"The Windhover" - Gerard Manley Hopkins

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,	5
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion	10
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion

If you are turned away by someone inscrutable whom you nonetheless love, what do you learn?

Fanny Howe, "After 'Prologue'"

Wanting to know is what makes me do things I don't want to do.

Wanting to know how far I can go with what I know.

Fanny Howe, "Catholic"

The Catholic Church once demonstrated the belief that the brain is the site of consciousness; that the body is not an illusion; that a person can be injured by thoughts. In accepting this situation, the Church tried to influence people, to turn ugly words into radiant ones, to feed each mind with sublime vocabularies. To offer repetition, rhythm, an end to the separation between speaking and hearing.

Fanny Howe, White Lines

Our field is the sky

Worked by the sweat of motors,

Faced with the night

At risk of motors

Who lived here? WHo has clean hands?

Who glinted in the phantom night

For other phantoms?

Who lives there below? Who is weeping?

Who has lost the key to the house?

Who cannot find the bed? Who is sleeping

On the steps of the stairs? Who, when the morning comes,

Will dare to interpret the silvery trail?

Look above me

When the water again pushes the watermill round,

Who will dare to remember the night?

Ingeborg Bachmann, "Fleeing by Night"

Who is walking beneath the quayside trees? Who is lost, utterly lost? On whose tomb does the grass grow? Dreams have arrived, they came up against the current, they climb the quayside wall with the aid of a ladder. People stop. People converse with them. They know many things. Only they do not know where they come from. That they do not know. It is warm on this autumn evening. They turn to the river and raise their arms. "Why do you raise your arms, and not close them round us?"

Kafka

Writers are afraid. Almost all those whose instrument of work is language are afraid: journalists, critics, university teachers, almost all of them. Fear and lies govern their tastes and their activities. Fear of what? Fear of death by social starvation, fear of not being invited to the dominant banquet, fear of not immediately receiving a pittance of compliments, fear of not being published, of not winning prizes, of not being invited onto the greatest possible number of TV programs. Fear of not belonging to the powerful cliques that reign over institutions private and public, fear of not belonging to the inquisition clubs. Fear for their reputation, fear of not being cited in the maximum number of papers, fear of not always being congratulated, of never being congratulated, fear of being unmasked and called inferior, fear of not getting in touch with the establishment, fear of never getting a taste of power, fear of exile, of cold, of solitude, of that sever climate that follows the artist, as Joyce well knew. Fear of being honest and of this old fashioned virtue costing them very dearly indeed.

Helene Cixous, We who are free, are we free?

12:42pm

Single: adj: individual: being or characteristic of a single thing or person, solitary or sole; lone.

8:30 p.m.

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like her

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

I don’t like it

text tree n solid root you find, you roll

crouched like a crow

dress up as this though another

question o,k. knight may me my i

ow go further yeoman ch. chooo

invent my identity

social roll you are avail able

hi me a-don't recognize me, mi

you're my vegetalia

typing too loud in the car on the way back from Evansville, Indiana

for k.

it's silver, not gray

could get it, no no didn't get it no no, you warned me

ah meeee, made noise enround

black bed horsey.

black bed window.

black bed open.

black bed yes.

black bed red and black and hingest hottest rug

need you (k)now

went up, and up hund, grood, no no you are you-your grooved pinion on little button carnival backdrop. leaf. leg to arm at mi. it's silver, not grey

o,k.

you-you're round, it's grey, not brown. getting somewhere here. like where this is going somewhere. now here we are getting somewhere no no again.

"...the agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks (for it is she who is constrained), but in the one who listens and says nothing; not in the one who knows and answers, but in the one who questions and is not supposed to know." - Foucault

ENG 402 Post

Hawkins' piece completely challenged the way in which I have been thinking about new media. Am I allowed to say that? It's just one essay. It's just one person's belief about the importance of new media, and the connections she is making to her experiences with new media and the pedagogy she employs. I was confronted and shaken by this text. In my apprehension to seek out and utilize new media, I was affirmed and consoled by this text. We as teachers need to work with new media so that we can feel and understand the extent to which our students feel confused and challenged by their projects? Hells yes, praise the lord, and pass the salt! If this desire to deconstruct, make new, make fragmented, make visible, make unsure, create tension, is a main idea or ideal component of the pedagogy I am developing as a new teacher, which it most certainly is, how can new media function for me as a teacher and a learner? I challenge my students to write an

essay

…

paragraph

…

sentence

…

word

…

letter

…

THOUGHT

This is not easy for them. The impossibility of a word. I am challenged to further develop a pedagogy.

