X|O (For)

~ for Emilie & Michael

The wrecks and the lives
never wrecked if not
for love a body blossoms
into it and is strangest

in this duration which
is it that moves every
one the balloon floating
in the train car today

reflects this flabby ho-
liday distorting and
wrinkled where a pattern
spells "xo" "xo" "xo"

somehow there was still
a locus for loving you
other things ineffable
done if only in time this

breath's shipwreck that
mourning may be our
joy afterall a friend wrote
to me writing *myself*

back into being that
'hollow ego' [Oppen] tears
shatter the numinous
no one has yet to kiss.

Coterminous (Regular Lovers)

If you were with
'No one' among so
many than truly
You were with me

Moi aussi! all I re-
member from the
French are con-
ditions of possibility

A 'language per se'
As pure means
Within eternity since
Caresses keep on

Giving--this is the
Book you would
Write and keep on
Writing where no

End should justify
Which lips hands
Seek our event so 'us'
Was always wasting

No time a 'grey-eyed'
Dawn saw it all be-
tween these lines
Athenas pray return.

Prosodic Body schedule

Daria Fain & Robert Kocik are unveiling the next installment of their Prosodic Body collaboration these next few weeks downtown on Wall Street. Below is the low down...

BUILDING A PERINEUM

The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has granted us (Daria Fain and Robert Kocik) a workspace in which to continue our prosodic research.

We will be using the space to design a building based on prosody. Some aspects of this residency will be public. For example, we’ve built a rudimentary anechoic darkroom. From 2/13 to 2/24, anyone can reserve time in this room. Suggested uses include: darkroom retreat, tracing the origins of language, wakeful hibernation, hypometabolic attention, swinging open the door of life and death. I call the
darkroom a 'perineum' not only because it has been built in a basement bank vault—but because the perineum (in the subtle body)is the still point and the point of entry for words, and thus the basis of a building based on prosody.

Tuesday February 12: we are having an opening from 6pm-8pm. We will be on hand to speak about darkroom, perineal practice and prosodic architecture.

Sunday, February 17: I will discuss WHAT IS A WORD--the 4 stages of speech and the cosmogony of phonemic emanation in nondual Kashmiri philosophy (particularly the writings of Abhinavagupta) as example of ‘word’ at its fullest)—in contrast to English, psychoanalysis (especially Lacan’s parole pleine) and the neurocentric problem-of-origins in contemporary linguistics (is language acquired or hardwired?). The talk will start at 3pm. The space will be open as a public reading room, with relevant reading materials provided, from 10am on.

Thursday, February 21: the above event will be repeated. The space will serve as public reading room starting at 10am. The talk will start at 6:30pm.

Sunday February 24: we will orchestrate ALL AT ONCE—a voicing of all the phonemes, using permutations such as exhaustion, resorption, forced, unforced, vocalic, consonantal, unstruck, etc. R. Steiner wrote: “The entire universe is expressed when the alphabet is repeated from beginning to end.” Even better (nonlinearly,
atemporally)—in nondual Kashmiri linguistics the phonemes are energies, awarenesses, atoms, that give rise to the objective world. Sound-sum, buzz-bundle, heard at once to see what it does. (I’m also in need of volunteers for the phoneme choir. English employs 40 phonemes!)

Lastly—I’d very much like to meet with anyone who’d like to talk about designing a building that meets the needs of poets.(To my knowledge, there is not a structure on the planet designed specifically for full realization of poetry.)

The address is 14 Wall Street. LMCC Swing Space, level B. Due to security, all visits require appointment. My cell: 718 503 4246.
Yours, Robert.

For (Three Valentines)

1.
Arrows make up the
rules as we go along

in the same spot ventursome
of what is if what is is not

cause for anthem nor
garrulous for forms

what should *not* be ethical
we had to have situations

night and day we had
to have some of it?

most of it? all quantity
became quality in our eyes

a merely projected sunset
the products would seem

too human more than
we’d like them to be

anyway, surplus value
notwithstanding your hands

dematerializes every-
thing it touches, my love.


