seen in a car spinning tires in snow the light in my eyes dust over every flat surface. fraction of a piece of infinity goes on splintering. held quick like mist, each drop of ink a lyric, spaces that dissolve in favor of unmoving time, this broken distance only a shadow of wonder, what might have held fast upon impact.

from HERmione

2011-02-22T05:49:00.001-08:00

…I want to sit here sensing this moment that is dawn and morning. A moment and an infinitesimal fraction of a moment and dawn slides into morning like starlight into water. There is a quivering, a slightest infinitesimal shivering. The thing that was is not. (212)

impossible

2011-02-21T13:08:00.001-08:00

“In the whole of what’s possible, you’re not missing anything.”
--Laura Wetherington

when the impossible becomes one
and the same vibration
show me
I am this body, turned and judging
missing only the possibility of
symptoms, listing ways in which
a breath, a cough, dust in the air
figures perceptibly like fragile
velcro scratching against yarn
this knitted deafness

I am (this body) under
the pressure of breaking through holes
of mist, part of a parcel
of forgotten worry
strangers meet at the intersection of 3
states, cross each border
and reconsider
symptoms can lead to other than death

when the possible becomes inclined
to ask
a philosophy of circular thinking
redundant emotional clutter
intervenes
smoke figures loosely in this analogy
see lightning, wait for
more undeniable clues
and ignore, like a sore throat
what lies behind eyes of
inclination
circling around the obvious
musical interlude
on repeat

cool Poetry Blog

2011-02-15T06:28:00.000-08:00

Lemon Hound

in february

2011-02-15T06:15:00.000-08:00

listless antecedent reaching heights
of fancy a gaze splayed through dirty
glass elements of sun disperse gather
dust a silent
ring

i imagined it a voice telling me something in rubble
rumble a bubble of nonsense syllables like a singular
om uttered by 100 voices simultaneously
off key

i heard a voice still repeating polite
affirmations
not unnoticed until cleverly
dismissed
accidentally nonsensical or paralyzed

loss of individual words
word sounds
making sounds like words
fails

i resort to thinking in overtones
heavy breathing
particles linger just away
from

from Slow Love by Dominique Browning

2011-02-15T06:12:00.000-08:00

Slow Love

How Words Fail

2011-02-10T06:27:00.000-08:00

from:

How Words Fail by Cathy Park Hong

Blevins says that the poetic “sentence” is a unit for “talk” and that “talk” is the essence of the poet’s authentic being. I, however, cannot shake the belief that English is “an artificial, stiffish thing” and was grateful to discover Stein and a whole lineage of poets, in particular the Language poets, such as Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman, who pretty much thought the same. Their poetry emphasizes the materiality of language rather than language as transparent conduit for soulmaking. They asserted that the “I” in the poem is really a fabrication of the self rather than a direct mirror of the author’s psyche. As Hejinian once wrote, “One is not oneself, one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal.” From these ideas, the Language poets stylistically formed their own versions of what poet Ron Silliman dubbed the “new sentence”: poetic lines that are syntactically fractured, purposefully atonal, averse to the first person.

Ultimately, though, I was more drawn to poets who severed syntax out of a sense of cultural or political displacement rather than for the sake of experimentation. History and circumstance alienated these poets from their own language, placed them in the margins of their cultures, where they were witness to language’s limits in articulating a cohesive voice. Through deliberate inarticulation, they managed to strain out a charged music from syntactic chaff, a music borne out of negation. The poet I have most in mind is Paul Celan.

Celan’s relationship with the German language was tortured and ambivalent. Son of Jewish parents, he lived in Romania and grew up speaking German and Yiddish, Hebrew, Romanian, and Russian. When the German forces conquered Romania, they deported Celan’s parents to the concentration camps. Because his German mother tongue was also the language of his parents’ murderers, Celan wrestled with it in his poetry, a tension evident in the fissures, elisions, and neologisms of his poems. From these ruptures, Celan sutured a composition that radiates a haunting and terrifying music. To wit:

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay,
no one incants our dust.
No one.

Blessed art thou, No one.
In thy sight would
we bloom.
In thy
spite.

A Nothing
We were, are now, and ever
shall be, blooming:
the Nothing-, the
No-One’s-Rose.

With
Our pistil soul-bright
Our stamen heaven-waste,
Our corolla red
From the purpleword we sang
Over, O over
The thorn.

read the rest: How Words Fail

from The content of Form

2011-02-02T06:08:00.000-08:00

by Hayden White

What I have sought to suggest is that this value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary. The notion that sequences of real events possess the formal attributes of the stories we tell about imaginary events could only have its origin in whishes, daydreams, reveries. Does the world really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories, with central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that permits us to see “the end” in every beginning? Or does it present itself more in the forms that the annals and chronicle suggest, either as mere sequence without beginning or end or a sequences of beginnings that only terminate and never conclude? And does the world, even the social world, ever really come to us as already narrativized, already “speaking itself” from beyond the horizon of our capacity to make scientific sense of it? Or is the fiction of such a world, capable of speaking itself and of displaying itself as a form of a story, necessary for the establishment of that moral authority without which the notion of a specifically social reality would be unthinkable?...Could we ever narrativize without moralizing? (24-25)

check this out

2011-01-17T16:07:00.000-08:00

EMU Creative Writing Blog

from HERmione by H.D.