Hawkins says it best when she says we are situated within a "current historical context." Our current historical context is not only a suggestive for new media. We are not. It is not an option! We are not being asked to incorporate new media into our teaching practices and pedagogy. Our current historical moment demands it. "And your resistance will only result in your own disability, your own immaturity" she says. I see my students resisting and resisting, paralyzed by the inquisition of a why, the seemingly perilous nature of constructing the sentence, expanding the thought. I am equally resistant to new media. Paralyzed! Para/lyzed. Para/lies.

Everything comes back to queer theory.

Hawkins writes, "I imagined what it means to my students to 'read' as a butch lesbian, how that would or would not differ from reading as a trasngendered person, how and why this may or may not affect their ability to learn to write in my classroom. As a writing instructor, I mark their essays and mark myself. How are these markings related?" I love the parallel she is creating between genderqueer (I would even argue genderfuck), and new media. What happens when we step outside of a prescriptive method of identity is what happens when we step outside of a prescriptive method of composition is what happens when we step outside of a prescriptive method of language. Markings emerge on my body as a text. My power is exerted through my body. The choices I make pertaining to my body are the scripts through which my students read my text.

I am comforted and challenged by what Hawkins says at the end of her manifesto: "All you need to do is believe that you have a shot at the magic, your own magic." When such mechanisms for invention as the typewriter or the word processor came into being and students were confronted with learning how to use these mechanisms for composition, I'm sure there was apprehension and distrust. How could these students and teachers adapt and embrace these mechanisms, and how is this different from what contemporary learners and teachers are faced with today? Not so different, huh? We can do it, 402-ers! We can do it!

"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" - Wallace Stevens

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be

The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

The access of perfect to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

exerpt from "Infected Elegy," Selah, Joshua Corey

ah the moment before letters form
burns heaven behind your eyes
to empurple enroyal blood-temper
though I parted your book not in order
think skin a place for the pulse
to kneel or clutch your knees or bemoan
meeting and missing in the orchard
the hopeless equivalence of systems
what we were a blind pair of throats
who teaches me hot to find God
on the volume and verse of being
on the pale printed page of your bed
we had no recourse but discoursing
look love the light's better here

"57=12=3," from The Dik-dik's Solitude by Anne Tardos

Prostitution candy wrap gallivanting sweetie
Blues donkey, Jew's monkey, everlasting news junkie

Lavender elephant
Piggly Wiggly evidence

Grange wool simulacrum eigen perseverance.
Gangliated fitz-koh macafee connection, matz-koh.
Eagan again.

A baby gorilla mistook his hat for his gingiva. No shame, Sir. Your
hair is not my hair. No shame. Semiramis hubbub and a charivari
collarbone.

Fuck you, Semiramis. Macafee fromage desiration frock-coat.
I gladly form English sentences.

Iffy nanny incantations.
Five and seven make twelve.

The law says it all.
Maybe.

Steadfast kitchen drainage erosion darling.
V-neck validation negligenty critical.

What's my story?
Fifty-seven people were killed in the 1994 earthquake in Lost Angeles.

Words no longer pronouncing the letter l are walk, talk, folk,
yolk, palm, salmon, half, calm, almond, and a few others.

Vaccination metaphysics Iris Murdoch never mind.
Episodic nifty ginger.

Slide 57 shows an example of Acne Vulgaris. Ingenuity.
Fast Fifty Seven - Synovial Carcinoma.
Primitive simplicity.

Election enigma academic epidemic.
Maphtalene gossamer bioremediation.

The Male

Epilogue

Rituals are like ducks in pink water, says the Male. Like everything else he says this is from out of the blue. In the background Baudelaire imitates an orator, "If I am not decorated for having my duty, I will cease to do it..." Words come to the Male. They are not willed into being. There is a sinking feeling at the end of any utterance. The last word may be accident use up the potential of all the others. Then the pitch downward will be into the eternity of the Male's mind, his endless spontaneity and lack of preference. When I drink pink water out of the bowl shaped from his head, he looks at my throat. Bolus, says the Male. This seems to cover up some kind of disparity. The desire to be touched is overwhelming. But who's desire is it? This relates back to our initial conversation, where one word could be taken to the land of many.

