Amberwaves in Negativeland (Nonsite)

We are not a camera obscura
for the world as was once sup
posed and this is not opposite
day after all you can do that on
television the way your smile
triggers something in my brain
waves an implosion makes yo
ur body disappear into the things
we have made keeps gesturing
but can’t explain the war away
nor this fiction they call nation

Like we was even exchangeable
there or able we must be a means
the fire must be our fire we must
own it as we write and read this
book erstwhile sprinkled with le
aves and dirt because we appear
in the world we are sites for sore
eyes we mean “X” as in wrecks
places became subsequent to this
urgent complicity this being with

Confused tulips and spring ca
me too early this year so actually
your mythology is outmoded
April is the cruelest month for
poetry can only break your hea
rt if it doesn’t persist in some
allegory of agency or love which
is a kind of allergy or actually
produce that world we would want
because that is what we feel
the words must say the city in
its springtime that is not our mu
sic yet not green wrecked enough
so we can see us surpassing it

Nor any ideas but in relation
to each other often contradiction
becomes this city we must live in
because it is nature more than
nature more than the trees were
nature when what flowered was
wheat too bountiful for the realty
so our “common law” is reality
contradiction became a quanta
for which we use for how we
are used land art and land use
art art of use not a useful art

The air was this quanta the privati
zation of our barest needs purifies
blame does not purify the world
every thing we seem to touch this
nation turned to shit long ago we
need a body for this endangered
consciousness made from the fail
ure of all this discovering some new
mode of gathering in what remains

Elka Krajewska in Filmslash

Check out Elka Krajewska, whose *Plany Mela* I reviewed last spring, interviewed by Nancy Rhodes in Filmslash:

http://www.filmslashmagazine.com/node/45

Dirt Eaters

for Brenda and Conrad

No one was the wiser
How much blood
There would be

No one seemed to care
Given to stenches
They can’t see

Offshore we must find
A means that is
Pure to gather again

We must shove dirt
In our mouth until
We taste blood

That blood occulted
Like the 5% who
Took all the wealth

In the meantime
There will be new
Uses in this eating

Of dirt this new re
membering which must
Remain our meaning.

All This is Discourse (Statement)*

Reading Oppen’s Daybooks and selected prose recently I was struck again by the diversity of Oppen’s philosophical sources, which include Neoplatonism, Jacques Maritain, Aquinas, Leibnitz, (William) James, Karl Jung, and of course Martin Heidegger. While there is no denying Oppen was invested in philosophical problems and discourse, he also realized philosophy’s limitations as they relate to poesis. For Oppen philosophy could never be anything more than a stimulus for the work at hand, if not also another object to be incorporated into the work, another set of words to be tested as things with which to think, to generate, to know as much as anyone knows. I wonder in fact if some damage has not been done to the reception of Oppen’s work by the focus on philosophy, as well as by such self-mythologizing accounts as Oppen’s own letters concerning his suspected “plagiarism” of Heidegger. Eschewing any rigorous analogization of Oppen’s poetry and philosophical concepts and systems, it seems more important that we, as scholars and poets, put to use our own experience about how philosophy and theory infiltrates our work, potentializes the imagination, and lends itself to poetry’s toolbox, if only to the ends of inoperativity (those tools breaking). For it seems, as Zukofsky notes in *Bottom: on Shakespeare*, that poetry and philosophy do not usually get along, and yet at the same time would jealously put on the mask of the other. Oppen’s work for me is proof that the poet may be every bit as rigorous as the philosopher in thinking one’s existence in relation, however the thing philosophy does not often do which Oppen’s poetry does is enact. Philosophy lacks action. And where philosophy becomes active, when it does the thing it would otherwise propose and systemetize, it broaches poetry. Poetry’s enaction (what Stein famously called “composition as explanation”) proves Spinoza correct when he writes “the eyes are demonstrations of the mind.” However I would extend this proposition to the poem’s movement. To read the poem as a kind of field of meaning a la “composition by field,” but also the wonderful event horizons of Oppen’s late-work, is to move with the line and into lines as lines intend meaning in their motions, the measure and sound and consequence of those motions. This “saying of saying” or “pure expression” exceeds conceptualization embodying what is perhaps most ethical about the poem as an act of meaning: that the poem exceeds what can be said and thus thought about it beyond its own reenactment. The way we make it active by reading it and thinking with it beyond any convenient recourse to criticism or theory per se.

