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1964

For whatever reason I really wish I could go browsing in a decent, inspiring bookstore today. There used to be a decent used bookstore between work and my house, but that’s been gone for a few years already. All I really want is a used copy of Herzog by Saul Bellow. My current project is reading books published in 1964 (don’t ask); I used to have a copy of Herzog but I must have given it away on the assumption that I was never going to get around to reading it. I think Bellow’s star has really fallen since his death so that makes me like him a little more.

Off the record

I just want to say that there is either a rule, or there is no rule, and that can't be "off the record." It's just absurd.

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Poem for speculative hipsters by Amiri Baraka

#amiri baraka #audio #short

New Poemtalk!

Yes, I geeked out yesterday after seeing a tweet announcing the new episode of Poemtalk.

I believe I have made my way through 71 of the 72 previous Poemtalk podcasts, listening to many of them multiple times. The episode I have yet to listen to (because I already this morning listened to the new episode # 73) is episode 54 on Ron Silliman's "You," just through, well, not listening to it, I guess. (Well, it might have had something to do with Michelle Taransky's voice. She subs for regular host Al Filreis on that one.)

But I will listen to #54 eventually. After all, it never hurts to save one of something you love, when that thing is limited in supply, in case of an emergency. (This partly explains why I have never read "Seymour: An Introduction.")

Some of my favorite episodes of Poemtalk are:

PT#8: Rae Armantrout's "The Way"

PT#9: John Ashbery at a crossroads

PT#14: Wallace Stevens at the end

PT#18: Lydia Davis has a position

PT#28: Jack Spicer to shrink: drop dead

PT#33: flarfist Sharon Mesmer

PT#59: Blackburn on baseball & imperialism

PT#61: Bill Berkson's signature song [*this is the one that initially got me hooked on Poemtalk]

PT#64: Bergvall chants Dante translations

PT#67: Catherine Wagner’s fucking poem

PT#68: Ray DiPalma’s languagy optimism

One episode that I cannot make heads or tails of is PT#69 on Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts. PT#3 on George Oppen’s ballad left me cold for a long while, but I eventually warmed up to the poem and even Oppen's reading of it. I love William Carlos Williams' reading voice, and Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery. That Jack Spicer poem is dynamite. The Poemtalk on Poe is kind of cheating since the whole premise of the podcast is recordings of poets themselves reading their poems, when obviously there is no recording of Poe reading this poem or any poem.

I was a little hurt by a comment made in the new Poemtalk by one of the Poemtalkers -- that the podcast was mostly for students and teachers. It made me feel like I was watching a filmstrip in fifth grade. Why not for poetry lovers in general?

#PoemTalk

#mindofwinter

As you probably already know if you are reading this contemporaneously to its posting, much of the US has fallen into something they are calling "The Polar Vortex."

Or perhaps I mean #polarvortex.

#purplemeanscold

These days everything has to have a name so it can be tagged. I guess that's an interesting new way for the mind to approach moments or the aggregation of moments known as events. Someone will do a study. Does it change the way we think if we are constantly, contemporaneously "tagging" everything we do, mentally, as experience washes over us? How does that change us?

Stevens' "The Snow Man" has been running through my mind: "One must have a mind of winter...."

But somewhere in there the whole stream of logic seems to get twisted like a Möbius strip. One must have a mind of winter to not think of misery when confronted with this frigid landscape, and the listener (is the listener "one"? Or someone else?) ,

"nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

So if you're not thinking of misery, you're basically thinking of nothing. Both sides of nothing. But what if you are thinking of misery? Is that better? Somehow it's easier to fall back on a misreading of this poem that makes it prettier even if it is still kind of nihilistic.

By the way the Wikipedia entry for this poem is seriously effed up: "The poem, the Snow Man, was written in the transcendentalist styles, of which occurred during the Romantic time period. The transcendentalists were a group of people centered in Concord, Massachusetts who thought that one should look at God through nature and that God was ever present in all of it. The Snow Man is mostly about describing the beauty of winter and therefore, it fits that style." Huh?

#Stevens #polarvortex #hashtag

alternately nonplussed and charmed

"Here nostalgia and imagination skip hand in hand, alternately titillating and gratifying all the way."

Sentence of the day. Describing a restaurant. File under "wow," and not in a good way, either.

It seems like I have been having a lot of "wow and not in a good way" experiences lately.

Also, I have to apologize for the Duck Dynasty cup posts of a few weeks back. As I stated at the time, I bought the cup because it was exactly the size I needed, it was there, and cost only 57 cents. I had never seen the show. Is it less offensive if I'm using the cup ironically? Anyway. Sorry.

