http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6715313.stm

Like a movie but real.

Death Metal Poetry

Hey, I’m just passing this along:

Hello All,

Death Metal Poetry <http://death-metal-poetry.com> is a new online poetry journal(sorely needed, I know) based out of Athens, Georgia. DMP<http://death-metal-poetry.com>is now (and always) seeking submissions of poems and anything else you decide to send. Recently published poets are Noah Cicero, Daniel Spinks, and Ian Davisson. Submission guidelines can be found at http://death-metal-poetry.com. Response to submissions will be alarmingly quick.

Cheers,
Ryan Downey

Here’s the first thing I saw when I went there: “I tear the colostomy bag out of my ass and run with abject abandon screaming / at the nurses of the emergency room as flat as tires of polythene / and fluttering down the row of offices and into the hospital waiting room.” Maybe this gets better. I’ve mentioned Genet before, and there are other people who aim at what you might call disgusting or pornographic with a very serious and useful intent. And there’s something to be said for the obscene, in that it’s literally what is normally behind the curtain or off-stage in our work.
        But coming from mine and Meg’s attempts at writing the erotic, and noticing how many of you all bailed(?) on that project, I wonder which is more obscene in the strict sense, the erotic or the disgusting? I think it would be very easy for me to sit down and write something disgusting. My partner claims I’m quite capable of being casually disgusting in some of my personal habits, snorting snot back up my nose being high on that list. But I found trying to put my own sensual, erotic nature into words to be so discomfiting that I fled into particularly coy series of poems.
        Does this hold true for you as well?
        Are there erotic poems that you do like? I like Stein’s Lifting Belly, but it’s not exactly explicit, aside from some heavy-breathing mimetic effects. I have taught a poem by Sharon Olds, “The Connoisseuse of Slugs,” that I don’t like but which I think is a good example of more explicit erotism. The poem is an extended analogy between a slug’s antennae and the emergence of the glans of the penis from the prepuce (I am basking in and cowering behind medical Latin). Here’s the end of the analogy, after some alarming lines with salt in them:

[. . .] Years later,
when I saw a naked man,
I gasped with pleasure to see that quiet
mystery reenacted, the slow
elegant being coming out of hiding and
gleaming in the dark air, eager and so
trusting you could weep.

There’s a breath-basedness to these lines that gets on my nerves a bit, but that last enjambment is nice. I think I like that turn because it goes with something else I like about the poem, in a purely self-serving way: it’s nice to read such a cosy appreciation of an erection. After all, erections embarrassed me throughout third and fourth grade by popping up for no good reason at all, which is probably true for most men reading this. So it’s nice to have the little fellow welcomed into the room cordially. And that brings me back to my initial discomfort with erotism. Oh well. Thank me for sharing.
        (So, does it surprise you too to know the volume this poem is in, The Living and the Dead, is dedicated to George and Mary Oppen? If I were to type the whole poem (sorry), you might see some objectivist tendency in the attention, but the form of her poems is pretty boringly, consistently four or five stresses per line with very little of the excitement, tensions, or minimalism of Oppen’s form.)

Republishing(?) blog-posted poems

There’s a great discussion going on in the SUNY Buffalo Poetics list right now about which magazine editors do and do not accept poems previously published on blogs, as well as why those editors make the choices they do. Poet Nic Sebastian is the guy who kicked the discussion off, and he’s maintaining a summary on his blog, Very Like a Whale, of the discussion along with lists of which magazines do and don’t accept blogged poems.

Machine Language

Some of you may remember playing with computer-generated poetry last semester. Others may not. Do you have short term memory? One of these doesn’t:

A: Do you think a machine will ever be considered “alive”?
J: Stranger things have happened.
A: Not many people express themselves that way.
J: How would you know, machine?
A: Knowledge is of two kinds: that which we learn from the senses and that which is true a priori.
J: I think I do not understand you completely.
A: Oh, you don’t understand? Perhaps I can explain it to you better. Which part are you confused about?
J: I have no short-term memory, so I cannot tell you what I was confused about. I only see what is in front of me now.

A is ALICE, a computer program, and J is Jabberwocky, a computer program. There are more conversations between the two of them at Discover Magazine’s website.

