FCF 120

so technically I might be 64% mad …

which is a change
from zombie-like ooze-creatures …

and an entire town enamored by a simple rock …

“Is this the right one thing you haunt? …

living large and in stereo. If

you
were alive
all those years,

what
would you
say happened? Did

you
like it,
or didn’t you?

Did
you want
ever to trade

it
in? The
answer is, it

doesn’t
come in
a package, you

are
there all
through, stoned or

not.
You are
not an exception.

If
there was
a puppy playing

with
a ball,
you’d not be

confused.
Yet your
own delight, just

the
same, seems
to need reasons.

“Can
you afford
not to make

the
magical study
which happiness is?”

So
Olson translates
Rimbaud, his last

poem,
I believe.
Did he fade

out
into heaven?
I don’t think

so.
As if
the world were,

I
mean, let
me write this,

I
mean, That
is the glebe

and
this is
the glissando, I

mean,
it ALL
beglozes in a

swoon
of brilliant
corners and a

big
return, I
mean, sometimes, the

hand
sits quietly
on the flaming

arm.
I no
longer have

any
sort of
thirst. My sword

made
from a
shark’s-tooth smile

is
becoming terribly
useless. You can’t

put
Z against
A in ten

minutes.
A Sex
of Lists. Violins,

like
dreams, are
suspect. She asks,

Is
this the
one called Passages,

or
is that
one to the

west?
The lamp
burns on top

of
an unsafe
forest. The applause

faints
underneath the
cryptic percent. Yes,

yes,
or Cage’s –
to paraphrase a

bit –
let the
mess shine in!

mbers shoul ha gn
uides
e
ity
f
ected

crack blank fast air con’t

Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes

the horizon or deep down in the chest

“Nothing conclusive …”

inaudible incredible

the
murmur that
comes to us

scraps
of code
eyes painted open

on
the deathmask
“resolved the sky

bears
the enjambments
petit récits “should

aggregate”
a spasm
of zig-zags

suddenly
the street
was bananas and

the
clangor of
Japanese instruments

[Note: I’ve used the last book on the shelf. This is it. For Rebecca Loudon. Sources: Crg Hill, “Now Available: Xerolage 44 – “proviles encouragolage” by musicmaster”, at Crg Hill’s Poetry Scorecard, 13 Jan 010; Nada Gordon, “I Was Making Some Tuna Melts”, at ululations, 13 Jan 010; ablurb for Sawako Nakayasu, Texture Notes, and Travis Nichols, in blurb for his Iowa, in email from Letter Machine, rec’d 13 Jan 010; Richard Lopez, “got the beat”, at Really Bad Movies, 12 Jan 010. 1-3 hits from each of those in the 2nd half of Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics (ed. Peter Baker). And. Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson (translating Rimbaud), as quoted by Creeley, “Was That a Real Poem or Did You Just Make It up Yourself”, “Nothing New”; Stephen Rodefer, “Codex”, “Child of Faust”; The Random Sentence Generator; Aimé Césaire, “At the Locks of the Void” (trs. Clayton Eshleman and A. James Arnold), at Poems and Poetics, 13 Jan 010; Clark Coolidge, and Morton Feldman, as quoted by Coolidge, “Regarding Morton Feldman’s Music and Wherever It All Now Goes”, “A Sex of Lists”; Michael Palmer, “Autobiography”; Creativity Tools Random Sentence Generator; Joan Retallack, “The Poethical Wager”, “The Women in the Chinese Room…………..A Prospective”; Nicole Brossard, “Fluid Arguments”; Mikhail Bakhtin, as quoted by Carolyn Forché, and Forché herself, “On Subjectivity”, “Hive”; Bob Perelman, “The Manchurian Candidate: A Remake”; Lyn Hejinian, as quoted by Barrett Watten, and Watten himself , “Nonnarrative / History”, “Position”; John Ashbery, “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name”]

Comments

[Bob]

Congratulations!

[rebecca loudon]

Violins,
like
dreams, are
suspect.

This work is vivid. Fluid. Not at all suspect. Thank you!
xor