2.
You were the thought-
balloon directing me

my words your faith
in materialism makes

what’s between
our ears like a wall

creates space stars
time as what is on

them crumbles like a
stencil to this sense

see me please oh as what
isn’t is a horizon or rim

not a mission here’s a book
eat it don't read it don’t

judge us for what we are
precariously put the

whole world would dis
appear if not for these

hands touching you once
the world felt heavier for

which color must discover
please tell me you felt

something too because
there was thinking a set

of terms that our love
was somehow necessary.

3.
"number there in love was slain"

No sunset of information or fa
shion or who-you-know or talk

to these glass buildings ugly as
you observe thank goodness for

love or love’s presentiment at
least this time of year even if

we should never be I wanted
to speak of it also its flickering

locatedness its discretion and
difference if we should not

finally say “desire” there are
children we must imagine never

having there are places and there
are place-names divisions like

time is a series of cells beneath
the shipwreck of our breath

could you for instance “kill time”
with me forever or "go to hell"

for love is it your lips the antici-
pation of them which made

the movie start and stop premo
tions of whatever one begins to

recognize as feelings obscurer
places in our screen-life how I

can’t stop thinking about them
once the movie’s started how

ever we decide there must be
blood--*number there in love*.

BIG DIG

for Kyle Schlesinger
after Lawrence Weiner

If quotation were subtle

and/or then →

a project arrows would point

to this and be arrows

diagrams

and/or this unsubtlety

material changing its mind

the more one looks at it

it looks at you

incanting there is

a logic to

whatever we dig

and/or that, in an effort

← to text you forget me

taking up all this space

holey moley! (not)

market forces what is

recognition to our cause

Every Name in History is I

While the precipitating event for *Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land* was the 2002 Chechen hostage crisis in Moscow, the piece is in no way concerned with its representation or with the fast kill—notions of the spectacle as they relate to terrorism as a mediated form of political address. Also not on the agenda is a neo-Brechtian foregrounding of theater itself as a metaphor for the presentational excesses terrorism generates. Destruction aimed at the surplus of the antagonists’ “way of life” and the symbolic regimes they hold valuable, are always the target of mutual agitation. Particular to this event is the vast spectrum of trauma existent even prior to the hostage crisis; my interest is more in forms of erasure and arbitrariness—some of the extenuating circumstances of an assimilating regime.
~ Catherine Sullivan, from "According to the Good Wishes of the Tlaxcalan People, Cortez Set Out on an Exhibition"

That all of Sullivan’s work is "political art”—a nomination Sullivan would herself resist—I have no doubt. But it is political mainly in the way that all aesthetic mediations of cultural content produce indeterminate political consequences and meanings. In *Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land* (2003 and 2004), Sullivan would seem to bring the problem of political consequences qua aesthetic determination to the foreground of her work. “The project itself is hopelessly immersed in an confounded by the painful trajectories suggested by the event, what is elusive about them as opposed to what is directly consequential.” *Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land* is partly based on the submerged massacre of Chechen terrorists and theater-goers in a Moscow theater in October, 2002. If terrorism, more often than not, enacts forms of hysteria through its immediacy, *Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land* would seem to embody this hystericism through its use of pantomime to reenact the event at the Moscow theater via the Russian Broadway-style musical, *Nord-Ost*—the musical that was playing in the Moscow theater at the time of the hostage crisis.

In a time when few public intellectuals or artists would seem to know how to adequately address the terrorist as a viable political subjectivity, Sullivan has done so by articulating both the actions of the Chechen terrorists and the brutal reaction of the Putin regime as the irresolvable effects of cultural struggle, and struggles specifically for political autonomy and agency. Whereas one might typically ask why the Chechen terrorist or the Putin government acted in the ways they did, Sullivan does not interpret through her art, and instead chooses to dramatize a struggle of forces as they present political antinomies after the fall of the Soviet Union. From Sullivan’s theater of effective antinomy result aesthetic works and events radically opposed to any foreclosure of meaning, a typology of individual and collective desires as they negotiate both wills to power and to ressentiment.
~ from "Every Name in History is I: Catherine Sullivan's *Triangle of Need* and works to date"

Interrupted Form

The sentence is always interrupted. Mind 1 that speaks out loud, or writes, is interrupted by mind 2 that is simultaneously preparing the next sentence or answering a question. Therefore the correct form to represent both minds or the complete mind, is an interrupted form. It takes two or three seconds for the thought to form into a sentence, meanwhile another is being spoken-written. On acid some hippies could hold conversations with two people at once....

