Zeitgeist Spam

SPANSE 3 as reset by Steve Mitchell

SPANSE 6

When
you finally
climb up on

the
piano and
your hair starts

to
blow back …
and you are

just
so undignified …
like good. O

tickle
star o
rub that purple

rim,
this is
the “weird mereology”:

two
enemy puffs
of air uh

mingle.
“Forget my
ocean,” I cry,

I
laugh, I
read, “I have

something
sleepy to
tell you.” The

god
emerging from
marble points at

the
chisel at
the base of

its
stone, no,
end stain bookcase

reassuring
brutally eating-
house, why, who

hears
inside the
brick these notes?

Ash
is crystal.
And, may I

ask,
what ethnic
background are you?

Oh,
regular? Yes,
it must be

boring
to be
so normal. You

could
be at
the beach one

day
and the
ocean could sit

on
you. When
I get nervous

I
get hyper
and bump into

people.
Thank you.
Orange, brown and

green
are false.
Knock on the

cage,
boogie-woogie,
we are given

to
understand that
to learn to

play
boogie-woogie
has salvational and

utopian
overtones. If
you open your

mouth
to start
to complain I

will
fill it
with whipped cream …

Don’t
undermine or
overmine. Don’t deny

the
unicorn lover
deep inside you.

[Note Sources: FCF 6 was made out of bits from “some books I pulled off the library shelves.” This is made of bits from most of the authors sampled there, as well as bits from some substitutes, etc. Alternate title: “Poem Beginning and Ending with Some Lines by Chelsey Minnis” …

Chelsey Minnis, Poemland; Philip Whalen, “T/O”, as quoted in Dale Smith, “Philip Whalen Inside and Out”, at Big Bridge; Levi R Bryant, “Flat Ontology”, at Larval Subjects, 24 Feb 010; Pedro Llanes, “The Fly” (tr. Mark Weiss), in The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (ed. Mark Weiss); Thomas Fink, Maya Diablo Mason, Tan Lin, in Tan Lin’s blurb for Fink and Mason’s Autopsy Turvy, at Meritage Press.com; Dan Beachy-Quick, “Antique Foundation”, at Reading Between A & B; Jackson Mac Low, The Virginia Woolf Poems, as quoted in Tyrus Miller, Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde, and Miller on Robert Ashley, Perfect Lives; Bill Berkson, “Melting Milk”, in Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems; Heather Nagami, “Thank You”, at Living JA; Cyril Wong, “that day”, in like a seed with its singular purpose; K Silem Mohammad, “Poems About Trees”, at Poetry Foundation.org; Edward Foster, “Dry Landscapes in Cezanne”, at Edward Foster.net; Rachel Zucker, “bed”, at Barrow Street;Chelsey Minnis, Zirconia, as quoted in Arielle Greenberg, “Zirconia” [review], at Electronic Poetry Review 3]

Please Go Shopping

MERITAGE PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT

Open Palm Press (an imprint of Meritage Press), is pleased to announce the series:

Hay(na)ku for Haiti

-- a fundraiser for Haiti, edited by Eileen R. Tabios and blessed by support from chapbookpublishing.com.

Poets who write in the hay(na)ku form (about which more information is available at http://haynakupoetry.blogspot.com) have consented to create hay(na)ku for helping Haiti's recovery efforts. The results are to be released as "pocket poem booklets" by Open Palm Press. Each will be sold for $3.00, reflecting the hay(na)ku's three lines, with all proceeds to be donated for Haiti relief.

The first five of the series are:

#1: PARTICLE AND WAVE and FROM THE CHAIR, two hay(na)ku sequences by Jean Vengua

#2: On A Pyre: An Ars Poetica by Eileen R. Tabios

#3: Hay(na)ku for Haiti by Tom Beckett

#4: when the earth moves by Lars Palm

#5: After René Depestre’s “My Definition of Poetry”, as translated by Edwidge Danticat, with lines at the end by Lafcadio Hearn by John Bloomberg-Rissman

Over time, more releases will occur as it is anticipated that Haiti's relief requirements will be prolonged and deep. Poets interested in exploring the hay(na)ku through this fundraising effort may contact the series editor at MeritagePress@aol.com

"H for H" booklets are lovingly produced by chapbookpublishing.com (http://chapbookpublisher.com/) on lilac-colored paper to fit, at 2.75" x 4.5 X 2", on an open palm -- ideal for giving engagements.