-Carla Harryman

There is no first or last discourse, and dialogical context knows no limits...At every moment of the dialogue, there are immense and unlimited masses of forgotten meanings, but, in some subsequent moments, as the dialogue moves forward they will return to memory and live in renewed form...Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will celebrate its rebirth.

Mikhail Bakhtin, last written words, 1974

from The Cold of Poetry - Lyn Hejinian

The Person

I love the weather
The scene in nervous snapping
Rocks rise in a rain bearing bridges, chairs
The emotions follow...watchful
My desire is dragging direction to say this
The pen is a nag
The bulb crackles
The sky was never a chipped ceramic
Bulk is brightened by collapse

On my skin are a million lozenges
And outside are stalks of dirt upon inspection
Dimension and longevity--they raise ridges of
description
Here are Rock-drop and Asylum, almost alone
Poem, or ragged prose
The pulse is not an omen of rhythm to come
Pedagogic love
Learning is like poetry-an uncalm practice
It makes the promise of unlikeness and discipline
I love a trilling bird with extended dawn
vocabulary

LH

I'm filled with holes.  I used to see spackle in my relationships

with people.  And I still have a hard time holding on.  But really,

there is nothing to be filled in.  Knowing this gives me some com-

fort because it means that I have to live with my losses as one

would live without an arm: being constantly aware of the phan-

tom lim sensation that wants so desperately to connect, to be

filled in, with flesh.  But ultimately, I have to survive by rewriting

the script that assumes the spaces have to be filled in.  They don't

-like the universe, my holes are filled with their own energies,

forces fields, and pulls.  The challenge is to recognize this anti-

matter as some kind of sustenance; to find in holes a certain kind

of completion.

KP

From Kristin Prevallet's I, Afterlife

[Maxim]

Never fall in love with a text that attempts to convince you that you are already dead.

Or that says you are a vampire.

Or that makes you feel distant, aloof, removed from the scene.

Because the crime has already been committed.

You don't need to read about the gory details to know that it was violent.

We were both there, all along.

The only difference is that I see autumn leaves and immediately hear the gunshot.

You just want to see the body and marvel at how it fell forward, and then was left behind.

Some excerpts from "Castration or Decapitation?" - Helen Cixous

She does not hold onto loss, she loses without holding onto loss.  This makes her writing a body that overflows, disgorges, vomits as opposed to masculine incorporation…She loses , and doubtless it would be to the death were it not for the intervention of those basic movements of a feminine unconscious (this is how I would define feminine sublimation)  which provide the capacity of passing above it all by means of a form of oblivion which is not the oblivion of burial or interment but the oblivion of acceptance.  This is taking loss, seizing it, living it.  Leaping.   This goes with not withholding: she does not withhold.  She does not withhold, hence the impression of constant return evoked by this lack of withholding.  It's like a kind of open memory that ceaselessly makes way.  And in the end, she will write this not-withholding, this not-writing: she writes of non-writing, not-happening…She crosses limits: she is neither outside nor in, whereas the masculine would tray to "bring the outside in, if possible."

Let's look not at syntax but at fantasy, at the unconscious: all the feminine texts I've read are very close to the voice, very close to the flesh of language, much more so than masculine texts…perhaps because there's something in them that's freely given, perhaps because they don't rush into meaning, but are straightway at the threshold of feeling.  There's tactility in the feminine text, there's touch, and this touch passes through the ear.  Writing in the feminine is passing on what is cut out by the Symbolic, the voice of the mother, passing on what is most archaic.  The most archaic force that touches a body is one that enters by the ear and reaches the most intimate point.  This innermost touch always echoes in a woman-text.  I see it as an outpouring…which can appear in primitive or elementary texts as a fantasy of blood, of menstrual flow, etc., but I prefer to see as vomiting, as "throwing up," "disgorging," And I'd link this with a basic structure of property relations defined by mourning.

