Laura Riding

"The World and I"

This is not exactly what I mean
Any more than the sun is the sun.
But how to mean more closely
If the sun shines but approximately?
What a world of awkwardness!
What hostile implements of sense!
Perhaps this is as close a meaning
as perhaps becomes such knowing.
Else I think the world and I
Must live together as strangers and die
A sour love, each doubtful whether
Was ever a thing to love the other.
No, better for both to be nearly sure
Each of each - exactly where
Exactly as I and exactly the world
Fail to meet by a moment, and a word.

from Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me be Lonely


Sometimes I think it is sentimental, or excessive, certainly not intellectual, or perhaps too naive, too self-wounded to value each life like that, to feel loss to the point of being bent over each time. There is no innovating loss. It was never invented, it happened as something physical, something physically experienced. It is not something an "I" discusses socially. Though Myung Mu Kim did say that the poem is really a responsibility to everyone in a social space. She did say it was okay to cramp, to clog, to fold over at the gut, to have to put hand to flesh, to have to hold the pain, and then to translate it here. She did say, in so many words, that what alerts, alters.

moving through

after listening to Renee Gladman talk about narrative and writing fiction


nearness and the difficulty of arriving
placement
deferral

She intended to follow the lines on pavement
broken, faded, yet leading, or potential,
marking first the potential--and then
later realized--journey.

spatialize
miscommunicate
the space of the city bears the weight

Around one corner, and then another, the simple
whiteness of the line, like a shadow, not determined,
constructed and fading, nearly transparent, directive yet
diminishing toward total possibility.

a state of mind
something is not the way it might be

One block, a building so tall, blocking the sky.
One block, the smell of fried beef.
Each block making it difficult to remember having once
eaten. Another corner, wind whipping round like an
urban hurricane, covering her skin with layers
of grit, particles scratch out her eyes.

who are you, aren't you?
white space
slowness
reasonates

Having wandered off the line, what cannot always be
followed, what can no longer direct, orientate, circulate, each
corner marks the affect associated with each experience,
a coffee, cut of the wind, she sees them through the window,
imagines their mouths saying words in Portuguese, she
responds, the wind blowing away every language that she tries.

evoke
simultaneous
intention (unintentional)

Try this word in German. Listen in French. In Arabic the
subtitles linger for much longer than one expects--a short,
concise translation for so much language. The lines change,
move into the streets, no longer painted but built into the
structure, graph of bricks meeting curved lines in concrete.
The traffic ceasing to determine the pedestrian nature
of this city (scape).

conceptual, material, exercise

This, she decides, may be a continuous journey. Not of a day,
but of many days. Not of a language, but of the mingling of
words, vocabularies swirled like hot milk with caramel. Not of
a lined path but of paths textured with flavors, sweet for summer,
rich for understanding, acquaintance, the rewriting of history.

from Lipstick Jihad: a memoir of growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran

by Azadeh Moaveni

"What I wanted to explain...was that we had a moral obligation to care when awful things happened to people around us. That by treating beatings, lashings, or checkpoint arrests as common place--ordinary, like going to the ATM--we were becoming dehumanized to the sickness around us. A heightened threshold of suffering was necessary for getting through the day, but mentally, we had to retain some sort of perspective. Of how a functional government should behave. Of what was unacceptable. Otherwise, we would become like those blase reformists, who would look you in the eye, and say: "Look at how much progress we've made... See! I'm wearing short-sleeves...Could I have work short-sleeves ten years ago?...No!...What are you whining about human rights for? ...Aren't we better than the Taliban? Than the Saudis?" Yes, there would always be some junked, lost country we would be superior to, but that wasn't a proper ambition, was it?" (217)

"I had taken the first steps assured in myself, intent on discovering Iran, and I had eventually found that Iran, like the Simorgh, was elusive, that it defied being known. Its moods changed mercurially by the day, and even its past was a contested battle. Though with each day there I accumulated as many questions as answers, like those steadfast birds, something kept me honed on course, a belief in the obscured value of the destination. The knowledge had been unfurling in me slowly since the day Agha Joon's funeral--that the search for home, for Iran, had taken me not to a place but back to myself" (245).

story

her hands the color of mediterranean olives oiled smooth young, nails jutting out of clear skin no lines no scratches no scars rich like changing tones of day

as she paints each move of the wrist fingers choreographed against the sound of color the brush circling sure hesitant marking every note across the page

sits, against a backdrop of anger and history thinking purple sketching lyric creating lines reaching out toward every horizon

how does she, one wonders, compose each line as if set to music without tone, coming together in the realm of present fragments turned whole, continuous

turning toward breathing deeply woven with layers of incarnation imagined possibilities in each shadow from the time before and into

space, or the shape of a mango

a 20 (or so) line poem

the sound of fall cutting through, chainsaw against orange leaf
each grain layered like little chinese dragons
at the new year

the taste of buttered wine at lunch
smelling sweet like grapes pressed firm

chittering distant or the mosquito in my ear
scratched, to the bone
a piece of golden green, refracted, shadows shifting against each changed light

the clever taste of single voices, shimmering clear
not each grain but the particular flakes of wild, golden, rustling
a moving away from the understood glow
maneuver of an autumn

feel this, pig lipstick
the painting, disturbed by sound, broken, echoed
"that one"
the red wheelbarrow of hilarity

falling rocks scrape the insides of intuition
taste the root vegetables, one flavor at a time
chandelier

we will march toward the tree line and circle flowers made of teflon
each leaf laughing against blue
troubled wonder

the flavor of a shade
spliced on the wind

Obama Rally Detroit fall 08

Photos 1

Wall, by Don Brower

Lights, by Don Brower

Stones, by Don Brower

Photos 2

Lines, by Don Brower

Color lines on rock, by Jill Darling

Fountain, by Jill Darling

Leaves 1, by Jill Darling

Leaves 2, by Jill Darling

Kristin Prevallet

from [I, Afterlife] [Essay in Mourning Time]


The elegiac burden is the poem expressing, through the form it takes on the page, the broken minds which have shaped it. The poem is a state of both mind and landscape, and because it is not mappable, is capable of articulating a person's spatial distance. The poem, scratched out on the surface of the page, scratches then at the surface of the world "outside" of the poem. The success of this is articulating something difficult; perhaps even articulating something so well and so persuasively that readers are inspired to seek clarity in their relationship to loss, disappointment, or fear. The sadness of this is the difficulty of knowing that what the poem knows--or rather how it knows--will probably not change the world. And yet, people die every day from the lack of poetry in faith. In doubting the possibility of a tidy afterlife, I have come to compose a fragmented system of believing. I call this poetry.

words overhea(r)d

good meat good oil and salt
wine and the odoriferous
midwestern
idea of water
what looks like screaming, a rattle, a glass
wilting
going nowhere
a suite of statistics
screech
survey study reverse scene

walls hold sound
reside invite interior utter imitate
a response
rejects
the instant
pixel

health/cares

after Sandy Tolbert


the treachery of argument a migration of carnations how will this murky adherence siphon each molecule, a proud migration tilted toward gravity, an unheard acoustic shift frames the artifact.