To order some or all of the series, please send checks made out to "Meritage Press" for $3 per booklet and send to

Eileen Tabios
Meritage Press
256 North Fork Crystal Springs Rd.
St. Helena, CA 94574

For more information: MeritagePress@aol.com

SPANSE 5

In
context hmmmmm
is a string

of
DNA, for
the scale of

the
task is
so huge — sidebar

scatter
of poetic
debris going all

coastal
hmmmmmmmmm hmmmmmmmmm, “a
panoply of perfect /

luster
bouncing” those
who forget their

youth.
Great Jesus’
ghost — offwhite, visceral,

on
a tray
in the butcher’s

window
like that
stuff inside a

cow.
Again the
day comes fat

with
that apple,
the world ’s

an
iceberg again
I am naked

as
a table
cloth in Lisbon,

city
of stairs
stairs loin-like

stairs.
Exhale without
thought three miles

out,
all those
what-ifs struck

against
a hard
surface, the hard

surface,
where the
things hang out,

a
vertigo of
objects such as

Graham
describes with
his infinite submultiples

of
multiples. The
ampersand is more

and
more pleasing
there for people

to
snag themselves
on; on which

to
snag themselves;
their long strands

of
gravity; I
was a teenage

gingerale:
a stranger
meat, like salmon:

pink;
has eggs,
intricate bones. Half

the
moon. -light
slice      frontal. That

was
the road
with the mad

women,
where at
any time of

day
you’d see
them hanging out

third-
floor windows.
Good title, I

thought,
then thumbed
through the handsome,

flamingo-
pink, I
went out into

the
world and
bought as many

knickknacks
(death and
air, counting and

telling,
failed revolutions,
empty tombs). “Put

the
rocks in
your mouth, rub

them
in your
eyes.” Ever heard

of
a viroid?
For a thousand

years,
we had
lived like this —

heat,
in this
place, goes deeper

than
sleep. I’m
sure Aristotle wouldn’t

have
been able
to answer my

questions
on comedy.
RU busy?

U
R always
busy. A mollusc

consuming
itself with
its own flame.

Behind
all the
trees and everything.

The
actual trees
are not visible.

After
each pulse
a strange slow

dimple.
Near several
prone sheep a

man
dangles a
parasol. Keep on

spuggin
in the
antique turbulence. White

yachts
soaked in
mist cruise gray

bay
waters. Yight
watts moaked in

sist
gruise cray
way bawters.

Bite
cotts goaked
in wist … “It

was
35 dollars,
a fortune at

the
time, but
I had to

have
it!” The
new softness, talkative

hands
rinsing the
mesh of their

wheels
in mysterious
oil, res ludological,

software
& systems
app rhizomatic Rollover

Resistance
Rating. Stars.
Five. Five Stars.

Italics.
We’ve held
to this and

set
our teeth.
Dead rat nailed

to
weathered board.
Can of spray

enamel,
top off,
empty. Pebbles. Shadows.

NrMt
condition. Dark
Matter collapsolating. Wazzup

motherfucker.
What does
homo sacer mean?

[Note: Sources:Except as noted, Shearsman 77/78. The rest’s mostly built round FCF 5’s bones. Astrid van Baalen, “The saddest tree at Kew”; James Bell, “Fishing for Beginners”; Blue Press Books blurb for Kevin Opstedal, Maybe Ocean Street; Bill Berkson, somewhere in Goods and Services, as quoted in Blue Press Books blurb; Ilhan Berk, “There Have Been Trees I Have Made Friends With” (tr. George Messo); Linda Black, “The Onlooker dictates”; Frank O’Hara, “Animals”, “Sleeping on the Wing”, “Music”, at Frank O’Hara.org; Rita Dahl, “The city of white stairs” (tr. by author); Carrie Etter, ‘McLean County Highway 39”; Carrie Etter & Zoë Skoulding, “[untitled]”; Levi R Bryant, “A Little less Speculative, A Little More Real”, at Larval Subjects, 15 Feb 010; Gareth Farmer, “Song”; Keri Finlayson, “Gulls”; Garrett Caples, “Er, Um”, as quoted in Andrew Lundwall, “Garrett Caples”, at Literary Kicks, 10 Aug 03, “Same Mesa Boogie Woogie”, at Duration Press; Janice Fixter, “Song from a bamboo flute in the dark”; Mark Goodwin, “Passing Through Sea-Thorn”; Lucy Hamilton, “A Road in Berlin”; Adam Fitzgerald, and Stuart Krimko, as quoted in Fitzgerald’s “A Pitch of Sonic Ecstasy: Stuart Krimko's "The Sweetness of Herbert"”, at The Best American Poetry; blurb for Anthony Auerbach, Aerial Reconnaissance Berlin: Dossier submitted in evidence to the INS Inspectorate, at International Necronautical Society; Joanne Kyger, “Places to Go”, III, at EPC; Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition; Carolyn Hart, “Aurora — an excerpt”; Sarah Howe, “Night in Arizona”; Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, “Memorandum”; Birhan Keskin, “Winter of Murder” (tr. George Messo); Eileen Myles, “Protect Me You”, at Eileen Myles.com; Peter Larkin, “Stone Forest” 2; Peter Makin, “Neck of the Woods”; Christopher Middleton, “A Longer Wind”; my verification word when leaving a comment to a post of Geof Huth’s at dbqp, 19 Feb 010; Christopher Middleton, “A Longer Wind”, “Homage to Alkan”; Michael Rothenberg, and Philip Whalen as quoted by Rothenberg, in “House On Fire”, at Big Bridge; Geoffrey O’Brien, The Ailing Wife; Anne Stevenson, as quoted in Peter Scupham, “Looking in Love” (review of Stevenson’s Poems 1955-2005), as found at Anne Stevenson.co.uk; Richard Owens, “Ulixes Comicus”; Janet Sutherland, “Ash”; Mark Young, “Angst/Romance fanfiction with characters”, at gamma ways, 12 Feb 010; Matías Serra Bradford “R.W.” (from criticism (brief lives of poets))]