This is how I would define a feminine textual body: as a female libidinal economy, a regime, energies, a system of spending not necessarily carved out by culture.  A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending: there's no closure, it doesn't stop, and it's this that very often makes the feminine text difficult to read.  For we've learned to read books that basically pose the word "end."  But this one doesn't finish, a feminine text goes on and on and at a certain moment the volume comes to an end but the writing continues and for the reader this means being thrust into the voice.  These are texts that work on the beginning but not on the origin.  The origin is a masculine myth: I always want to know where I come from.  The question "Where do children come from?" is basically a masculine, much more than feminine, question.  The quest for origins, illustrated by Oedipus, doesn't haunt a feminine unconscious.  Rather it's the beginning, or beginnings, the manner of beginning, not promptly with the phallus in order to close with the phallus, but startling on all asides at once, that makes a feminine writing.  A feminine text start on all sides at once starts twenty times, thirty times, over.

Women who write have for the most part until now considered themselves to be writing not as women but as writers.  Such women may declare that sexual difference means nothing, that there's no attributable difference between masculine and feminine writing…What does it mean to "take no position"?  When someone says "I'm not political" we all know what that means!  It's just another way of saying: "My politics are someone else's!"  And it's exactly the case with writing!  Most women are like this: they do someone else's-man's-writing, and in their innocence sustain it and give it voice, and end up producing writing that's in effect masculine.  Great care must be taken in working on feminine writing not to get trapped by names: to be signed with a women's name doesn't necessarily make a piece of writing feminine.  It could quite well be masculine writing, and conversely, the fact that a piece of writing is signed with a man's name does not in itself exclude femininity.  It's rare, but you can sometimes find feminist in writing signed by men: it does happen.

Now, I think that what women will have to do and what they will do, right from the moment they venture to speak what they have to say will of necessity bring about a shift in metalanguage.  And I think we're completely crushed, especially in places like universities, by the highly repressive operations of metalanguage, the operations, that is, of the commentary on the commentary, the code, the operation that sees to it that the moment women open their mouths-women more often than men-they are immediately asked in whose name and from what theoretical standpoint they are speaking, who is their master and where they are coming from: they have, in short, to salute…and show their identity papers.  There's work to be done against class, against categorization, against classification-classes.  "Doing classes" in France means doing military service.  There's work to be done against military service, against all schools, against the pervasive masculine urge to judge, diagnose, digest, name…not so much in the sense of the loving precision of poetic naming as in that of the repressive censorship of philosophical nomination/conceptualization.

Women would then have to start by resisting the movement of re-appropriation that rules the whole economy, by being party no longer to the masculine return, but by proposing instead a desire no longer caught up in the death struggle, no longer implicated in the reservation and reckoning of the masculine economy, but breaking with the reckoning that "I never lose anything except to win a bit more"…so as to put aside all negativeness and bring out a positivness which might be called the living other, the rescued other, the other unthreatened by destruction.   Women have it in them to organize this regeneration, this vitalization of the other, of otherness in its entirety.  They have it in them to affirm the different, their difference, such that nothing can destroy that difference, rather that it might be affirmed, affirmed to the point of strangeness.  So much so that when sexual difference, is touched on, the whole problem of destroying the strange, destroying all the forms of racism, all the exclusions, all of those instances of outlaw and genocide that recur through History, is also touched on.  If women were to set themselves to transform History, it can safely be said that every aspect of History would be completely altered.  Instead of being made by man, History's task would be to make woman, to produce her.  And it's at this point that work by women themselves on women might be brought into play, which would benefit not only women but all humanity.

57+12+3 - Anne Tardos

Prostitution candy wrap gallivanting sweetie

Blues donkey, Jew's monkey, everlasting news junkie

Lavender elephant

Piggly Wiggly evidence

Grange wool simulacrum eigen perseverance

Gangliated fitz-koh macafee connection, matz-koh

Eagan again.

A baby gorilla mistook his hat for his gingiva.  No shame, Sir. Your

hair is not my hair.  No shame.  Semiramis hubbub and a charivari

collarbone.

Fuck you, Semiramis.  Macafee fromage desiration frock-coat.

I gladly form English sentences.

Iffy nanny incantations.

Five and seven make twelve.

The law says it all.

Maybe.

Steadfast kitchen drainage erosion darling.

V-neck validation negligently critical.

What's my story?

Fifty-seven people were killed in the 1994 earthquake in Lost Angeles.

Words no longer pronounced the letter l are walk, talk, folk,

yolk, palm, salmon, half, calm, almond, and a few others.

Vaccination metaphysics Iris Murdoch never mind.

