my new students

I had a dream that a small white piece of fur was going to be in my class. They said it had eaten two cats. It bit me or scratched me, and I had a large gash. Beside it, someone was playing with tiny animals, one purple, one green. They had wings and tails and smiles. They were also going to be in my class.

Books, books, books. Unnameable Books (formerly Adam's Books). Dripping with books. Lie down, wait to become one. On a walk to Red Hook saw the other Adams Books. Got Lydia Davis, Break it Down. Broke it down. No I didn't.

That thing in the corner is a poem.

I saw an amazing deer sticker. My friends have the most amazing deer stickers, full of emotion.

BAPM!!!

I stole this from NEG at humanverb.blogspot.com. For some reason every year I have a hard time finding out about the Bay Area Poetry Marathon and usually miss the whole thing even though it takes place over several months:

The 2007 Bay Area Poetry Marathon

Curated by Donna de la Perriere & Joseph Lease

Saturday, May 26, 7-9 PM
Lee Ann Brown, Anna Eyre, Kevin Killian, Erin Morrell, Stephen Ratcliffe.

Saturday, June 30, 7-9 PM
Polly Conway, Diane DiPrima, Sara Lihz Dobel, Camille Dungy, Israel Haros, Paul Hoover.

Saturday, July 28, 7-9 PM
Albert Flynn De Silver, Noah Eli Gordon, Lyn Hejinian, Jane Miller, Rusty Morrison, Jessica Wickens.

Saturday, August 25, 7-9 PM
Edward Foster, Judith Goldman, Andrew Joron, Dana Teen Lomax, Denise Newman, Lisa Robertson.

$3-$15 sliding scale admission

From its inception during the summer of 2001, the Boston Poetry Marathon developed a national reputation among experimental poets. An annual weekend-long event, it featured approximately 40 readers (poets primarily but also artists from mixed genres). Everyone, from the distinguished poetic elder to the excited emerging poet, read for 20 minutes each. Boston Marathon readers included Charles Bernstein, Maxine Chernoff, Norma Cole, Robert Creeley, Forrest Gander, Laura Mullen, David Shapiro, Tom Sleigh, Cole Swensen, and many others. When co-founders / co-curators Donna de la Perriere and Joseph Lease moved to the Bay Area in 2003, they moved the Poetry Marathon to San Francisco. A tremendous success, the 2004, 2005, and 2006 Bay Area Poetry Marathons took place as four day long events at The LAB. This year, poets from across the U.S. and the Bay Area join together again to celebrate innovative poetry in a series of readings throughout the summer at The LAB. Come join us to hear this year's exciting line-up!

For more information on upcoming events at The LAB visit our website at www.thelab.org

for lack of anything better i'm writing about the typewriter. my mind is clear, i don't know about clear and strong like result of meditation but anyway clear. my responsibilities are few for the summer. it's a state of mind i forgot i'd return to.

new york is a lot dirtier than california but surfaces are ready for it. in california we have carpets and metal window frames. hardwood floors in brooklyn are supposed to be covered with black dust that never leaves your feet until you scrape that skin off. and the open windows have leafy trees outside them. that is what i want in my life. leafy trees outside my windows. shade trees. we don't have those so much in oakland. just oaks with tiny leaves. live oaks, stubbornly alive.

llb and i are using the mail, the real mail, the realmail. writing poems and mailing them. however there are glitches. we had to drive up a huge hill to get one of the typewriters and then climb a long stairway. they were moving and the man's grown child seemed reluctant to let her take the typewriter. was the child there or did he just mention it?

llb moved three times without trying out the typewriter. in her current residence, we wrote one poem. first the typewriter was broken. then i fixed it by snapping a piece together. it was not really broken. the poem was called "first poem." yesterday she was typing a copy to send me. three lines in, the ink ran out. that typewriter is electric. it erases the whole word when you make a mistake.

now she'll have to go to the typewriter store for a ribbon. i have a typewriter. a black smith-corona. it takes serious finger muscles to get the letters out. the poems i wrote on it in grad school seemed momentous. so much noise for those letters. the force damaged the table underneath. but those poems...not as good as the effort.

here my sister has an underwood. i could type this post on it, photograph the page, and post it as a jpeg. then it wouldn't be searchable. i think the underwood belonged to my great aunt mary. correct me if i'm wrong.

UPDATE: LLB: my typewriter IS really loud

I got my book back from the most unreachable book shelf. I peered into a private park, knowing a friend could get me in and get me out. I'm reading Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance. Watching John from Cincinnati, Deadwood. I'm going to meet my cousin for the parade.

brooklyn sounds

trying to get some sounds on this thing, a better microphone. buses, cars, airplanes, kids, yelling, cars, buses, airplanes, horns, birds, wind. all you can hear is the trucks and buses on the thing that i can't put on this thing.

there's a sound tunnel. a street's a sound tunnel and the sound tunnels by. earlier i napped through thunder, wind, dark clouds, rain, yelling, and woke up to sun shining at 8 o'clock. only hearing all that, i couldn't have slept. listening in the sounds, awake. longest day of the year.

Ariel Pink

"For Kate I Wait"

Decalogue IV: Young Polish woman's very cool, in theatre school, loves her dad.