The interruptions may be hereditary. My mother could go on with an interrupted story after several minutes without going back and repeating a word. The structure of the mind we each have determines somewhat our style of writing and some style therefore as well as some formation of brain cells may be an inherited quality....
~ Hannah Weiner, from "Mostly About the Sentence," in *Open House*

Screen Life

~ after Thomas Hirschhorn and Rob Halpern

Not in those videos or anywhere will their
flesh be anything other than flesh a nation's

generalized porno of tanks and skulls &
bones rock you scrape the eye where it wasn't

saved by screen savers other fantasies what
would a decal say if it could speak what

promises would it make abjection creeps
like shadows close around the "developed"

world whose gun-bursts tell disastrous schlock
shuck gassy brains shell-shocked marines

rip video contain what glimpse of the ter
minal multiple windows open-up while a billion

others close "kind of like" people monads
corpses global effects despair of subjects

"the multitude" how militarized a world became
our sex the way one skull-fucks with pics

4-EVA magic markers occult whatever sense
brought back collapsed skulls nipples defaced.

Some Sort of Grace (quote)

So I asked her to leave and after closing the door again I tried to say something to him staring into that enormous eye. If in death the body's energy disperses and merges with everything around us, can it immediatley know my thoughts? But I try and speak anyway and try and say something in case he's afraid or confused by his own death and maybe needs some reassurance or tool to pick up, but nothing comes from my mouth. This is the most important event of my life and my mouth can't form words and maybe I'm the one who needs reassurance and all I can do is raise my hands from my sides in helplessness and say, "All I want is some sort of grace." And then water comes from my eyes.
~ David Wojnarowicz, from *Close to the Knives*

Last Year

I go thru hell
Everytime I see you
And you don't disappear
With me

The meaning of this
Film a ghoulish Europe seeks
Its exhausted dead when
We were little

Universes her gasp
Escaped from anywhere
A portal in the air
Where those who can't

Escape from thread
Reproduce despair
Multiply the survival
Of every possible name.

In Memory, Peter Hare (1935-2008)

Teacher, scholar of Pragmaticism, philosopher, gentleman...

Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn. In this line we live prospectively as well as retrospectively. It is 'of' the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly as the past's continuation; it is 'of' the future in so far as the future, when it comes, will have continued it.
~ William James

Kocik / Levy*

If young men are killing not only themselves but also other innocent civilians with the backing of their people, you should be able to figure that out. It’s too much; you’re not listening. Keep reading. Nothing is in here. Poems, as Spicer reminds us, are written for ghosts—there is no point in *my* living life elsewhere, so this is the place to be.

Infinitely more

Are an infinite miracle

The beauty of something you can do when the attempt toward that thing, thoroughly promised, is penned to dissolve or resolve our hopelessly dated history in a way that feels like something true. Everything settles down from someone telling the stories in which everyone appears, i.e. the writer’s thought in the space of committing to thought. There’s a loosening and gathering into sense, an erasure and inscription of sapient terms that melt in the leavening of one state to another. The poetry of one’s self in relation to one’s self and all that self may be embodied by to others. There’s a gentle curvature in its reflection—it moves toward the readers who come.
~ from Andrew Levy's *Nothing is in Here*

*drawing titled "Amygdala Alembic Talisman," by Robert Kocik

Peace On A presents: Dan Featherston & Catherine Taylor (Ad)

Peace On A

presents

Dan Featherston & Catherine Taylor

reading for the launch of Featherston’s *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* (more info below!)

