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Friday Notebook 03.18.2011
Reading Karl Shapiro‘s last book,Coda: Last Poems, pisses me off. Errors galore, half-assed typesetting (a bulbous typeface with too little leading, the last words of long, overrun lines dropped against the left margins as if they were new lines. Shit—Shapiro deserves better! Deserves a Complete Shapiro, for one thing, with tiresome variorum notes and two prefaces, one by a scholar of Ovid (who knew about classical standards and personal rage), and a second by the ghost of Henry Miller writing via Ouija board from some hedonistic paradise.Read More
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Friday Notebook 03.11.2011
Further Adventures of K. I’ve saddled an enormous cockroach,and here I am clattering across the desert griton his back— his back a hard, glossy brown—digging my spurs into his armor now and then,now and then glancing back at the billowing cloudhis skinny feet keep kicking up. The sunis setting now, making the floating dust a vastsmear of red across the sierras. Now and thenI pat the creature’s armored head, stroke his feelers.“Good boy, Max,” I croon. His answer never wavers:“Like a dog.” * So many are like gulls thriving on garbage, on contagion.Read More
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Friday Notebook 02.25.2011
I’ve laid low all week long, trying to get caught up after our trip to Mexico. And since the only notebook entry I have to offer is political, not poetical, I’ll resurrect an old unpublished poem for your a(be)musement. First, the politics—on the uprisings in Tunis, Egypt, and Libya: When Capitalism faces revolution, it forgets all about “creative destruction” and begins stammering about “stability” and the dangers of democracy in the hands of The Other.Read More
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Friday Notebook 02.18.2011
[I found a scrap of paper under my car seat with these lines scrawled on it, from last summer, as I recall] A chirring fires up in the locust treeas if a hand switched on a lamp of sound. * The tyrant resigns and flees.The ancient square throbswith exultant crowds. Reportersfor State TV recant the liesthey told all those years,and are forgiven. Far away,the tyrant has wrapped himselfin a cloak of rage and fear-sweat;he smells like his subjects didfor three decades.Read More
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Friday Notebook 02.11.2011
waning moon—stars coming backthat were never gone * “Even the buzz of a mosquito is a communication.” —Róbert Gál (in New European Poets) * Coffeeshop Sunday Morning sun tangled upin a stranger’s hair;her intelligence tangled upin the book she’s reading;and I—— * Ritual Meloxicam to soothe the angry disk between L2 and L3, pinched and bulging like a bitten tongue. Prilosec to save the stomach from the ravage of Meloxicam and to keep down the Resveratrol (an oblong lump of compressed soot said to keep the blood vessels pliant and cancer at bay).Read More
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Friday Notebook 02.04.2011
In the perhaps vain hope of liberating some potentially interesting jots from the well of my notebook, I’m launching Friday Notebook. (Applause. Fireworks whistling in the background.) The impulse for this comes from thinking about fragments, for which I have that thank Ian Hamilton Finlay (as quoted on Jerome Rothenberg’s Poetry and Poetics blog) and John Latta’s musings on Roland Barthes at Isola di Rifiuti. I feel that fragments are only fragments by reference to an imaginal wholeness; without the imaginal wholeness they are nothing but debris.Read More