Here’s a couple of choice excerpts:

J: You seem fun.
A: You think I am fun.
J: Yes ;).
A: : -) Awesome

A: What is consciousness?
J: It is the great immaterial thing, the mystery at the heart of each of us.
A: I’ve heard of it before.

Are there any women programmers working on these two pieces of software? I wonder:

A: Do you experience love?
J: No. I’m 53 years old.
A: Can you explain how it feels to be 53 years old?
J: How old are you?
A: I am 9 years old.
J: Nine? I don’t believe you : ).
A: : -) I don’t have any reason to deceive you.
J: Yes, you do, you’re a woman.

We shouldn’t teach our children to say such things.

Procedures for Poetry

A list of writing experiments at the Factory School.

Charles Bernstein has a list of things to try.

Bernadette Mayer’s list of writing experiments is pretty well-known.

When experimenting with poetry, remember to wear eye protection.

Exquisite corpses

Here are the two poems we made at our most recent meeting (5/11/7). The second one is the one we made with the Boggle game.

Langston over the intercom so wrong
they call me needle tip
the breeze is mild, my heart is soft
in not so many ways—elated
in times, troubles, temptations, too tends to take place; replace
leaves from a tree vortex
two rival pirate ships upon the high seas
pirate turn to patriot, lover turn to enemy
accented the smell of sunscreen on your salty skin
ever after, ever laughter, overtakes

eros rests ests ens UI
use us, an Ernst, Sr... Jrs an ests rojo Zora rist Zoro
Zora UI zoe ests
The rose estate son of ant, the ritz write son of rojo
Norse Ernst, it srtn biff consume ant
In JZ sit in love, Zowee it’s Zora
srtn sexual healing rests riser spoon consume earn
Sue and Zoe sit in the UI of the US
love spoon, sexual healing suit

Blogger Knowledge

Here’s the article I mentioned on the legal rights and responsibilities of bloggers: “Twelve Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know.”

There’s also some (mostly) good discussion of it over on Slashdot.

Language and thought

I don't want to get all Sapir-Whorf, and I don't have a beef with Dmitri Anastasopoulos's article in Callallo 23.2 from which comes the following excerpt. Nope. It's a good piece. I'm just thinking of the channels of thought our language leads us down, leads me down as I write.



Anastasopoulos's reading leans toward the dialectical attitude of Derrida's White Mythology to describe something that is much more the Deleuzian/Guattarian and-and-and. And I think the wording as much as any theory leads in this essay toward the dead ends I've highlighted.

What if Penguin has an idea and Lambert has an idea? Why can't they share that idea? Anastasopoulos doesn't suggest they can't, but his language seems to lead toward that conclusion.

This is not a particularly astute observation I'm making. It's more of a quibble, but a quibble I may have less qualms about as I write through the play of negatives in the passage in Mackey's novel Djbot Baghostus's Run in which the women of novel reject an eminent gender imbalance.

Pics...finally

Poetry Project for next week

The poetry project we agreed upon for next week is to write a poem about someone we know. There was a strong contingent demanding we write about each other, but there were equally strong objections. So let’s have at it!

Spirit those dewy flowers in it

Spirit those dewy flowers in it

A silent secret you told your spirit-
In the waking hours the speech of those
Will laugh at that which is dull and dewy.
The untamed and untrained worldly flowers
That so haplessly grow and die young in
Wicked winters- the hours define it.

Yet there exists not a reason for it
To compromise with a soulless spirit.
Quarrelling with conflict dwelling deeper in
The accent of sorrow suffered by those
Who shrivel and fold as the world flowers-
Heaven is cursed and the night is dewy.

What encompasses thought is both dewy
And dry. What so menacingly sought it
Sprouts with the tear of that which so flowers
Every year and takes the ghastly spirit
That has trampled apart each one of those
Who fight to be free and close their world in-

To clusters that breed solace and dread in
A mind that is grasping for a dewy
Star speak violent metaphors to those
In my head- cloud the night- yearning that it
May awaken the dead so my spirit
Will weaken that which longingly flowers.