Jerome Rothenberg on Abdellatif Laâbi’s Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis

In today's post at Poems and Poetics, titled "Abdellatif Laâbi: from Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis" Jerome Rothenberg writes:

That the origins of poetry go back to a poetry of origins is a point often made, not least in musings by the present editor in books like Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, & A Big Jewish Book. If cosmology & cosmogeny, once the domain of poets, are now firmly in the grip of a developed science with a narrative & poetics of its own, there are poets in our time who pursue still vibrant forms of poesis to create new myths of origin, human & cosmic. or barring that, to use parody or collage from older sources as a kind of “transcreation” (H. de Campos) in a mind-enthralling play of origins. Abdellatif Laâbi’s Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis, newly translated & published by Leafe Press in Nottingham, UK, and Claremont, Calfiornia, enters a field inhabited by Blake’s prophetic books, Hugo’s Dieu, Poe's Eureka, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Olson’s Maximus, & Harold de Campos’s Galaxias, among others then as well as now. A heroic figure through years of imprisonment & exile from his native Morocco, Laâbi, as his translators describe his Fragments, carries forward “the plight of the prisoner … one who has been tortured and silenced, who must somehow create hope.” But above all, Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis is “a surrealistic refiguring of Genesis presented in twenty-six fragments … a mystical yet cynical revisioning of both the Old Testament and the Koran.” Or Laâbi himself: “Le cauchemar / Epouse un cercle parfait // Cela se nomme l’éternité // Un bocal hermétique / qu’aucune magie ne peut ouvrir” ("The nightmare / has come full circle // This is what we call eternity // An impenetrable jar / no magic will open"). In 2009 Laâbi was awarded the prestigious Goncourt Prize for Poetry.

Intriguing, eh? If you have yet to order a copy, one can be yours via Leafe Press or Amazon ... only £8.95/$15.00, which is ridiculously cheap when you consider the going rate for for mystical yet cynical revisionings.

1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' reviewed

At the end of David Hart's not-too thrilled review of Abdellatif Laâbi's Fragments Of A Forgotten Genesis in the Feb 010 issue of Stride Magazine, we find the following good news:

When I received [the Laâbi] in the post, I saw at its endpaper an advertisement for Leafe Press's 1,000 Views of "Girl Singing", edited by John Bloomberg-Rissman, which caught my imagination strongly enough for me to send a cheque for it. It was money very well spent, it's a unique book, if in uneasily small print, of many invited responses, by way of poetry or visually, to a poem by Eileen Tabios.

It has led me to speculate about early modern, say 15th-16th centuries or earlier, whether there were, along with circulation of poems by hand, also response-poems and perhaps drawings: exchanges and additions verbally and visually. The book implements a fertile present and suggests a future for such intermingled new work. A delight.

Not bad, folks.