Friday, February 1st 2008 8PM
BYOB & $5 donation

hosted by Thom Donovan with Cuneiform Press at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2 (btwn 10th and 11th)
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

Dan Featherston is the author of several books of poetry, including *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* (Cuneiform Press, 2007), *United States* (Factory School , 2005), and *Into the Earth* (QuarryPress, 2005). His critical writings on American poetry and poetics have appeared in a number of publications, most recently Charles Olson: A Poet's Prose. While living in Tucson , he helped found POG, a poetry group that has hosted dozens of performances by poets and artists, and edited A.BACUS, a journal of experimental poetry and translation. Featherston is currently a visiting professor at Kutztown University. He lives in Philadelphia with Rachel McCrystal and their dog Fredo.


Carceral Time

Forced to sleep with their hands exposed
how will a tool take shape?

Dreams take the shapes of tools
through which the body escapes itself.
A wake. A spoon baked into a cake.

In the fist of memory
time was folding inward.

(from *The Clock Maker’s Memoir*)


Catherine Taylor teaches at Ohio University. Her essays, poetry, and reviews have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Typo, Xantippe, The Colorado Review, The Laurel Review, Jacket, and ActionNow. Taylor is a Founding Editor of Essay Press (www.essaypress.org), a small press dedicated to publishing book-length innovative essays. She is at work on a hybrid genre book about South Africa and a scholarly book about 20th-century documentary representations of political violence entitled */Documents of Despair/*.


nobody, who are you? A fucking nation? Walcott I’m not. A roseate universe, subcutaneous nipple, prismatic cd playing cum and dust and Oum Kalsoum. National identity’s inevitable as sand, blood, a dark juggernaut MLK refused to accept despair as the only response to the ambiguities of history, but I can’t, today, so far from you, O Canada, who is asked to represent it. Which I’s slip the noose? Salim Halali’s heart may have been a foreign country, mine’s a minefield for you, h’bibi, skip the stones, centrifugal archipelago, ruin

(from an untitled work)

Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and
scholars. Link Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements,
introductions, reading selections and pics.


THE CLOCK MAKER'S MEMOIR by Dan Featherston
Advanced praise for *The Clock Maker’s Memoir*:

Through a series of poised, meditative stanzas, *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* takes on the formidable topics of time and memory. What’s evident throughout this book is a careful craftsmanship leading to novel perspectives all around the clock.
~ Lisa Jarnot

*The Clock Maker’s Memoir* registers the world’s variety in small catalogs of storms, shadows, dreams, memories, and rituals of childhood. In such forms, time returns each time with a difference. Likewise, the supple measure of these poems returns us to a rhythm or tone each time with a difference, sounding a subtle echo of slipped in sleep. As William Blake declares, “There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find / Nor can his Watch Fiends find it.” Yet Dan Featherston finds it — through alert and resourceful art.
~ Devin Johnston

With its precise music, *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* navigates the immeasurable distance between the clock’s face and the face worn by lived experiences. In these poems, memoir is not some static repository: it is a poesis of the present tense. Featherston’s craft and his unblinking commitment to particulars fashion a lyric search that one can trust to ask the questions, the necessary questions of time, space, and how we find one another amidst all this memory.
~ Richard Deming

This book will soon be available from Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org). Order direct from Cuneiform (www.cuneiformpress.com) and you'll receive FREE SHIPPING. Send a $12 check to: Cuneiform | 214 North Henry Street | Brooklyn, NY 11222

“Effort lay in us
before religions”
~ Lorine Niedecker










photos courtesy Dan Featherston & Geoffrey Gatza

My Chance (II)

Sings amber rose hues blue
Splits the morning air sun

Rendered a perpetual window
Everywhere you should really

Read the paper dummy pay
Attention follow hand to its living

Conclusion caresses can do no
Harm in fact they wander without

End distractedly like the body
Can't know anything when we

Do what we do I think of talking
Like this also a "happy" poem

A "sad" one undergoes skin
Stalks eyes pressure intends

Sings the bright blue white
What happens happens since

You are a song or pressed to
Me what is news anyway when

No one was a product no one
Was alienated brifely we could

See things finally as just things
Things just in their thing-ness.

