11.26.2003

I see here that the President of The United States is actually two full steps removed from literally being business partners with Osama Bin Laden.

What a relief.

11.23.2003

Robert Creeley and Jennifer Moxley
St. Mark's Church, 11/19

The vastness of the main room at St. Mark's isn't exactly conducive to focusing on poetry. Muffled bassy EQ for both readers. During the second half of Creeley's reading there was a continuously creeping reverb feedback. Maybe the good people over at the Poetry Project could do a sound check for situations like this?

Jennifer Moxley

Jennifer started with a Christmas poem and a memoir about life in San Diego.

"the mind is a ghastly instrument"

During the reading there was one of the all-time most annoying cell phone interruptions I've ever experienced -- impossible to ignore. Jennifer stopped, pointed to the offending party and said "You -- OUT!, for a little comic relief. She followed this up with "No, it's okay, I forgive you."

Dream recounting.

She ends with "The Sense Record." There's something about this poem which allowed me to finally focus in this boomy cavernous space.

"he fends off emptiness with his feet"

"nights I worry about spiders in the vacuum cleaner"

Insight polyphonically mixed with negatively charged romantic autobiographical declaration. She's most like Creeley in this aspect of her work, where there is a will to go over the details of life and formulate some kind of keepable propositions about it.

Something about the voicings -- I kept thinking of Mary Butts…


Robert Creeley

Beautifully crafted thought traces and modest propositions about going through time.

Still struggling to switch on during the reading, what did Pound say, you should be a ball of light when reading poetry? And listening to it, I suppose?

"the truth is in a container"

11.21.2003

Paul Bremmer's power suit / Timberlands combo sticking in my head in a bad way...

"we're gonna have a t.v. party tonight..."

Flipped between two crude documentaries on the Kennedy assassination followed by a full hour of Chomsky on Charlie Rose. Rose so flummoxed by Chomsky's focus and clarity he was basically unable to get to the next question.

11.18.2003

Michael Gottlieb and Michael Scharf
Nov 15, Bowery Poetry Club

Both writers establish a broadband connection though an engagement with life informations that refuse to be otherwise. They both refuse to ignore these situations and predicaments, historic, mental, personal, that cannot be easily be improvised out of, though they can be wished away or repressed -- situations that are, after all, probably ignored at both personal and collective peril.

Gottlieb and Scharf are using a kind of poetic fusion, where information and energy is released through an act of combining intellectual processes and subject matters that would rather stay separate: poetic renewable energy.

11.16.2003

Heard Richard Thompson on the radio this morning doing a cover of Britney Spears' "Oop, I Did it Again" with a great Nirvanaish arrangement for acoustic guitar and voice.

Even more intriguing was a few seconds of a troubadour-sounding arrangement of the same song that he has apparently been doing live.

The chord changes of "Oop, I Did it Again" are very medieval -- a structure that must have been unconsciously transmitted via the original Swedish songwriter, Max Martin. The transformation of this material was dramatic. I wish I could have heard a full version.
"Amplified"

Chunks of stuff crumbling in the background.

I can't be the only one who has a growing sense of unease about the gradually acrueing signs of long term disasters in several realms?

The largest ice shelf in the Arctic, the 3000 year old Ward Hunt Ice Shelf on the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada has broken off due to global warming, releasing all the water from the lake it contained -- the Disraeli Fiord.

That particular ecosystem has been lost.

Huge free-floating ice islands are now adrift.

"It is accepted that should the global climate start to warm, the effects would be felt first in the polar regions, and they would be amplified," said Martin Jeffries a geophysicist.


11.09.2003

The Apartment, Billy Wilder

Jack Lemmon is a young suck-up bullshiter drone getting ahead at the office by letting his managers use his bachelor pad apartment as a place to bring their mistresses. He seems to have no connections to the outside world except for his neighbor and his job. Despite these qualities, he creates a certain amount of affability, mostly with body language and delivery.

Shirley Maclaine is the elevator operator bottom in love with the everything-out-of his-mouth-is-a-lie lothario upper manager who promotes Lemon.

All the relationships are pure form/ and/or power exchanges. No actual affinity is show between anyone. The relationships capitalism likes to create? Bullet-like noirish dialogue but for comic effect.

The real theme is the disconnection between people on the job that happens as they are relating to each other – like when Lemon, with a goofy smile asks Maclaine if she likes his ridiculous hat. She nods and talks about the hat, but the expression on her face tell us she is devastated by what she has just been told by the secretary who also had an affair with the boss she is love with. Later Lemmon will have a whole conversation with Maclaine, unaware that she is unconscious from an overdose of sleeping pills.

The vast, disconcerting Manhattan office hive-space is filmed in much the same flat shiny inhuman way the office spaces were early in the first Matrix movie. This is contrasted with the way Lemon's Upper West Side apartment is shot. It is shown with at least three different spatial levels at any given moment, which emphasizes the multiple possibilities of life and thought that never occur to any of the characters.

11.07.2003

Peter Culley & George Stanley
Oct 22, Poetry Project

George Stanley

to write without any justification, carelessly

Startling wish-fulfillment poem, Vera Cruz.

Poet as yeast cell.

as simple as a glass of beer

Impressive dramatic monologue --
real shit from a canvas horse
Focused use of image and metaphor -- also, taking or leaving image and metaphor.

Intense, casual dramatic insights.


Peter Culley

masters, if your arms could reach
-- riffing on Marshall Amplifiers -- stacks…

Very small units of coherency, context and perception all with an equal amount of valence recombine and build kaleidoscopically without ever losing a sharp sense of place and commentary.

Culley, like Steve Dickison, is a master of drawing information and thought out of the CD collection. You can feel the music becoming a thing as it is perceived, then as an area from which connotation occurs.
Where Bach wakes you up for a head count, Metallica tucks you in
Controlled and various juxtaposition, not dream-like. More like particle physics...

11.01.2003

Diminutive Revolutions, Daniel Bouchard
subpress, 1999

Poetry as salvaging -- recovering a sense of place -- acknowledging the multiple layers of world and perception you find yourself in the midst of.

Wrackline, the information about life contained in garbage -- poet as gleaner

Almost Buddhist (Basho?) evenness of attention and affect across the layers of the world
Mosses and lichens

in the woods of Wellfleet

Recreate prudently, the president advises
and the motors hum far off the coast

A summer to write about

In the closet of the cottage
a tiny toad hides
under a laundry pile.
We capture
to release it outside.
Scanning the street and the horizon with a attentiveness and a poetic pleasure which makes occasional forays into crankiness on one side, and rapture on the other.

A poetic capacity for listening. Listening to the way the elements of the natural world, which after all, include all of the man-made world, its technology. history and poisons, interact. Listening to the simultaneous emerging patterns of public and private life across time.

A certain affinity with ecosystem, including alarm at the egregious human chemical and political imbalances.
the world is on fire     fire sold separately
A gentle kaleidoscope of perceptions and recognitions used as musical intervals.
life must be at least as well lived as fantasy.