NO ONE's Autopathography

for Eleni, Rob and Taylor
after Muriel Rukeyser's "Book of the Dead"

Power becomes you dear endangered body skin so thin with armor
amorous Isis Osiris scattered becomes us compels you this subtlety in over-

sensitivity as the hills which once were white-mottled Romantic models as
Rukeyser would make ironic alloy call a rose a rose and us by any other aim

would recognize no other power but in degrees of this world transcendent so hell
is also MY SELF on earth because we made the factories time convolute
Vertov touted the machine age Williams never sang the Passaic for labor per se

that other Eternity power always exists the problem is what to do with it
how NOT to USE is sometimes how to direct writing from a white heat O Love

O downy picturesque particulars and pastoral spotlessness pimps your poem

“glassy moons” confound the social every rose wants to be a rose merely
every nation just a nation but can not because we fall to rise every rose begs

to be both interrupted and ongoing a paradox tautological as every pane
of glass which thisness inheres that bears witness a SOUL for every violence
committed to someone in this world of force and nothing else a gun sites the said

dialectics tread on where desires go into the Open of control my sovereign
my brain-sickness my body my head prevented the tongue as well he asks HIM

SELF “am I alive?” a ghost of sorts while she pursues her actual Bardo power at
the price of exploitation hatred at the price of force so illness transformed her.

Jane Sprague's *Danger Flash || Army Flash*

The following is a poem Jane Sprague sent me, scanned. "Fuel Low / Steal more..."!!!

War and Peace on A pics & ad*

Peace On A

presents

War & Peace vol. 3 (NYC launch!)

with readings by:

Bruce Andrews
CA Conrad
Michael Cross
Thom Donovan
Brenda Iijima
Paolo Javier
Susan Landers
Evelyn Reilly
& Rodrigo Toscano

Tuesday, November 27th 2007 8PM ( gab session followed by reading at around 9 pm )

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A (btwn 10th and 11th), Apartment # 2

about War & Peace vol. 3

War and Peace 3/The Future, edited by Judith Goldman & Leslie Scalapino,
Borrowing Tolstoy’s title and basing our manifestation of War and Peace on the conception that everything goes on in war and peace, the editors, Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino , have gathered forty poets on the theme of “The Future.” The future arises with (at the same time as) history and the present. Included in the forty are Lyn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, Lisa Jarnot , Bruce Andrews, Rodrigo Toscano, Anselm Hollo, Paolo Javier, Laynie Browne , Anne Waldman, Jen Hofer…

“the migrating cranes—whose lines of flight misalign what *will have been* with what’ll be no more …” ~ Rob Halpern

*photo credits go to Mika Johnson, who generously captured the night's proceedings.

"'Hannah's Bifurcation'"

The following I read at the tribute to Hannah Weiner this past Weds. at St. Mark's Poetry Project along with selections from Weiner's *Spoke*, a book of 'transferences' as Weiner herself recognized it:

"The mind obeys unconsciously giving strict orders that are agreed upon by someone who twice dying explains without giving clear motives like once clairvoyant journal explained."
~ Hannah Weiner, from a letter to Charles Bernstein, 5/25/1989

I first read Hannah Weiner in the Fall of 1997. One of the things that made her writing stand out to me—among other writers linked to LANGUAGE—was Weiner’s sense of empathy, if not her tendency to identify. Identification has been a “no no” for a while now, after various critical theories, and after alterities more celebrated. My readings of Weiner in the past few years have helped me to attribute and recognize the otherwise in Weiner, whose mind-person were continually turned towards an outside of information, other people, discourse—language itself as that 'ultimate' other.

A particular identification or transference that has long drawn me back to Weiner is that with “the oppressed”. In this category I would lump the AIM activists with whom Weiner had longstanding friendships, African-Americans whose economic struggles are dramatized in Weiner’s book *sileNt teachers/remeMbered sequel*, the earth as it continues to be ecologically ravished, and women as Weiner often pokes fun at gender politics, and especially those within her most immediate communities.

Beyond these particular commitments one of Weiner’s ultimate concerns is with power itself, and most of all the status of her own powers in relation to others ("clairvoyance," "silent teaching" etc.). In this concern I believe she attained a kind of innocence. Not an innocence of reversion or regression, but to a place where her will could be involved with everything she felt, and came into contact with, and not least of all with the page on which she composed and gave aesthetic fact to her intentions. Only here—in the seat of the will—could Weiner not only claim the name of AIM leader Leonard Peltier as “I,” but conversely that of the neo-conservative American president, Ronald Reagan.

Not having had the opportunity to know Weiner, from the stories I’ve heard about her from others over the past decade, and thru her texts, she would seem emotionally privileged. Through this privilege she conveyed the person as an entity utterly singular through which events are named as powers, singularities among an open multiple.

Our Immunity (Antigone)

for Robert Kocik & Eleni Stecopoulos

Impersonating the void we no longer
play in the dark
~ Eleni Stecopoulos, from *Autoimmunity*

1. Next of Kin
what ken we follow the blood down where future
should have been wherever ‘we’ goes geneo-
logies of monsters step teeth follow from them
productions from despair swords search-out

a limit to this body in the limitless dark ‘you’
are a cave for NO ONE will be forgiven 'kill
them all' he said the undead who shore words
against sense ascend if ever to follow them down

into a field of open letters into a force followed
a hollow all ours wound to a Balkan blankness
ensconced at the bottom of the self yet for them
something persisted believing in no grammar

no syntax in need but the words in your mouth
spill out myths spell mnemotechniques as
possible conditions in this wind 'I''s occluded
by sight who proffers an anthem excludes.

2. Our Immunity
declaratives operatives ‘I’ distends 'you' 'you' 'I'
we spoke of empathic radicals you are Greek to
me of that community of believers holding
Wisdom straps-up the bombs again hailing us

through smoke how could we do anything dif
ferent corruptible mortal immunizing whims
of progress difference saves face put the blood
and don’t triangulate don’t trilateral unilaterally

submits no more signs make fools of us con
tracts of letters debts others paying through the
nose for culture makes our culture totally fucked-
up some holistic imbalance points to ‘I’ doesn’t

want to make sense at a certain point sense be
came senseless where anger deafened flights
of degrees no one into those buildings swell with
history and forget their promise like a rainbow.

3. I Don't Go to the Movies
these two bodies belie emergency in the inside
getting sick to progress democracy purges itself
of justice the physician brothers Cosmos Damian fall
and we call this death two postmodern crystals

capitalist in their unwishing a sheen to all economic
indolence scrim subsides like butter does like healing
but in healing is laid waste real bodies accumulate
risk real bodies of exchange second life that was

none other than the other magic lantern x10
preparing for this lack of sense the bunkers were
them on the screen fantasy of us deterritorialized
or 'germy' what was in this code that told us

to be us while capital waited for a cure wishing
its jaundice on the world retroactive presentiments
of terror greener pastures property rites and rights
of the undead flung to the wind tell trauma slant.