SPANSE 4

Source
time elapses
before the mind’s

eye
goes blind.
The instruments pull

at
their cords.
Down, the tide

goes
down into
the irresistible warmth

of
a body.
“Imagine staying one

person
after this,”
taking de Sade

for
a lunatic
saint & Zizek

for
an animation
character rationally placed

in
a Japanese
movie. It tears

at
the eyes;
it carries water

into
the thinness
between air and

vacuum,
wringing something
like signals from

the
noise, unconcerned
about the water’s

purity,
like something
gone past on

a
highway of
heads and beds

of
swollen creeks
and theories and

coils.
A being
of smoke inscribes

me
as erasing,
rising albumenescently. You

gather
momentum &
scatter it everywhere,

through
the rotating
blades. What happens

when
the distinction
between a true

world
and an
apparent world falls

away?
I have
asked the promoters

and
people who
have brought me

to
this city.
Since I’m not

conscious
why I’m
crying. In Morocco

it
is thought
to be good

for
warding off
the common cold

in
damp winter
weather and is,

indeed,
more effective
if taken with

large
quantities of
hot mint tea.

Euphoria
and brilliant
storms of laughter;

ecstatic
reveries and
extensions of one’s

personalities
on several
simultaneous planes are

to
be complacently
expected. Almost anything

Saint
Theresa did,
you can do

better
if you
can bear to

be
ravished by
an ‘un évanouissment

reveillé’.
“Don’t back
away helpless, eyes

fixed.
I’ve simply
ordered a box

of
maniacs. This,
this is my

task:
to imagine
no whole.” Our

rice
pot is
so full. There

are
pines that
are tall enough.

Wow,
or “pouf!”
We ought to

say
a feeling
of and, a

feeling
of if,
as readily as

we
say a
feeling of blue.

Will
any silence
fit? Into that

cloudy
hole? A
screaming comes

across
the sky,
as if you

didn’t
know, silver
half freezing in

day,
moon’s elation,
an aperture or

an
aporia, go
forth prettily and

miscalculate.
One. One.
Three three three.

[Note: 1st interpolation. Sources: stuff I found on the web by 10 of the poets in the SPD Spring 010 Catalog, Poetry, Prose, Cross-Genre, W-Z. Starting with the last Z and working toward the first W. Then I went back to use the skeleton of FCF 4.

Steven Zultanski, Christmas Future; Rachel Zucker, “Welcome to the Blighted Ovum Support Group”, at 42opus v.8 no.3; Lila Zemborain, Mauve Sea-Orchids, as quoted by Eileen Tabios, in her review of same, at Galatea Resurrects 9; Maged Zaher, “my software mission”, at Jacket 29; Joseph Zaccardi, “The Nine Gradations Of Light”, at Joseph Zaccardi.com; William Slaughter, SPD blurb for Alexandra Yurkovsky, Wanting; Alexandra Yurkovsky, “Nocturne”, at Caveat Lector, v.16, no.II or 11; Matvei Yankelevich, “Far After Five (Deposit, New York)”, at 3:AM Magazine, Nov 02; C D Wright, “Floating Trees”, at Poetry Foundation.org; Sam Witt, “The Face in a Hospital Bar”, at Shampoo 5; Dara Wier, “Land of Steady Habits”, at Salt River Review, v.12, no.3, “Little Black Tangrams”, at Poetry Foundation.org; Martin Heidegger, epigraph to Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism; Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology; Alice B Toklas/Brion Gysin, a recipe in The Alice B Toklas Cookbook; Charles Bernstein/Brian Ferneyhough, Shadowtime; Sylvia Plath, “The Arrival of the Bee Box” (this, and the Toklas/Gysin, are for Rebecca Loudon); Frances Chung, “winter festival”, in Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple; David Giannini, Others’ Lines (Series I and II) (his source is Donald Justice); Anselm Hollo, “30”, in rue Wilson Monday; William James, as quoted by Ann Lauterbach, epigraph to And For Example, and Lauterbach herself, “Not That It Could Be Finished”, in If in Time: Selected Poems 1975-2000; bp Nichol, “Clouds”, in The Martyrology Book 2; Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow; Leslie Scalapino, “It’s Go In Quiet Illumined Grass Land”, in It’s go in horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006; Nicholas Manning, “On The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography”, and Tabios herself, as quoted in Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, “Eileen Tabios, Dredging for Atlantis”, in Eileen Tabios, The Blind Chatelaine’s Keys]