Episodic nifty ginger.

Slide 57 shows an example of Acne Vulgaris.  Ingenuity.

Case Fifty Seven - Synovial Carcinoma.

Primitive simplicity.

Election enigma academic epidemic

Naphtalene gossamer bioremediation.

some criteria of poetic analysis suggested by Lyn Hejinian

• a poem is not an isolated autonomous rarified aesthetic object
• a person (a poet) has no irreducible ahistorical, unmediated, singular, kernel identity
• language is a preeminently social medium
• the structures of language are social structure sin which meanings and intentions are already in place
• institutionalized stupidity and entrenched hypocrisy are monstrous and should be attacked (Professor Cynthia Huff particularly loves this one)
• racism, sexism, and classism are repulsive
• prose is not necessarily not poetry
• theory and practice are not antithetical
• it is not surrealism to compare apples to oranges
• intelligence is romantic (The Language of Inquiry)

my poem of protection

Poem of Protection

Isis, agape theon
lover of lilacs and bronze!

Protect Jenna Lynn Goldsmith, my rainbow, queen dyke, mullet walker, scholar of English studies and feminism, writer of beautiful words, intensely secular jew-ish, silhouette of androgyny reading Sexton, Whitman, Tennyson, driver of a bumper of social issues for peace and equality, wearer of hemp, burner of jasmine, drinker of soy milks, nosher of toast, sporter of numerous high fashion hoodies and blue bandannas

Shield her from all forms of water falling from the sky
acids rains, slight drizzles, snow pellets, hail storms, summer monsoons, wet socks, cold jeans, frizzy hair, the mist off Lake Summerfest
use uninvertible umbrellas, silver awnings, hoods of faux fur, petition to the rain gods! such as Cocijo of Mexico, Mulungu of Africa, Tawhaki of the South Pacific, Lei Gong of East Asia and Thor of the Marvel Comics

Block her irrational fear of hoo-ved animals especially those of North America who may attack like the White-tail deer, the Mule deer, the Sitka deer the Elk and the albino deer that roam Argonne National Laboratory with a vengeance, that are especially
ferocious

Isis, agape theon
lover of lilacs and bronze!

Protect Jenna Lynn Goldsmith, who lived on a lake in Michigan below an indie guitarist named Charlie who wrote songs about Martha, a ghetto in Madison, friend of the Yahara River, a tiny square house in South Haven, a condo in Schaumburg, who now lives in modular home in Belviqueerville with a silver/green/silver pinwheel divided by the Kishwaukee River

Guard her weakened immune system from allergens and allergy-induced asthma, sinus infections, packets of nasal phlegm, cat dander, dust, pollen, mold, feathers and leppits with hypoallergenic breeds, air purifiers, nose spritzers, Zyrtec, Allegra D, forget Claritin, soap scum remover and featherless dusters

Hold her during the death of her mother, Martha Ann Trowe, who hugged me first and knew me later, lover of Door County coffee, teacher of giving, expert photographer of the Sycamore, the Pin Oak, the Buttonbush and the Sweet gum but who also has an office and a desk as a carpenter contractor, lover of Jenna so much

Hold her during the death of her Grandmother, Haroldine Bernadette Sorensen who married Herbert Trowe, divorced Herbert Trowe, married Herbert Trowe, divorced Herber Trowe, then partnered a woman named Caroline, fellow English professor, who she walked with on the beaches but could not hold her hand, lover of Jenna so much


Isis, agape theon
lover of lilacs and bronze!

Find Jenna Lynn Goldsmith who spent her summers as manager of guest services, author of term papers, on Rape and Sexual power, the Stigmatization of AIDS, speaker of Spanish II, proof reader of my abominable prose, runner of town errands, genius conversationalist, maker of eye contact and mixtapes

Deflect her from my mother, Maria Anne Mazzola Coyle, who is trying
who knew me as girl scout, bride, boy crazy, Catholic school girl, soccer player, only daughter, virgin, Nicholas Sparks, honor student, sound breeder, big sister, collector of marbles, volunteer, teacher, her sweet Melissa she should have put in more dresses, bought more Barbies thought less of the saber-tooth, read more Babysitter’s Club, watched less Star Wars, planted a rose not dug up a worm
who forgot misprint on the upper middle class nuclear family, poet, vegetarian, bundle of social issues, queer, secret from Grandma, novus scholar of post-modern, traveler of the world, lover, idealist, foolish

Isis, agape theon
lover of lilacs and bronze!

