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.

What We Were Into Was Willing… (Deadpan)

with Dorothea Lasky

Partial View of Self

I can’t exactly see the face of the woman in The Shining
But I can see Animal’s face dead-on
Thom, I can see your face in the mirror behind me and it is a good one
Self, I can see the partial view of you when I am not looking at the moon
Moon!
Moon, I can see your face you look like an old man who is kind and gentle
Father, I can see your face as I lay it down and it is old
Old, too, your brother
Father’s brother, I saw your bloated face after the accident so I forgot about it forgot about it
Somewhere your face is in my memory I do not want to know it
Lucy’s face I want to know it, it is coal black with white hair
And her brown eyes filled up with cloudy white, the clouds
Fly’s face, I looked deep into you
Your eyes were a landscape I flew over
Isn’t it strange how I flew over you?
I did not want to have such a big perspective on your life
But my size made it so, made me see it
The whole thing in an instant
And what a burden it is, to see you all in an instant
Love, I don’t want to see your full thing except in parts that I can take in simultaneously
Cut into me with these parts though, I want to be cut and deeply
And all at once as you lay me down
In a bed of tigers, the rushing
Partial self, I don’t want to know you except simultaneously
And all like the stars falling on me with gentle burning
I want to be gently burned in the dead of night
I don’t want to have to face the hot face all at once in the dead of night
To be surrounded by black and white and one strange eye
He is the Joker that one strange purple eye
But I do not want to know him
No no never let me know him
Never let me know his face entirely
Until I can somehow get away from him
Until there is no place left for me to go

*

Under a mask or some
blanket of substance that

face full of violence bursts
I am not really sure

what this means to see
things two women kissing

one young the other
old an enormous flag

wraps around itself the
wind curls like spirit

gives head behind a veil
of hair none can see

heaven through just the
colorlessness of our crying


Nothing was the thing you
Would save in those trees
All lit up at night with green
And wind the dead will tell

No tales from a point-of-view
Of your eyes staring down
The abyss of this world until
All worlds were until all

That possessed you was fire
Alone and the ‘No’ and that
Night everyone must refuse
To move away from too soon


Like a form of hunger your
Life that will never give you
Those things you thought

You wanted when only night
Can be saved every refusal
You made for the effort of it

And the survival of all efforts
Noontides the will was like
Those leaves you seemed to

See rustling above your head
The fires your eyes lit-up re-
calling their past detachment.


Face of my life you made
Me afraid there is some blood
We don’t understand some

Distance you were holding
While the view seemed to take
You in the sea and the clouds

The valley’s greenness what-
ever else made up the silence
Of your life at that moment.


Susceptible sunlight no soundtrack pans
Fact without music the slight trace of the
Nothing he was us the pressure in events
And wind that produces and chance peeps-
out from that world where the dead would
Go if they are not still in fact here graphic
Because there is always a war on elsewhere
Not a metaphysics but a war those heads
Sitting in the dark not one mind nor making-
up one nation take-up that “movie violence”
As if their oldest and most familiar wishes.

Deadpan cont'd

with Dorothea Lasky

Animal

I have lost my mind completely
Animal is in every room of this house about to walk in
He is turning the corner with his giant red, ghoulish head
What will he do to me?
I do not know what he will do to me
Darling, I am sitting here and saying goodnight to you
We can be friends if you would like to
I would like to
Be your friend if you will have me
Now I am leaving this room cause Animal is moving in
Making his way into the room, his eyes are on me
I am going into the bedroom that he can’t get in
Not one person who will do me harm can get in this room
I lay on the bed and everything is safe
And with the words of this poem I am thrusting Animal everywhere
I am putting him everywhere
He gets scarier with my every word
I am shining through my fear with the dreams that the lovers make
The dreams that the lovers make, I do not make alone
I make with two people, their twin heads fanciful and wise
And utterly blond
Gleaming in the sun with their yellow teeth
My twin lovers
The ones who will save me from this nightmare
Two-headed
Turning their heads towards me and then towards the ceiling
Unable to see themselves
This monster that escapes me

*

The matting in my mind
And the matting in yours
Records a place not qui
te here the ways the wor

ld possesses us and surr
ounds us with products
Of no known substance
This is what it means to

Make worlds and make
Them urgently our comb
ined speed is blood as the
Time it takes to form that

Definite idea clear as fuc
k when we breathing tou
ch and our breasts touch
And thus night interrupts

Our continuous burning
In which open flame str
uctures the breath and is
Far away in a mood of

Fear no brooding can ba
nish nor God apprehend
Even through our trembl
ing kisses veils are tears.