According to the New Yorker and the archives in Austin, DeLillo wanted Panasonic to be the title for what become White Noise.

the tiny #3 available

the tiny #3 features work by Andrea Baker, Ellen Baxt, Edmund Berrigan, Mark Bibbins, Daniel Borzutzky, Kristy Bowen, Joseph Bradshaw, John Coletti, Rachel Conrad, Crystal Curry, Michelle Detorie, Julia Drescher, Will Edmiston, Bonnie Emerick, Betsy Fagin, Paul Fattaruso, Peter Gizzi, Scott Glassman, Sarah Goldstein, Garth Graeper & Jason Sheridan, Eryn Green, Kristen Hanlon, Mike Hauser, Anthony Hawley, Anne Heide, Brenda Iijima, Greg Koehler, Rodney Koeneke, Michael Koshkin, Tim Lantz & Mark Yakich, Lauren Levin, Jill Magi, C.J. Martin, Joseph Massey, Kristi Maxwell, Ange Mlinko, Michael Montlack, Marci Nelligan, Nick Piombino, Billy Ramsell, F. Daniel Rzicznek, Brandon Shimoda, Logan Ryan Smith, Maggie Smith, Chad Sweeney, Derek White, Dustin Williamson, and Devon Wootten, with cover art by Andrew Mister.

the tiny is available for purchase for $12.00 by clicking on the
PayPal link below, or by sending a check made out to Gina Myers or
Gabriella Torres to the tiny, 95 Verona St. #4, Brooklyn, NY 11231.

Paypal

the tiny website is currently being updated to include purchasing
information for the current issue as well as submission guidelines for
our next reading period which will begin in August. Please check back
in the next week or two at http://thetinyjournal.com.

Are you afraid of studying? Living in darkness? Fearful of pencils? Too exhausted to turn on the light?

Once I take this test on Saturday, I can teach you or your child to read. I'm not too worried except when I look at the website, which makes me want to check into a soothing facility.

The bomb lance fragment, lodged in a bone between the whale’s neck and shoulder blade, was probably made in New Bedford

Cetacean citation , courtesy of LB.

These are my real friends. They are people with jobs in their fields of interest.

When I couldn't sleep I was thinking about Miranda July's book No one belongs here more than you, which has a fabulous website created with a dry erase marker, a stove and a refrigerator. I was thinking what I love about the book is 1) a lot of the people in the book are alone; 2) characters are deeply affected by common phrases/normative speech; they say cheesy things with sincerity; they say exactly what they think they mean; often they say amazing things 3) characters seek out companionship in strange ways, seek out strange sex; nearly all of it feels real; 4) humor: we're screwed up; it's sad but funny. I was thinking, Mop the kitchen floor.

Kansas City

Steven Holl's addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City opened yesterday. I grew up a few blocks away. In April, I made a video of the Walter De Maria pool lighting the parking lot below.

Sharon Osmond, Jasper Bernes, Elizabeth Marie Young, Kristen Yawitz

Xantippe Reading Saturday Night at Pegasus Books. More info here. Go see Sharon Osmond. She is amazing.

My last day of school.

Finishing Great Jones Street I found pages written by one who had lost language. A fictional drug possibly developed by the government to take language away from those who cause trouble. See Saturday, June 2nd.

Great Jones Street 2

Savoring the end of Great Jones Street. It wants to be a really bad movie in my head. I want to read the DeLillo plays.

Good sentence: "I picked up the telephone and listened to the dial tone, music of a dead universe."

Now most of us don't even hear it.

"A touch of comic paranoia, I thought. One disguise covering another. The touring clown doubly self-effaced."

The narrator, the rock star experiencing privacy, frequently fades into the background while speaking in his own voice. We get the meta DeLillo narrator talking our ear off, then a little bit of Bucky Wunderlick jumps in to remind us who he is:

"They will study us not by digging into the earth but by climbing vast dunes of industrial rubble and mutilated steel, seeking to reach the tops of our buildings. Here they'll chip lovingly at our spires, mansards, turrets, parapets, belfries, water tanks, flower pots, pigeon lofts and chimneys.

"I turned south on Broadway."

Wunderlick interjects with his "I" then a new paragraph begins, similar to that above. I love those moments. We're steered through the story with sentences borrowed from reality. Diction changes from matter-of-fact to wildly repetitive, invented slang, real slang. A character's thought can take up a page. The response to it may be one word. This is how the rhythm balances itself.

Monday, June 4, 2007

It is the human that is the alien

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

-from Wallace Stevens, "Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"

This reminds me of Josh telling me that in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema Slavoj Zizek says language is alien to us. We shove it in our youngsters' ears, otherwise it wouldn't be in their throats. And if you know people who are naturally nonverbal, you get to see that language is not the only way to be human. Which is kind of insane after you spend years writing and reading poetry. One of my nonverbal students leaned over and puked on the floor next to his desk and then he said "Health Services," two words I have never heard him say. He prefers not to talk. Language is purely functional for him. He can express his needs. He can "play" with one meaningless phrase, like the name of a radio station, repeating it for months without making any syntactical substitutions or changing intonation. Through him I've learned there is thinking without thought. There's spatial thinking, desire thinking, movement planning...My thinking of how to relate to one who doesn't have language is observational, experimental, repetitive, at its best I guess it's wordless. Stevens poem hopes that god is nonverbal and that he cannot hear us. Our speech makes us alien. It's great to be alien sometimes. Sometimes we can be our animal selves silent with the natural world. But once we're infected with speech, we can't get rid of it. We could try to take it from our children. I don't think we should.

Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit


If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost

Or Aristotle’s skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
as those are: as light, for all its motion, is,

As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.

Light Perception