from Lisa Jarnot's poem Whole Hog

after Barrett Watten and for Thomas


1.
The pig is complete.
Barns demand limits.

2.
Pigs fall down to create drama.
The materials are hoof.

3.
Daylight accumulates in work yards.
Farm hands substitute for suns.

...

44.
Flora stand up to fauna.
Science gives features to the world.

45.
Another tractor is invented.
They sniff it like a dog in heat.

46.
Plows fit into a perspective.
Photos of piglets cover the earth.

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.