*presented as an opening statement for The Shape of Disclosure George Oppen Centennial Symposium panel, "The Literary-Philosophical Spectrum," organized by Poets House April 8th, 2008 at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Two Inconsequentials (Deadpan)

with Dorothea Lasky

"Two inconsequential things can come together to form a consequence."
--Jack Spicer


Everything is important

Everything is so important now
The lilac flower growing up
From what seems to be a washbasin
The clouds
I remember the old leper’s lips in this moment
I remember the odd man in California
Who did not love his wife
But could not stop talking about her either
And so, maybe he loved her slightly
But yet had something like hate, not the full thing, his complaints
Echoed in me
They were complaints about me somehow
And what about the boy
Who was left for dead under the airplane?
What about him?
I cannot remember his name, although I want to
These poems are essays
Important ones
And everything else became important when I met you
Everything became important again
I had been called elitist by those closest to me
For trying to think that we had a shot
To come on and make this world right
I had my voice made fun of
I had died inside a million times by
The lack of anything, infinite resignation
Infinite resignation, Kierkegaard says
Is the last stage before faith
And you can’t have anything
Like a belief in the moon
Without seeing your own black night in front of you
Like some tempting ghoul, its ferocious eyes
Darling, we are the ghouls, but we are also tender
And when act upon the world in this way
The world cannot help but be happy at our choice
To not give up
I will not give up!
I will not give up anything til
They lay my dead head upon the ground
And smash it, take pictures of it
Do all the horrible things they had always wanted to do to it
Before they do all those horrible things
I will make one choice to be good with you
Let us be good, iced-bright one
The purest thing empties out of you
And I can hear it
The sweetest bird-like thing
Is what it is, is what you are
Its acid-yellow head
Infinitely tender upon us all
Otherworldly, tenderly enacting
The kind of actions that make the saint
But not a bad saint, a good saint
In front of me in these symptoms
In this age of doom
All my dying ideas
Alive again
Because you breathed the air that you did
Important air
That swirls around you
Everything
Every piece of air important
Because it feeds us and you
And our brothers and sisters
And the other people we love
Because they are living with us
In this important moment, this time of being us
So that we cannot help but rejoice that we are one thing
So God?
Yes God
We are all one thing in this God
We have infinite resignation to be God
Because God is the thing
After you have all but given up
Everything
The most important everything
But everything
My love
And yours
The children’s love
To breathe this air
The air of health
Which is in and of itself
With the black clanging in the distance
A version of a saint


That heart slowed by glass
That heart that is not mine
Not yours that heart outside
Which I can see no longer

Works floats there and is a
Resin for what once was li
ved what twice-dying breath

Slows within this resin there
Is a sense of effect in glass
How one got here to be so red
And not somewhere for the
Heart to stop time would be

Like this we will begin in
Allegory again demonstrati
ons will be a medicine for

Thinking and doing what we
Do the cause of all glass to
Frame this and exhibit a case
Of us encasement of our fact.


You’re dying O you’re dying
Into the stage lights and second
Lives reflections that are the

Lives of adult children not sure
What age they are yet living
Against that light of day what

Hardens us against it once ag
ain made the face soft you are
Talking and I am always tired

But two inconsequential things
Can become a consequence ba
cked by what life was impend

ing a stage happening at every
Moment we died of our dying
What women what men are we

What result of this that some
Time passes how the face beca
me hardened in this knowing.


How the people we are become
Us actually exponential powers
We became action before that

Light as a kind of action those
Lights feel hard we knew we we
re dying before we knew what

Hit us exactly some images of
Us seem to be more real for the
Fact that there are others we hold

Inside us other women other men
For the fact that we make pictures
We are “not me” we are them th

ese eyes blinking through us all
The identities we had to kill did
We really have to kill them to be

Any one and the curtain and the
Stage and the audience that is
Never one hearing these lines.


I think of Henry
James the way
his characters mo

ve like animals
with memories
remembering wh

at they did not do
what they could
not become be

cause truly time
is their master
and what we can

not imagine our
deaths as the stage
lights pour down

on our faces and
the sunlight pours
down like it were

this real light of
dying O we are
dying to meet ea

ch other there you
talk while I am al
ways tired resig

ned infinitely res
igned to touching
you in these dis

tances in them
fear almost seemed
like our friend.

I am angry at you, Death (Deadpan)

with Dorothea Lasky

I am angry at you, Death

Death, I have been angry at you
For such a long time
And I still am
So angry at you
For giving me too many things to take myself away from
Hollow out the time of them for the sake of it
Metal bowls I leave the fruit in, but they change eventually
I don’t want to ever not change, but I want something constant
Like the ocean
I don’t want the ocean to ever die
And yet, you steal the saltwater from it as a lark
You take the seabirds from it one by one
As you glance at them casually, a party
Of seabirds raining down
My breath labored
At the light of all my birds
Raining down on the ocean.
You know, one day, I will kill you
Before you have a chance to
Do anything anymore to the people I love
Leaving them awry in the summer sun
Or bloody on the pulpit
Leaving all the people I love bloody on the pulpit
And raining down with things I cannot contain
I cannot contain you but I will kill you
So swiftly one day in the morning
I will enter a room and there will be so much
Folding of the Spring that I have created and made
My life into it will be like you are dead once and for all
How will you feel to be dead once and for all?
All of it happening to you like you have no empathy
I don’t think it is that you have no empathy
But moreso that you are so wild
You cannot stop to consider our feelings
On the day I will kill you I will be so wild
That I will not have a civilized moment to consider your feelings
I will act upon you in a reddish smoky haze
Because I am more powerful than you ever gave me credit for
My limits exceed that of other men before me
And I have prepared for this strike
My whole life
And when the time is upon us
I will do the thing I have set out to do for this humanity
As you creak under me into the earth
A groaning, lepered thing
A fallen thing we will all learn to forget forever