This weekend’s aeons reek
Of evidence wanting to take
Everything further worlds
Moon-signs and signs of blood

In alphabets always bursting at
Their skin with what life we would
Like to share but never can the
Lips born together to any satisfaction

Other than adequacy but then ideas
Like blood rush upon us love
Us more than anyone we could ever
Know when they touch no one

Is the wiser when they fill us with
This warmer feeling of knowing and
Not knowing somehow that you
Or anyone I love will not always be.


You sing of larger structures in me
Of rhythm still with monsters growing
Bigger into the sky scaring-off all

The guns and weapons we were once
Serving the night the servicing night
Using us up into the night that night

The human once grew to like a giant
Ear filling-up all we once were all
That was an empty head so that’s all

Hearing is and speech and music a
Function of animal vigilance a need
To hear the vowels these origins stink

Of blood before melody and motet
Dominated us with numbers with
That music militant in essence.


There was no sanity
But trails of resources and the

Soul given to money
A phylum written

On the backs of organic history
And women and slaves

And children we will resurrect
Them with our sounds

That are not music controlled
By a deadly logic of wise-

Schools and science and rhetoric
Hardly for any people

Singing into each other’s breasts
We must destroy those deathly

And insane songs of ratio
Singing the song we must sing


A crane fell this was all emblematic
Of the economy laboring to make
Of itself like any good soldier or cap
italist something more than it should be

Without a structure to distribute wealth
More fairly or enact laws that counteract
This fundamental unfairness of the human
Since we are human and we made those

Cranes they are part of us and when they
Break they are even more a part of us
An accident may be more meaningful in
Its effects than any cause it manifested

A militarized sky mocking our civilian
Domination by glass towers and glass re
flecting helicopters countless times over
When the sky should be one subject.

Strobos (Deadpan)

Strobos (Deadpan)
for Dorothea Lasky

There are things we live among
and there are things that make us
undead in seeing them or by
their very use of us I saw Dottie
the dead ones we would feign
on our adult screens scare me
"me and my shadow" where I go
nothing follows no one because
this not-following was us at play

in eternity there was no trace
had not been taken by our steps
our ands and buts and conjunctives
these real sweet-nothings pimp us
out like substance interrupted
a baby which grows from it
and doesn't have a name we
would like to say yet if a name is
like a strobe staggered in shiny
moments we felt its actual poses
as our impermanent movement

what we don't see as a duration
but only the semblance of when
you put roots here and name them
“desire” desire which made things
grow only sometimes which left
bite-marks like question marks
while we were still in medias res
birds swept down to catch us
and care for us before we really
fell back-to-life such recurrences

were real you say death is never
really fair like your life like our lives
when you touch me there and stare
out from it like it was always here
always before a guilt of caring I don't
want your roots & branches to ever
die this forest of meaning even if we
know their names even when love
knows the names it desires to be
called by to make a new subject from
this subtraction this being entity

where the sun’s often trapped like
bronze and outlives our lives the simple
animals torn limb-from-limb the things
we should be startling poetry for the
first time and make everything fear
we were finally We deadpan seeing
everything the sun involved as though
for the last time this sickness a cure

that can in fact have no name but
gravity given to teeth and pain all
the machine movements we ever make
like stop-action babies we can't ever have
the noonlight of that video which is you
in a way ready to announce yourself
an idea of your “bigger” self little ones
that go like big ones do the lumps meta-
physical lumps of the mind and actual
lumps materials as they are made by
no one can never be a shared child