We digress, deviate.

The surface of erasure is porous, a hybrid vocation scanning the syllabic properties of discord.

Hear text.

Mark a location.

Fracture.

In every case verbs (voice) multiply, the sound of height a clarity of mixed images.

Palin, Poet

from Slate

"Small Mayors"

You know,
Small mayors,
Mayors of small towns—
Quote, unquote—
They're on the front lines.


"On the Bailout"

Ultimately,
What the bailout does
Is help those who are concerned
About the health care reform
That is needed
To help shore up our economy,
Helping the—
It's got to be all about job creation, too.

Shoring up our economy
And putting it back on the right track.
So health care reform
And reducing taxes
And reining in spending
Has got to accompany tax reductions
And tax relief for Americans.
And trade.

We've got to see trade
As opportunity
Not as a competitive, scary thing.
But one in five jobs
Being created in the trade sector today,
We've got to look at that
As more opportunity.
All those things.

Gloria Steinem on Sarah Palin

Click here to read the whole story: Palin: Wrong Woman, Wrong Message

from the article:

"Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the "white-male-only" sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

"But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

...
"So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting for Palin's husband.

"Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.

"Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

"And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

"This could be huge."

Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd died recently. Here: Reginald Shepherd's blog his blog lives on, and continues, with his voice.

here's a couple of Shepherd poems:

from one of my own favorite of Shepherd's poems:

Geology of Water
for Maureen Seaton


The sea grows old in it.
--Marianne Moore


1.
Striated tides draw their lines
in the sand, leave them behind
in retreat. Warm layers on the colder
to blind indigo, strata of temperature
and color down to bedrock
settling, plates shifting in their cobalt sleep
to nudge the continents apart.
The sea grew old in me, the blood
as salt and turbulent, as unpacific.

2.
There's someone who foundered there
and lost his way: he's in above his head,
out of his depth, he's been concealed
beneath his representability or gulf
stream. If I bend closer I can hear him
drown, a man made out of water
whose words arise like bubbles
to the surface: something survives
in every carbonaceous molecule, every

3.
intermittent spindrift's punctuation.
Fossils compacted in the bluff's rush hour
say things change, but never for the better:
they've stairstepped four geologic eras just to stay
in place. Their smashed catastrophe theory confirms
some things aren't worth surviving. Evolution
croons its single song, come out of the sea,
my love, to me, and never adds, and drown
knee-deep in air.

..
6.
It's true: the sea grew old here, and here
it left its will to live, a testament
to what it couldn't take back, couldn't help
but keep. It drank itself and sank for good.
Wash that sea in me and wring it clean,
ocean to ocean till there's no water left.



Lens

Where the blue meets blue, where sky
meets the sky. Behind the white which hides
behind disbanded clouds, high humidity
at higher temperatures, holding it in, precipitation
imminent, but not today. We'll meet there. You
whom I have lied to, you to whom I've told
the truth, some version of turning
light. You can't be seen
through mere transparency, no
scene: something hidden in the here, unavailable
to sight. Blue into white and what becomes of it,
where silence becomes summer, there where summer
wouldn't wait. You were waiting, air
full of unfallen rain. You say this, you say that, nothing
I understand: I hold light in one hand, a prism
or this unrequited reticence, your
onehow, anywhen, all elegy and distance, and away.
And still say come this way again, tomorrow or the day
before, once then, where last,
or any time at all. Fire, lamp and lantern,
wander me, scattering glass.

from Spring and All by Wm. Carlos Williams

The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air--The edge
cuts without cutting
meets--nothing--renews
itself in metal or porcelain--

whither? It ends--

But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry--

Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica--
the broken plate
glazed with a rose

Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
and steel roses--

The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end--of roses

If is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness--fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching

What

The place between the petal's
edge and the

From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact--lifting

from it--neither hanging
nor pushing--

The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates spaces

"...that 'beauty' is related not to 'loveliness' but to a state in which reality plays a part"

--Wllm Carlos Williams, from Spring and All

After having finished the qualifying exam, having passed, moved beyond, moving forward...suddenly september turns toward fall, toward each escape blinking along a continuum, sparkling, plastic, rest.

m, in multiples

at which
faded faded
inquiry response
into solid parameters
fading
over
a fantastic geometry
curled
in a wave of salt
and translation

m, this letter silently
returns a concrete image
(each scene you depict)
(the sound of vision)
listen, to the particles of light
motion a naturalist textbook

the green-blue rainbow
turned in on itself

exercise for today


On my tongue memories of foul snowflakes, in the rain, hair a twisted tangle of oatmeal and butterflies. I tolerate balloons and butterflies in lieu of phone communication or the education of birds, disintegration of every winning lottery ticket. Don’t fake this egg. The axe, my teeth, sharpen safety and watermelon over a meal of marginalia. The mushrooms have grown distant this year. The miasma encircles, lingers, travels far to hold the pieces apart. If you were only as large as a pea, we would have lost your shoes altogether, the leaf a structure of redemption and shelter, your tail flailing for want of a protective cape.