Poetry has slipped in the last three weeks. I obtained Bernadette Mayer's "Midwinter's Day" through interlibrary loan but I couldn't get into it, and too soon had to return it. I did spend some time yesterday reading Lorine Niedecker. I read much of, but grasped little of, John Ashbery's As Umbrellas Follow Rain -- maybe that was not the right book of JA's to start with. I did read and enjoy the Paris Review interview with Ashbery at the same time but it didn't really help with comprehending the poetry. I was a little nonplussed at Ashbery's own apparent mystification with his own works, and wonder to what extent it's an act.

In only tangentially related thoughts, I am charmed by the incongruous Playmobil banner ad on the top of the Paris Review page.

Need. Bookstore.

I miss bookstores. On a rainy melancholy December afternoon like this one, I really miss bookstores. We killed bookstores. We killed them like newspapers. I'll admit that this city never had any bookstores I particularly loved but I occasionally did work up enthusiasm for the Borders. I can't abide the Barnes and Nobles that are left. Our remaining independents have no soul. One of them looks like a place where books go to die.

I remember lovely times at the Wordsworth in Harvard Square. I think it was on an afternoon much like this one (re: weather) when I wandered over to Wordsworth to look around and chanced on A.S. Byatt's novel Possession, which was brand spanking new on this side of the Atlantic and I had not read a word about it. I bought it in hardcover, went home, and read it almost without putting it down including the poems while lying on my big old couch ("The Barge," as we called it, in reference to Cleopatra) in Kirkland House. And that is why a day like today feels so lonely without a bookstore.

Even the semi-shitty, semi-okay used bookstore on my way home between my job and my house closed. There literally isn't a bookstore in town I want to go to.

Great bookstores I have visited or frequented: Wordsworth -- loved that store. Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee - more than decent. St. Mark's -- that's still there, though I haven't been to New York in well over a decade. City Lights -- even longer since I have been to San Francisco. Cottage Books in Glen Arbor, Michigan -- one of those lovely vacation finds, such a charmer.

#bookstore

T'giving

It occurred to me this morning that Bernadette Mayer could do something interesting with the T'giving I underwent yesterday.

Apologies to myself

Sorry, Flannel Kinda Site, it's hard to believe that the Duck Dynasty cup knocked me off track for so long.

Here's my reading for today, regarding, well, I guess the collision of text and textile. More on this topic, but for today, this is a looo-oo-oong article so have at it, gentle public.

http://jacket2.org/article/desiring-visual-texts

I needed a cup/glass/container to put some liquid in today.

So I ended up with a 16 oz. (? I think) “Duck Dynasty” cup from Walgreen’s. It cost 57 cents. It says:

“If it Walks Like a Duck

and Talks Like a Duck,

It’s Dinner.”

And then there’s a photo of a bearded guy holding some kind of duck whistle. I have never watched Duck Dynasty and don’t really even know what it is about.

It fits the basic to-go coffee plastic hot lid.

I love my new Duck Dynasty cup/glass/container. (P.S. It is plastic.)

“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.”

#shakespeare #caliban

It's dark early now that we are back to standard time. Today was even gloomier because it started raining mid afternoon. It reminded me of days like this when I was in grad school and after a day teaching and studying I 'd head back to the house, and the heat would be on ...thank heaven, heat...and the radiators clanging. Then dinner in the dining hall and sitting for a long time with cups of tea after dinner, until they closed the place down at 7:15 or so as I recall. Once on a rainy night I went up to another house to see Peter Hall's film of King Lear. Appropriate. So it has been that kind of fall day.

#fall #musing

Devil spawn of the New York school

Bastard offspring of "I Do This, I Do That" poems.

"I feel this deeply, I feel that deeply" (aka The 'My Sensitive Problem' School of Poetry)

"I have to do this, I have to do that" (Poetry of the Overcomitted)

No poetry today. I've fallen behind on ModPo homework, though not too far behind. I need to do the "My Life" video segments which I skipped over, then I can start on this week's poems. Today I went out into the beautiful fall and shot the ends of three rolls of film I had in a Holga, a Diana + and a Brownie Hawkeye Flash, with the film from the BHF dating from Sept. 2011. I don't even know when the other cameras were loaded. I have to say the rise of Instagram really did help dampen my enthusiasm for my plastic camera photography. But maybe I can revive the spark. I found a new place to photograph this afternoon quite by accident and I feel good about it. The other part of the spirit dampening of film photography is how difficult it's become to get 120 film developed. It is a pain in the ass.

It takes some courage to write about your favorite music. So, Rae goes there! Good news: She likes The Decemberists! Bad news: She likes Adele.

That’s okay, Rae. Read on.

#Armantrout #rock

Very interesting ... talk and separate MP3s for the readings.

#Armantrout #interview

The whole boatload of sensitive bullshit….

Howl Allen Ginsberg

#Ginsberg

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