can this be embodiment like bumper
cars only shocking when they stop
our techne a world of surprise and
blinking the eyes were so exhibited
for control and controlled us verily
they were convertible they made our
lives more real writing through riding
to make this last man suffer the dis-
tances the little huts of us a *domos*

the wind swept them and blew our
windows open disturbed the curtains
changed the mood of last things that
would come to touch us like a wind
or tears thru which we see the world
somehow corrected sex was true
the wind when we are coming (and
we are coming) complicit in evidence

no longer some excrescence or
stupidity of the sky like Williams says
herds and heads of men like armies
battalions of stumps men should also
sing joyous stealth what’s burnt at
least is seen and what isn’t seeing
a faction not entirely opposed to
force tingling where we might dis-
appear still within a trembling earth

under a torn canopy through the open
night before anything we learned was
useful or what we could see the blank
neutrality of those lips before me the
genital contact of the animal too close
to this color to feel it to feel anything
but a general dreaming that thoughts
were feelings too and sense an image
catching up to us totally desynched

from worlds in their prehensions of
what poses us what moves discretely
not as me in this detachment semblances
of “haunted” nature the quote around our
necks stubborn as our literal dreaming
preponderances of flesh mold this
crawlspace this airlock the sudden
dying-with-you how the shadows grow
and close in and are in us and become
us so we were their insatiable interior.

Damn the Caesars Boog City reading pic*

right to left: Kristin Prevallet, me, Kyle Schlesinger, Rich Owens

*thanks to Nathaniel Siegel!

Catherine Sullivan's *Triangle of Need* (Review)

Here is a link to a review I wrote for Catherine Sullivan's most recent work, *Triangle of Need*, currently exhibiting at Metro Pictures gallery...

http://www.thefanzine.com/sections.php?s=art&id=222&a=articles

Thanks to Photi, Rob and Jane for their help with the piece.

Deadpan cont'd

with Dorothea Lasky

Bumper Car

Purple night with the black trees
I am in a bumper car with my love
Except he is the kind of man who is scared of everything
And I am not, the kind of person who knows anything is wrong
I was born into oblivion so I do not
Care what they make of me in this world
I go free into the darkened night with only the heavy hearts of my ancestors and not myself
Orange ancestors, with their bright red masks and lips
Handicapped only by their antiquity, how they escape into time
Astronomical too like the black night they take me into
They speak of the great night, which comes after this one
This one they take me into, O steadily
The darkness they stretch their arms out into and grab me
To be erased completely by darkness
Except, instead of being pulled by their arms into it,
I am driving into it because I have no other place to go


This is the Deadpan (1)

Dear Thom, this is the Deadpan
That is racing at us in the noonlight
Do not be afraid dear one of the thing that is contained
Do not be afraid of the thing
No, but you were never afraid
You were always here, resting
And I too was rushing at the moon with all my thoughts that have no place in antiquity
No place in the olden times because those are too much what is bronzed and here
This is a letter to you so that you may write back to me
This is a letter I write in the fading light
As I am fading my every breath
A kind of candle at the very faded moon
The moon
He was an old thing
That I spied when I was out
Among the trees and woods
Great fox was he
These trees and woods
These trees and woods
That were in me
I could see them planted
Even when I never knew their names

*

Baring our teeth.

The mortal
Rocks me with grief.

Am I the
Animal or are
You?

Our will is
Bound by accidents.

The apprehension
Of that motion—deadpan.

That is, the dead pan

And become what
We live for.

Try these motions

On for size,
These simple

Machines shock and

Awe. Teeth marks
Indicate eternities.

Falling doesn't fail
to amuse us.


Minor moons dominate
Differently than the sun

Sleeps instead of me
Instead of night being blue

In the glass that was you
My case reflects our formal

Sky tho the park is closed
And it is cold out we

Walk thru it clouds move
More quickly than dreaming.