“The poem is the record of the body”

--D.A. Powell

The nuts and bolts of expression

after Mark Levine


henri
your soda your skullcap
fear, unzipping confetti
a parade, spoiling, bleached
an electric quill, a robe, a statue
(a single alp?)

cobblestones and dirt spiral away from plaster
pose held, like a 10 syllable disease
graphite, cardboard, coal all lie flat
on canvas

rings around a grove of thistles
forgetting the machine, uranium, fallout
and the copper voices

the falling vase signals chronic geometry
an acacia dying alone near the marsh

gravel surrounding a nest of resin and clay
under the willow the circuit, magnetic, ceasing

toward

do what you will to organize, plan, predict, claim space and texture as your own-- we will all, each in ways green or scattered across / among consider the lyric, the sense of sound and interior vision, piles over words, a quality of moving music-- of which genre placed multiply factors organized around each green formica coffee flavor-- catch the contents of your stomach before anxiety spills over, reach inside the deep idea or a notion of grey jettisons over each strand of disturbed carpet, justifies its own reckless element-- place, please, words together get words use others' get a dictionary replace text determine a new language-- choose-- translate for/toward a new politic a new season/sense

each

Serena knew G before the catastrophe before the trauma that affected them all. Small and wise, her scent like blueberry lavender lingered before and after her arrival and departure. G before the trauma, she used to say, had curls flowing around her face, skin the flavor of sweet ice in summer. G, once upon a time, painted life-size canvases with her toes, using every color in the spectrum, and then some.

Barth always sang. He wondered about G, and never believed Serena's stories about the hair, but he wanted to believe that once upon a time, G also sang. Lyric pastoral stories put to music. So lovely. So perfect. Barth sang his own part of conversations, and otherwise spoke little, it seemed, as a way to maintain a space, a no-place away from the spoken world. He thought about this for a while apparently, until finally encountering the post-catastophe G, whose entire spacial presence confirmed his notion. And he only sang more.

On a particular afternoon, Barth hummed, G sighed, and Serena recorded each detail of the lawn, on which they sat, in front of the house where no one lived. The long folding blades of grass tickled their calves. The color of the house faded with each note that Barth found to express. Serena asked G if she would decide to paint again soon. G turned toward the old tree at the far end of the yard, turned back toward Serena who watched the face with no expression for only an instant before G got up from the grass, and walked straight into the house whose door pushed back with no more than a gentle groan.

exercise

Those normal clouds, this common air, participate in and are the cause of a surging resistance.--C. Harryman, Gardener of Stars

Trailing along, she bends grass, slithers through weeds, walks over dirt humming change. Pale and unmoving, lemon-scented air past her ears, through eyes, she decides not to become one unknown and trampled, but to march solid, quell fear, and create a determined identity. Each shaded step rings across a spectrum of silent language. Each layer, a body of texture and promise.

strain(ed)

aching individual spokes
sizzle around summer
stakes settled in
unmoving minutes

of shade sparkled
kids on foot
watching bikes

fallen under dirty skin
dust clenching
strokes
the back of a knee

unaided waiting
in dismay
optic nerves
clenched
strive, arch

a new poem on Rewords, after JKD, after Sean S...

flip

if you pick up one penny every 3 minutes
over an hour
you may as well work a job

20/hour

who earns this much
in a day life

20 pennies
pieces
memories

every 3 minutes every footfall gravel step
heads up

karma
or design
works through

each overturned copper
possibility

see Rewords for something... seething...

serious commentary... on the Zohan

Although A.O. Scott gives You Don't Mess with the Zohan a decent review, upon some reflection, the film seems more geared for audiences of the Idiocracy(not the audience that views the film...but the America that the film depicts). At first I though, oh yes, a politically serious-through-stupid-humor film for the mainstream that could, through its pop culture status, have some positive consequences for getting information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict out into the generic American public ear. But I wonder if this is both too optimistic an assumption of the viewer as well as of the politics of the film itself. The political-commentary-narrative in the film runs through the long-standing conflict with little background info and a lot of "inside" jokes (even in the Detroit metro area, which claims one of the largest Middle Eastern populations outside of the Middle East, many people don't know what hummus is; one character comments that the conflict has been going on for 2000 years now so it should be over soon...) and basically ends in an all-too-Hollywood generic climax of conflict between the two groups (on American soil, the Israelis and Palestinians have businesses across from each other on the same road, the big white-man developers set fires to the businesses to "fuel" hate between the groups); upon realizing the truth hate turns to love and hugs via the clearly announced realization that anyone who looks Middle Eastern is discriminated against by mainstream (white) America. Not unlike in Crash (though admittedly in a much more ridiculous way), we get the message that we shouldn't hate each other because of skin color but that we should all just get along.

And so, do we take it for what it's worth? Sandler clearly has some personal interest in the politics of the issue, and how many people can an Adam Sandler film reach and potentially "affect" with its politics? Or is it not too late to still consider ourselves a small step up the clever ladder from the Idiocracy mainstream and do mess with the Zohan by demanding he give us more: more substance, more creativity, more that goes beyond the same old crotch and sex jokes and still laugh and be held interested.

“I was to conduct an inventory, he says,” the man clearly tilting a little to the left side of near understanding. A boat passed, quietly and loaded with layers of colored boxes, like a steel rainbow of fruit flavors. Each color representing a particular type of potential luck or good energy as it passed across the water moved further from solid ground. Counting each color, starting over once, twice, a final time getting through the collection in its entirety, he scribbled in his book and mumbled the prayers that he claimed accompanied each fortuitously shaded square. We watched together, the details melting into what we imagined to have been pure possibility, floating away from foundation, spreading on the air.

try unequal-librium on Rewords

Raucous #1

after reading some Kevin Young poems

the streets are curtains
skin chalk
dead hurt

whether pockets season or
stretch gin

acrylic drawers repeal
hurt skin
pigeons
a flat moon

frame vinyl, bop black
scrawl captivates the blaring
light
dead sheets painted

feminist critique anyone?

I witnessed this for real in Louisville...walking down the street suddenly there were millions of pre-teen girls swarming in anticipation of a Jonas Brothers event of some kind...

a new poem on rewords: after after a train passing

the only explanation

I did it because the light was leaning heavy over the horizon at a particular moment of humidity and sweat. The air was like butterscotch candy freshly licked, wet, sticky then spit out -- it's scent clinging to my skin. A constant crackling echoed across the lawn like heat breaking into pieces, firecrackers across the sky.

She leaped across the fence as if we were related, and came at me fast and furious, until I couldn't recognize her at all anymore. The leaves shimmered violently against the wall and it was only then that I felt every detail of my former life as a vision in front of me. And although she had encouraged me to take the trail to the left, it is true, she never promised the appropriate, or even desirable, outcome of my travels. In retrospect, I would have preferred to accumulate enough financial stability to have avoided the entire incident altogether.