Adore Jenna Lynn Goldsmith who even before we met I longed for her thorax, hinge joints, carpals, fibula, the dear roof of her mouth and other obscure parts, who has her very own handwriting, a nose ring, two tattoos but wants another, fake poet glasses, a turtle named Buddy who is twenty-five years old, reminiscent of the Archelon ischyros, who likes ketchup but also chocolate chip pancakes

Protect her from mundane living circumstances
let her love her coffee every day, give her Sunday mornings with perfect toast, a bookshelf so collected, sun sliding in envelopes, an endless lover, real flowers, smile at bad drivers, let her notice every building on the way to work, find the curious intellect of every student, let the weather take her back with old feelings, have every lovely piece of word move her, have mercy on the kingdom of insects

Protect her from the story of us
mornings like yesterday
graduate schools and their state flowers

at Las Vegas the sagebrush
at Philadelphia the mountain laurel
at New Orleans the magnolia
at Notre Dame the peony
at Normal the purple violet
at Champaign-Urbana the purple violet
at San Francisco the poppy
at Chicago the purple violet
if we succeed there or there, future girlfriends who are not me, the drawer of poems we filled, the classes we skipped, hugs of absolute unselfishness, how I laid about you like a sponge, engrossed in identical breathes, that one time I took her to get sushi and let me pay, or that other time I showed her my bedroom and all my things, the other time we ordered pizza and wrote a poem together, or tripped to Northern Illinois under the siege of a snowstorm only to eat wheatbagels and drink coffee, or the last time we talked, when she showed me her bedroom and all of her things


Isis, agape theon
lover of lilacs and bronze!

Face her to hatred
who replaced the human with dyke, faggot, rugmuncher, homosexual, feminazi, catlapper, butch, kike
forgetter of Jenna Lynn Goldsmith, who looked past the stares of hatred to the soft retina of face into the flubbery lobe behind
who taught me to make human humans, make them people to the point of their sleeping breaths in steady rhythms, be love in their dreams, blanket their distant hearts, see them in the kitchen plucking unwanted hairs, riding the elevator to the 42nd floor, vomiting bile, surfing porn, loading the dishwasher, pinching their fat, wiping their glasses, inserting enemas, praying to the sky, tripping up curbs, flicking their boogers, kissing their mothers, holding on to each other

from Juliana Spahr's Response

VIII

an attempt to speak to the human moment will occur

in these moments someone touches someone

someone claims to love someone

someone moves closer to someone in prelude to a proposition

someone waits outside for someone to come by

someone becomes unable to live his/her life and succumbs

this is information that might be left out of witness

yet it has a bearing that is all the more strong

it speaks to the safety of immunity that does not exist

to the various other kinds of immunity that do exist

such as an emotional immunity to the world

a quarantine of engagement

a feeling of safety

which one do you believe?

some words to live by from Lyn Hejinian's My Life

So that if I tell you my intentions, I force myself to maintain those intentions.

I found myself dependent on a pause, a rose, something on paper.  It is a way of saying, I want you, too, to have this experience, so that we are more alike, so that we are closer, bound together, sharing a point of view--so that we are "coming from the same place."

If I couldn't be a cowboy, I wanted to be a sailor.

Now that I was "old enough to make my own decisions," I dressed like everyone else.  People must flatter their own eyes with their pathetic lives.

When you've exhausted setting, topic, or tone, begin a new paragraph.  The refrigerator makes a sound I can't spell.

from Juliana Spahr's The Transformation

So there was a certain emotion in the air.  This emotion was

trivial.  It was not an emotion that would last.  It was a passing

emotion.  It was the emotion commonly experiences around

brushes with disaster and the awareness of having been spared.

The after a hurricane, after a black out after a tornado, after

an earthquake emotion.  All of this gave the small parts of their

lives the same intensity with which they listened to poetry.