I had one little book

I had one little book
Of a boy thrust in the snow
Now I will think of him forever
In his quietude, the warm December lights of the inside
And then January, the quietest month
With its green smokestacks
And the purple fog hanging over everything
I walked from the Green St. Station
To my house on the edge of the park
And no one knew
That I was that little boy
I never told a soul I wrapped myself
In reddish towels and laid down
In the middle of the floor
Til time came to me as a convincer
I was silenced only by own regret
That I had been born this thing
We all look upon
And I look upon
The many things
That are encased in glass
Dear Love, Friends, and Animals, like you
I do not want to be in glass ever
Instead, you can leave me in the snow
As you pour water slowly over my bones
Flowers will grow from me eventually
The flowers, they will grow from me eventually
If you finally learn to be silent with me
If you finally learn to leave me be


Deadpan 2

I don’t care if the system is corrupt
I will continue to donate my organs to history
Take my heart, my brain, my brainhole
Take it: veins, eyes
And legs
That have wrapped around the trees of summer when I was alone
I didn’t want to be this thing as clear as day
Anyway
Anyway, I wanted to be
The purest clump of sand in the palm of my love
Where is he? Where is that clump of sand where I am held?
I can feel the love of my soul surrounding me
But no hand upon me
And in that
I place the hand upon myself
Oh could I look upon myself
Sweet slumber of hands on me
Yellow seagulls above the olive green pools
Orange sandbars in the blue-green pools


Quote of the day: *Don’t shoot me please!*
Shining out in your wild sentences silences

Like a sin of these structures bursting an
Ecology bust every ought how will our

Culture survive without New Orleans one
Wonders there is no way to lyricize so

We disaster culture crowns its remnants
Revenants and ruins politics the hyper-

telic claims siphoning the dead for whose
Use a force no “nature” has seen that open

Which is us our subsistence while we keep
Fucking each other up the silence sentence

In this repeats a structure of every police
The maximuses of exiled wishes we are not

Sure what they have said those citizens the
Levees themselves in broken articulation a

Variation on a variation of a theme by Will
iams I’m sorry we didn’t reinforce properly

The levees of New Orleans the oil we suck
ed from the Gulf made us rich we suspect

The waterfront real estate of the 9th Ward
Will make us richer sincerely sovereignty.


Veritic in songs stars cycle
Disaster cuts the vision was
A distance we could feel but

Never know audience to the
Perception of words as we
Were hearing them float

In the lights that dream of
Distance the way tanks dreamt
Us blood flowed like crude

From a bird’s appearance in
That light under it a night of
Floodlamps and checkpoints.


Under it that night song permanent
Tanks don’t turn here and veins don’t

Bleed yet flesh vanishes from flesh
A proposition about fire the light be

fore a thousand arrows flew thru it
So it seemed Lear floated on those

Burning stairs a ghost if eyes were
Ever certain and they are not would

We see ourselves again in reflections
Of other eyes could this heart Cor

delia be true if eyes didn’t just take
In light but threw it out into world

What I alighted under it singing oth
er kinships in this dark under this

Dark lamp by which our straying
Says everything the dead who never

See me speaking for them won’t save
Us spirits what work I can’t intend.


How will we know anything
The snow that surrounds us
Like an endless color I knew

We are simply a diadem for
ced to rule ever forced to
Rule by these objects with

These objects like the body
Was an object you said you
Object to this that we should

Be cremated so that they ca
n’t do anything with us when
We're dead those collectors

Of curiosities and culture
Other experiments upon un
ruly bodies subjects all this

Makes me think of our dis
agreement about some lines
I wrote that “the dead do not

intend anything” though I
Meant this as a question ab
out their powerlessness.


What exterior was I felt
Inside it your patience
The blood folds these
Worlds were one single

Information the way
The sunlight hits us while
We are here in bed no
Subject but in this ob

jective no other outside
In the lips begin it is not
As if we are outside them
Or inside them merely

When they touch and
Feeling begins somewhere
Else the lips begin to kiss
Like mirrors touching

Making no reflection but
One we can’t see this is ca
lled immediacy so love is
What we subtract from.

Organs Without Bodies

We gave our limbs we gave our throats
We gave our eyes to it and this is not
A voice for the dead organs float with
out bodies I wouldn’t wish my life

Upon anyone like an impossible image
We were anything other than this yet
That song gets sung for the numerous
For the numinous we are wastes the wo

rld is laid waste in reverse when we
Imagine other uses for I and we the
Way they became weapons and speak for
What they shouldn’t what they are not

This gift unaccountable of what a body
Can do we know too much we do not
Know what use to put it to so this is
More terrible than anything we know.

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...