I did it because at that moment, standing over the pool table, each striped ball angled in an awkward direction, I knew there would be no hope of ever winning or losing another game. I did it because his breath, against my back, salty and fresh, like the ocean, charged with electricity and the scent of lime.

recall that there was a moment
visual
of taste and sensation (bile basil mint)
(re)constructed via detail (figurative analogy)
a story not told
without characters
the design of violence on the surface of a shirt
a rainbow pierced by hail
atomic or over-fed synchronic events
seen at an angle
on the surface of a wing passing unnoticed
over the face of every ticking second

minimal ink satisfaction light
inside anxious
precise every syllable use
following each argument relation
encounter comma
effect not affect
completion or the inauguration
of juxtaposition
a single selection making
one's point on a page
under obtuse sentences period
a post-selective construction

Begin with May Now Available

Please check out my book begin with may, a series of moments at Finishing Line Press and order a copy today!

Free Shipping on all books ordered during May!

over the space of wood topped shimmers of thought
a grey paper lined with scratched unknown unanswered
today is not the day to (insert action verb here)
though one must recall the accumulation of seconds
in a lifetime
many days of coincidence march
or linger

one must recall every exposed desire laid out on naked concrete wondering around pieces of language never quite aimed in any direction, never quite passing the required levels of professional status. i am of two minds, each shaded in another color depending on weather, history, and the pursuit of any possible syntactic strategy

as each crystalized moment...no, each hard penny...or, the wet concrete soothes the fingernail of understanding (not understanding...something like paper covered balloons) ...you get the idea, which at least the words linger, wade through the drops of a monday, at or because of distance i can only link to the idea, virtually, not even an idea...no, a black-covered paper-back, inside of which, each line of which, pasted into my mind (visual-like, but closer to crude animation). between the drops i wonder how to kill the lyric...squirrell...digging away planting poems of roses in the sweet mud. imitating lines of sense and logical awareness. a posted letter arrives only in time for...spring.

reflected back or into

at this moment, instantly
dirt dug deep into a gap absence holed out from the land (land is dirt) from the earth (the whole planet, no just this space outside the window, floor to ceiling window, outside of which a big hole, before that there was some concrete sidewalk and grass and something else maybe that doesn't matter now b/c it doesn't exist... does it matter in memory whether there was a bench or a garbage can or who walked here and when once?). two holes, really, large and small, the former remains of or the potential for. a reconstruction in dreaming stages. in spring at least this dirt like mud or soft, spongy, saturate-able, with or without light applied appropriately.

a series of red-covered texts lines the walls opposite the inside of the large window and, i imagine, filled with the ideas for the construction of whole worlds (earths) of possible pieces of space (in dirt form).

poem on rewords

see a poem here today, march 10:
REWORDS BLOG

in direction of our own vision

square orange practice a singular wooden misadjustment inkling ever toward marble founding foundational placed clearly around each moment, announced every minute speaking chamber she said willingly over and under each phrase, turned ever which way slightly and then something instigated, a curl, a turn, every particular timed flayed floating like a butterfly until the final knockout-- a shadow dances across the mat, making politics, calling out a name for determined and changing the metaphor of the glove, practical and enduring across each struggle or piece of rusted metal against skin

half-note

any display might advertise an indication, the grey against grey, atom-istic, level the distinction between, relation among or to: meter (poetry) beat (music), experiment with one or another, the logic(al) analogy

the implication
attended
re-tend
space or a history of escape and denial

alter each rose covered
chain
created especially for each
scented array

a series
of misfits
captured on film especially
tending
toward exactly
fitting in to
everything
else

Check It Out

Coconut Poetry Online

thinking of summer

how you may hold many faces
in one hand
the style of performance revolves
around a curl of hair an aroma
lips moistened just
in time for
an entrance
or exit in to any variety of wardrobes
(hide in and among)
a curl of
style like sweet
silk laden lengthened hanging
from trees
or fingers
crossed
around the notes
break through
one gesture (re)peated

Women and the UK Experimental/Avant-Garde Poetry Community

some old fiction or something

i'm going through some old work, thinking about compiling the various pieces of strange prose fiction or whatever genre you want to say, gathering things that came from somewhere and have otherwise sat around in the computer for some time... it's hard enough to publish strange poetry, what about strange prose... so i've just not thought much about sending much of this work out... i don't even know where to send it... though there are a few places that are a little less genre determinate such as Quarter After Eight... alas, the subtly implicit question, regarding how one does work one is inclined to do and also consider publishing as a necessary element to the ever getting a job situation, or, i'm tired of sending crap out only to get a multitude of crap rejections back in the mail... and i'm tired of the lectures on playing the game, being resilient and persistent, needing to have some connections in order to get work out there, whatever.... so here's a little ditty about mr. wilson:


Meatloaf is essentially interchangeable, with what? something thrown out entirely, silken and thank goodness for ever leaving the house getting away entirely and here we are burning teeth. cousin, watch out for cracked ice suddenly it may not be good not at all this time what is no good said obituary said this time we are searching for kindness. a woman she had mercy, walked the streets of mercy talked to the windows shopping for mercy thinking about how too many people are lacking these days lacking entirely. post: communion will be served at the 13th chime. Post: Mr. Wilson please report. Post: Lord have mercy. She sat down to feast, a brief intercession. Pray for me. Lead me to the light. To eat and a variety of blended vegetables. a variety. Thinking if only the stray thoughts were put down on paper. Thinking: Mr. Wilson ought not recover too quickly. Thinking of salvation and turning away from what she thought and flesh. Beyond vegetables. Mash potatoes. I was thinking of an after dinner fruity drink. Thinking of a rare species. It is not so wrong if it feels good. Intercess shock .. Post: these are the rules. Post: do not mix. She knows now that if Mr. Wilson arrives he will not drink wine. His eyes like Bella Legosi. She rewinds the tape, again. Mr. Wilson has not come this week. Yesterday she saw him on the street selling cigarettes. Last month he replaced light bulbs. Today he is to bring fresh bread. Post: Mr. Wilson? The dish is dirty. She looks over the newspaper in front of her. Cut into pieces. Sometimes an article. Sometimes a headline. Sometimes a word. Sometimes a photo. Sometimes a paragraph a block of prose. Sometimes she has cut through around into the text. Pieces of news paper moving around the table. Her hands over the pieces. Moving the pieces. Putting pieces together. Pulling them apart. Rearranging. The whole table becomes a newspaper puzzle. The dish is on the floor. Mr. Wilson is already aware of the events of the day. He only uses the newspaper for the floor. Puts it all over the floor. Opens pages and lays them out all over the floor from wall to wall. He will not bring a new newspaper. She knows all of the stories. Out of order. He will bring a cigarette. Lay it on the table. They will watch the cigarette. Moving around the text. Photos of people smoking. Not color photos. The newspaper is not USA Today. She is not sure what day in the U.S. is it. It is not today. Mr. Wilson did not come today. He is scheduled. Next week he will vote. She knows he will save a tree. Send someone to sit in the tree. He will compost. In his pocket. Carries extra newspaper in his pocket. She has a design of text. A newspaper crescent moon. A story about robbery. A shooting. Child abuse. Nestled in the curve a picture of a clown. At the circus. Last week the clowns left. They took their little cars and lollipops. The news is not always happy. She lifts her gaze from the crescent news. The curtains across the room are open slightly. Sunlight hits the red chair. Late afternoon sun. She has already eaten breakfast. The red chair flames. She remembers the popcorn from the circus. But not from last week. Mr. Wilson sold popcorn before he discovered cigarettes. Popcorn never lasts. Post: incoming message. Post: this is a public service announcement. Post: this station will play none of your favorite bands. One time Mr. Wilson won at checkers. He was born under a sign of luck. On the table, the star of david, in newsprint. Eventually it will be December. The sentences in the star were composed in July. A paragraph about a lost toddler. She walked from house to house. Rang doorbells. Her father was asleep. A sentence about the military in China. A headline: Local Cigarette Salesman Follows Clowns Out of Town. Mr. Wilson was not expected for diner in July. The circus hasn’t toured since 1976. Tomorrow each headline will paste itself into a perfect cube. She has solved each equation for the good of society. Soon it will all make sense, a particular order. Cutting the text into paragraphs into phrases cutting the words into letters. Cutting letters into dust. A pile of newspaper dust exactly n the middle of the table. Post: with a low tonight of 19 degrees. Post: no one ever really sleeps through the night. Post: where articulation intersects, I will find you, the story of the day.

letters

old pieces, from an old piece of work, found and uncovered...


dear elle,
you told me a secret. you took your hat off. ask me.


dear elle,
i enjoy cheesy love songs. particularly those from 1979. to someone i mentioned your state of affairs. i sleep teal. it has been called a hard habit. the stucco in your voice signals a spot of closure. the end of a sentence. your knee covering spit. i tell you cover me up. history is not accurate. tame your wild vocals.


dear elle,
syntactical illusion. carry on a cup of wasting over into. push over a useless vocabulary. tell me, do you do the dew? in what state as of moment? the last sparks are dim and flaring lost. dead animals caught and choking into skeleton. overheard intimate language.

pound – zukofsky – niedecker… a reading

niedecker:

My friend tree
I sawed you down
but I must attend
an older friend
the sun


pound:
1. direct treatment of the thing
2. to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation
3. to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase

pound:
an ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time

niedecker:

Well, spring overflows the land,
floods floor, pump, wash machine
of the woman moored to this low shore by deafness.
…
pound:
it is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works

pound:
use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something


niedecker:
…
you water my worms
you patch my boot
with your mending kit
nothing in it
but my hand
pound:
do in fear of abstractions

pound:
use no ornament or good ornament

niedecker:
…
I worked the print shop
right down among em
the folk from whom all poetry flows
and dreadfully much else
…
What would they say if they knew
I sit for two months on six lines
of poetry?

pound:
there is in the best verse a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer

pound:
the experimental demonstrations of one man may save the time of many

niedecker:

Hear
where her snow-grave is
the You
ah you
of mourning doves

pound:
it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. we will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it. I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither

niedecker:

How white the gulls
in grey weather
Soon April
the little
yellows

zukofsky:
the lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus
that which is aimed at
desire for what is objectively perfect
inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars

niedecker:

Popcorn-can cover
screwed to the wall
over a hole
so the cold
can’t mouse in

zukofsky:
that historic and contemporary particulars may mean a thing or things as well as an event or a chain of events

niedecker:

Lights, lifts
parts nicely opposed
this white
lice lithe
pink bird

zukofsky:
this rested totality may be called objectification


niedecker:

July, waxwings
on the berries
have dyed red
the dead
branch

zukofsky:
the implications are that a critic began as a poet, and that as a poet he had implicitly to be a critic

niedecker:

I’ve been away from poetry
many months

and now I must rake leaves
with nothing blowing

between your house
and mine

zukofsky:
a poem as an object…experienced…perfect rest…theologically perhaps… like the ineffable…the context…dealing with a world outside, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars…desire for what is objectively perfect…context based on a world…this object in process…the poem as a job…

niedecker:

My life is hung up
in the flood
a wave-blurred
portrait

Don’t fall in love
with this face—
it no longer exists
in water
we cannot fish

zukofsky:
a context associated with ‘musical’ shape

niedecker:

Now in one year
a book published
and plumbing—
took a lifetime
to weep
a deep
trickle

zukofsky:
intention must be distinguished from accomplishment which resolves the complexity of detail into a single object

niedecker:
…
We stayed till the stamens trembled

zukofsky:
(quotes contemporary American poet) a machine made of words


niedecker:
…
Leave me the land
Scratch out: the land

May prose and property both die out
and leave me peace




sources:
Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect”
Louis Zukofsky, “An Objective” and “A Statement for Poetry”
Lorine Niedecker, The Granite Pail, Ed. Cid Corman, 1996

on a friday

display
a crane, moving, industrial
behind a billboard
in front of the printed
architecture
of city
scape
not an e
scape
but haze
mutes silver
buildings
late september view
of heat
holding fast
to the notion of a space
surrounding
or in a place
like something that doesn't belong
in the desert

i don´t seem able to load any photos at this time, so here are some others, similar to some of my own, of ouro preto, a great colonial town sculpted into the hills of Brazil...

contemporary art in brazil

went here today in person... one of the best possible museums...
it is work from artists from all over, including but not limited to brazil, and the setting and atmosphere is amazing and fabulous...

http://www.inhotim.org.br

some pics in pampulha, belo horizonte, brazil

here's selmin's blog with some info and pics of belo horizonte:

http://www.lonelysatellite.blogspot.com/

thinking space

Bachelard, from The Poetics of Space


"For the house furnishes us dispersed images and a body of images at the same time. In both cases, I shall prove that imagination augments the values of reality."