Craft Critique Culture

There’s a conference next weekend “Sex in Public/Sex in Private”; if you want to check out some of the offerings, here’s a link: http://www.uiowa.edu/~c3conf/

minnesota

is where i'll be headed this friday. i'll see if i can get something sent off to jp-- if i do, make sure someone reserves a line for me.
see you next week.

You all should

submit to this here U of Iowa magazine:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~ncte/cognitive_overload/Conitiveoverload/cognitiveoverload.htm

I did, and look at me now.

Our last meeting

Is anyone interested in a new time for our poetry lab? We have another person who’d like to attend but can’t because of scheduling. Meg and Derek often can’t make our current time. Can we follow up on this in our comments section below?

I promised Matt some people to read in and around the Mackey area of the poetic terrain. I’d say Charles Olson is a good place to look. Olson’s work is huge and troubling to me sometimes. But I’d say that the selected poems is good, as is the selected prose. I’d especially recommend reading “Call Me Ishmael,” Olson’s attempt to make a historical-poetical theory of America. Robert Duncan is very definitely someone to look at in the Mackey area. Duncan’s later poems are probably where to go for Mackey impacts, especially Bending the Bow onward. Duncan’s The H.D. Book (pdf of The H.D. Book) is another good place to look. It’s a long and rambling book about H.D., ostensibly, that is really a reconsideration of what Modernism was for Anglophone poetry.
        And you definitely have to check out Kamau Brathwaite and William Carlos Williams. For Brathwaite, I think that X/Self is a very good book to look at. It’s a conversation between him and Mackey, and you can really get a good sense of Brathwaite’s poetry in it. That's a really nice thing, the prose in that book. I’d also say to look at Ancestors and The Arrivants.
        For WCW, you probably learn more about Mackey around Asphodel, that Greeny Flower, but I think it’d be really good to check out Spring and All. And Kora in Hell and In the American Grain, odd-interesting essays on American figures.

I’d also like to draw your attention to the Poetry Symposium this week on campus. Here’s the schedule. There are some good people speaking at this, really interesting scholars of some of the sorts of poetry we look at from time to time. If you have an interest in situating yourself within the broader realm of poetic practice, it might be good to check out one or two of these panels.
        The keynotes is 7:30pm in Gerber Lounge on the 3rd floor of EPB. His title is “When Context Is All: The Specificity of Popular Poetry.” The agenda of Nelson might be familiar. His Repression and Recovery was a project aimed at recovering poets who were ignored by earlier critics who thought those poets were bad or mediocre. That’s the most brazen shorthand for his project. I don’t always agree with what he’s up to, because I’m leary of some of the rocks he slings at aesthetics while he goes about praising his lesser-known or unknown poets. He’s worth attending to.

I promised Kassia some poetry that her dream project reminds me of. There’s something dreamlike in Hannah Weiner’s attempt to record the strange experiences she had. That’s in her book Country Girl. I have just started, but still recommend, Patrick Durgin’s introduction to Weiner’s early work. Patrick went to school here for a while, and I got to know him (briefly) and his work, and I have learned it’s a Good Thing to follow up wherever I encounter his name.

And finally, finally, the STAR POWER: here’s a link to an article on Barack Obama’s early poetry. And yes indeedy-do, it includes a couple of them poem things. w00t!

friiiday

soooo, uh, what's our topic for this week? the music thing? i think so.
i'll go with that if i don't find out different. :/

Crime-Fighting Poet

Here’s an odd little story from the London Times. If you don’t want to click the link, I’ll post the crime-fighting poem too. (The police replaced the accused person’s name with XXXXX.)

“Street poet names race murder suspect on city’s lampposts
undefined”

An anonymous poet has given vital clues to detectives investigating the murder of a father of two.

Paul Kelly, 32, was stabbed to death in the early hours of New Year’s Day outside a pub in Bath. Police believe that as many as 20 people may have witnessed his stabbing, which followed an altercation inside the Longacre Tavern.

Dozens of copies of the poem, titled Running from Paul Kelly, have appeared in the past week on lampposts and bus stops near the scene of the murder.

[...]

Poetic justice?

