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THE BIGGEST WOMAN OF THE DAY (cont.)

after Anne Boyer


Cougars

The cougar can rise or create history on a stump.

If a human talks, then history is good.


Deerhunters

Your outfit and clothes are fluidity, they get me totally wrong and dig into me / the pieces that break the ear and ribs. I get so much music it is breaking apart the wallpaper / the ribbons grouping under my nails. I am never leaving this cranked, fluorescent microcastle. First a conduit to having no age / First a deliberate playing of all songs at once, coalescing as rainwater that makes me high. Please baby, do not be happy about the deliberate clicking of the glass / do not be happy about the exceptional love making.


Bear

In a video the woman bears a child
in her room.
This woman
a 74-year-old
was attacked cutting and wrapping illegal foods in newspaper
but still feels lucky to live in the bear enclosure
with her four miracle babies.

the sound of your blog exploding

Jack Christian wrote a really great essay called Blog as Form.

He also has a great chapbook out Let's Collaborate (Magic Helicopter Press, 2009) which I own and think is excellent.











Sample from Diagram 8.2:

We're in a giant mom and dad linked by a heart.
We're going round in circles in the figure eight
made by their bodies and cinched by their heart.
Where their lips touch is another kind of heart.
Where their stomachs meet a third type of heart.
They sort of know this, but they're too busy
convulsing. They think they're a constellation
fastening in space. And we're going with them
on a vague run for groceries. It's a long ride
in a station wagon ...

Jeff Soto

Jeff Soto

Brandon Brown is a Starman

HI: Talking Points

1. Brandon Brown (BB) is one the most thoughtful and intelligent people I kind of know. His most recent blog post steered me in the direction of this amazing essay(?) on Prosody that I can't even talk about but only quote, "In the far-out sense (i.e. immanently) prosody is the dialogue between finite and unlimited energy." Which, as I pointed out on Brandon's Blog, has me thinking about Charles Olson's Projective Verse.

2. BB is a human being. And he also has a divine aesthetic sense when it comes to hip-hop. Without BB's help I may have never discovered the sublime of Rhianna or heard the beautiful poetry of R. Kelley's proposal to a stripper's ass.

3. I'd liken listening to BB read his poems to losing your virginity at a rap concert in space with Jimi Hendrix. Not really. But it's pretty fucking sweet. When read out loud, his poems have a conversational cadence and tone you might not imagine when you read them. Sometimes I'm not sure whether he's starting a new poem or talkin' robot trash from the future, but either way I'm enthralled. But reading his poems is still a treat, don't get me wrong. His poems have a savory abuse (in a good way) of language in them, with a touch of lyrical know-how and the hickory aftertaste of a lost narrative snatched from bits and pieces of overheard lunch time conversations (See: Six from Lunch Poems).

4. For all this, and much, much more, Brandon Brown is a fucking champ. (Also, BB will sell you cocaine laced with PCP if you ask nice.)

THE BIGGEST WOMAN OF THE DAY

after Anne Boyer

Animals

Now it's hummingbirds, jerks, and cougars with the keys as beautiful as the animals.

So the only kind of cancer was the jerk kind.

It's nice to find bears in caves and lions sleeping in the corners. And today I rolled my eyes and said, okay, because frankly, spiders are a pain, and we are both waiting for them to take us away while we sleep / in those little bags you love because we aren't allowed to touch without the sheet and we wear these garments which are not a secret but still keep us attached to the clouds and bright places of marble, this is our love and our heart homes and our not-secret. It's our magic. You know. But no one will miss us anyway because all our lights are always on.

Tonight the hyena gave out, he coughed blood onto us and crawled off to dark space, we kissed those still soft lumps of black on his feet, we could feel him sign off. Do you really believe animals die, too?


Customers

in the wild
and what to do
after you
find them

KILL


Wood

It's driftwood trying to be a place to live.

"All this makes sentences so clear I know how I like them."

From "The Sentence is a Lonely Place," by Gary Lutz; The Believer (Jan. 2009)

It took me almost another decade after graduate school to figure out what writing really is, or at least what it could be for me; and what prompted this second lesson in language was my discovery of certain remaindered books—mostly of fiction, most notably by Barry Hannah, and all of them, I later learned, edited by Gordon Lish—in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself. I once later tried to define this kind of sentence as “an outcry combining the acoustical elegance of the aphorism with the force and utility of the load-bearing, tractional sentence of more or less conventional narrative.” The writers of such sentences became the writers I read and reread. I favored books that you could open to any page and find in every paragraph sentences that had been worked and reworked until their forms and contours and their organizations of sound had about them an air of having been foreordained—as if this combination of words could not be improved upon and had finished readying itself for infinity.

I read this article every couple of months to keep writing what will now be referred to as (as K. Silem Mohammad put it) Conceptual Prose. I don't really want to be think about FICTION. That word makes me think of all those awful New York Times Bestsellers littering nearly every bookstore where I live. I want "every sentence [to have] the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude."

I'm tired of Beige Prose. I want to read books by authors who get inside their sentences. How many authors would screw up the whole plot of their novel/story just to make one sentence more beautiful? Those authors that will are the ones I'm interested in. Too often when I go into a bookstore I just feel like shaking my head after looking around the Fiction section.

If I'm being really honest, I should tell you, I want FICTION to be POETRY. That's why I like Kasey's title "Conceptual Fiction." Blake Butler, Shane Jones, Deb Olin Unferth, Amy Hempel, Donald Barthelme, and Chelsea Martin; are just some the people I see doing this.

This is not to say I don't like Hemingway. I love Hemingway, but I think his style is interesting partly because of its historical context. At the time people were like, Holy Fuck what is Hemingway doing? This isn't how people write! There was chaos in the streets, people were flogged for sure. It was new! He was taking risks.

