Alone With the Alone

I am afraid
You are afraid
I am afraid not of this voice
You are afraid not of this voice
I am afraid of the voice inside the voice
You are afraid of the voice inside the voice
This voice pauses
This voice having paused has paused
I am afraid of chronos and kleisis alike
You are afraid for all time
As what I do gets in front of me and in back of me
As what you do can not be regained
Or numbered as such what I do
What you do will not be numerary as the stars are made from numbers
The stars are a disaster—operative
And yet steered by them we brighten worlds
Is there anything you haven't seen
I haven't seen nothing, not yet
You have seen too many somethings
All somethings being alike
And not alike
Like stars disastered by their source
Like night saved from these same stars
We are starlight
Chosen to no particular end
But the end itself neither near or far
And everywhere in between divided
Consequential
But never fatal
You are afraid of that light that leaves you alone at night
I am afraid it taunts me to climb it
It taunts you to descend
And wear the masks I always was
The things you pretended to be
Daylight and noontide coterminous
Our actual midnight
There is no our here
Only stars
Only our night saved from stars
Yours and mine
Yours and mine and nowhere
A concretion indeed
A pause in the heart
The deepest pause a heart ever did feel
The shudder of all beings
Hearing themselves
Hearing themselves hearing

*Undeserving Lebanon* Review in Modern Painters

I have reviewed Jalal Toufic's *Undeserving Lebanon* (Forthcoming Books, 2007) for the recent "Art and War" issue of Modern Painters (April, 2008)...

"The stakes of Toufic’s newest book are immense and emphatically stated, as the thinker identifies the task of a present and future Middle-Eastern culture to think beyond justice, commemoration, historicization and reparation towards the creation of original works of art, experiment, and concepts that may confront events which befell Lebanon during its civil war. For Toufic, to leave these ‘basic tasks’ to others might preserve in Lebanon’s Event the ‘conditions of possibility’ for a memory anterior to both psychological memory (the “working through” of individual and collective traumas) and collective-historical memory (reparations, commemoration of the dead, “settling of accounts”). This anarchic memory presents what Toufic recognizes as the ‘invocation of the Redeemer’—an ability to imagine the forthcoming of the Messiah as the event of a virtual existence in relation to social fact, actuality..."

To download *Undeserving Lebanon* as a PDF link here.

Richard Foreman's Deep Trance Behavior in Potato Land (Review)

Here's a review I wrote of Richard Foreman's latest...

www.thefanzine.com/sections.php?s=art&id=228&a=articles

Oppen Centennial at Poets House (Ad)

Tuesday, April 8, 3:00-9:00pm
The Shape of Disclosure: George Oppen Centennial Symposium

On the occasion of George Oppen's centennial and the publication of his Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, poets and scholars gather to honor the life and work of this spare, powerful and original poet. Co-sponsored by Poets House, Tribeca Performing Arts Center at BMCC and University of California Press. Funded in part by the New York Council for the Humanities.

3:00pm Panel: Biographical-Historical Continuum
Moderated by Michael Heller
Featuring Stephen Cope on Oppen's diaries and journals, Norman Finkelstein on the late poems, Eric Hoffman on Oppen’s political identity and Kristin Prevallet on Oppen's response to World War II.

5:00pm Panel: Literary-Philosophical Spectrum
Moderated by Thom Donovan
Featuring Romana Huk on Oppen's relationship to metaphysics and Judeo-Christian philosophy, Burt Kimmelman on Oppen and Heidegger, Peter O'Leary on Whitman's influence on Oppen and John Taggart on Oppen's poetry as "a process of thought."

7:30pm George Oppen Centennial Reading
Stephen Cope, Thom Donovan, Norman Finkelstein, Peter Gizzi, E. Tracy Grinnell, Michael Heller, Erica Hunt, Burt Kimmelman, Geoffrey O’Brien, Peter O’Leary, Kristin Prevallet, Anthony Rudolf, Hugh Seidman, Harvey Shapiro, Lee Spinks, Stacy Szymaszek & John Taggart

George Oppen was born April 24, 1908 in New Rochelle, New York, and died in San Francisco in 1984. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Of Being Numerous (1968), Oppen was also the author of Discrete Series (1934), The Materials (1962), This in Which (1965) and Primitive (1978).