My Chance

~ after Loren Connors' *As Roses Bow*

1.
Where did anything come
from that it must all fall
down and float and rise

uncovered the strings wh
ere you put them plucked
in the air anywhere we are

not and sometimes abrupt
ly stopping for what did air
stop for what did it pass

into evening or blacker suns
wake recent things the human
voice is not even there

when it is memory is the
memory of every recurrence
for which strings circle

roses in animal grace
the perfect obedience in every
thing you chose not to do

the air impulsively you
did not put here sensing
what opens out there.

2.
Nothing disappearing
disappears my heart
yours plays any way
it wishes floats up from

such things the meaning
of it all in our timing
a tangle degrees don't scare
easily not afraid of thin

air the inside in this ether
pulled out the other end
of the song nothing
appearing appears again

to stop to flutter heart
all bassy in which air is
this the air of winter before
spring glacial and old

when fairies first learned
to cope with the human
sprung from their heads my
heart yours plays with steam

melting ice glacial and old
of certain fields one plays
the world any way they will
so gravity whithers away.

Blood Noise (Whiter Than Sun)

with Betsy Bonner

I.

I write from a sacred mountain

Not only the
body, but the whole
architecture of memory

changes

handmirror, quince
and comb
I've been dreaming

here seven days male and female
cypresses

(big differences
between them)

wild narcissus will crowd
the path we have when it's too bright

to see

but the doves
don't mind, whiter than sun

who's here who's
here who's here,

then stop suddenly.

Somes Lines & Phrases From Robert Kocik*

"Which is ostensible democracy"
"can only cause" " English speak
ing to fight" "to simplify" "we lea

ve for our children" "America ca
ptive" "self-justification distorts
eternity" "I prescribed life" "as o

pposed to medicine" "correct in
complaining" "the sensation bit
ing into" "to be brought before"

"no bodily link" " is all that's req
uired" "soldiers and salesman"
"the patient is the medicine" "but

basking is neither light nor dark"
"takes effect" "scorn for spiritual
discernment" "heal first the words"

"are heaping up" and a word tur
ned pathogenic" "may not have
intended the wording" "the inver

se nervous system" "even at the
point of the heart" "the brain isn't
even involved yet" "creditors panic

and rage" "the predator is on the
inside" "no one told me that this
was a poetry reading" "remember

labor?" "one's own medicines with
in" "is the building inside not in
capacitated?" "nothing is wrong it's

just we're diseased" "copious copy
ing" "in a post psycho-somatic age"
"I just love the taste of a stranger"

"people are dying from nothing" "f
ree range genoming" "the parasym
pathetic system" "accusing Darwin"

*transcribed at Segue this past Saturday

Three By CA CONRAD*

April 21
“Ought to send the mayor and them
other politicians over to fight the war!
You know how long they’d last! Yeah!”
--Kathleen McCollough, one
of Philadelphia’s homeless
Senior Citizen Soothsayers

phrasing lack…
time was
longer once

then the
sponge of
routine

whose idea
was this
planet
anyway!?

you mother
fuckers
shitting
on life

time

throat muscle!

hearse & 4
of Hearts
corner of
15th & Green

celebrity guest: ABUNDANCE!

car is nick
name of auto
mobile
Jay’s nick
name his
first
initial

what was a
window before
the word?

imagine entire
cities with no
language
no?
no.

for other
possibilities
please ignore
your priest

your
mouth will
free
you

gnaw your
foot from
the trap
c’mon you!

who mentions
Pegalina first? (one time
this guy yelled
*SUCK MY DICK!*
she yelled *I’LL CHEW
YOUR CROTCH INTO
A PUSSY!*
she’s not
kidding
mister!)

what are we
doing here
Sherlock
playing
Black Jack
at the bar this
fascist restaurant
where I once waited
tables Police Trainer
video game where
I sucked dope and
made out with the
nerdy dishwasher in
the cooler where
sausage beat cheese
where sex on the
job replaced health
insurance and rent
overdue where I
first thought if
restaurants in
the afterlife
don’t serve
themselves
I’m not
going!