"We are never real historians, but always near poets."

"Through poems, perhaps more than through recollections, we touch the ultimate poetic depth of the space of the house."

"Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These drawings need not be exact. They need only to be tonalized on the mode of our inner space."

or the spacial geography of
the unintended
opportunity
a counseling
or the movement shiver
of water across a puddle
under sun
we tried once
a topographic understanding
inhabited by mountains of image
and decor
but the specific leaf wanders
across town in search
of any new way
to see

brazil aug 2007

visiting belo horizonte, brazil for 2 weeks to co-teach a seminar at UMFG (University Federal at Minais Gerais)...

the hostel:

the hostel has breakfast and finally today we got up for it...
yesterday i slept 'til almost 10 i think... pretty tired... and today
we were up and out in better time... there's an open patio
between the "dining" room and our room with many plants, trees, vine growing vegetation,
some little palm trees, flowers... sort of tropical...
and the dining area (also where we sit to use the computer and work) has a big
glass door that just stays open to the outside patio...
a nice cool but fresh breeze blows around the patio this morning... temps in the 70s, sunny, perfect...


the hostel room:

tiny room with tiny little beds and a tiny little bathroom... also include a little refrigerador and a little tv...


portugese:

no one speaks english. portugese is not like spanish. sometimes i can communicate a sentence or an idea. but i can't understand any of what is said back to me. i listen to the portugese cds and read the phrasebooks... but by the end of 2 weeks i'll no little more than how to order beer and food from a menu.


the seminar course:

critical geography, globalism, urban experience... sounds good.... we're still figuring out how/what we're talking about... spending today reading and preparing to begin the class tomorrow... will post some interesting or relevant quotes that might help focus/locate the ideas for the course... selmin is good and smart and insightful... and i can talk and make things up... so i think we'll get through it alright...


writing:

i don't know if i can write any poems here. i will record my thoughts. consider images. take notes... the actual writing always comes later, on the verge of forgetting...


photos:

to come.

Cell Fragments: a reflection in color

1.

First, choose a word…paper, word, lipstick…the sky this morning breaking through before new fall light, before snow… tile, face, sound…books piled around, the Marx readers are always red. Red. Like Communism. Or Bricks. Or Christmas. Fire engine red. Infra-red. True-red. Apple Red. Red Cross. Red Herring. Pirates. Stop.

2.

The record of a language painted, textured, smeared in the history of presence, forgotten or pushed aside, its pages crumbling, turning to ash and flame. Can you remember this moment already happening, again.

3.

European revolutionaries in 1848 adopt their color, wave red flags. Later it becomes the color for Communism in Russia, China, it spreads around the world. Then fear spreads around the world, a color becomes derogatory. Commies painted red.

4.

“Reach out and sneer: Dem radicals speak to the Red States” The Register

“After reading this article, it occurs to me that Blue America sees Red America the same way Red America sees Iraq: A basically backward place full of nice people unable to destroy their own tyrants without our enlightened help. Also, the fact that they are unable to do this imperils our safety as much as it imperils their own. Perhaps this is why we are making no headway in either place...

Also, both places are dusty and full of oil.”

--punningpundit.com

5.

The red dragon on the flag of Wales. The country motto: Wales Forever. Welsh band Super Furry Animals sing “It’s not the end of the world / why?”

6.

And Redcoats. Marching through the woods. Not so camouflaged. Or the Red Badge of Courage. Stay and fight, or run away, the color of blood, and war. Or the courage of not war, other-than-war, the red badge of a future that does something different from history.

7.

Sunday, March 11. Two people (women) try to drive across some rail road tracks and don’t make it. The get around one train and collide with another. They die. Trains are held up for hours. Our 8pm train is cancelled. Getting hit by a train doesn’t get you where you are trying to go any faster. Two teens trying a challenge? Two drunk women not paying attention? Two people with music playing too loud to hear the second train? What about the flashing red lights, the white and red striped arm that you have to drive around strategically if you are trying to beat the train. Two mothers no longer waiting for two someones to come back home.

8.

Blood no longer looks like blood when the bodies from which it falls are mutilated and destroyed so completely.

9.

“Two Petaluma store employees and a shopping center customer were beaten by reputed gang members, apparently for wearing red clothing, police said Tuesday.”

“”Not all the kids wearing red clothing are committing crimes,” Captain O’Rourke said.”

“Due to its extreme nature, wearing red clothing during a negotiation or confrontation is never the best choice.”

“In the US wearing red clothing is promoted by some groups to symbolize support for or opposition against the Iraq war, or to spread awareness about heart disease. See: Red Friday.”

10.

The set sun sends back rays reflected against the sky the last moment of a spring day constructed out of time.

11.

Red and yellow hammer and sickle logo tee: $16.95 on merch-bot.com. “The logo…makes a bold statement or no statement at all, depending on the attitude of you, the wearer. This is a must for the back of every angry youth on the planet.” (note: the “logo” is on the front of the shirt, but I guess angry youths across the world can wear this shirt “on their backs.”

12.

To invoke or embody. To call a color your own. The smell of dry grass as the summer wears on and ice cream trucks slow their rounds through streets ghostly without the sound of children. Different trucks, in different shades of cool and refreshing.

13.

A wedding in India.

Chinese New Year.

A Hmong funeral.

14.

She said she has emotional memory. She sees a scene from her childhood and knows, feels exactly how she felt at that moment, watching from the window, for example, the look of the street below. He says he remembers details. Every number of every player’s baseball card from the collection he had as a kid. I remember only bits and pieces of images, some of which seem to be in my mind because I saw them in photographs. According to my mental record, I couldn’t have had much of a childhood. But on the contrary, it was full of events and emotion. I can at the moment recall the huge red sun dropping in the sky in summer when we rode in the boat across the lake, returning from an impromptu dinner picnic on the small island in Muscamoot bay. Always that huge sun seeming to stand still in our western vision, keeping the evening sky lit and timeless.

15.

A moment, spatial, layered, a spot of time etched perfectly into this immediate suggestion that generic history is peppered with particular drops of

from an essay on the color red...

VIII.

