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

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

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

from: was jack kerouac a punjabi

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

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

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.

"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

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

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

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)

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

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.

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

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

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"

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.

"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

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

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