Back Room Live!

The first 4 parts of [the] Robin's Poem are published over at Back Room Live as part of a series curated by Sara Mumolo (she also curates the Studio One Reading Series in Oakland), along with work by Mumolo herself and Sharon Zetter and Ben Prickett.

The same poems are also excerpted at the blog CALLING CARDS: international calling cards online.

"Down by the river / I shot my baby dead."

HELP A SISTER OUT!

Jennifer Garcia (a fantastic and talented poet) is selling her fucking amazing chapbook THE SHIELD OF MEDICATION, based LOOSELY on the life and times of Marie Osmond, for $6.50






ALSO. It's never too late to trade me something (like other books, or cool stuff, or money) for a copy of Prithee (Abraham Lincoln Press, 2009), a series of collaborated COWBOY AND GHOST poems with Jess Rowan (firefighter extraordinaire!).

email me alexsmalix@gmail.com

Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan

For Bryan Coffelt & Phil Spector's ashen ghost

=fucking stupid=

1. Man, fuck that.

2. Organic foods need to chill the fuck out!

3. The desire has creeped upon Los Angeles like a wedgie at a water park

4. When Phil Spector was stuffed into a prison cell to serve 19 ... Nope, she married Phil for *love*. Gag me with a fucking crimping iron.

5. Are you comparing Phil Spector to the Holocaust?

6. A bad hair day in prison.

7. fuck a duck has a reputation beyond repute.

8. u listen to britney spears, hells yeah, man fuck that.

9. u like olives(the food), hells yeah

10. Just watched a spider try to fuck an ant, and he said, "if you're gonna kill me, kill me. But don't fuck with me ears. I need 'em."

Black Poem #2

a panda is a bear
or
Physics for Kitty


'Science was Wrong!'
because I am heavy bored

his death made us sit still
until our eyes hung out
at work
with my two
floral guys

he does only die later / in the mud / and the sea

they stand out
often the lone white face in a black crowd
a result of a genetic condition
muzzles on their eyes

I make a call to stomping
literally translated 'cat-foot black-and-white'
an owl is a cat-faced eagle / a crow is a black duck

'what a desperate creature panda is or no, / not panda'
After all / the sky flashes / the great sea yearns

the voice in Henry's head
is broken syntax
and broadly moves
the entire body

Black Poem #1

do dogs listen to you

it's a good thing you're reading this
blood is coming from the upper part
near the mouth pits / the vampire nose

*

covered in tar I see what was the exposed parts

dirt blood / tar blood / mud brain and eye
trailer park skull

trailers parked
on loose
stones
exposed
to
the cold

*

in a few minutes we will stand in a quagmire
the consistency of ancient sand and lions

the same lungs do not take up the same space
so we quicken the distance to fail and sleep

Notes: William A. Camfield's essay Marcel Duchamp's Fountain Its History and Aesthetics in the context of 1917

"Duchamp also transformed the object by an action that incorporated elements of place, name/title, and point of view (both visual and conceptual)."

photograph of Fountain some imply an anthropomorphic perception of Fountain as Buddha or the Madonna

"The only works of art America has give are her plumbing and her bridges."

Choice (choosing) is the barest act of creating art / then transformation by an action that incorporates elements of space and point view



the fountain not made by a plumber but by a force of imagination or re-imagining / removal of context and purpose / made into an object with no PURPOSE

stressed anti-art/aesthetic neutrality

not to look at it with a "post-modern" lens (?)

readymades as "sculptures already made" not as anti-war/anti-aesthetic statements (?hmmm)

Notes 6-2: Robert Hughe's Shock of the New

Part 1 : intellectual life = struggle for absolute freedom

Andre Beton (1896-1966) "Pope" of Surrealism
Surrealism = interpretation, liberation from constraints - logic, morality - aim to recover original(?) "powers of spirit"
turning to the Unconscious-->the dream = the gate to art

Goya: when reason dreams, monsters are born.

tradition of the irrational producing a potent conter-tradition to the "reasonable"
"bejeweled Symbolist fancies"
"a lady's long kid gloves"

Futurism's attempts toward "objective" and "progressive" discarding history

Giorgio de Chirico's "metaphysics" or "metaphysical painting" (pintura metafisica) - "It was a question of mood, the sense of a reality drenched in human emotion, almost pulpy with memory."

"Space rushes away from one's eye."

"...inhabitants of de Chirico's landscape are neither men nor art, but somewhere between: they are tailor's dummies."
the encounters between object and clarity
1918 "death" of de Chirico's work (like Bob Dylan in 1970 or is it 60? But also like Dylan, made the dream seem real)

Surrealists, like Rimbaud, fashioned "a simple hallucination" to live in
Ernst (Dada collages) meets Surrealists (poets at the time)
"The Elephant of Celebes / Has sticky, yellow bottom-grease"
"a great deal of pyschic violence in a small space"
beauty (to Breton) same order as sexual desire or fear: no intellectualism

the sense of an immediate and vicious past

PART 2 : an emotional exactness bereft of representational accuracy

3 kinds of art: child art, the art of the mad, and "primative" art

Joan Miro (1893-1983) "the best pure(?) painter"
the art of children
the climax(!) of the idea
Miro's "The Farm" as "a counting of blessings" or "Noah's Ark"
"childish-ness" "everything seen equally"
"a multiplicity of life"
flashes of Hieronymus Bosch
cues from Blake:

Seek those images
That constitute the Wild:
The lion and the Virgin,
The Harlot and the Child.

"He had the rang e of a man who owns all his sensations and is abashed by none of his desires"

Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926)
"Sagrada Familia" - may never be complete (so cool)
"Parque Guell:" "...outright madness: not a straight line or a clear imperative visible anywhere."

Magritte's Pipe "a sign that denotes an object and triggers a memory"
a sea change of seeing
dread: "a pair of boots end in real toes: a fossilisation of life, or an awakening of leather?"
OUR threshold of liberty
argues NOTHING is certain

Hannah Weiner's "Magritte Poems"

Picasso "admired" for his sexual hostility (?)

turn the body into another kind of object and strip away its familiarity

a society preoccupied with the personal and the self