SPANSE 3

Chimes
dark blue
and they wish

to
copulate in
that medium, hands

in
the noodles,
then the bronze

rain
fell, jamming
with both the

message
in the
bottle and the

bottleneck
of its
messy (distorted by

time)
arrival, I
like that color

which
is why
I’m eating it,

all
slinky like
cringe at syntax

sustenance
to award
evermore emotional bargaining

chip
prosody in
tinsel, whatever you

do,
dearie, recuperate
for where or

how
are intimations
of an echo,

window,
would it
float, would it

like
snow, settle,
you see, we

have
that much
in common already,

sail
and cobalt,
to be ugly

now,
with the
ugliness of earth

unmixed
with subtler
matter, irretrievably so

that
all the
mirrors in the

house,
all, all
are broken and

to
emerge on
the other side

of
beauty
with the mirror

shards
ablaze with
faces, listen, below

salt-
streaked stone
the piper’s reel

is
the sweep
of a boiling

well,
daft-mad
with root spikes

&
spirits, rhythm,
ythmm, timing, timbre,

also –
another legend? –
don’t throw rice:

birds
eat it
and then explode.

[Note: Sources: bones of FCF 3 but upside down. Barbara Guest, Stripped Tales; Barbara Guest, “restlessness”, in Selected Poems; Laura Mullen, back cover blurb for Joe Amato, Pain Plus Thyme; Joe Amato, “Some Fuckoffs”, in Pain Plus Thyme; Mike Cannell, “sextant”, at visoundtextpoem, 8 Feb 010; Melanie Nielson, “Seated Woman by seated woman”, “Disfigured Text #4”, in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (ed. Mary Margaret Sloan); Jean Hyung Yul Chu, “Compromises”, in Premonitions: The Kay anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (ed. Walter K Lew) (where her poems sit next to Ann Choi’s …); Bruce Beaver, “Letters to Live Poets” 1 (Frank O’Hara)” “Angel’s Weather”, in The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry (eds. John Tranter and Philip Mead); Nathaniel Tarn, “Body in Glory”, in Recollections of Being; Gavin Selerie, Roxy 39; Geraldine Monk, “Out-thoughts”, “Vocalised (public)”, in Selected Poems; Bruce Engelfried, email, 9 Feb 010 (in re: how he remembers what his mother told him of the death of Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts – turns out she didn’t die after getting hit in the eye by a grain of rice at her wedding, as he recalled, but she was deafened by one …]

Thank you, Mr Rothenberg!

When I look back on what inspired and formed me as a poet, I have to give a lot of credit to the work of Jerome Rothenberg, whose Poems for the Game of Silence opened a world for me, as did his marvelous anthologies Shaking the Pumpkin and Technicians of the Sacred. Therefore, it is really gratifying to note that today's post at his Poems and Poetics site is dedicated to my No Sounds of My Own Making, and concludes with the following:

"An extreme example of what I’ve elsewhere called “othering” or, borrowing the phrase from John Cage, “writing through,” Bloomberg-Rissman’s No Sounds of My Own Making is a 200 page work constructed (almost) entirely from words or sounds appropriated from other writers. That this is done without any sacrifice of coherence or feeling or intelligence & in a voice that remains unified & “personal” throughout is a testament to the communal nature of language & thought of which our individualities are a crucial if sometimes questioned part. While Bloomberg-Rissman is not alone in the pursuit of such an outcome, his beautifully wrought & linked three-line stanzas present what may well remain a milestone of a new communal poetics. (J.R.) No Sounds of My Own Making was published in 2007 by Leafe Press of Nottingham, U.K. and Claremont, California."

Can You Stuff This Into Your Poetics and Smoke It??

I stole this post from Levi R Bryant over at Larval Subjects because now I have something new (to me at least) to consider as I try to live/make my poems "adequate" to the REAL, Lacanian, Spicerian (as in "real unfucking rain") and each and every otherwise:

I came across this terrifying robot on a documentary a while back. In a nutshell, researchers have spliced neurons from a rat brain to a computer-chip. The computer then transmits signals to the robot controlling its movement. As the neurons “experiment” with the movements of the robot, the neural network actually evolves or develops (learns), developing its own behavior. This is a rather terrifying example of the sort of strange mereologies I’ve been talking about. Ordinarily we don’t think of neurons as entities or objects in their own right, but as parts of another object (a body) that are unable to exist in their own right. Yet here we have a rather terrifying example of stratified objects where we have objects wrapped inside of other objects. The neurons, when transplanted to the chip, become something other than they were and new powers not present in the rat itself become manifested. The truly horrifying question for me is that of whether these neurons continue to have some form of consciousness when transplanted in this way. Is there some highly confused sentient being in this assemblage that is thoroughly bewildered by the assemblage in which it finds itself and which is living an existing of shrieking pain? Here’s the video: