Mes amis, y'all are making me feel like a hippy. (Well, *that* doesn't take much, I suppose). There may be a lot of us these days, but I still think there's room for all of the poets. We all act like jerks sometimes. We all write stuff some of us may or may not like at certain times. Aesthetic debate is all well and good. But there seems to be a lot of...like, heavy energy these days, man. Maybe I'm just an intellectual pacifist. Maybe I'm a fence-rider. Maybe I'm just lazy.

But my emotions don't (always) speak in sentences.

Save the Date

The release reading for my Katalanche Press chapbook, Film Poems / going away party for yours truly will be Friday, August 12th at the Katalanche Press headquarters (e.g. Mick's house). More details as the day approaches.

Poet Tics

Since we're all into manifest toes these days, I thought I would share this that I wrote a few years back and still holds true for the most part. One can't do footnotes in Blogger, so I have tried to indicate them as unobtrusively as possible.



I write to set the river on fire. {FN1}.

Amid the din of work and the commerce of narrative, {FN2} thoughts leave the marks of their mouths (the grins of their teeth, the spit on their tongues) on whatever surface is made available to them. These small wounds make poems when left undressed.

A poem comes into the world numb, dumb, and moaning for the attentions of the demon emotion. {FN3} It is made pretty through revision until ready to meet the eyes of the world unflinching, as a corpse is made ready for a wake. It is at this point that the demon has had its way with it and leaves the poem to recount: weeping, laughing or sleeping according to its nature.

Through its life, the poem will teach us that our dead cannot be reclaimed, the things that things without brains know, and the names of our doubles, if we're lucky. Our doubles who listen to each word we speak and shriek and cackle. {FN4}

The poem will forget what it speaks at the moment it is spoken. This speech is recorded as marks on the poem's body. The poem speaks most clearly, most musically those words that are written on its back, the balls of its feet. These assertions will run counter to those found on the hands, the forearms and the face of the poem. {FN5} Some say this speech is musical, some say it is like silence. {FN6} Some listen to this speech and mistake it for the sound of their watches. It is these people who comprise the majority of our populace.

Some poems lack certain limbs, some with flippers instead of legs, wasps' nests instead of heads. It is these poems we must listen to most carefully, the ones the demon emotion scorns and is secretly afraid of, the ones whose speech amongst themselves mimics the ticking of watches.

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1. The river remembers every injustice done to it, the name of each person who has offered it a kindness & the stories of those injustices and those names. These stories move through the river in a kind of communal dream. The figures of this dream can be seen as shadows dancing in the flames when the river burns. The river burns only when no human eye is watching, a sight that birds know but cannot speak of.
2. Desire, acquisition, the release of desire, regret.
3. The angel emotion.
4. The existence of these doubles has been all but ignored by contemporary thought; the doubles of a few have been made known and assigned the names of particular deities.
5. Common practice in preliterate cultures is the recording of stories as pictures on the body. The practice is similar in literate cultures, but the recordings themselves move though the world as words, carried forth by the invisible bodies beneath them. These ghost-word bodies will inhabit our cities and occupy our homes when we are but dust; never speaking, the task of speech having been completed already.
6. "I can write a rhyme where nothin' rhymes,"--High Priest of the Antipop Consortium.

Still speaking of hot, the July 2005 issue of Carve looks to be just that. I'm in there with some of my favorite poets. Makes me feel nekkid. Which I suppose is a good thing on a day like today...

I am hot, too. It is very hot here. Hard to think.

Jack Kimball is hot.

The three Pakistani men were taken into custody and questioned after other passengers complained that they were moving about the cabin, FBI spokeswoman Gail Marcinkiewicz said.

I suppose they're lucky they didn't get shot 5 times for trying to use the fucking rest room.

You know, I think *I* hate whitey. And I am whitey!

Je Suis L'autre

The mysterious Clifford Duffy seems to be behind a watershed of poet-machines over Here.

Since we're on the subject of children's literature, I feel compelled to point to what was perhaps my earliest experience with the novel: Thornton W. Burgess. Though I suspect my interest in these books was fueled largely by my love of Harrison Cady's illustrations. Burgess's world was engrossing, though; once you had entered, the repetition of characters and themes made for an incredibly vast-seeming community of anthropomorphosized animals. (Most likely similar to the books that Kasey and Ron mention). Burgess wrote around the turn of the cetnury so his stilted and idomatic language sounded exotic and arcane to a kid in the 70's. There was a novel for virtually every species of animal one was likely to encounter in the New England forest (Burgess was from Sandwich, MA)--what's more, Burgess was a naturalist and a realist--his love of animals extended to possums, muskrats, rats, wolves, coyotes, the lives of whom were explored with naturalistic detail and a humanistic eye (animal characters were motivated largely by hunger, protection of their families, etc.) which transcended (or at least looking back) the usual good/evil dichotomies of children's literature. The most questionable characters in these books are the humans. A lesson we all do well to learn early on.