2011-01-06T14:08:00.001-08:00

There are of course bits of colour to be thrown down like counters in a banking house, or chips across a poker table. All your life you will retain one or two bits of colour with which all your life will be violently or delicately tinted. You will have an infinitesimal grain of purple dye or a flat counter to hoard or to risk in one reckless spendthrift moment. there are gamblers of the spirit as there are gamblers of the mind, passions of the psyche as well as passions of the body. All of life may be spent looking in vain for a counter that might bring glory or fame or wisdom which at some off-moment you may pick up unexpectedly—from the gutter—then you save it or you spend it. (53)

One conversation of all the conversations may retain significance; by one leaf you may judge the contour of a great tree, whether it be oak, or beech or chestnut. One conversation can give clue to the whole insistencies of a forest; analyse it and you will find whether the tract of oak wood may or may not, at some specific later date, be lighted. Analyse pulp substance of green gelatinous woodleaf and you will find worlds revolving and a continent of armies, massed to slide along ridges of leaf-vein or to swarm in battalions into another exact triangle of wood fibre. Here a patch of brown may show the invidious canker or here some sodden bubble under the living texture may foretell a waterlogged anaemia. One conversation in a sodden jungle (her yet unformulated consciousness and her consciousness of America) gave her a clue to a new race and a new revaluation of the forest. The jungle must be weeded out surely…but the soil was ripe for a new sort of forestation. (57)

Choriambics of a forgotten Melic. Chroiambics of a forgotten Melic beat rhythm and rhythm through the alert avid out-watching mind of Her Gart. “Choriambics,” she repeated valiantly swaying with the jerk and sway of the trolley (149).

Now more than ever she knew they were out of some bad novel. Sound of chiffon ripping and the twist and turn of Hermione under the stalwart thin young torso of George Lowndes. Now more than ever thought made spiral, m ade concentric circle toward a darkened ceiling. the ceiling came down, down. The ceiling became black, in a moment it would crush down, crushing her and George Lowndes under a black metallic shutter. The ceiling was a sort of movable shutter like some horrible torture thing out of Poe’s tales, the wall that came close out of Poe’s tales was coming close, the wall was coming close. Doors were no more in walls, the curtains were no more curtains. Walls were coming close to suffocate, to crush her… “You’ve torn this chiffon sleeve thing horribly.” (173)

“…I want to sit here sensing this moment that is dawn and morning. A moment and an infinitesimal fraction of a moment and dawn slides into morning like starlight into water. There is a quivering, a slightest infinitesimal shivering. The thing that was is not.” (212)

Then in a moment, in an infinitesimal second, the moment that divides day from dawn, that other moment that divides dawn from morning, perhaps that moment that divides early morning from exact morning, will intercede. A moment will stand in a starched apron and the moment will save Her’s being. I will draw back tenuous antennae of delirium… Her will be quite sane. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps on its petty pace from day to day and all our yesterdays and all our yesterdays… (216)

Heartless means without a heart. Less a heart. Hermione. Less-a-heart. What is Hermione Less-a-heart? Hermione heartless is this thing. Tossed like a winter branch on a snow bed. I am Hermione stripped of blossoms. Flowers drifted here, there, incandescent flower. Snowdrop under a cedar. You are a parasite, drifted here and there to perch a moment parasitically on George Lowndes. Branch flowers dipped parasitic feelers down and down into the live bark of somewhat common tree branch. George could love no parasite, could love no flower as I am. (219)

2010-11-15T15:27:00.000-08:00

narrate the space of a line in motion or the shortest distance
between what you say, and then what you say, and then
an anecdote spoken verbatim down to the shoelaces (stars
of every color, sparkles) before she stepped on one, tumbled over the other

from this story to your intention is what i am implying directly, present
future hyperbole, a state of unplanned reason

include characters such that ages and eye color vary, one smart like a stone,
another holding pet scissors, somewhere a gerbil hides in terror from domestic predators
a setting in which situations (tripping, bad humor, emotional conflict) perform educational content, characters lose their footing and fall into awareness or attraction

2010-11-15T15:07:00.000-08:00

the distance between an intention and a bleeding wound, lines curve in sand, he tells me she was only 20, a fake promise of a pulse, glimpse an instant possible return

i'm just saying that to scribble any word phonetically is to claim a resistance
to dripping body fluids, outside lines of reason, an instant in retrograde blinks shivers

november turns quick minus desire, flavor of a general understanding when February lingers
the distance in favor of turning from one side to another, completely still, washed clean

Bathhouse Online Journal-check it out

2010-09-28T11:07:00.000-07:00

Dear Peers,

A brief note to invite you to peruse the website of BathHouse, a hybrid arts journal published by the Creative Writing Program at EMU. Issue 7.1 just went live this weekend, and we're eager to share its cornucopia of hybrid goodness. Inside you'll find visual art by Andrew Abbott and Sarah Walko, a sound piece by Meghan Lamb, plus text-based creations by Emileigh Barnes, Rebecca Mertz, and Felicia Shenker.