@ Tribeca Performing Arts Center
Borough of Manhattan Community College
199 Chambers Street
$10/Free to Students and Poets House Members
Audiences may attend individual events or the entire symposium

Love's Event* (Deadpan)

with Dorothea Lasky

You are beautiful

You are beautiful
But you are also heartbreak
Locked forever frozen in time
A cry I cannot get out
No matter how much I grease myself
With honey
Pink palette of grapefruit, the book on the shoulder
Of the room, the rose gardens
But I do not want you to be so
I want to be spilling forth with the acid yellow honey of the bees
O love, take me thusforth
Into your secret places
I will never travel
I will never wake
You are more than heartbreak, you know
In your fanciful suits and closing sighs
You are more than the shining blue room
On the afternoon of the date, the cold bite
You are the hot breath too I take myself into
The hot red fruit I take myself into
The living breathing thing I take in, I want to
Be a watery nymph in a wooded grove
With you
I want to be a cloud so full of honey
That there is nothing left of me
Until I throw myself into the fire
And am contained forever
I will be contained forever, a thing of beauty
Forever
I will be that thing forever
I don’t want to be beautiful with you
I want to be an ugly, wretched, bleeding thing
Poring out on the windmills
I want to be the locked tiger they can’t lock up
Until it murders and then rages through the fields
Of wild grasses
I want to be so wild they can’t lock me up
Put fences around me to pen me in
I will be so full of fire that they won’t be able to extinguish me
Before the beauty comes I want to be so full of fire
That they can’t tell me from you, my wretched angel
Sweet animal, they locked us in this life
But I think we still have time before we have to get out of it

*

--after Rob's *Disaster Lyrics* & Dottie's "blue room"

The limit that is us to
Reach out to it stays the
Understanding since
Nothing forthcoming
Should be understood

Our blank partition
That is the shudder
Separating our blood
Barely prophylactic
"When my soul starts

grow...ing" against all
Assumption and vanity
Not just standing under
All pricksongs nor a
Surety of what we were

So intimacy finds what
Refuge event couldn't
Think the body what
Breath is made up with
Not purely separate

From substance worlds
Whenever we begin to
gether and what we were
Before we began as matter
Was once a gas waiting

To organize these powers
"delay us, our certainness"
In patience these feelings
Never stop growing so we
Seem to float without them.*


I learned to read the letters they said
To me as someone fixed my broken
Teeth while I was learning to read these
Letters and their shape and likeness

Of their shape was like your body and
So that voice comforted me that voice
Of childhood pedagogy like anything
Else I could touch and therefore shape

To my wishes while they sealed my te
eth thru a veil of pain I saw physical
Pain should not be mistaken for grief
For a moment the grief you feel let's

Say when the world is not honey or the
Way we need when we need it not to
Be ironic your imagination wandered
Necessarily like an animal in this pro

blem just released to the wild from its
Cage crying out its eyes for all the blood
It must now shed to continue to be this
Is grief and more rarely a kind of guilt.


All the while that
we were
changing this room

didn't change the
furniture nailed
to the floor the blue

lighting that some
one designed
nothing matters

in that room ex
cept that we are
moved your hands

move to touch me
while the curtains
stay still

not even swayed
by a modest wind
or the air

conditioning
yet part
of what stirs us

what makes us
move I think
is a desire

to cross that
imaginary
line of all exhibits

sit on those chairs
so perfectly still
wrap those curtains

around us as if
they and we also were
on fire and this

also moves us
that to disturb this
stillness is taboo

and without taboo
we wouldn't see
the ways we were

moving behind
the blue of the
photograph

you took
at that moment
the gauzy softness

of that light like
our eternal tears
our lips impermanence.


That we are complicit
in evidence whatever
our economy gains is

not we with it not wh
en you say No again
to me to everything t

he tanks and their se
xual politics whatever
that is which was one

some lump or waste
left-over from being
recrudescences the ho

rror of sex in this eve
ry poem I confuse with
a poem about love lay

lyrics' condition of
possibility that it will
always be part of dis

aster that more parti
cularly it is the disaster
of the two becoming

one power unsubtract
able from what number
can't know and love's

body can only do in "re
al" duration because be
ing together in whatever

ways we are is always
immeasurable no one
can abstract or quantify

the tears we cry con
tinue to be like a ruin
or the remnants of

what subject we were
within not playing dead
but doing perhaps as

they do occupying their
eyes like a position
our weapons die into.

*quotes from Panda Bear and Sheila Donovan/Tallboys.