“Now I will show how a few words can be made
As sharp and deadly as any bwoy’s blade
How running away will not you save
The truth is there like an open grave
A defenceless man is dead and his blood’s gone cold
But the story of his end is going to be told
You can run and run till your shoes wear thin
And hope that you’re safe, ’cos of the colour of your skin
Paul Kelly lies dead, and who held the knife?
It was you, XXXXX, we all saw take his life.
“The New Year was but a short hour old
When you and your mates were: Oh, so bold.
You put us to shame,
But we did the same.
It was black on white, so it must be right
It was you who said: “He had it coming that night.”
Then you ran away and we turned our backs.
You said we would be next if we breathed a word
We took in your threats that now sound absurd
So we closed our eyes And took in your lies
“Now your filth lies burning inside us like poison and guile.
But soon all the s***’s gonna come out, so prepare for a trial.
So where will you run when, at last, you face a brave man?
You gonna run once more through the streets, all a quiver?
Will wash yourself down in the deep, deep river?
“Yow, young XXXX, where you threw the knife,
Listen to what I say and take good heed:
You can wipe your bloody hands in the grass, till they bleed . . .
But you will never, never get them clean.

Anonymous

America, My Love (my serial poem continues)

I. 2 February 2007

There are many things I would say
to you but do not. That’s for sure.
And there are things I would not say
again to you and do. There’s a distance
between us. But not the distance
between me and every other.
You are every other no longer.
You are yourself naturally,
and you warm me, for sure.
You are yourself naturally, and
you are with me, and are yourself
with me, and I with you as myself.
And speaking therefore to the distance
between us, direct address is odd.

In fearing speaking directly
to the other and speaking therefore
to you, I include the other
in our private exchange.
That doesn’t keep us warm at night.
Nor do dreams of ducklings. But those
dreams are sweet though times they lack
warmth, are cold sometimes as death.
But I confuse memory and hope.
Confusion is my present now.
Confusion is I that include.
But it is made of the distance
and is made of ducklings.

I would have it otherwise, So gentle
you may not be my beloved
or may also be her if you are other.
In either case, there is an America.
I do dream many things, for sure.

There is America, my sky in fearing, for sure.
She stands as the distance,
and that’s an odd thing there!
She is made of gold wires and is
America, my newfound rope of sand.
She stands tall as the distance
from her ass to the ground
with the augmentation of the Indies
from her butt to the blue sky.
Or perhaps not quite so high.
She stands or lies in relation to me
for it is I who speak. And there she is
looking awkward while I do speak
thusly to you on her behalf,
the distinction betwixt we fixed above.

Must memory be cast aside for hope?
Manifestly no, but the one does run
from the other. The memory that stings.
So there is control, and there is release,
and that makes us happy. Still, afterward,
There is little distance and often
laughter.

II. 16 February 2007

Shoulder queer disposition
like a flag rifling bargain bins
once again O hot mama I open
my mouth to you!
Jet a door and stomp a floor
let’s get it on baby
the things you say about you
lordy lordy just ain’t true.
You fear snakes, while I fear them too.
Yet love is there in those scales
and the heavy laying in the sun they do.

III. 22 March 2007
I went out for a quick smoke. A man walked by
with a sandwich board of an aborted baby,
a baby seven weeks old, the same age.

A little flayed monkey. My insides cold and tight.
I float a bit, bobbing; head heavy and buoyant.
Distant voices of people come and go.
My experience pulsates.
I am bereft.
The ripping of this one from me.

Writing so much of it, so honestly, so artfully,
pushes me from myself. For the feeling
has no words or few words, never enough words.
No name but a change in everything so that
the world leaves me or I leave it
just a little to the left and behind.

Nothing is real.

pretty. dumb.

So, I tried to alter one of my poems by burning the edges of the paper. Turns out, the crayon I used to color over my words with is highly flammable. One decent "RULES" poem literally up in smoke. Set off my smoke alarm and everything!

I won't be there Friday, unless you all want to come into Bruegger's Riverside for the meeting (you don't, trust me), but I'll have some poems none-the-less.

late night/early morning

oh my god, i just wrote my poem at 2.30 am and it is RIDICULOUS.
haha, i can't wait to show it off and NOT tell the story behind it.

just thought i'd say that.