The world continues to change and I think modern writing should be written in a way that reflects the constantly mediated experience of modern existence. Or something. I want abruption!

A sentence makes them all not an avoidance of difficulty. A sentence is this. They never think before hand if they do they lay carpets. Lay carpets is never a command. You can see that a sentence has no mystery. A mystery would be a reception. They receive nothing. In this way if it finishes. This is so obviously what they will do. Obviously what they will do is no mistake because we did not know it. We did not know it is not a mistake either. Leave it alone is not theirs as a mistake. Artificially is what they call when they call out. Who knows how many have been careful. Sentences are made wonderfully one at a time. Who makes them. Nobody can make them because nobody can what ever they do see. --- Gertrude Stein

Excerpt from And I could not keep the night from coming in

The yellow car slides through the girl with light in her palms. Charles spent the day frowning, equipped with two squares of fabric in his breast pocket, he drank lemon grass by the shot and he listened to a man sing out the souls of a lost people buried beneath a burning building. The girl is tucked between the granite and the black car and becomes a form like nothing. Charles glides his luck into her but it still cuts. As a child Charles loved to jump back across the engravings of tires while wearing his favorite yellow hat. The girl begins crawling into the hood of the car. The Rich Men know the girl and they know Charles and they know nothing of suffering. Charles’ father was a fishmonger and as a child Charles avoided the ice, yelling to all the suffering gills LAVA! LAVA! Someone on a nearby lawn decides, Baby’s cry because they like crying. The girl had labored next to dull corpses for three years, deciphering the surgical code of the men in white coats working the floors above, only now understanding the actual limit of flesh and seeing her own code open up before her.

John Cage interviewed by Ted Berrigan

CAGE: I agree. Somebody said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want
everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a
way. Russia is doing it under government. It's happening here all by itself
without being under a strict government; so if it's working without trying, why
can't it work without being Communist? Everybody looks and acts alike, and we're
getting more and more that way. I think everybody should be a machine. I think
everybody should be alike.

A Manifesto

My poetry wishes to avoid becoming a tool.

...JUST LIKE JESUS!!

PINCHPINCHPRESS IS NOT DEAD

Kenny G VS "Chip N'" Dale Smith

Kenny Goldsmith VS (not really) Dale Smith (Jacket 38)

KG: I really have trouble with poethics. In fact, I think one of the most beautiful, free and expansive ideas about art is that it — unlike just about everything else in our culture — doesn’t have to partake in an ethical discourse. As a matter of fact, if it wants to, it can take an unethical stance and test what it means to be that without having to endure the consequences of real world investigations. I find this to be enormously powerful and liberating and worth fighting for. Where else can this exist in our culture?

DS: This reminds me of something Robert Duncan said in correspondence with Denise Levertov over the Vietnam War. They both opposed that war, but Levertov was an activist and tried to write poetry that would support her activism. She wanted change. Improvement. Etc. Duncan argued instead that such a use of poetry-as-activism became merely a kind of propaganda that participated within a discourse of power. In response to her being a poethics pusher, he famously stated: “The poet’s role is not to oppose evil, but to imagine it.” So, yeah, anything goes, in that sense. I’m right there with you.

Today is a large motor that doesn't stop beating.

I"m sitting at the library watching bugs trying to get inside, to feel the air conditioning. I sat by the window so I can watch my bike. It cost $48 and it was probably stolen. It didn't come with a lock and I haven't bought one. If someone steals it I'll think less of humanity.

I'm trying to write fiction-y stuff again, but it feels a lot like pouring a lot of water into a tiny bottle. The best way I can deal with it is to think of it as WRITING, rather than FICTION or POETRY. I'm also staying far away from THEORY. It's such a drag. People are spending more time arguing about how to write then actually writing. I always thought it worked the other way around.

I want to start a movement called FUCK IT. Where we just write and drink beer (or wine) and act incredibly irresponsible for a few years but generate tons of writing and have lots of readings. Then we can have the OH FUCK movement where we have to pick up the pieces of our lives because we've drank away our lives and we need health care and our children need diapers. It's gonna be great!

ANYWAY, The story is called KARL MARX, and it's not very long yet. A friend of mine is going to publish it (Wonderlust Press) sometime this fall. It would be wonderful if tons of people wanted to read this and make me some kind of deity. I would like to be God of Cheap Beer or God of Blue Gatorade or God of Sentences That Hurt at First But Later Make You Realize That Being A Person Isn't Completely Shit. Yeah, that would be nice.

I think the two of my favorite FICTION writers are Amy Hempel and Donal Barthelme.

Here's a site that has a bunch of stuff Donald Barthelme wrote.

Thanks for stopping by.

St. Anne of Blueberries

something hesitates / near the chamber where
some people are missing cats / but
only if they're fucked up and pretty / swapping one
dictatorial universe for another with wine


this is the true form of heroes / tackling
St. Anne on fire over newsprint with spirit
sweating a pimpled gossamer of surgeries


I will kill you / keep you in hell / and frost your bangs


I fear
I am
growing
immune
to
blueberries

/ / /

we fear you will leave / walk / eat blueberries
she will have met a man at her feet / in the dance space / among crushed blueberries

and the dream of blueberries looms drunk and fucked between us
then comes a wave / and the forest next to us splits its pines
and we drink beer sweating / and stinking of pitch

St. Anne bags up fennel and lost antlers / around her the pines drone
she whispers back / everyone has a lovely time during shopping online
the woods do not whisper back / St. Anne enjoys watching the deer converge

She will insist on reading the lonely out of leaves / bringing it back to the water
and letting it fall from the clouds


***

Poetry is blowin' up all over this mother bitch!

Is disjunction dead... alive... horny?

Mark Wallace
Nada Gordon
Anne Boyer