She said she has emotional memory. She sees a scene from her childhood and knows, feels exactly how she felt at that moment, watching from the window, for example, the look of the street below. He says he remembers details. Every number of every player’s baseball card from the collection he had as a kid. I remember only bits and pieces of images, some of which seem to be in my mind because I saw them in photographs. According to my mental record, I couldn’t have had much of a childhood. But on the contrary, it was full of events and emotion. I can at the moment recall the huge red sun dropping in the sky in summer when we rode in the boat across the lake, returning from an impromptu dinner picnic on the small island in Muscamoot bay. Always that huge sun seeming to stand still in our western vision, keeping the evening sky lit and timeless.

"when i touch your skin, or hear singers in the dark, i get so electric..."

--mei mei bersenbrugge from Heat Bird



some summer writing exercises...see below....

story

she runs right in front of the car at the moment i am spitting a cherry seed out the window, juice slipping down my face, no time to reach for a tissue or find the brake quite fast enough. she came from out of no where, like a drunk at the corner of cass and the fisher freeway yelling at no one and stumbling into the street to fight with the hood of my car (last week). this week: wildlife. my metal and her fur collide and then separate in an instant. i slam the brakes just as she looks at me to realize the mistake of her impatience, like the ipod clad pedestrian causality in nyc who knew only after stepping too confidently off the curb. unlike the oblivious urban trekker though, she is down and then back up in an instant. the stop is immediate and skid-free, the hit quick and short, the closest thing to blood shed is the cherry juice dripping from my lips to my new fancy summer shirt. but unlike the drunkard without reflection, she picks up, carries on, goes back to warn the others about their future of impending technological doom.

night school

fluorescent light blocks out the dusk that threatens to put us all to sleep, notice broken clouds grey in part illuminated in part almost pink above the tree dusk creeping around the clock while we try to fit in every story before parting. what evening light comes between vertical blinds, at an angle, blowing with air from the fan, clanging plastic blinds disturb spontaneous conversation, or a question, addressed out loud, while what was clearly lit by dry warm sun all afternoon turns soft like under the gaze of a particular lens, and buildings melt together with their contexts, while we listen to explanations of mysterious stories convoluted by language and movement in multiple directions, like on days I pack bags with folders and books from places all across town.

the broken clouds remind me to sleep fast, run slow, learn to wade through the moving dusk

paste

groove

solid

red brown earth tone

laminate

tea

shimmer

perpendicular

wonders across blue

waxed fingertips hair-free

shimmery passage of stinging

skin the dry humid pressure

against aging veins of

my hand pull

at an exoskeleton

(external)

ragged and cringing

parsley

or some solid caffeine

sliced

a thermometer laced with fruit

mint

whiskey

cold and chewy

against the heat swimming

through a pita

with cheese

knees sweat in every direction

basil, garlic

circulate

through what is left

keeping me from

melting

apart

a walking measurement

a spider

a text

who forgot walking or light

intervals, and the king

of missteps

in france the bald examine light

interpret intervals

measure traffic and

the spiders who forget

how to breathe

the plush must be worn away

--lyn hejinian, from My Life

green leather, felted, ragged, having forgotten any specific time of day. the photo, of the girl, on her couch. light damages the color, (dis)articulation. an image disconnected from its own story. wears thin like the tales you give of someone’s history, and call them my own. the indeterminate color of overused age. it can only be this, without a fuzzy understanding of where we once were.

returning to chaato street

after ashbury’s leaving atocha station

the cold sugar crackled under the book

disturbing color and reminding her

above all

listening for it –

we later…

and the layered ducks

the can, falling over trees, in order

for aggression and religiosity

to fold

inward over particular participants…

strike

the yard is your resting place

and broken layered green

a visual dog calls out

for compensation discomfort

or my inexact concrete pounds

explode earthly change

and flowers

in opposition to

across from the morning

hauling chemical abuse

the sink falling from the wall

slowly they separate

chewing the pipe

before we realize electricity –

cars enable sight

orange buckets of rain

one drop holding fast to the lens of her red glasses

every morsel crumbling to the bottom of the foil bag

intricate beaded sparkling stones lying at my feet

ink falls in straight and curled lines across a day

tile floor spilled thick with cherry coke

the gel pen lingers on canvas, sparkle language flows

on carla harryman’s memory play

dreams of an adult

thinking she is a child

thoughts – characters – animals

in vivid detail

memory stored inefficient – computer development of memory – evolution in world –persona – characterization – original creatures – memory moving through time

instruction – patterns – separating parts – fish from bowl

child recalls an event

traumatic etc. memories

movement between child – adult – understanding – language

language poetry goes disney

the way you say vs what is said

or

the articulation of self in context

the shot sent scratch across a highway

march 3

a shot, a highway,

and the eggplant shaded,

a frog, mingle around

the billboard –

await jose

and scratch at the dirt

3 poems

after Bin Ramke and others

plastic lice bisects an uncle skewed

blind dust

toil asparagus lice

skid blind

what have you

uncle

botanical blackbird

is the same as

or circulate among

electric

blind uncles spend light

a botanical apparatus skews

the well-groomed toil

dust skids across

the image of a blackbird

bisecting lice

grass

infinity

what you can’t see

smell

asparagus

asparagus dust

and the mention of

skid

skew

a blackbird

what the blind uncles couldn’t have known

toil botanical

lice and light spent

bisect the grain

of plastic wood

from PAMELA: A NOVEL by Pamela Lu

“…since the main challenge of contemporary life rested not in going out and identifying the “there,” which was everywhere, but in discovering a “here” that wasn’t “there,” for this “here” was slippery and always seemed to be somewhere else” (21).

“For what other reason would cartographers design a building map with the highlighted phrase “You Are Here,” accompanied by a large arrow indicating the place you were supposedly standing…Where does this map get off, telling you where you are or aren’t at the moment…Or consider the point itself: Where exactly is “Here”? At the exact point indicated on the map?...And consider the ever-present tense of the phrase “You Are Here”: If you walk away from the map, are you still “Here,” as the sign says? If you leave and come back in a week, does this mean you’ve been “Here” all along?” (22)

“…we continued to examine the situation from all points of reference while we were still inside that very collision and even after we escaped it, which in actuality we never did, since we were perpetually moving from one near-collision to the next, or finding ourselves in situations of existence which, no matter how hard we tried, made no sense at all. This sensation of whiplash suggested that we were moving much faster than ourselves when in actuality we could barely keep up with ourselves, and when in fact our generation was, by all popular accounts, going nowhere” (23).

from "META-LIGHT ON FILM"

in response to / a conversation with DuPlessis' DRAFTS

4 (IN) Which

"How white "all color" the color / of luminous death"

white death radiates unleavened

lifting cities elide the spectrum

of language spoken

"articulate a blank blanked space, a dotted dotty line"

moves by way of perception on a page of noted / pieces flake

onto, fall off the edge, eliminate margins what refuses here

to circulate circumnavigate

the binary

"each line is an inter; there is no action"

interstice / interstitial

in which there is no (character, plot, life-changing ring tones glittering) but think "otherhow" (yes I know you are listening)

digress in order to depend on sentiment -- in other words the shimmering ink spreads under the puddle dissolves each word

"inside the paper of the page / the iris watermark I suck"

" a brush flick of / shimmer" (I swear I used this word before turning the page)

"amid which nuzzle worms and shaking dew."

"cherry words" sprinkled over salad homemade dressing tells each story of how we came to be clever ugly cruel each crack in the sidewalk undisturbed (I can see the words before they appear control the page with my thoughts) patterns reflect moods of sky and social action

"on which words could be feeding the cow / inside the ruminant middle."

but the images clash here as I trip over the waves of possible action beheld in subsequent syllables others following others following ourselves folding our words into the palms of hands de-coded, uncolored

"the whole structure of transcendence" (show this)

BOLD BRAVE

a nice image is, simply, nice

show the juxtaposition of intersection and blasting

simultaneous. Require the detail of specific spots of memory

a scene I have constructed to pull toward

this present

an instant horizon imagines how to change what has already

but may not have to

always

to blast this or she

was never listening

when the original events were told

in verse

form

(pause: how to work in space of breaking

out of this pale face)

(the words fall off the edges flakes slipping away to the floor or where

blow around float away)

PORTRAIT D'UNE FEMME by Ezra Pound

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,

London has swept about you this score years

And bright ships left you this or that in fee:

Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,

Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.

Great minds have sought you- lacking someone else.

You have been second always. Tragical?

No. You preferred it to the usual thing:

One dull man, dulling and uxorious,

One average mind- with one thought less, each year.

Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit

Hours, where something might have floated up.

And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.

You are a person of some interest, one comes to you

And takes strange gain away:

Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;

Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,

Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else

That might prove useful and yet never proves,

That never fits a corner or shows use,

Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:

The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;

Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,

These are your riches, your great store; and yet

For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,

Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:

In the slow float of differing light and deep,

No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,

Nothing that's quite your own.

Yet this is you. - -

DuPlessis on Pound

from Blue Studios


Chapter 6 "Propounding Modernist Maleness"

DuPlessis writes on Pound (the poet and his practices) as an example of "managing" the women poets, thinkers, artists that might have otherwise moved more fully into the modernist circles inhabited by Pound and his contemporaries. Specifically here, DuPlessis gives a reading of Pound's poem "Portrait d'une Femme" which is presented as a poem addressed to a generic woman (as muse, inspiration for and subject of the poem), but is more specifically, in actuality, about Florence Farr, a woman artist and actor who was active in the respective artistic and literary circles of her time (barely a generation earlier than Pound), and was on good terms with the poet Yeats, among others.

"A postformalist reading strategy...must look at the deep formal mechanisms of literary texts with New Critical Care yet link formal moves to the issues that purist New Criticism rejected: social substance, biographical traces, constructions of subjectivity, historical debates, and ideological strata" (122).

In the poem Pound moves Farr from status as real person (woman) to a place of "figured representation as muse" (124) and thereby removes any agency that she might have/had. Through both content and formal strategy, he presents the female figure of the poem "as virtual lack, inadvertent creativity, and compromised ability" (125). In this way (without agency and possession) she becomes the generic muse figure.

"The poem becomes a muted, backhanded tribute..." to her own modernist tendencies and strategies, both acknowledging and "disparaging" the "source" of the artistic production (of her own work and of her place as real in his poem) (126).

In her own life, Farr "played the muse but also mused the play" in her relationships with other artists and through her own "critical agency"; "she situated herself on both sides of the muse-agent compact" (127).

"...for females entering modernity, artistic agency and erotically charged inspiring with free love bravura are mixed together and give tremendous professional power and satisfaction in ways that the pure stereotyped form of "muse" wisdom-in-passivity-and-sublimation cannot articulate" (127).

For a time, it's possible that Pound felt like a rival to Farr for the attentions of Yeats on his own (Pound's) work (128).

"Pound produces [this] work by the thematic occlusion inside it of the work of the woman on whom the poem is based" (130).

"The real figure has been transformed from a critical, powerful, influential, outspoken, and original historical woman to a textual "femme"--one of a muse of modernism--an inadequate, anonymous and displaceable female figure...Pound's poem is a mechanism in the service of one kind of male subjectivity by the active creation of a shallow but provocative female muse for the containment of historical New Woman effervescence and achievement. This is an important transposition in the relationship of modernism to modernity. By representing a female figure in this way, Pound has contained, grounded, or stalled consideration of the impact-laden presence and agency of the "real person" on whom the poem was based, making the figure an Old Woman with useful muse properties, an exemplum of old stuff that still somehow inspires. Poetic representation masters this female figure, using poetic institutions like "muse" in order to deflect attention away from the historical achievements of Farr, the hidden subject" (133).

"Making an coequal historical woman into a poetic muse thins her...evokes the past of poetry as an institution obscuring her...the muse is a mechanism that takes a modern subject--a New Woman-- and changes her into an encumbered, static, nonmodern subject...moves Farr backward...creating female belatedness from a woman pioneer in order to consolidate a male pioneer from a man's sense of his own belatedness...The resistance to acknowledging females as modern subjects...may be said to begin, in Anglo-American modernism, with poems such as this one" (136).

"Pound uses poetic convention to protect himself from historical shifts around gender" (136).

madness is a medicine from which the length / has slid
--lyn hejinian, writing is an aid to memory


across the angle narrated along a sentence minute particulars find themselves placed/placing degrees of image of sense

rattles under each syllable like the convenient displaced notion confronting only fragments of what i can recall -- lemon-scented stickiness spread thin like an original idea -- the page refuses to interrogate just what she meant by the severe separation of tense

each frame holding her own against
the tendency to blast history