One night, standing in the cold out on the sidewalk looking at

the towers-of-light while waiting for friends to come out of the

bar, they realized that while the collapsing buildings did not

cause them to fall in love, make babies, give rings to one anoth

er, settle down finally after years of having trouble with com-

mittments, it did change the way they read poetry, the way they

looked at art, the way they thought about ideas.  Even before 

the buildings fell down, they had gone to many poetry read-

ings.  They went to poetry readings where poems that used frag-

mentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical

syntax, and so on were read.  On the odd occasion where the 

poets used complete sentences, they were usually used ironi-

cally.  The fragmentation felt reassuring to them.  Felt like a

trance-induced chant.  Like a philosophy of connection.  Like

a model of intimacy that was full of acquaintances and publics

that recognized not only points of contact and mixing, but also

relationship difficulties, cultural and linguistic difference.  And so

they often wondered in this time if perhaps all those who 

claimed that poetry was a comfort were right.  Even those

who claimed this were usually talking about lyric poetry and

not poetry that used fragmentation, quotation, disruption, dis-

junction, agrammatical syntax, and so on.  They had noticed

before that they felt writing in their body.  That they felt those 

certain sensations, those sensations of interested calmness that

happened when their mind and their breath were working

together, that pleasant boredom.  And they began at this time

to think of the poetry that used fragmentation, quotation, dis-

ruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on not as a 

radical avant-garde break but as the warm hand of someone

they loved stroking their head, helping them to relax the mus-

cles in their head and inviting them to just close their eyes and

relax for a second with the words of someone else.  This feeling 

somewhat answered that constant question of about the use of 

the avant-garde in a time like this.

from Juliana Spahr's The Transformation

Because the town was dirty, whenever they read poems about 

the beauty of the countryside or the rich, dark woods of the

eastern part of the continent or of the other continent, and

islands across the Atlantic, which was all they knew about

poetry because the only poems they read in school were about

stuff like this, poetry made little sense to them.  So then they

found this writing of fragmentation, quotation, disruption, dis-

junction, agrammatical syntax, and so on in an anthology.

This writing was at the time over sixty years old and mainly

written on the continent and the islands across the Atlantic

and yet it felt completely fresh and new and because they were

looking for something that was not a weird environmental lie,

and because this writing of fragmentation, quotation, disrup-

tion, disjunciton, agrammatical syntax, and so on was so weird

it at least didn't seem to be lying in the usual ways and they

clung to it and they felt it was a part of them.

Really what it was was that they felt this writing in their body.

They felt certain sensations, the sensations of interested calm-

ness that happened when their mind and their breath were

working together.  This sensation of interested calmness might

also be called pleasant boredom. There was something about 

the artfully vague repetition of this writing from afar that

pleased them.  It pleased them slightly but not too much and

from this mild stimulation certain thoughts formed in their

head and they felt they could pay attention to these thoughts

and their emerging symbols as much or as little as they wanted.

9:05 lost in Chinatown

assimilation is unfortunate
I contain the shudder urban cramp
the smoke pole
a too hot latte
peer’s book

farewell French sparrow
me time is always here
when you need it

condensed packet sounds
like a tax receipt
motion distracting
the borrowed barista ink

inky smudge finger/smudge
on my hi five-r
too late to avoid this pen type
from the burning lip beans

it’s not pleasant
somebody diarrheaed here
pounding iron, Texas
sheetrock planks
cold and burnt
air and oxygen container

you seldom know
tested it for me, disparaged
I guess
you should remember twenty
plus years and grasp, it
that okay?

this my available conversation
and stop opening the fucking door
she asked “Poet or fiction?”
I point: stage left
she suggested returning two-fold
revisit the classics
check page three
review the neglected submission
relish the error.

No parking sign
pre-paid parking feed, bye

synthetic down spread, bye

narrow cup for soy, bye

tenth floor windows and chairs
Chicago Cultural Center, bye

tenth floor: wood, stage, chairs
Columbia College, Chicago, bye

lowerlevel bookfair
Hilton, Chicago, bye

Mambo. Artists. Dunkin. Descartes, bye

Milkweed, Poet Lore, City Limits, Graywolf, Orion, Mandorla, Dalkey

bye
bye
bye
bye
bye

Six degrees of communism

Kriemhild in-love with Siegfried
every wit as much
as Gunther in-love
as much as Gunther seeks Brunhild
equally as does Etzel, with Kriemhid
where Siegbant of Ireland
seeing Ute, the Norwegian,
as Hetel of Hegelingen that of Hilde,
of Ireland
not foregetting Siegfried of Morland
Harmut of Orman,
and Herwig of course, well, Seeland loved Herwig.