It Can’t Be True. Tho being there is a real surprise, vast and everyday and not just the unspoiled tip of an island fenced off by the gov’t. for one brief clumsy weekend, their strewn limbs, at first random, like spokes, ray out, and the candles are lit as if by themselves, do you believe it would be worth the trouble to kill all the gods to see if that would straighten out the world? Would it be worth the trouble to risk your life for an idea that might be false? I ask you now if it would be worth the trouble to eat crab meat. When I look in myself I see Arabia, Venus, Brush a grill gate with spring tension adjuster / Add 20 #7 x 7/8” flat-head screws / Add ¾ cup of decorative bolts / Preheat oven to 375’ F / Use a slotted spoon to churn headboard / Use a slotted spoon to mix the sweet / Add 2 side frames, Add 4 adjustable shelves / Add a layer of caramelized connection sleeve / suga sockret, suger socker / More boomashootns, for many children, the age of 7 is the age of social awareness, a perspective on the world that broadens beyond what is identified as local, and some beginning awareness of a history beyond the one the child conceives as one’s immediate own. I drove to Scotland for pizza. Wait. Perhaps this will be my next novel. A sequel to the monster one. Which is a country beneath a dome. Should I bring my mother to Wyoming? So the story goes: a young Hasil Adkins, secluded away in poverty in the wilds of West Virginia, listened to radio broadcasts of the popular bands of his day, & noticed the announcers typically crediting each song to a single musician. Adkins, isolated & unable to see live music performances, naturally assumed that songs attributed to ‘Hank Williams’ or ‘Louis Armstrong’ meant that these single musicians played all of the instruments he heard on their records. Thus from inspired literalism was born Adkins’s characteristically frenzied one-man band.
.;;.;..;.;.;..;..;..;.;.;.;.;.;.;..';.';.';.';.';.';,';,';,';m';m';',',;';.';.';.';.'.;';.';.';.[[;[pl[][l[popm[.
';
l;
'.uh[k[[l.kpl;l]/\]
/';/
/\.\
'
And says
And says
Woo ee ah ah!
Woo ee ah ah!
Woo ee ah ah!
Woo ee ah ah!
Wooooeeeeahhh!
So this time we got waay over here
(Where?! Where?!)
I don’t know, since it was early dawn’s light
She looked to me like a dinosaur ‘bout to jump outta that seat
She said
She said
She said
Woo ee ah ah!
Woo ee ah ah!
Woo ee ah ah!
Woo ee ah ah!
Wooooeeeeyahhhh!
So this time we got waaay over here
And then we went waay down here
We got all the way over
‘n Oooooo! Oooooo!
Hey John
certain that it 10 minutes to spare
and all you out.
mater cells
awful awful may or window here
in the spotted risking
anyway we can group okay
absolutely have it
over the
-- thank you might be doing some here --
Zeros wonder
somewhere five.
yet it would be a sad comment on humanity were the whole of civilization given an endorsement to a physical practice which so egregiously defies the basic principle of natural law as it manifests itself in the human body
an analogy:
very early in the developement of the human intelligence
perhaps more than a million years ago humans knew fire
it was a learning curve
they -our ancestors
had to learn to capture fire
to begin fire
to sustain fire
to use fire in constructive ways which facilitated survival
and they also realized quite certainly the destructive possibilities of fire
and the injurious possibilities of fire
given this it follows that at some point a child
is introduced to fire
a child might learn painfully that fire burns
a child will look in wonder and feel the warmth of fire
a child will observe the use of fire in preparing food
a child might then begin to manifest pyromaniacal tendencies
quite normal really the desire to use fire and perhaps create spectacles
to apprehend the power therein. Like:
1. Sex saves Soul
2. Sex awakens Soul
3. Beauty punishes Soul
4. Nature saves Soul (twice)
5. It’s about someone falling for someone they’re supposed to punish.
6. Sex disobeys Beauty
7. Sex is a winged serpent
8. Soul is forbidden to look upon Sex - but does so anyway, of course
9. Sex and Soul are married, for chrissakes!
10. They make love in darkness, not seeing each other.
11. Soul wounds Sex, not vice versa (and recriminations follow).
12. Soul is tormented by jealous sisters
13. Sex is locked up when Beauty whomps Soul
14. Nature assists again, in the form of animal helpers.
15. Beauty is mollified by the Soul’s apotheosis. Sex is still divine.
16. (In the Roman version, of course, Daddy has to throw the whole mess out.)
and Joe said, “Everyone at this table
has to write a poem with that line in it.”
- Tony Trigilio
Take www.duckskulls.com -- home of
the Original Intimidator Duckskull --
w/eyes.
If I had an animal skull on my rear view,
to remind me of the fractional life
I control,
well, some months ago, there was a “chain e-mail” making the rounds that asked you to send an encouraging statement, poem, dictum, proverb, etc. to the sender, and then send the message to 20 friends (who would then send you such a message). You may have gotten one from me, who knows. Anyway, here are the responses I received: Then again, I’m revising the hell out of all of them. It’s not like Michelangelo “finding” the form in the marble. As to the serial poems,
[pause]
Is that it? Are we done? …
It’s true; it’s all backward to them anyhow.
Except that when I wrote the words, I began from the right side of the page. With my left hand, I reversed each letter’s form. I moved swiftly towards the gutter — the people’s margin — that place where we learn when we are small to begin. But it didn’t have to be that way. Maybe this is where my obsession with holy books began, why I thought I might like to write one someday, its pages all beginnings and endings. Still, long after they played a role in establishing modern geohistory, individual boulders persist as cultural artefacts for provoking and inscribing ideas about time. Certain erratics maintain a dual status as physical fragments of deep time and as contemporary cultural objects that relay more recent histories. They are curious things — according to Zoe, like Russian films: everyone’s drunk and sad and there are pictures of Putin in every government building. Or, as CA puts it, “Celebrity Crystals is a (Soma)tic poetry ritual where clear quartz gems absorb several full-length films of a celebrity, and are then stored in a box lined with their photos. Denzel Washington quartz is underway, currently soaking in the images and sounds of the 2010 film THE BOOK OF ELI.”
I have only one feeling
but everyone knows what a champion
looks like
five fingers make a nation of wealth
days and nights of eco-terror
No lie. At home glowing orbs have begun to appear, at night. Hope it’s not some kind of nuclear pollution and no, not fireflies. Yesterday, while walking in the desert thinking that etymological root: ... Last night I watched for long fields, and I tested this morning at my sister, to make sure there is a phenomenon environmental, or hallucinatory. At my sister spheres no peep. You see what works live near family? What house can I play friend in the morning to ask you to allow me to make sure that no glowing orbs hovering at home as spores? Well, the fact is that I woke up with that result I do not know by heart and I have not gone into researching. Also you will see I woke up with the obsession to change the “c” for “s” in everything I write. So every time I click here I have to go back on the line and make sure that no spheres floating changing so c by the s by c. But these symptoms are so common (the excitement of everyday life tied to my favorite activity). We have solution, right. This dimension is not what troubles me. What troubles me is that, as I reflect on the ways in which (already started) I realize that although my mind moves beyond the body, the space of my heart has started to decline. I talk with plants I give rides through the desert, caress animals. You have to get their hands firmly. Learn peek through walls that still can’t not jump. So, once and for all, here goes: to hell (with my wetsuit), charge my blanket and my cup with chocolate, but I’m going to see me. Space can not wait. Still, perhaps “relation” is the wrong word for what is thought in ecological ontology. There’s something too ghostly, too incorporeal, about relations. Everything in the entire cosmos could be still and there would still be relations. Things would be to the left or right or one another, so many miles or light years apart, larger and smaller, and so on. Yet ecology, above all, thinks beings in interaction and becoming. Taking that as given, I want to argue that if there is to be an articulation of conceptualism’s globality, and if we want to use its trans-national significance as a way to catalogue and historicize contemporary literary production, then we must insist on thinking repetition without Stein. In other words, we’ll have to circumvent a Western, primarily imperialist pedigree. The critical effort (Goldsmith, Perloff, etc.) has portrayed conceptualism as a historical continuity between two origin myths — one set in European, sometimes transatlantic, modernism (Duchamp, Stein, Klein, etc.) and one set in North American conceptualism in the 60s and 70s (Huebler, L. Wiener, Acconci, Cage, Schneeman, Kosuth, etc.). These artists and writers supply our ur-texts that then essentially allow us a convenient, but narrow, regionally- and racially-specific way of imagining the projects that present as conceptualist right now. It gives us good mothers and fathers, and then in turn defines our pedigree. This is obviously insufficient. If critical efforts have managed and controlled our genealogies of conceptualism, the continually documented simulcast of coterie has defined its geographical parameters. Of course contemporary coterie matters, but that too is only a partial explication of influence. It is necessary for us to imagine and articulate conceptualisms not only as a product of regionally specific scenes or communities — for instance the thriving and brilliant community of poets working in New York city, and circulating in the gyre generated by the compelling and ever-dynamic Segue series. We need to also describe emerging forms of conceptualism as results of historical pressure and consequences of globalization. To do so is to include a consideration of who else is making conceptual works and to pluralize the poets who can occupy the cartography of conceptualist tendencies. To do so is to explain these emerging tendencies as a response not only to already institutionalized origin myths, or already privileged urban centers of making (New York, L.A.), but also as responses to lived practices of immigrants, travelers, or those who have systematically eschewed the fabrication of localized community by being itinerants. Conceptualism has made space for new forms of inclusivity, but these spaces have to be articulated into existence. Conceptualism’s “globality,” in other words, has to also make place for placelessness in practices of writing that come out of geographic transitionality. So, while Kreislaufzusammenbruch, or “circulatory collapse,” sounds deathly serious, it’s used quite commonly in Germany to mean something like “feeling woozy” or “I don’t think I can come into work today.” While you were listening and not paying attention Ulysses lashed himself to the mist. That was your great discovery, an unreasonable desire for poetry while swallowing blood. The first time I saw a space NDN was in The 6th World, a short film by Diné director Nanobah Becker that extends the Diné creation story into outer space, where humanity’s future is made possible through ancestral corn crops on Mars. The movie was released in 2012, the same year Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction was published, the first-ever anthology of its kind. Becker shot the Mars scenes in The 6th World in Monument Valley, one of the sacred territories of the Diné. The red rock canyons and cliffs make a convincing Martian backdrop. They also offer a symbol of dynamic sacredness. These distant lands are connected. Just because the Diné have not lived on Mars since time immemorial, it does not mean our plants and teachings cannot take root there. I am reminded of the time before a ceremony on a college campus when we washed our hands in a drinking fountain. I am reminded of Betonie, the medicine man in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, who makes medicine bundles from trash heaps. I am reminded of pow-wow regalia ornamented with semiconductors. I am reminded of the descendants of slaves telling and re-telling their stories on new, bloody ground. Finding ourselves in new contexts, we are always adapting, always surviving. This is the seed of many indigenous technologies.
[Note: Except as noted, a spin thru Ron Silliman’s links list: the letter H (thru Laura Heidy). The spin ends with a full stop. Then back to regularly-scheduled programming. Sources: Michael Brownstein, “It Can’t Be True”, Kim Addonizio, “On Opening a Book of Photographs”, Mark Strand, “The Coming of Light”, Nicanor Parra, “Questions and Answers”, Patti Smith, “Notebook”, quoted in Dust Congress Hackmuth, various posts, at The Dust Congress, 3 Jan 015 – 3 Dec 014; Paul Cunningham, “from ‘The House of the Tree of Sores’”, at Seven Corners, 25 Jul 014; Forrest Hamer, “Fiftieth Anniversary”, at Hear, Hear, 1 Sept 013; Bhanu Kapil, “I hope one day”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 25 Jan 015 (not Silliman); Michael Tencer, “Jeffrey Hayden Shurdut’s Face-Off live at Spectrum”, at Association of Musical Marxists, 19 Jan 015 (not Silliman); John Hanson, “yo”, “voice recognition found poem”, “au naturel”, at A Bewildering Search, 9 Sept 014, 17 Nov 013, 25 Sept 013; Hasil Adkins, “She Said”, at Lyrics Mania (not Silliman); JBR; Joseph Harrington, various posts, at Blog of Myself, 16 Aug 014 – 10 Feb 014. Jericho Parms, “Mirror, Mirror”, at Drunken Boat 20; Jane Hutton, “Erratic Imaginaries: Thinking Landscape as Evidence”, at Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy; JBR, but see next; Zoe, “russian films …”, at I Have Absolutely No Idea, 25 Jan 015; JBR, but see next; CA Conrad, “#119-A: Denzel Quartz”, at (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, 25 Jan 015; Cassandra Troyan, Hatred of Women, at Solar Luxuriance; Dolores Dorantes, “No lie …” (tr. Google), at Dolores Dorantes, 26 Jan 015; JBR; Levi R Bryant, “Interactivism”, at Larval Subjects, 25 Jan 015; Divya Victor, quoted in Lucas de Lima, “Conceptualism Beyond the West: Divya Victor on Displacing the ‘Imperialist Pedigree’”, at Montevidayo, 27 Jan 015; JBR; Arika Okrent, “15 Unique Illnesses You Can Only Come Down With in German”, at Mental Floss, 15 Jan 015; Rod Mengham, “To Repeal the Spoils”, in Paris by Helen, at Oystercatcher Press; Lindsey Catherine Cornum, “The Space NDN’s Star Map”, at The New Inquiry, 26 Jan 015]
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