Additionally, we would be thrilled for you to "join" BathHouse on the student orgs web portal. Joining doesn't lead to any commitments on your part; it simply shows support and gives you access to news and events on our student orgs page. Just go to the web portal, login using your normal e-mich name and password, click "organizations," and search for Bathhouse. If you're interested in becoming more involved, e-mail eic@bhjournal.com.

We recently set up a facebook page, which is another way to find out about BathHouse and other hybrid arts events. Please consider visiting and clicking "Like."

Thanks so much for your time,

Joe Sacksteder

Editor-in-chief
BathHouse Hybrid Arts Journal
http://bhjournal.com/

from Bhanu's blog

2010-09-28T06:28:00.000-07:00

from: was jack kerouac a punjabi

2010-09-22T16:49:00.001-07:00

at the level of constructing from dirt and gravel
I have held you my breath for a distance
not unrecorded by elements of lyric measurement
carry a tune not unlike a choir in unison
gone flat on occasion missing notes
entirely as I stroll across the capital sidewalks
into blistering wind I recall
building resistance toward uneven displays of honesty
and conjecture a subtle move, and continuous, toward
the multiplication of inhale no matter the status
of particles of pollution per

2010-09-16T10:51:00.000-07:00

can one write about traffic
as landscape
the surrounding hills
of concrete
cliche
you paved my forest
plowed down the blue skies
and put up a shopping mall
this is where i am
paved
potholed
stuck in chronic
reduced lanes
of sensory
damage

from Orlando

2010-09-01T06:59:00.000-07:00

by Virginia Woolf

Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. Therefore--since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what Orlando is doing now--there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar, tell one's beads, blow one's nose, stir the fire, look out of the window, until she has done. Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a kind. Or if a butterfly had fluttered through the window and settled on her chair, one could write about that. Or suppose she had got up and killed a wasp. Then, at once, we could out with our pens and write. For there would be blood shed, if only the blood of a wasp. And if killing a wasp is the merest trifle compared with killing a man, still it is a fitter subject for novelist or biographer than this mere wool-gathering; this thinking; this sitting in a chair day in, day out, with a cigarette and a sheet of paper and a pen and an ink pot. If only subjects, we might complain (for our patience is wearing thin), had more consideration for their biographers! What is more irritating than to see one's subject, on whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one's grasp altogether and indulging--witness her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her palings, her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as dawns--what is more humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone through before our eyes when we know that what causes it--thought and imagination--are of no importance whatsoever?

But Orlando was a woman...And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman's whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin to think, at least of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make as assignation for Sunday dusk; and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window--all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible subject for fiction. Surely Orlando must have done one of these things? Alas,--a thousand times, alas, Orlando did none of them. Must it then be admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters of iniquity who do not love? She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love--as the male novelists define it--and who, after all, speak with greater authority?--has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one's petticoat and--But we all know what love is. Did Orlando do that? Truth compels us to say no, she did not. If then, the subject of one's biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine, we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.

2010-08-14T14:23:00.000-07:00

"all this language is floating"
Beverly Dahlen

the anchor torn away dust
flies rampant
spinning blades inevitably
alter
the landscape
dry
against august lull
floating away from
words entirely
five years turns
into
a choice between
every option
including the places
(rugged, slanting, wet)
where one is named
outside of chronological
determination
go on ahead
i will meet you there
climb back down
where the trail begins
marked
with stones

from A Reading 1-7 by Beverly Dahlen

2010-08-11T10:23:00.001-07:00

a moon, the Rockies, the mountains in which you were. crestfallen. I came out on a high place looking back. there was where I had come from. here among stars, Olduvai, the canyon, the oldest bones. I was thinking of that line, of that longest line. a river and its tributaries. it doesn’t look like that, this is a map. (108)

your teeth, a tongue. gondola. teeth, a tongue, a dark. putting his finger in her mouth. in her mouth. the weird way in which the world gets in the way. rattle, rattle. getting into it, filthy marriage. opal. a silver drawn out dark, the new moon. a halo. finding food, water, there in the desert. she said that too, that desert was a nature. (114)

from A Reading 1-7 by Beverly Dahlen

2010-08-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

terror, the first word lighted, brushed across my eye, my eye, mother said, in that version. a chain of tears, one tear for every year, how summing up a year in that single painted drop. (87)

a white space intervening.

a white space intervening, white, white. that white light, static. questioning the first draft. this is not a literary work, I told him, this is not fussy. this is not my mother dusting the daisies. this is not domestic duty. this is not the idea. a preconception. this is it. the baby. the corpse. you can take that body and cut it up forever. this is a metaphor. a something. a meaning carried over. from one thing to the next. these are my leg hairs. the short hair that grows at the edge of my lips. lips, teeth. this is my little bow mouth. here it is. you will never know what I mean. when I say you I mean me. erasing all the I’s and using instead the third person. it alternates. an alternation, or alteration of generations. it changes. in other words. i.e., it changes. that is to say, it changes. it alters. it becomes something else, though its original form is still visible. one can trace that. he put a mark over it, a cross, but the word could still be read beneath it. ‘the effacement of the trace.’ to deface it, to cross it out, with a knife, to scar her face, his legs, that gesture, to whip the knife out, to scar it, the sign, these words do not match the thought. we will put an end to that longing. what thought there was we do not know. we will never discover it. it is not there. it is gone, or it never existed. impure. a fig leaf, someone said, of my imagination. covering it. (89-90)

from A Reading 1-7 by Beverly Dahlen

2010-08-10T19:14:00.000-07:00

wishing someone would give a talk against psychoanalysis in order to test, what, faith, embarrassing word, what is the ground of what you believe. how come it’s easier to write her, that third person. how come saying I means I. a confession. the I is never identical with the fictional character being written. ‘the moment of writing.’ but what I that is not a fiction, there isn’t one, me from moment to moment, I think I know where I am. ‘where you are there arises a place.’ a theory of relativity. (72)

endlessly in that place. Foucault: ‘Henceforth, language was to grow with no point of departure, no end, and no promise. It is the traversal of this futile yet fundamental space that the text of literature traces from day to day.’

I could cry salty tears. (74)

what this yes means. the binary. symmetry. open-ended. the limist of yes. the limits of no. (76)

anything may mean its opposite, green may mean red, you can’t tell an omen when you see one. reading it. must we go on reading as if we lived in the sixteenth century.

(All this language is floating. The men make statements. They use the forms of the verb ‘to be’ with confidence. What I write is provisional. It depends. It is subject to constant modification. It depends.)

(Equivalence.)

(They are so sure this equals that. Reading their sums.)

on the other hand. all dark. blank. the blank wall waiting. in it. waiting for something. The Other. (76)

wonderful, the critique of wit. the critique of reason. a woman on the bus, demented, talking about another woman who had eight children. old mother Hubbard. getting the bone. saith Gertrude Stein: my little dog knows me. Lucky Pierre, Lynn’s dog, knows her, is getting older, grayer with each passing year. this is wonderful. lying in bed I would never have thought these things. (77)

the reading of the writing goes on, this is for you because you are not here. you are always not here. you are never here. I make you up, I wonder how you look. and now it is so much easier to write than to speak. an other is so much an hallucination it’s scary. I don’t know what I speak to. (78)

that X which was laid over it ages ago. no wonder I am a woman. now. impossible. woman, that impossibility. that it takes place at all in any of us. “takes place.” take it. there’s a word for you. by god, it makes me angry to think that “take” appears here so easily, or any word, upon the ‘mystic writing pad.”

the reading of the writing goes on, this is for you because you are not here. you are always not here. you are never here. I make you up, I wonder how you look. and now it is so much easier to write than to speak. an other is so much an hallucination it’s scary. I don’t know what I speak to. (80)

all that flash in the pan, fly by night. it is heartless. I had
a still uncertain distancing of the mother, by the simple fact of naming…”

(impossibility)

found but claimed as loss. to say it. (81)

2010-08-03T08:39:00.001-07:00

gathering light shadows naked

on peaks born into clouds

how we have arrived

pale anxious determination

walking downhill

for once

the flexible comfort

breathtaking curves of gravel

converse lightly around wildflowers

covering thick and spreading

fragile petals

low to the ground

and calming

from "To Autumn" by Keats

2010-08-02T16:36:00.001-07:00

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

2010-07-24T13:50:00.000-07:00

from "8 a.m., Sunday, August 28, 2005"
by Patricia Smith

Now officially a bitch, I'm confounded by words--
all I've ever been is starving, fluid, and noise.
So I huff a huge sulk, thrust out my chest,
open wide my solo swallowing eye.

You must not know

Scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,

I fly.

minus one

2010-07-16T15:29:00.000-07:00

in the end, static
the tuner set to an inappropriate station
cable goes out in the storm
you never existed
in the moment
middle of night
when time stops
when the network stops
broadcasting
lines of grey fuzz
lies rest heavy
you again repeat an undisclosed
fabrication
a sham, would be deceit
if you had not already
disappeared

2010-07-11T08:34:00.000-07:00

an early hour waiting in the past
misdirected play against tides chronic
and seamless
your notes linger

blackbirds have many ways
cold plums
white chickens in the rain

soak in salt water or
humid mountain air
the gravel trail unwinds
simultaneous wandering a figurative
explanation for moving from point to
point without the use
of any straight line

Foucault, from "Heterotopias"

2010-07-09T12:00:00.001-07:00

Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

2010-07-09T10:46:00.000-07:00

"The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed." (Foucault, "Heterotopias")

perform a continuous utterance:
over a space, she clarified

recite the lyric
quality

that is

simultaneous
circles drawn in pencil
on a white board

contingent
or history laid out
on a table of elements:
artifacts, debris, fragments

each piece a present
intervention
between past
future

an ensemble of relations

proximity site grid
real unreal virtual

in the cemetery both
alive and dead
the illicit meeting
contained and
secret

time sliced into
pieces
laid out across

a horizon
at once moving forward
standing
still

inspiring and thoughtful articulation...Naropa Summer writing, and Thinking

2010-07-09T10:43:00.000-07:00

michelle naka pierce : no use in a centre: Continual Surface

2010-07-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

alongside 600 leagues base by base
green fields saunter knock it out and
away every 11th time
scores
how many can you list
recall statistics from previous
across the lawn
pass it call it blown across
an average telling
narrate experience told through
numbers rate players all the world's
a stage

2010-06-30T17:25:00.001-07:00

make a list

sun in the eye
something sweet and peppery
pieces of a board game
wood tiled disruption

send instructions leaving out each noun

using prepositions, adverbs, exclamation
no commas only disrupt the continuous

a scratched memory repeats
rock ledge crumbling
reflection curved
a glimpse falters

more great Stein quotes

2010-06-30T17:14:00.000-07:00

“Poetry and Grammar” (from Lectures in America in Stein writings 1932-46)

One of the things that is a very interesting thing to know is how you are feeling inside you to the words that are coming out to be outside of you.

Do you always have the same kind of feeling in relation to the sounds as the words come out of you or do you not. All this has so much to do with grammar and with poetry and with prose.
Words have to do everything in poetry and prose and some writers write more in articles and prepositions and some say you should write in nouns, and of course one has to think of everything. (313)

When you are at school and learn grammar grammar is very exciting. I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagraming sentences. I suppose other things may be more exciting to others when they are at school but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really completely exciting thing was diagraming sentences and that has been to me ever since the one thing that has been completely exciting and completely completing. I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves. (314)

Sentences and paragraphs. Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are. I can say that as often as I like and it always remains as it is, something that is.
I said I found this out first in listening to Basket my dog drinking. And anybody listening to any dog’s drinking will see what I mean. (322)

Prose is the balance the emotional balance that makes the reality of paragraphs and the unemotional balance that makes the reality of sentences and having realized completely realized that sentences are not emotional while paragraphs are, prose can be the essential balance that is made inside something that combines the sentence and the paragraph, examples of this I have been reading to you. (326)

Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry.
When I said.
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun. (327)

2010-06-25T14:04:00.000-07:00

imply.

your silence by which I mean
there is no eye contact

a tattered ball
night giggling
mud scented

intend.

it is unclear by which I mean
I try turning in each direction
and yet

yellow light
a waxing moon
at all hours
or a shared taste sweet
and salty

indiscretion.

by which I mean
every possibility

against smooth
against skin
against thinking for a moment
outside of this

more Stein

2010-06-25T14:03:00.000-07:00

“Lecture 1” from Narration (Selections Ed. Joan Retallack)

It is something that any one interested in narrative has to very much think about, because it has never happened before. Always before the language of each nation who had a narrative t make a story to tell a life to express a thing to say did it with a language that had gradually become a language that was made gradually by them to say what they had to say. But here in America because the language was made so late in the day that is at a time when everybody began to read and to write all the time and to read what was written all the time it was impossible that the language would be made as languages used to be made to say what the nation which was coming to e was going to say. All this has never happened before. History repeats itself anything repeats itself but all this had never happened before. (293)

So there they were and the Americans were not at all that way they did not live their life at all no not at all in that way and they had it to say that they lived their own life in their own way and they had it to say it with the words that had been made to tell a nation’s story in an entirely different way as the nation who had made the language had the entirely different story to tell of living their daily life every moment of every day. (295)

I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do when they live where they have to live that is where they have come to live which of course they do do. (300)

from "My Debt to Books"

2010-06-24T12:44:00.000-07:00

by Gertrude Stein

So many books have been important to me, it is like the man who said about automobiles when some one asked him is that mark a good one, all automobiles are good, some might go better than others but they all go, and that is the way books are to me, any book that I can read at all is important to me and I can read most of them, each one does something to me, you have to read a lot of books if you are going to read all your life and read at least five or six books a week, you can read them over and over again but even so it does take a good many if you begin when you are very young and you live a reasonably long life.

2010-06-23T16:04:00.000-07:00

intuitional transfer, a geographical space, topographic concerns relate to an array of condensation (emotionally speaking). these things I offer in response: catalyst or cataclysm. each photo a design specific to internal conflict, blurring scenes interrupted by color, fragments of lines, framed monotony of landscape nonetheless in constant flux.

what I will tell you is this: each implication like a gravel floor, shifts underfoot. specific pebbles stuck between toes or in the crevasses of the soles of my shoes. the dry dusty pattern of comprehension gets muddy in the rain.

this space, filled with the sound of cars and industry, hints toward complete isolation, outside of...then turns away entirely. a continuum of populated reflection.

2010-06-21T19:56:00.000-07:00

a wildflower, and endangered plant, a trail closed for restoration. the dog wanders. seconds filled with detail, scent of rotted something in the freezer, a cool humid breeze brushes dry foothills. she sniffs, sticks her head all the way in. i tell you this is not like it ever was. returning to the same but completely changed. this other me. a distant imagined you. the dog, like the path, seems to intuit direction. morning evening birds, this isn't the desert at all. rocks underfoot, I am thinking that there was a moment when I would have wondered otherwise. but in this, exactly, there is no other present. no example of a replaced moment. a dog sleeps under the desk and nothing has happened, not before I thought you existed, nor is there momentum toward a future struggle. it is this. two dogs jump under the showers of a garden hose. one dog watches. one dog sleeps. the image stands still with no purpose. that is the lesson.

2010-06-08T08:49:00.000-07:00

1.
Can you dare encounter each detail, a personality, in relation, a situation. We are all in context. She wandered across the room: grey carpet, grey walls, the scent she remembered used to waft through hallways, mingle over letters received from far away. An earlier comfortable moment, that is, in terms of not knowing so little for so long. How to relate each feeling encountered, that is, shredded fingernails, hair tightly curled, blemished skin. That is, an inability to process emotion. Temperament. Holes in the wall. Self flagellation. Verbal abuse from the inside out.

2.
Describe your own specific location:

Concrete. Moving layers of human built not nature. Planned, usable, landscaped. Wild Detroit. Birds, overgrowth, taking over empty lots, spaces, wildlife call it home. Crumbled sidewalks covered in weeds. New gardens using space among impromptu wilderness.

3.
What's your story?

4.
History of economic turmoil. Disturbed dreams of suburbia. Fleeing city grounds. Undone. History of mixed emotion. Stay. Leave. Stranded. Abandoned and crumbling. History of a city full of profit. Lingers in shadows of monuments: an old train station, high ceilings, frescoes. What grows around in through. Write your story. Years of sediment. Emotional rubble. Graffiti consequences. Art in public where once stood capitalism's empire. The auto center of industry. The self(identity) in context. History of emotional abandon. Grey.

2010-06-08T08:45:00.000-07:00

revolt is continuous
the space of a body in space
pieces cohere, dissolve, calculate
coins, instruction, an orange hue
wafting
smooth tones linger
wasting precariously
why imagine any
future
refuse
choice

2010-06-08T08:39:00.000-07:00

number the sections in order to tell
truth grey mist
every day is otherwise
but need
fake photos fake plants
remember
blue sky decorated streets characters
colored in crayon
outlines
striped
hold distance at length
with or without lyrics
chords vibrate
decades the false progression
looping each nervous intention
scared scarred diverge
neatly censored (sensory) concrete
seeps

2010-06-08T08:33:00.000-07:00

mostly inhibit decline rancor aggressive viral or a stairway
of iron tells otherwise, choose a word write it in parts one
section after another list pleasure weighted over a list

cat crawl spiral iron
mint ice in summer
bowling after hours

can you this page cut at the edge missing words display
a new sparkle, or pretend, at least walking one distance

or another
focus each line

2010-05-25T14:29:00.001-07:00

an extended visual moment. flame. scattered. a camera shifted microsecond. your wild hair. my manic laugh. there was talk and sound. in that instant. a wish, a beginning with inarticulate syllables. repeat the number 30. count. repeat. a sentence with no predicate stands still. flame scatters suspended. illuminates. repetition with a shift, slight, clear.

from Plot by Claudia Rankine

2010-04-30T07:18:00.000-07:00

10:12 pm

Is it allowed? Am I, as a descendant of particulars, unneeded times, permitted the thing and more? This world, its worst is real. What doesn't hurt, ticking past, what doesn't intersect? Our destinations recalled, our points of fracture, of limbs crushed to memory, no more than experience, I am too aware of other ways.

Still Life

A draft enters. A sketchy gust. Blown is the woman standing within her likeness. To her left the sun needs to be drawn but her hands are the shape cradling her breasts, keeping her nipples in place. Each breast is the rest floating within metonymy. Her swollen scape keeps her awake. In its milky silence she feels distaste. She holds still. She waits. The draft draws dust into her eyes. Her eyes tear until her outline dislodges, dilutes, blurs. In the time it takes to fix her face the moon is drawn quartered.

2010-04-28T08:22:00.000-07:00

from Branches Without Leaves
an essay on a word

4.
In terms of grief, it’s a matter of time. This is what they say. But it is not what one hears. The words are intangible. The notion of time, of grief, of what has even been lost is not conceivable. There is no time. There is only time. What is time. There is only this.

Grief caused by loss. Death. Displacement. Deconstruction. There are symptoms, treatments, complications. All of these only equal moving through stages in time. Deny. Anger. Be numb. No sense of time passing, not passing, standing still, falling.

So many people show up for the funeral. From all over. Many were here for the wedding. Tell stories, look at pictures. One night we drink beer at Mike’s favorite bar down the street. The next day his dad gets up to speak during the service. We all hold our breaths, don’t hold our tears. He tells us to have faith in what happens next. We have lunch in the same room where we ate ribs and corn on the cob at the rehearsal dinner almost five years ago. You were with me then. I don’t know how things came to this.

2010-04-23T07:47:00.000-07:00

from Branches Without Leaves

5.

Cathy Caruth explains that the traumatic neurosis is “not the reaction to any horrible event but, rather, the peculiar, and perplexing experience of survival” and asks the question “what does it mean to survive?”

The pathology or neurosis is not in the original event, but in the haunting repetition of the image or event that takes hold of the traumatized in different manifestations, and for which there may be no understanding. The obviously traumatic event for both family and friends of victims, and the general American public is 9/11, into which there is no real access, nor does it seem possible to represent. Alongside a photo of a pile of stretchers made of wood for transporting rescued victims (or bodies) from the Trade Center wreckage, Rankine writes, “The language of description competes with the dead in the air” (82). What does it mean to survive? Caruth explains, “contemporary trauma” involves “a crisis of truth” that “extends beyond the question of individual cure and asks how we in this era can have access to our own historical experience, to a history that is in its immediacy a crisis to whose truth there is no simple access” (Trauma 6). But the stretchers were, for the most part, unnecessary. There were no bodies. At first, some few survivors of the event itself, and later, family, friends, rescue workers who experienced the event only in its aftermath, and through the loss incurred.

grey

2010-04-21T16:14:00.000-07:00

2010-04-17T09:02:00.000-07:00

from Branches Without Leaves
an essay on a word

9.

The rain makes her crazy. The smells. Not able to walk around outside. She takes off, runs, leaps, climbs the neighbors’ fence, gone. Only instinct, the desire to keep going. After a squirrel, a smell. She’ll endure the consequences later, now, she doesn’t think, just goes. Later, she’ll reflect on her actions from her time-out place in the basement.

When one thing disappears, something else takes its place. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it, or it isn’t apparent. One day I was missing you, but thanked you, quietly, for giving me the opportunity to do some things: adopt Tash, listen to myself, do more yoga, sleep in the middle of the bed. One day I forgot altogether, and then remembered: Friday happy hour, eating with friends, snow in the woods, breaths instead of thoughts.

Tash is always in trouble. She runs away and climbs fences. She gets into the garbage and pulls out things to lick like wrappers or plastic bags, or things to tear into a million pieces, like empty milk cartons. Still she is all love and energy. Her whole body wiggles when I walk in the door. She sticks her nose right up against mine and stares deeply into my eyes like she knows we are connected, like she is telling me everything will be fine, we have each other. She jumps on the bed and curls up with her body pushed as close to me as possible and we keep each other warm.

Some Buddhists say that emptiness simply means inconceivable, or infinite, potential. In order to have the opportunity to realize this potential, one must surrender to complete emptiness, release attachments, trust in letting go. Pure possibility. Like a tree with no leaves, heading into spring.

2010-04-14T09:21:00.001-07:00

from Branches Without Leaves
an essay on a word

6.
scribbled on scrap paper. you want to keep doing this into the future. sign here. date it. write it. say it. live it. the narratives we tell (ourselves). you tell hybrid stories. fact, fiction, sound misplaced, modifiers, dreams repeated as misheard memories. you decide how to narrate my past.

(Rankine: is he dead? is she dead?)

present elided by blurry images. you paint between lines you have drawn by hand.

(no one deserves to be shot 41 times.)

re-create events for some character who has my initials, is not me. I am in a room with no door, no window, a phone that doesn’t call out. when it rings I talk to you but there is no one the other end. I can’t find my stories. filed in another room I try to narrate them for you but there are no verbs, or articles, available. I realize there is no phone. I am talking to the face I imagine is you, projected on the wall. when I wake I am on the floor. suffocating. repeating the same 3 line story wondering if you can hear me. a chant. trying to catch my breath. repeat. what happened to that paper? the one you signed? in a file with my stories. the stories you told before you disintegrated on the breeze. you are in front of me. cannot speak. mumble in nonsense syllables. lips contort. my hand goes through your chest. I wake in the corner. why did you, I repeat. I crawl into the closet. curl on the floor. the dog snores. your face moves out of focus.

(Rankine: what’s the use of forgetting if its followed by dying? this is the most miserable in my life.)

Laura Mullen

2010-04-10T09:02:00.000-07:00

"Original Material"

Laura Mullen

2010-04-10T08:57:00.001-07:00

so fabulous...

Bride Journal

from Precarious Life

2010-04-05T11:02:00.000-07:00

by Judith Butler

I do not think, for instance, that one can invoke the Protestant ethic when it comes to loss. One cannot say, “Oh, I’ll go through loss this way, and that will be the result, and I’ll apply myself to the task, and I’ll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me.” I think one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing.
Something takes hold of you: where does it come from? What sense does it make? What claims us at such moments, such that we are not the masters of ourselves? To what are we tied? And by what are we seized? Freud reminded us that when we lose someone, we do not always know what it is in that person that has been lost. So when one loses, one is also faced with something enigmatic: something is hiding in the loss, something is lost within the recesses of loss. If mourning involves knowing what one has lost (and melancholia originally meant, to a certain extent, not knowing), then mourning would be maintained by its enigmatic dimension, by the experience of not knowing incited by losing what we cannot fully fathom. (21-22)

On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost “in” you , that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related (22).

What grief displays, in contrast, is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control. I might try to tell a story here about what I am feeling, but it would have to be a story in which the very “I” who seeks to tell the story is stopped in the midst of the telling; the very “I” is called into question by its relation to the Other, a relation that does not precisely reduce me to speechlessness, but does nevertheless clutter my speech with signs of its undoing. I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My narrative falters, as it must.
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other, And if we’re not, we’re missing something. (23)

For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the “we” except by finding the way in which I am tied to “you,” by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know. (49).

from Introduction to A Stein Reader

2010-03-31T14:49:00.000-07:00

Ed. Ulla Dydo

No time, no space, no center, standard, or authority. Stein wrote in a world changed by Einstein and even more by Heisenberg and Schrodinger. She knew she was one of them, constructing for words what they had constructed for quantum mechanics. On 25 May 1928 Dorothy Dudley Harvey wrote to stein from New York...Harvey described Stein with a quotation from Russell ["Physics and Metaphysics"] as a visionary in the world of the new physics.

"Nowadays, physicists, the most hard-headed of mankind...have embodied in their technique this insubstantiality which some of the metaphysicians have so long urged in vain."
In connection with grammar I thought at once of you, and wondered, knowing little about them, if you have not been one of the metaphysicians as an artist, with whom the physicists have just caught up.

from "Things to Do Today"

2010-03-26T12:54:00.000-07:00

by Joe Wenderoth

1. thaw the wounded

7. decrease the drama to the point of gesture, phrase, a weathered and weathering yard

10. organize and dispense an imperceptible the

19. determine the cause of the cause

22. set the famous criminals free

26. make the beautiful go to work

37. prepare the eyes for the oncoming absence of voices

42. produce a striking likeness of any one unproductive moment

53. clarify a morning posture

59. insist on the sad waste at the heart of all honest work

70. control the urge to farm

75. rehabilitate the truth tellers

77. practice saying something

79. try to fluster the bulk of language with the idea of buried faces

80. discontinue the breadth of the applicable horizon

87. mimic the open area

90. post signs indicating relevant battlefields

92. make the faithful look at us

93. weep new syllables

2010-03-26T12:19:00.001-07:00

"54. sing of eyes freezing, thighs giving birth, what have you"
--Joe Wenderoth, "Things to Do Today"

have not into cold
a flash of cutting crisp
in the dead
of terror
shivers what freezing
birth white frost
giving new
slide screech shatter
finger
nails
lengthen scratch a
formidable horizon falls
into disrepair regard
silences in flesh
composed sweet
notes ring
fast

from Don't Let Me Be Lonely

2010-03-23T09:22:00.000-07:00

by Claudia Rankine

Define loneliness?

Yes.

It’s what we can’t do for each other.

What do we mean to each other?

What does a life mean?

Why are we here if not for each other? (62)

relates

2010-03-23T06:48:00.000-07:00

“Of this kind is the distinction betwixt figure
and the body figur’d; motion and the body mov’d.”

--David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

your marble sphere my box
dimensional
the words laid one on top
across
broken letters
an articulation of history through space
on the page
who was defeated
whose artifacts
weapons

kiss me present tense against shining marble
does not move
its form holding together
molecules
straddling
how much means
across letters objects
viewed from every direction
will not simply show and tell

2010-03-23T06:38:00.001-07:00

stories without verbs

punctuation wasted

linoleum can you bend

all the way

against yesterday

scheduled mishaps unruly

confined progress still

each hair meticulously

nails hammered into steel

without structure

in accordance with

dreams, textured

in the gaps tangle

wine, peppermint, cardboard

details

2010-03-23T06:28:00.000-07:00

sustain sun in through the window unexpected listening masks a visual sensation narrates the lines set against her, can you tell me how and in what manner? not angry but potential, under the surface, bare tree branches of the inconceivable. hope has feathers you know, little else. concrete array of vocabulary intoned against, detour instead, storms lingering. grey orange mix with silent refrain—repeat and hold back—the coloring texture noisy scattered maneuvering. the body impulse, intoxication, monologues of manic silence.

from "Poetry is Not a Luxury"

2010-03-05T12:11:00.000-08:00

by Audre Lorde

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core--the fountain--of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds.

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt--of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7am, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead--while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.

2010-02-26T07:22:00.001-08:00

one notices the slivers of pale flesh in the ash. she is come undone. flakes scatter a breeze it will be impossible to close our eyes without the smell, of ash, of flesh. heat amplified against flame and a forgotten history, never recorded by victors or anyone else. we tie our ends with neon ribbon, pretend there is a common story that would make us feel better, that we could remember fondly, that we could displace into lines of feeling. Pale, gruesome, emotion. she led us to believe there was another way. instead, coming to this.

from "Proportion Surviving"

2010-02-25T09:50:00.000-08:00

by Renee Gladman

For years I had known that if there was a wall between where I was and where I needed to be, I did not want it there. Some people have personal goals that are demanding. Certain goals make it impossible to lounge around in bed.

from "Translation"

2010-02-23T15:28:00.001-08:00

by Renee Gladman

I love this town. It's still vibrant though I have not seen anyone in years. I am not in jail--they have just gone. I cannot remember where I was when I came back to find them gone--maybe at the river or drying my hair in the hot part of the forest. All I know is the sudden ghostliness of it. Imagine having loved something for so many years that you don't see it anymore. I mean, you feel it, but so synonymously with the flow of your blood or taking in air that the beauty seems to be about you. Life was that dynamic. We could not love ourselves more. Well, imagine coming home to a one-hundred-mile expanse of beauty that you always have thought of as yourself, and finding on that day that it exists without you. Furthermore, contemplate the disturbance of that compounded by the apparent exodus of those who, in your mind, were extensions of yourself.

2010-02-22T10:31:00.001-08:00

"You may have noticed, however, that there is frequently an irritating, if not depressing, discrepancy between our ideas and good intentions and how we act when we are confronted with the nitty-gritty details of real life situations." --Pema Chodron