While we are here
before it the formal
sky these separate
entities in our awe

the white just grows
large there is no
thing can account
for black which like

a wall erects light
whole universes of
ideas and sound-
images against us

what makes us awe
or tremble is never
our friend neither
friend or enemy

powerfully neutral
like black and white
overwhelm us in
their neutral blank

spreading over every
thing they touch so
this is when I want
to touch you whenever

this ends touch begins
again and the world
begins and “and” and
“with” begin conjunctive

worlds communication
relation a commons
you could feel because
one withdrew from all

that joy in magnitudes
and fear crawlspaces
of the spirit anteceded
our heart ‘s dominion.


Your marriage is on my mind
that knife of poetry drawn
to its object they said an un-
conscious process we blow

our tops off slice open heads
expose them to this wind
realer than anything and yet
make from our words meat

our extreme exposure insists
what a body can do be deter-
mined so this is meat’s only
moral—-whatever exceeds it.


“True true true”
and not true birds

rock doves and every
thing else happens out

those windows no one sees,
no one cares to see.


The structure of flame is not flame
it is something else the mind
can’t get a handle on the atoms
before we knew what everything was

we imagined them something there are
brighter colors you see rather than
nothing you feel like little bolts of lightning
in your eyes migraines like a second

starlight impressed in the retinal attention
of everything one sees in their hell I
is hell instead of others is at least colorful
and keeps our interest in the details.


C'mon!

The name we share is *techne*.
What is there to fear?

I am not seeking anything,
but to crash into things with you.

Our thingness in the world
little deaths, sex and teeth O

to be with you, to be with
you my fellow animal.

A kind of third sex the corpse
always in us, a reuniting force.

To rehearse these deaths would leave
little else for our amusement.

Cadavers, we fell highest
abandoned to this world.

Deadpan

with Dorothea Lasky

There are mice crawling everywhere here
In this house
There were four birds, or were there six,
Or seagulls rather, that flew through the Russian sky
And they were always there or will be forever
Alone in that sky, or with each other
White birds that fly through a white expanse
Of an airy feel like snow or semen
Or milk, holywater that flows from the heavens.
I have decided to be an alien, or to live alone
On a spaceship with lifeforms that escape me
By their many years ahead of me.
Still, it is not midnight yet, but this poem is very old
And I do that, write poems that are very old, much older than me
Even though I am at this moment decomposing into nothingness
Like the rotting flower that God meant for my body
Woman in the green bathroom, who descends the bathtub
Because it is her time to haunt
Or it is rather, she can’t get out of there
The way the birds can’t ever get out of that painting
The way Emily Dickinson is in that house, whether she likes it or not, for all of history
Her brown hair surrounding her face in the same white bed
The grapes in the small silver bowl next to her, not rotting but frozen for all eternity
In mid-gasp
Things are like that, whether they escape (and I mean escape) into the bloody footprints of hell
Or they go down like saints, with children at their bedside.
It is all frozen in time, like a static shot of bloody leaves
All along the baseboard of my mind.
Still, the saddest movie in the world shouldn’t scare us
Don’t be scared of the saddest movie in the world that is your favorite
You are not fixed in their story, that is theirs
And when you leave this earth, it will be of your own free will
To go into that snowy plain that you have understood completely
And when I said that the sublime is only the beginning I meant that too
That to be one bird in snow is to know you have nothing left to lose
So the fullness of life is right upon you
The tomatoes, the tomatoes, the lemons
The orange fruits, the lemons, upon you, wandering in the dark forest
Is not the loneliness of life, but only the idea of love
Still soaring above us in the wind


*


Serials tune us… *All work and
no play*

Interference
The way you said

The light was hitting it
That ass tapped by grief

Would not be haunted if not for
You

Hunted

I returned to my senses I cried
What place is this the world

An “Earth-scorched” world today

Fire here
Fire far away

In headlines
Because we tremble

They say we are sometimes true.


This place always calls us out
Into what shining won’t set

There will be no pictures enough
For it, just the tinge of worlds

No walls, no windows to feel
It felt itself becoming us

A bright monochrome, a direct line
For semblance, its purer spaces


Some pre-Soviet sea not quite real yet
Not quite "after the fall" or before it

Those birds are soaring for your “idea
Of love” the cum of their crests snow

Caps and sails glint in this false sunlight
Clouds like an unfinished business of us

True because no one can be together
We were always those crystal birds we

Can’t help it the frozen grief of their wings
Bring us back into being give us hands

To haunt a holographic world and float
Below them in a sort of saintly motion.


I think of the flames of David Lynch’s films

Always seeming keyed or matted, never
Quite here enough

I am reminded that we are always
Flickering
Our bones like

Substantives, suns, words we constitute
What little light

Is left in the world

Risked by wind, always ready to
Go out

If anything could spare it.

Is this your deadpan justice? That we are bound
In fatal

Contact with the words we use?

Lynch’s characters always live-out this problem:

The sound of their breath
That was always more
Than anything they said,

The open-ended pene
tration of the wind in this

The curtains still and the
Curtains just barely
Moving.

Your idea of love,
So much more than the real.

Whalen Notebk Pics

tx to Kyle Schlesinger for sending these along...

After Reading Tyrone Williams’ *On Spec*

Which arrested waves words cant
Light unclarified shake agreement
Qua language qua onus qua malice
Qua race qua riot qua equal signs
Often lie to tell the truth powers of
The simulacral babble of towers
Print it on our backs and what was
n’t and what was a subject blurs
Us looking up on high what is too
High thus isn’t anything to feel me
To tell it how we do tarrying too
Bright on spec where too much is
Seen some dark therefore withheld
So this was us a commons remains
Or as they say "a discourse" in lieu
Of “bruised blood” and blues cf.
*Come Out* by Steve Reich, 1966.

What a sight for sore eyes ruins con
fide reflect too much “as” lisps and
History forges us corruption wipes
The lips clean where we aren’t wor
ds can’t be anything sighted corrupt
ible at their source recourses force
reigns here qua mistake qua stupidity
qua over-produced qua “the voice”
doing the voices futures overheard
like a black box recorder pitiless a
pitch of disaster muffled as we mig
ht be if history didn’t echo so much.

Maybe coevalness despairs of us
Related by our simple rooms and
What words do like bodies prove
That we are here and here is some
where something different than th
is the geni of deixis we wish we
Could put it back in the bottle the
Rabbit of metaphor back in the hat
So damaging do all words seem to
Use them appropriately one would
Do more harm my unredeemable
Love all the creatures God forged
Out of hate instead of love like any
Whim we will be shored by no oth
er ruin than economy related by fas
hion and art indifferent to the spi
rit when in doubt choose union cho
ose synthesis tho only the wrecked
Should be saved and mind irrupts.

Tendencies erasures anchor percept
ible worlds of flight fight clubs cra
nes building to no good end ‘cause
No end seems good pure means only
Where I touch you and when we do
not withdraw into our separate light
Monads of my heart open a window
I am afraid so afraid to be alone in
The dark truer dark of being alone
With one’s powers an abaton of the
Will whole worlds with their tails
In their mouths self-ingesting I wa
nt you in my mouth to share a world
Imponderably coeval ungraspable
What grasps you "if I was you, if you
Were me" when being wasn’t a ficti
on most of all I wanted us to touch
To make me otherwise than I was.

L'Immortelle

My immortal
will you go

to hell with me
finally not be

substitutable
for anything

"you make me
weep, you made

me weak" my
heart is old and

not old the way
we stay so still

and seem to turn
away from this

world of light
the way that mo

tion makes us
a dwelling.

Peace On A presents: readings by PhillySound (Ad)*

Peace On A

presents

readings by PhillySound

featuring:
CAConrad
Mytili Jagannathan
Dorothea Lasky
Chris McCreary
Frank Sherlock
and Kevin Varrone

Saturday, March 1st 2008 8PM
BYOB & $5 donation

curated by CAConrad and hosted by Thom Donovan at:

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

about the readers:

Son of white trash asphyxiation, CAConrad is the author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull, 2006), The Book of Frank (Chax, 2008), (Soma)tic Midge (FAUX, 2008), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock, The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School, 2008). He can be found at http://PhillySound.blogspot.com


10 minutes into worry

needing us
a total attempt in vain some days

igniting a fashion for this blasted placement

my old thought of where we are going to bleed on the sofa
all around me this watered motion claps winter on the neck

we are not between trees between hairs
split mine in two so you can get it going
keep it soaring
~ CAConrad, from "going to 108"


Mytili Jagannathan lives in Philadelphia and currently works at the Asian Arts Initiative. She is the author of Acts, a chapbook from Habenicht Press, and her poems have appeared in EOAGH, Rattapallax, Combo, Interlope, Mirage#4/Period[ical], and Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics. She’s given many readings across Philadelphia, as well as in New York, D.C, and San Francisco. She is the recipient of an Emerging Artist grant from the Leeway Foundation and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.


Dorothea Lasky was born in St. Louis, MO in 1978. Her first book, AWE, came out in the fall of 2007 from Wave Books. Currently, she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-edits the Katalanche Press chapbook series along with the poet Michael Carr and is pursuing a doctorate in education from the University of Pennsylvania. Videos of her reading poems with other poets can be found on www.birdinsnow.com.


The Process of Explication

I.
Students, look at this table
And now when you see a man six feet tall
You can call him a fathom.

Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff
Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun
And the alphabet is full of blood
And when you knock upon a sentence in the
Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags

Likewise, hello and goodbye.

II.
Nick Algiers is my student
And he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide
And so, I am the one in front of him
And I dance around him in a circle and light him on fire
And with his face on fire, I am suddenly ashamed.

Likewise the distance between us then
Is the knife that is not marriage.

III.
Students, I can't lie, I'd rather be doing something else, I guess
Like making love or writing a poem
Or drinking wine on a tropical island
With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night.

I can't lie that dreams are ridiculous.
And in dreaming myself upon the moon
I have made the moon my home and no one
Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips.

And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you
You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is
That I will never win.
~Dorothea Lasky


Chris McCreary is the author of two books of poems, Dismembers and The Effacements. Current work can be found online at e.ratio and Tool. He co-edits ixnay press with Jenn McCreary.


Ultraviolence

Tiny Vikings break Jane Austen.

They play grab-
ass in class, crash their dad's Stratus

on the weekends. They
come together

in clusters to imagine our overthrow,
gossip about our bad

breath. They creep into our beds
as we sleep, gut us

w/ hunting knives, curl up to nap
wrapped in bloodied sheets.
~Chris McCreary, from "Fiend Folio"


Kevin Varrone is the author of g-point Almanac: id est (Instance Press, 2007) and g-point Almanac: Passyunk Lost (forthcoming, Ugling Duckling Presse, 2008). g-point Almanac (6.21-9.21) was published as a chapbook by ixnay press and Stenos for Indian Summer, a e-chapbook can be viewed at http://durationpress.com/bookstore/index.htm. Individual poems have recently appeared in Big Bridge #12(http://www.bigbridge.org/bigkvarrone.htm) and cross connect(http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect/i24/g/contents.html). He currently lives in Philadelphia and teaches writing at Temple University and The University of the Arts.

dear russell I woke this morning three am
ish my family all sleeping and I couldn’t
stop thinking of pollination and shrapnel
what a word o the transfer of energy
therein seems obvious enough. it’s too cold
still and walking through this sunken square
to where I sometimes wonder
if I might not break into blossom,
what would students think if I came to class
in blossom? I thought of swallows and providence
and bees how it’s all congealed in a drop of sunlight
and capistrano ain’t where it used to be even
continents drift when bart died I was moved
by all the people moved by him and not by blood
and the two black women who in a room full of
hospital administrators sang a gospel song
their acapella voices ached and near asphyxiated me
I had forbidden the use of soul in workshop
yet when they sang it is well it is well it is well
I knew it wasn’t, not with mine own,
which was bones in my pocket,
a spherical case, fragments
of a word that had metathesized
from coal.
~Kevin Varrone, from sortameditation


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


“till other voices wake
us or we drown”
~ George Oppen

*






















*thanks to Nathaniel Siegel & Dottie Lasky for pics!

Happening Now (Ad)

NEW YORK CITY
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23, DOORS 7PM, PROGRAM 8PM

HAPPENING NOW AT THE FILM-MAKERS¹ COOP
BENEFIT SCREENING AT MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP
66 East 4th Street (btw. 2nd Ave and the Bowery)
Subway: 6 to Astor Place; N, R, W to 8 St.; F, V to Lower East Side-2nd Ave; Tickets: $10-$25 sliding scale

Rally on behalf of the Film-Makers' Cooperative at a Benefit Screening and Silent Auction. The evening will feature a program curated by Caroline Koebel of historic and contemporary works recently inducted into the world-famous FMC collection with many of the artists in person. Partake in Two Boots Pizza, refreshments, and hand-screened FMC t-shirts. Auction items include books, i.e., Stan Brakhage's Film Biographies, Su Friedrich's Gently Down the Stream, Carolee Schneemann's Split Decision, and the dazzling Flaming Creature - Jack Smith and his Amazing Work and Times, - also: signed paintings and other unique pieces of art and expression like Ken Jacobs'first-of-it's-kind "Life Enhancer"!

PEGGY AHWESH
BEIRUT OUTTAKES (2007, DVD, sound, 7:00)
A startling digital resurrection of deteriorating 35mm trailers from the 1960s found in a ruined Lebanese movie theater. Outtakes appears to be a ready-made, albeit one tailor-made for Ahwesh's career obsessions, pre-filled with her signature elements: gleeful disruptions of high and low, affection for decayed textures, a peeping eye for lurid sexuality, and a fascination with unlikely images of the Middle East. Just one sequence of a go-go-booted belly dancer wriggling in an Arabic-language cinema advertisement for home air conditioners alone has the power to shatter more stereotypes than 500 pages of Edward Said. ­Ed Halter

PIP CHODOROV
FAUX MOUVEMENTS (WRONG MOVES) (2007, 16mm, sound, 12:00)
Having studied cognitive science and film semiotics, Pip Chodorov (b. 1965)recent films and drawings explore the terrain between the two fields. While aiming to confuse the parts of the brain responsible for the perception of motion (areas VI7 and VI8 of the optical cortex), Chodorov maximizes the potential hypnotic power of repetition and irregularity.

KEN JACOBS
CAPITALISM: SLAVERY (2006, DVD, silent, 3:00)
An antique stereograph image of cotton-pickers, computer-animated to present the scene in an active depth even to single-eyed viewers. Silent, mournful, brief.

BOSKO BLAGOJEVIC
DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE (2007, DVD, sound, 2:55)
Remembering the 90s, distracted; a single articulation, a way in.

LYNNE SACHS
THE SMALL ONES (2007, shot on16mm, DVD, sound, 3:00)
During WWII, the US Army hired Sachs¹ cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones‹small and large‹of dead American soldiers. This elliptical work, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of highly abstracted war imagery and home movies of children at a birthday party.

CHIAKI WATANABE
1/3 (ONE OVER THREE) (2006, DVD, sound, 7:00)
1/3 is an audiovisual ensemble with lo-fi and minimalist aesthetics. The ensemble experiments with "one-bit" as an art expression. The emphasis is on using a single bit of information such as one-bit color, one-bit code and a one-bit note. In the title, "1" stands for one bit, "3" stands for the number of audio and visual inputs (one video from a laptop and two sound sources from custom-made electronics and electronic violin effects). 1/3 explores the essence of simplicity within the complexity with electro-psycho-physical perspectives. Sound by Tristan Perich(electronics), Sylvia Mincewicz (electronic violin)info: www.vusik.net

MIKE KUCHAR
TONE POEM (1982, 16mm, sound, 6:00)
The comfort of solitude leads to dreams.

