AGAINST SPECIAL MOMENTS

Why I wake Mary O early
I will never know

I do not--for enrichment--own
the slightest view, nor its

window


*

fulfillment capital

surplus enrichment


*

(two poems that each need a second section)

1
Lobed, mellow
agreement.

Three shots
"rang

out." Blue
corps.

Add the
"e"

of the
air.


2
"More to be revealed"
said the white block
in the dark pool

You have to watch
reruns

for that.
The organizational

functions.
Loss on the vertigo-

danced horizon
of calm.


*

addenda

says the chimera

_______

laced
..........tide

_______

show your stock
a good time

bond, age, cow
(tick) talk

_______

feed us this crow
.
we don't know stones


***********

Today's reading: Carla Harryman's Open Box (improvisations). It's a great book. The form is highly liberating, and suggests valuable possibilities for writing to me. Each page consists of two four-line stanzas, with plenty of white space around them. The pairs most often seem like independent poems, but often the last line carries over syntactically into the first line of the next page, and themes recur at various points, so the book ends up reading like a very loose set of serial poems of varying lengths--or one book-length work. The way it can function formally in multiple ways thrills me--particularly the way this allows multiple simultaneous scales to work, often in friction with each other. The details (individual lines and stanzas) are generally stunning. The poems above, aside from being improvisations, have little to do with Harryman's book.

unmanned drones

pretending to be unmanned drones


*


I sing the body acoustic.
In this field, where becoming's pushed to such a speed
that we are robbed of the experience, the observation,
the sensation of change, and can only note that it has passed,

I write: POEM FOR--
--not a blank to be filled, but a direction of dedication, the possible
and the actual on equal terms.

The pretense here: I have not written such a poem.


For each stone from an old, old wall
meant not to mark territory, to make as permanent
as can withstand coldly the laughter at such pretense
the division within and between possible communities,

meant in quiet, forward-looking and defiant stead
to bank up the root place of the olive grove,

for each such stone--no longer in, but from--
and for the power to imagine, in each,
the memory of one now torn tree

--for each such stone a poem.


A lousy poem. Really notes toward a possible poem, for Palestine, or elsewhere. I am reading John Berger's Hold Everything Dear the best book of essays I've come across in some time. Dark, condensed responses to atrocity in the last nine years. Great writing, owing a good deal to Benjamin or the Adorno of Minima Moralia, or maybe not "owing"--it doesn't seem imitative, just unflinching and rich in similar ways.

Today's reading: Barbara Guest's The Blue Stairs. Guest's sense of form was phenomenal. I'm particularly struck by the title poem, and by the two in the middle entitled "The Return of the Muses" and "A Reason." There's a great variety here. As with many of the real "masters," I get the sense, in trying to figure out what it might have been like to write a given poem, that she "just did it," followed her compositional sense without question, but with an ongoing critical observation. It's not that there's any "ease" to the writing, or that it's particularly easy or difficult) to read--in fact, it's often upsetting, or thrilling in a kind of scary way--but that the poems seem so unapologetically what they are. Much to be learned from more reading of Guest.

The melon hides
the head
in wood. So what

is just
a faded
Should.

The new hot
pan in town
bordered by

holes. What did
the bleeding get
out. what did

you think, drink
at stars, a flagging
hoarse and guided

stab.



Today's reading: Norman Fischer's Charlotte's Way, in the beautiful edition from Tinfish Press (one long fold-out sheet, put together so well that I didn't see the seams until I was looking for them). I've found it hard to get incredibly excited about Fischer's work, but the straightforward, observant humility of this long poem makes me certain I'll come back to it for a second try. Its way of mapping daily experience and thought is an interesting contrast to Larry Eigner's.

I also read around a little in Benjamin Friedlander's The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes. I feel a strong kinship with Friedlander. His way of disrupting the poem, to fracture the smoothness in short lyrics, to introduce swift turns that send the energy of the poem off in unexpected directions, is something a lot of poets could learn from. I think he's at his best when he's not trying too hard to be "wrong"--I don't have any problem with obscenity, fecal matter, and so on, but it's less striking in his work than the other forms of disruptiveness there.

The sexual skeleton is cloyingly at wait
on the divan of darkly vandalized love.

A tarpaulin seen from two irreconcilable angles
can only have died in its sleep, too much on sale.

Kept printing out JAZZ MONKEY from the white ticker
tape machine erasing moss from a midget, page 15, raw cheat
pump deft
geisha chic
crop gran
it ick
lops side
sicle donor
hot butt
on invest
I equate it with great deeds
to put walnuts on the skin
of one's victims. She bangs an
egg against the bill of sale,
the boards that have replaced
Citizen Three with panel flips.


I'm trying to read a book of poems each day. Many, but not all, are short. Today's is Beverly Dahlen's A Reading: Spicer and 18 Sonnets. Many of my daily poems will be in some sense "imitations" of the day's reading. I don't see how I could imitate Dahlen without taking decades to do so. This one is closer to Bruce Andrews, I think.

Are you ready to become the man
you came here to be? Why do I present
this ironic facade, instead of asking
a genuine question? What is the question?
Why is it marked thus? What's the history
of that mark?

Is that a lotus behind my head? How far
from the last question to the last one? Am I
just happy to see me? Why do these questions
keep spiraling off, instead of delving deeper?
Why do I want deeper delving? Are the sexual
possibilities lost on me? Is that a real question?
What was the question? What was the gap?

What is performance? Does it involve that
tight feeling in the throat? That lonely olive
on the shelf? The presence of anything? Huh?
What? Paint? Tea? Stop now?


This poem, which fails somewhat miserably, owes its inspiration to today's reading: Steve Benson's Open Clothes. Benson's improvisations, all of which seem to involve the setting up of situations of vulnerability, uncertainty, probable embarassment and a great deal of brilliant surprise, are a recent inspiration to me. I've been meaning to really delve into his work for years, and this most recent book has me hooked. It'd be an interesting job to compare Benson's long sequences of questions with the questions that make up Ron Silliman's "Sunset Debris."

ok, a poem a day for the month of april

after Duncan

come back
as if
made up

I is
not mine

but makes
what is

by delimit:
walls shadow

and that's how we know
where we are


I'm a box
of bones,

their shapes
imitations

of the way
words always squirm
inside words

so that they don't
mean what they mean. they blanket the
squirming things.

I remember--enfold--at freeze--bent grass
in wind. I own it, but don't
own I. That is

the first persimmon. O mensch. O my.