May 1
“We just heard a live recording
of Dvorak’s *Symphony No. 4 in
d Minor*, with former president
Ronald Reagan playing all
nine instruments at once.”
--radio DJ in my
dream last night

shooting six
pointed stars
for the seal
of Solomon

what american
corporations
did Death
contract to
build our
eternal
hotels?

the unions
are *fucked!*

the Third
World will not
enter the
Afterworld as
the Third World
or was your
bible another
political
promise
or warm
piss
divined
as milk?

taste your
own and
let me
know

my friend
says she’d
rather see
state-imposed
atheism than
state-imposed
theism but I’d
rather see
the state
disappear

can’t we
imagine our
hands on
one another
instead? question
our extent
of warmth
LOVE was
a tomb for
awhile
between
borders

I will live
with you like
war has finally
ended please
meet me
there

if drag queens
ruled the world
our warmth
would never be
in question

great teachers
remain great
students

classic
evil new
evil what’s
the fucking
difference?

Sherlock and
I see Masonic
symbols every
place we look
Setting Mauls
Trowels a
butcher’s side
of beef in
window
sports an
All-Seeing
Eye this is
getting creepy
can we
leave
now?





May 30
“Just when you think
the work week’s over
there’s one more
lap to go!”
--Brett Evans every
Thursday

it never said
Tear Gently
it said
Tear Here

look at rush
hour—what if
it’s just a
repeat of
this after
we die?

I’ll be so
pissed off!

hold on
initiates
of the
sun

see how
they danced
and died
in a
hundred
year old
movie

they NEVER have
the *Valley of the
Dolls* soundtrack on
these goddamned
juke-boxes
around here!

ME: his father made
him pray to expel
all deviance

SHERLOCK: expel all
deviance!? where would
I be without it!?

that’s not a
loop hole mr.
president that’s
a hula-hoop

let’s follow the
insider trader’s trail
to the University of
Pennsylvania

Karma
another
cleaver of
the rich

it’s never
poor folks who
tell me every
body gets
what they
deserve

Sherlock wants
Diana Ross and
Lionel Richie to
redo *Endless Love*
as *Endless War*
it’s a
virus
Peace somewhere
means War was
sneezed some place
else our planet is
always sick with us

but I’m grateful
insects aren’t
bigger

(to the High Hat poet
who snubbed Sherlock)
Alice Notley told us
after her reading
“some poets like to
pretend poetry is
middle class” YEAH!
Alice KNOWS!

Lorrine Niedecker
mopped floors for
a living but if
her poems were
bullets most poets
would get it good!

* from his collaboration with Frank Sherlock, *The City Real and Imagined*, forthcoming from Factory School.

Recurrencies

for Carolee

Tapping the blood prime image of them
pomegranate red a rose arose life like

a dream dreams us like linings for be-
coming paint stirs potentia menses deep
research stirred like red pomegranate
red a rose aroused from bed this firm-

ament sex to extricate from lips mouth
of that boundary red in perpetuity
information divides the self recombines

no one since these states were made by
psychos such hard won ambiguities re
course blood prime image of her erotica
pomegranate red rose arose a round as
here no dream can end no where with

the lips we kiss or can’t with what bound
aries dividends divide the soul image
makes its way as space your conscious

ness enduring mouth lips of that which
kiss them and are a face brightened by
expression and are this whole body taking
place blood red rose arise aroused not

merely the symbolic not merely a history
of the real those stakes of your willing.

Anecdote

for Kyle

Just the facts my friend the man
taken for dead literally ‘at his

word’ is undead like a sign we
point to or hold-up like any

logical picture of harm points
disconnected on which map

a march of engines set a match
to search the fire so be it for

substance reveals what’s seen in
the said and demonstrated don’t

repeat yourself this that ran deep
lining their real with the sym

bolic giving number to event
defacing space so stats reveled.