FLAVIA SOUZA
CARNALEVARE (2003, DVD, sound, 5:20)
CARNALEVARE is an experimental film about the ecstasy of growth and decay.It is an attempt to reveal that ³the rawest materials in life are so pregnant with mystery and the capacity for change that disguising them is beside the point.² Carnalevare means ³take away the meat² and is related to the observence of Lent and the festival of Carnival. The parallel between this ritual and the cycle of birth and decay is in its powerful release and potential for material transformation. All the objects used in the set had been thrown away, by manipulating a few discarded materials and juxtaposing them meaningfully they could perhaps be transformed into something new. My inspiration for this small film was to investigate my own materiality,free of false trappings under the sure and unchangeable influences of time and nature.

JOEL SCHLEMOWITZ
THE GLOWING WOMAN (2007, 16mm, sound, 4:00)
Spiraling colors and abstracted rotating text, poem by Wanda Phipps on the soundtrack both layered and singular. The colors created through hand-printing black and white film with a flashlight and colored filters onto unexposed color film in the dark.

MARTHA COLBURN
MEET ME IN WICHITA (2007, DVD, sound, 7:00)
This work throws Osama Bin Laden into the fairytale Land of Oz. A combination of watercolors, collage and paint on glass animation, this film is a play between fact, fiction, politics, fantasy, terror and morality.

SARAH PUCILL
BACKCOMB (1995, 16mm, screened on DVD, sound, 6:00)
The Surrealists were fascinated by the idea that beneath the surface of everyday life there exist disruptive and uncontrollable forces. In Backcomb, Pucill inflects these themes with a feminist sensibility. In her film, the feminine, is neither personified nor idealised but remains symbolic - we never see the face of the woman with the black hair, nor do we hear her speak, but we come to see her as an almost elemental force. She suggests there is no escaping restrictive social definitions without some kind of violence, symbolic or otherwise. -- Chris Darke, London Production Fund

JUD YALKUT
KUSAMA'S SELF-OBLITERATION (1967/2007, 16mm, sound, 24:00)
A film exploration of the work and aesthetic concepts of Yayoi Kusama, painter, sculptor, and environmentalist, conceived in terms of an intense emotional experience with metaphysical overtones, an extension of my ultimate interest in a total fusion of the arts in a spirit of mutual collaboration. The soundtrack is by the C.I.A. (Citizens for Interplanetary Activity). "The obsessive act of covering (destruction of boundaries-identities) gradually equivalent to the ritual of uncovering (Stripping away of ego); individual self, destroyed in mask/parody/clustering, is transcended. Mandalic (magic circle meditational form used to concentrate attention to a spiraling in/to a point through which new, expanded awareness is possible. The techniques of superimposition, a mere gimmick in most films, is an apt formal analogue for the dissolution of discreteness, for the meshing-merging of identities in the last orgiastic section of SELF-OBLITERATION -- we are confronted with an atomistic collection of figures interacting but one emergent, undulating Meat-Cloud-Being." -- Paul Sharits.


SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23
Add to Calendar

Tenth Annual Bouquat (Ad)

The Weaklings launch (ad)

The Weaklings
Dennis Cooper reads from his new book of poetry The Weaklings
an edition of 300 numbered, signed and hard bound
from Fanzine Press
with art by Jarrod Anderson (displayed at the event)
Thursday March 13th.
6-9 pm. Reading at 7 pm.
Also music by Luke Rathborne

Ab(b)aton

Where no one should step
The hell of the "mind's
own place" to ever be-
lieve in a world behind

The eyes while the eyes
Were open in the dark
Blood expanded as sight
Concentric to which

Love is never grasped
That is only an impulse
Of care or intent thought
Only of what I would

Do with you today the
Fact that I wasn't a vision
Of light drawn from its
Object to any particular

Purpose disturbs me I am
Hell nothing else with-
out you to hold your hand
Or see sound this place

Was a wreck with us where
Light must begin night
When black light resolved
My objective withdrawal

Little bells seized his
Ears animals taught him to
Hear the law like prophets
Beginning again to see.