Before the Ice, There Were Starlings

Jack Kimball, "xmas09" (Dec 2009)
My Christmas traditions are set. Hours opening presents followed by hours reading, a fine but not extravagant meal, and a posting about some kind of verbo-visuaul digiteratum by Jack Kimball, something with a little soul and darkness to it, like a powerful grappa over a delicate tongue.

This year, I thought Jack might not make something for me to steal in time. I kept checking his blog, Pantaloons, but nothing appeared. Then, only a couple of days ago and only after reading a posting of my own, did he publish something I could use, and he gave as the only textual element of this piece a phrase from the title of my posting: "I told him they were starlings."

This piece of digital art is quite brief, but strangely powerful. In two tiers, images of starlings (occasionally closeups but usually distant shots of clouds of the birds) flash on briefly and are immediately replaced. The effect is something like a visual abstract for Hitchcock's film The Birds, and the masses of starlings alternate, in my mind at least, from being a kind of beautiful example of nature into a plague of starlings, at the very least a horde. Sometimes the number of microscopic starlings is so great that they seem to create written characters of unknown languages in the sky. And we wonder what they could mean.

Just as we might wonder what the starlings might be, if we didn't already know what they were.

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Waxing Wordy on Christmas Eve

Geof Huth, "Waxwords 5" (23 Dec 2009)
There is nothing particularly reminiscent of Christmas in this visual poem, this little piece of faux text, this little lie we call asemic writing, but to balance things out Christmas sometimes appears where least expected. Nancy, the kids, and I watched the film "Love Actually" tonight, which is a Christmas film of sorts, though truly just a film concerning the various manifestations of love and how these hurt and help us. And we enjoyed it's interlocking stories and their message of humans working together, even though imperfectly so.

Earlier in the day we continued our longtime tradition of seeing a movie in a theater on Christmas Eve (when almost no-one else thinks to do such a thing). We saw "Avatar," a film that surprised us by being an unavoidable dramatic and visual experience, especially in 3D. The film held us in thrall for every minute of its running time. What I expected to be ridiculous CGI turned out to be a totally believable new world, and we know we always want a new world, because this one isn't good enough for us (or us for it). And maybe that is the meaning of Christmas, just some sense that existence should be better than it is. Or it's about family, or those approximations of family that we find ourselves needing even more than family sometimes.

My family tried to Skype me from Schenectady in the evening, but we missed the call. I phoned my aunt in California, and did nothing but tell her jokes about what was going on in the family, laughing the whole time. I called our son-out-law Jimmy (meaning that he's the equivalent of our son-in-law but not married to Erin) and tried to make him want to see "Avatar" even more deeply than he already did. Tim's girlfriend, a Buddhist, called to wish us a merry Christmas, and Tim noted that her family actually did have a Christmas tree after all.

That is probably because the Christmas tree is an ambiguous symbol, ostensibly Christian even though there is nothing ostensibly Christian about any of its particulars (save for the theme of the occasional ornament). The Christmas tree is merely symbolic of family, a symbol of the lives we want to have but may not. For some, there are religious sentiments attached to that symbol, and for others there is not. As a visual poet, I'm sensitive to the symbology of the Christmas tree, I understand how it can be reduced to a meaningful glyph, and meaningful in a cultural way, because all symbols and all languages are cultural. We interpret within a frame of mind that we share with others, even as we might struggle to have a completely unique way of seeing. But if we did, nothing we'd create would have any meaning.

Tonight, as we await the arrival of Santa Claus down one of our two chimneys into one of our three fireplaces, we understand, we see that we have come to understand, that Christmas as a broad cultural construct is a symbol of yearning—sometimes for presents, sometimes for family, sometimes for God, sometimes merely for Santa Claus, who is the most complete and perfect lie of all, a lie we tell our children in order to teach them the truth. Because sometimes what we need and want the most is the lie, because we look out the window at this time of year and the ice comes falling down like a billion guillotines, because we need something to assure us we are still keeping warm within our homes, with a fire burning hard and bright, but safely, because we are never alone even when all we have to keep us company is our thoughts.

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The Letters and What They Let Her Do

Satu Kaikkonen, yvonna (2009)
Last month, Satu Kaikkonen, the most prolific of the Finnish visual poets, sent Nancy and me the smallest of books, a little purple-colored affair, twelve pages long, and carrying forth only seven one-letter visual poems. The presentation of the booklet, which was sewn together with regular pink sewing thread, was perfect for these little creatures of hers, which she call LetterVispoems, visual poems focused on not just the letter but decidedly on a letter.

Satu Kaikkonen, Inscription within yvonna (2009)
Satu even inscribed the book on the lavender flyleaf, adding a few asemic characters to her signature and noting the extreme rarity of this booklet. We received the third copy in a series consisting of only ten total. Nancy, of course, comes first in the dedication, since she is and Satu were good friends at this year's visual poetry workshop in Mietoinen, Finland. And I have to believe that Satu is one of the reasons Nancy became a visual poet this year.

Satu Kaikkonen, "announcement" (2009)
The opening glyph of this book immediately forces me to recognize the typeface: Trebuchet, which has a distinctive lower-case g, which coincidentally is one of the quartet of letters in Qage, that set of letters and that concept that demonstrates the power of letters as visual shapes rather than as carriers of lexical meaning. Satu's opening poem ins an announcement, the head of the two-storey g is blowing a tune of out itself, and the music of a g is apparently apostrophes, which are simply another form of silence.

Satu Kaikkonen, "öe" and "tired"> (2009)
Satu is playing with letters in this book, simply trying to see what connections and games she can play with them, trying to discover their secrets, attempting to decipher their DNA—for letters do not merely form the visible pieces of words. Letters also carry meaning and significance within their shapes. Each is a separate talisman, with a separate character, and Satu teases some of the meaning out of them, finding visual puns (like a period-spitting y standing on its head) along the way.

This book is a pleasant read, a joy for the eye, and something so rare that these might be all you ever see of this book. So remember these few pieces well, and thank Satu for being and making.

_____

Kaikkonen, Satu. yvonna. SatuKaikkonen: Vesilahti, Finland, 2009.

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Yesterday, My Son Asked Me What Those Birds Were Called. I Told Him They Were Starlings

Everything's hiding from me even Everybody Funny, the blog that, I have just realized tonight, Mike Busam runs. A blog, I am reminded, is more of a prism through which to see the room, and the light is slightly bent and split open into colors as we do. To put it another way, if we spent our entire lives looking through only our own eyes, it would be as if we were blind. We would miss more than we'd see.

Or so it seems to me after just a brief swim through Mike's blog. Mike comes at the world with his own perspective and personality, which may be the point of all poetry too. (But let's put aside anaphora for the moment.) He is interested in poetry, in the visual presentation of data, in birding, in visual poetry, in churches, in insects, and it is the refracting of these various lights of the world that produces that certain spectrum and character of Mike's. (My only conceit is extended. I have lived my life merely wishing I could have been a metaphysical poet. Whoever wanted to be a physical poet? Well, maybe Mike, who spends as much time outdoors as he can.

Mike Busam, "sharpie and starlings 2" (2009)
What is remarkable to me is how much of Mike's work on this blog—which includes essays, photographs, graphs, poems, and visual poems of all kinds—is centered on direct observation. Not all of it, but plenty. Careful observation is essential for a birder, for one who can identify more gulls in flight than I could in a book of gulls. An observer of the outdoors, Mike has to be able to count and measure and, thus, recognize and know what he is seeing, so his verbo-visual productions are outgrowths from those knotted woods of achieved knowledge. Imagine (no, look above and see) his simple yet startling drawing of starlings, yet not of starlings at all, really a picture of Ohio's November sky, and fairly realistically so. Though starlings inhabit the title, these birds are nothing more than a cluster of careful round dots in the upper right corner of the frame—a frame that contains and restrains some of the contents of the drawing but not all. The trees, which also represent characters in the language of the earth (because this is a piece of asemic writing), are leafless in the bracing wind of fall and their bare trunks and limbs also burrow downward, like Yggdrasil, through the rectangular frame of the drawing into the blue sky that continues under the earth.

Mike Busam, "thigmotactic 3" (2009)
His pages are filled with simple vispoetic gestures, many of them referring back to his outdoors interests, which are scientific, avocational, and poetic in focus. This tiny piece of visual writing demonstrates the meaning of "thigmotactic," and it illustrates this with the form of the mayfly, which makes up a remarkable photograph Mike has taken of one of these little creatures. This piece, however, is not a photograph but an imagining of meaning.

Mike Busam, "church window 2" (2009)
So Mike captures the world sometimes in photographs, sometimes in drawings, sometimes through words, and even sometimes through what I would call fidgetglyphs, and in each of these forms he has his own clean style, steady eye, tight shot, firm grip. The blog is a little cornucopia of riches and imagination, more than I can easily say right now. But look at the stunning clarity of this photograph, the sharp angles of light and deep shadow. And see how Mike has transformed this into the simplest of visual poems.

Note, carefully, how he writes and makes his world. That's what we want from a poet, so that's what we can thank Mike for tonight.

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In Place of a Thought

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Welcome to the Waxwords

Geof Huth, "Waxwords 1" (20 Dec 2009)
The ways of inspiration are mysterious indeed. I'm am always prepared to create something, but I'm not always ready to create what I want to create. Today proved proved this point. I was productive during the day. Did much reading, worked on the layout for my upcoming collected poems (which now goes by the name ntst), created a couple dozen nanopoems, and even created a few visual poems of the asemic variety. But I was trying to create an eXmaSscard, the twenty-third in our sequence of such holiday cards. I've created these for twenty-two years in a row, and the twenty-third is proving the hardest to produce. I spent hours at the computer designing and fiddling and discarding anything I'd come up with. I gave up on InDesign and decided to teach myself Adobe Illustrator to give myself the advantage of a new tool. I could not design anything typographical today, and had to abandon it. Instead, I drew sets of invented characters in lines, and then stretched the results out of shape. Reviewing my work, I called the piece "Waxwords 1," imagining that I'd create others.

Geof Huth, "Waxwords 2" (20 Dec 2009)
I returned to the holiday card, trying to think of something to do with the idea of snow, playing with a picture of our backyard in snow, realizing that it was ironic that I was thinking about snow when we had received not a single flake of snow during the blizzard of 2009. I began to play with another piece of asemic writing, trying this time to be as different from the first piece as I could. This one was spidery, written hurriedly so that it would look as if it had been. During the transformation of my scribbles, I gave the first line dramatic black curves that did not appear in the rest of the piece, and I liked that. Over all, the piece didn't seem dynamic enough visually. That didn't matter since these pieces weren't the goal of my night. I went back to the eXmaSscard with no results.

Geof Huth, "Waxwords 3" (20 Dec 2009)
I finally gave up on the card, at least for the night. I emailed a note to my daughter Erin, copying Nancy and Tim, and I asked her if she wanted to go back to the idea of creating the holiday card as a family. This would require not worrying about mailing it out before Christmas. To end my night, I began a final Waxwords piece. This is has a tight design with repeated symmetric patterns, and it's the only one of these visual poems for tonight that holds together just as I'd like it to. That little poem is enough to make up for my inability to get other work done.

And Erin wrote back to say she was ready to work on the card together. She'll bring cross-stitching into it.

There's a tool or method I've never tried.

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Fingered Words

Geof Huth, "nigh the nigh" (18 Dec 2009)
A bit of driving tonight, in the dark. A bit of back and forth in the dark. Six hours of driving after work, and now we're back home, with our son. The TV is on. Children returning to the fold, and how the night flattens everything out and folds us into it. Nigh the night.

Geof Huth, "th'last line of it" (18 Dec 2009)
Not quite, never quite, the last line, no last line of it, but the thought of it. A finish. Something we cannot achieve. Try to remember your death. Why is that last experience ripped from you? denied you? Entrails spilled and spread, and the words they write. Cursive, you note carefully (notebook in hand).

Geof Huth, "the reason it" (18 Dec 2009)
The reason for it, or this, actually, yes, this, is that this is something to do. For that part of the drive where I rode, I downloaded a little app (TypeDrawing) to my iPhone (the app Nico Vassilakis has been using to great effect), merely so I could make something while on the move. Since a shark, I cannot stop moving. Or I have to position myself so experience flows through me. Oxygenation. Or oxidation.

Geof Huth, "HOLLO" (18 Dec 2009)
I write by fingering the screen of my device. All writing is fingering, the fingers playing an instrument, and how they play, the particular movements and their consequential, subsequent, sequential sounds, shapes, senses. The world is fingered by writing, my finger, usually index, sometimes though the middle because it is longer and can probe, control, feel. The idea is fingered. We blame the idea for itself, yet all blame is ours. This little attempt (an essay) fails even in its imperfected holloness. {sic}[sic](sic)

Geof Huth, "earlier and want to" (18 Dec 2009)
Creating is discovering, and the process of learning to create in this way is the process of learning the possibilities and limitations of the tool. The possibilimitations. Everything undone is done. Everything possible is im. And in the way. At some point, I realized that I could shoot and use a picture of the darkness around me, and how humming planes of light appeared from within that creamy blackness.

Geof Huth, "logos" (18 Dec 2009)
A visual poem is logos: word and place. Replacement of the word with image. Reemplacement of the word on a plane of semeness. The more it is seen, the more it is seme. In image, I'm age and era and errant, astray, a stray word, a word out of place, what place for the word in this world of the senses? I hear with my eyes, and the car moves on.

Geof Huth, "once or on one" (18 Dec 2009)
Stratum and stratum, and strata upon strata, and strati beyond strati. The song of the castrati. Eunuch, me knuckle rolling across the screen. It is the hard part of the finger, evidence of the skeleton within us. Feel the bone of it, feel the articulations of the finger, how can you articulate them? In what patterns might you place them? Can you stack them so high that the darkness will not overwhelm them?

Geof Huth, "ghostrider" (18 Dec 2009)
There is flow and curve to the road, a sense like flying, maybe over a bump. The heart catches, and when it catches it stops. Before moving on, always moving on. Because there is no end to the road. It merely changes directions. And there is no end to the night. It just changes positions. We are haunted by our dreams, and that is why we refuse to return to sleep. Or its deepness (akin to depth).

Geof Huth, "pleated word" (18 Dec 2009)
A pleat is a fold like darkness, or drapes, and we fold these words into bunches, almost miniature nosegays, so that you can smell them. Fold them correctly and you might create a punctuation mark, a letter, the outline of a shoe, a diacritical mark. Each a mark, a marking, you mark time, once, then twice, and the water is deep enough because it is the night, which continues above us into everything else, and everywhere we will never be. Though it seems now that everything is upside-down, upside-down is impossible, except that gravity tricks us into it. This is a very serious point.

Geof Huth, "wayhome" (18 Dec 2009)
Do not pun if you can pant. You are anxious, as you might be, as we all are, to make it home, because you believe there is one, but all you see, all you ever see, is a dark road, and dotted lines that would be white if there were enough light for that. You would follow each line home if you could, but something tells you that those are the lines you must cut across if you are to complete this assignment. You’d rather go to bed. You always would. But there is no bed, just a road, simply the road. And if you listen to it just right, and ignore the rattling of the car, and ignore the sound of the tires on the road, and ignore the wind the car makes out of thin air, you will notice that there is no sound at all and you do not move across the plane of that road, sometimes flat, sometimes tilted, and you notice that you are alone within yourself, and even without, and you realize that it is much too late for sleep anyway, so you wait for the sunrise, hoping it is not an illusion.

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When We Age and Remember

Postcard (Reverse) from Dees Stribling to Geof and Nancy Huth (25 Nov 2009)
My friend Dees, it appears, is one year and fifteen days younger than I. Another Gemini. Now that I've worked that out, by evaluating the evidence above (the date on the card plus the indication of my age), it seems to me that I knew this all along, knew he was a man from the first half of June.

That is of little importance to me. What interests me about this card is how it is a bit of play and a bit of art, how Dees made himself a mailartist many decades ago but never let anyone know because he didn't know it himself. Of all my friends from college, I have the most contact with Dees, and I might even see him the most, since I see him every five or six years or so. But we are in touch constantly, usually in the form of postcards. He mails me a card just about every four days, maybe more frequently. I mail him cards whenever I'm traveling, which meant scores of times this year alone. What I send him is, usually, conscious, intentional mailart. What he sends me are sources of play with the format of correspondence, which are mailart whether he accepts it or not.

I like that Dees has created mailart without knowing it existed. He is the replacement for Ray Johnson, though a bit more stable, and therefore significantly more alive. He invented mailart in a better way than Johnson did, because he invented it without the hampering effects of "art" itself. (Lightning Hopkins is playing the Christmas song "Merry Christmas" as I write this.) If art is play for the artist and entertainment for the consumer—as it had better be—then Dees knows how to be an artist. Today, I received two pieces of mail from Dees: one a black and white postcard of a Hollywood actor with the note "Because you can't have too many pictures of Hugh Grant," and the other a small envelope filled with little bits of lettered detritus from his house (tags off toys, tickets, instruction sheets, warning labels—evidence of the simultaneously devalued nature of writing in contemporary society along with its essential purposes: to communicate, to record, and to prove.

The postcard above actually has a picture on the obverse. It is of a campground at the David Dam between Arizona and Nevada, and the campground looks like a parking lot gone to ruin. On the reverse, just above our address, are the words "Was full" written not in Dees' hand. That note, even though not of his own creation, is a Deesian touch. This card was once saved as a vacation someone didn't quite have, as evidence of an RV campground a family visited but could not overnight at because it was full. (This is, after all, Christmas time, so stories about being turned away from places to rest abound.)

The main point of the postcard is merely to draw attention to a poem of mine, "Bearth: Day," and its central line, which is a line I stole from Ted Berrigan. I made that line from Berrigan a personal line about myself, and Dees has followed by doing the same. It is a nice touch, a gracious recognition of my existence and my attempts to make something of my short time here. And it leads me to wonder if a year from now he will send me another card to mark when he becomes one year older, just as I did when I finished writing that book of poems that began with this line of Berrigan's. It's unlikely that I will remember the possibility of Dees' sending me that other card until or unless it happens. My reason for this assumption is that Dees already brought up the idea of doing something on the day he turned 48 years, 5 months and 16 days old, and I even wrote to him about it publicly, suggesting that the day might require a postcard to mark its occurrence. Yet I'd forgotten the conversation entirely until Dees' response arrived in my mailbox a few weeks ago.

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Postcard from Nancy

While I was downstairs here cleaning up my digital life—or at least the streams of digital data snaking into my life—Nancy sent me a postcard from upstairs in our cold bedroom. (We live in an old house, and even after pouring more money into it than I'd care to add up the house is still cold in the winter. We can feel currents of cold in different parts of the house, even where we are sure the insulation is thick and secure.) Nancy's postcard arrived in my email inbox. She created it on her phone and mailed it off, possibly as a little hint that it was time for me to head up to bed. Instead, I am writing about the postcard from our dining room, having left my computer set up here for a few days at least.

The postcard caused a smile to break the slumber of my face, caused me to laugh and then yell up to Nancy, and then to walk the stairs to say, Hello. By the time I had returned to my post, still wondering what of a verbo-visual nature to write about tonight, I was thinking how the postcard was such a beast, though usually the image is created by some anonymous person and the writing by a correspondent one knows. But in the case of Nancy's postcard, she had done the entire thing, and then the theme of my last week of life came back to me—something I had spoken about at a staff meeting last Thursday, and something I had spoken about to the Regents, who are the board of directors for my agency, this Tuesday.

The idea is simple: Digital life is real life. Digital words are real words. Digital images are real images. Emotions don't so much care of the source of a sentiment as the worth of it, the meaning suffusing it, because life is life in any form: physical, imagined, digital, proposed. Whatever the mind perceives, even erroneously, is part of the living of an individual. So this playful little note is real and living and true. There is nothing less human about that part of life that is nothing but pixels and bits, because paper and ink is no more human than the evanescent digital pieces of our lives. I like to say that electronic information is more natural, more human, than analog information, because the information we store within our bodies is electronic, our thoughts are pulsings of electricity, we are machines of power and light.

Just as the various digital asemic works of Gary Barwin that you can find today at The New Post-literate blog demonstrate a lively imagination, a beautiful eye, and a clear grip on the printer's fist, a clear sense of the physical beauty and meaningfulness of the mere characters of the alphabet. What these beautiful pieces of digital arts, things that may never hit paper, show us is how human the digital world is, how it serves as just another extension of our imagination and intellect.

Gary Barwin, "asemic rosetta magritte forest" (2009)
As I look at these glinting pieces of digital expression that have found their way into my own imagination tonight, I realize that I cannot leave the realm of that imagination, that I cannot succumb to the disease of poetry, the sense that there is something righteous in the mere stringing-together of words or sounds or shapes, that I have to avoid the pretensions of a world that my sometimes extravagant and always excessive words might seem to push me ever towards. I realized that I could hear myself protesting within my own head, and I was saying (and this is really what I was saying),

I'm not a poet. I'm a person.

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A Poetics (Continued through 25)

22. Matter

What matters in poetry is matter, and what matter is is word, the sound of word, the sense the sound of word embodies. Meaning, in its refracting manner, is what matters in a poem. At its base, a poem is about the making and transferring of meaning; it is about something just in the same way it is itself. A poem is a tiny (or sometimes a large) manufactory of meaning, and the process of its making itself is what matters.


23. Ruins

In his poems “Some Particulars,” Jon Cone writes, “It is in revising that ruins are made,” yet he is a poet who revises heavily, who must depend on revising even though he tells me that he invariably prefers the “original, untouched version” to any of the revisions. A poet expects out of revision a better poem, but nothing a poet does to an existing poem can guarantee improvement. A revision may make a poor poem great or cripple a good poem.

The value of revision differs with the poet. I can hardly revise at all and see this incapacity as a great failing and an impediment. If a poem of mine is not nearly perfect from its birth, it’s chances for a good life are limited. I can sense what is wrong with a poem, hear how a phrase twists against itself, see (as clearly as if there were fissures on the page) how the structure of the poem falls apart, but I can make only slight changes to correct such errors. I cannot completely reimagine a poem. The beast is born out of me in a moment, and that moment is its full life.


24. Oneself

Poets write for themselves, not for each other—as every artist must. We are told that this is impossible at best and solipsistic at best, yet what other way can there be? As humans, we have direct access to only one person’s consciousness, so that is the entity we must focus our attention on. We can imagine other readers of our poems, and even know them as real people. We might even try to write a poem that that audience would enjoy, but the only audience we know exactly how to please is the poet we call “I.”


25. Style

Style is the stylus, the way one writes, the way a letter is formed and the word is made from it and the sentence from that. Style is what defines us as poets, even if our style changes constantly. Not every reader can recognize style. Some are literate only enough to see the word on the page and know what it (generally) is. To understand style it so recognize the multifarious ways words can be held together and to recognize the effects of different combinations of words. For some people, words are air; they need words constantly, but they think little about them. For others, words are essential sustenance, and they search for the best words daily, eating those that will give them the greatest pleasure and keep them alive the longest.

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A Sudden Urge

While I was in New York City this week, I had a sudden urge to purchase a couple of books of poetry while at the Borders at Madison Square Garden—this after deciding, weeks ago, not to buy any more books this year. (Borders always has a better poetry section than a Barnes & Noble, so it's sad to realize that, of the two major booksellers in this country, Borders is the one less likely to survive.) Both these books were from Wesleyan University Press, which I have to say is one of my favorite publishers of poetry. I've read Rae Armantrout's book already, and it is filled with remarkable beauty and surprise. The Barbara Guest will probably have to wait until next year.

Armantrout, Rae. Versed. Wesleyan University Press: Middletown, Ct., 2009.

Guest, Barbara. The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest. Edited by Hadley Haden Guest. Wesleyan University Press: Middletown, Ct., 2008.

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Finding a Poem inside my Voice

Today, I downloaded Dragon Dictation software to my iPhone. As a matter fact, I'm not typing any of these words right here. Instead, I'm speaking into my phone and then I'll copy the text into this post afterwards. The software was remarkably accurate. I could speak into it and it could understand what I was saying and could reproduce each word exactly as I had said it—could even determine where sentences need to end, so I didn't have to add punctuation at all. The software was a remarkable success.

But success is only so interesting, so I decided to test the system. I began by speaking into the phone as quickly as possible, and for the first couple of tries I couldn't speak too fast for the software. It could still figure out what I was saying. Then I decided to speak very fast, so fast that even I could not understand. Even though the software made mistakes, it made only a few. I decided that next I had to do something to undermine the software's ability to return accurate transcriptions, so I spoke into the phone, but not with words, not with syllables, not with normal human vocal sounds. Instead, I made chirps and click and buzzes and all kinds of sounds that really had no direct connection to human speech.

In these cases, what the software returned had no obvious connection to the sounds I was making. It was simply forced to return something. However, in four cases, it produced texts with enough sense for me to take those and fashion them into a poem. I took part of one returned text to make a title, and I used the other three returns exactly as I had received them. I made each of them a strophe, and add line breaks. (The last test of the system I made as strange as I could and the software converted twenty seconds of noise into a single string of four numerals, the numeral 3 repeated four times.

The poem I created in this way seems to sound like me at the same time doesn't sound like me at all:

I'm Going to Speak as Quickly as I Can Remember and See

Good morning Don
phone call Don
on the purple Palm
going on

Baby names listed
and a very hard
to wade
going to marry you
start earning your
degree maybe

When the room
you bring me
know when I'm running
you are you
going in right now
I'm running a

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Found Pwoermds and a Fear of Elves

Two days ago, in New York City, I had a short time to see my daughter, so we spent most of our time at Macy's. Although I usually stay at a hotel only a few blocks from Macy's and have been doing so for many years, I'd actually never visited the store before. But the Macy's Christmas decorations were up and I thought I might as well go shopping with my daughter.

I really didn't expect the animated displays with the brightly colored elves that could give a small child nightmares. I didn't expect that it had nine floors or wooden escalators on the top four floors or so. I actually didn't expect it to be divided into two buildings, sometimes making it hard to return to where we'd come from.

But Erin and I had a good time, and I began a new way of making pwoermds. I found a set of inlaid words in the floor somewhere, and I began to photograph parts of them, to invent words out of the sequences of letters within those words, to write pwoermds with my camera. Now, I'll have to return to Macy's sometime to write more of these pwoermds sometimes—better ones. I got better at writing them as I went along, but many more possibilities exist, and I thought of a good one as I was taking the escalator down the stairs.









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Inappropriation

Amtrak Train 243, from New York’s Penn Station to the Albany-Rensselaer Station


I wasn’t ready for it. My camera was in my bag, and in two pieces, the lens separate from the body—so I missed the picture, but the billboard stayed with me. (The picture above is the same billboard, in a manner of speaking, but not from the same spot.) Immediately after my bus crossed the Goethels Bridge* onto Staten Island† yesterday, I saw the billboard. This is the billboard that first greets visitors to Staten Island, amazingly enough. I thought that the “Got Hemorrhoids?” line was bad enough, but that was before I noticed that the last line replaces the middle O in “Proctology” with a pair of buttocks.

The sign was mooning me as I rode onto Staten Island.

And that is when I thought of Daniel Nester.

During the course of the bus ride from Albany, I had been reading Daniel’s recent book, How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull, 2009), and even as a slow reader I’d made it through half of the book by the time I’d arrived on Staten Island. The book is a fast read, which might lead to questions about the profundity of this book, if that is even a reasonable question when considering a book of humor, even serious humore. It may, however, be a reasonable question about a book that includes a chapter focused on the various terms for mooning, or for exposing one’s buttocks as a form of practical humor.‡

Ostensibly—I mean, the title gives this away—the book is about being inappropriate, and the stories within it are usually about Daniel either being inappropriate or being in the company of people who are being much more inappropriate than he ever shows himself to be. If the book has a weakness, it is Daniel’s inability to prove his inappropriateness, his inability to show himself as anything worse than a goofy nerd who comes across as an honest and kind human being. For $14.95, we should expect more of a jerk. Instead, I found someone who reminded me too much of myself.

The first time I met Daniel Nester was at a performance I gave this year in Albany. At the time, I had just finished reading one of the essays in the book, a story about Daniel testing penile enhancement products via his friends. (But is this inappropriate or merely layman science, science for humor’s sake?) In the story, Daniel mentioned men being interested in the length of their penises, so the first words I ever said to Daniel, before saying hi, but while shaking his hand were “Six and a half.” (I know something about being inappropriate.) Daniel laughs at my opening. Months later, a female friend of mine tells me that I shouldn’t use the word “cunt” in a poem, that that word is reserved for women. She says this in the face of my poem “If I Had a Cunt.” I tell her I cannot accept that limitation. I send the poem to Daniel, and he responds with a note that it is a beautiful poem. I point this out because I might be biased in his favor.

But does Daniel know how to be inappropriate? Maybe a little. What I want to know is does he know how to be inappropriate the way I do. I won’t even write what my carpool colleague and I joke about while driving back and forth to work, except to point out that I usually end these conversations by saying, “Dave, we are bad people.” A common joke in my world is to act surprised all of a sudden, stop everything I’m doing, and say, “Did you hear that?” After the person listens and waits for a few seconds, I fart as loudly as I can.⁴ For many years, I had planned to be a grandfather by the time I was 47, because that is how old my father was when my daughter Erin, his first grandchild, was born. One evening a couple of years ago, on my daughter’s birthday, I realized that I would be 47 in exactly nine more months, so I called my daughter from the middle of a party I was attending and I urged her to get pregnant that day. I said, “You have to get pregnant tonight.” When she told me she wasn’t married, I explained that she didn’t seem to understand how it all worked. Once while giving a workshop with a good friend of mine, I suggested that he might have trouble fitting inside Shea Stadium. The shock of the elderly women in the audience was enough to make my day, and I have just smiles while thinking about this totally inappropriate joke again. I fill every day with as many jokes as I can, getting pleasure out of life only through the lowest forms of humor. I was, literally, named after Geoffrey Chaucer, so I come to my inappropriateness honestly, so I know a thing or two about being inappropriate.⁵ And I’m ready to try to steal the title of Mr Inappropriate from Daniel Nester.

Now, back to our story: Daniel’s book really isn’t so much about his inappropriateness as it is simply a kind of gentle gonzo journalism that is often hilarious, and always interesting, humanistic, and compelling. The stories in this book divide themselves into three main categories: touching, sometimes raw, and interesting personal essays focused on his life; pieces of journalism about people or topics that are unlikely to be the focus of many other journalists; and lists. Let’s look at these one by one in reverse order.

The lists are the simplest. These could include his list of different types of mooning, which is so detailed as to be frightening. How, I have to wonder, has Daniel lived his life?⁶ Among the funniest of the lists is the one of dialogs written by his English as a Second Language students that featured Holden Caulfield and his sister Phoebe swearing at each other in less than idiomatic English. Tears came to my eyes when I read these, but the story Daniel was telling was also one about how his all-Asian team of students was somehow freed from their usual social constraints by this simple assignment. The best of the lists is the one that ends the book, “Timeline of the Author’s Inappropriate Acts,” which is the funniest part of the book and which does prove the author’s inappropriateness.⁷ Another list in the book is a set of footnotes that grows, throughout the book, to 38.⁸ These footnotes are often simply asides, but they are also filled with weirdly detailed bits of information, evidence of Daniel’s compulsion to document facts accurately, even if sometimes unnecessarily.

His journalistic pieces are almost anomalies. They are still filled with evidence of Daniel as a person and character, yet their detail is almost overwhelming. The longest of these is his story of Todd Rogers, an apparent genius and an honest-to-goodness star videogame player. Daniel’s story of Todd is brutally honest but also kind. Daniel cares about this man whose life seems quite the mess to me. Daniel shows the weird genius of the man without killing his humanity. Todd exists as a real person in contact with another real person, and struggling his own way through his own life. It’s a beautiful story, actually.⁹

Finally, we have the personal essays, which often reveal Daniel’s weaknesses: his inability to convince a dog owner to pick up his dog’s feces, his troubles with his girlfriends, and his desperation in the face of his wife’s inability to become pregnant. This last story, “Garden Path Paragraphs,” is one of my favorites. It is funny, almost outrageously vulgar in spots, and finally and completely touching. I was thrilled when I read within it that Daniel’s wife had become pregnant—even though I’ve known for years that the daughter resulting from that pregnancy is alive and well.¹⁰ Maybe Daniel’s most important piece in this book is “Goodbye to All Them,” a wrenching story about New York City poetic politics and Daniel’s decision to give up being a poet and to give up on New York City. Reading it, I can’t figure out why I’d ever be a poet, except that I try to avoid the failings Daniel outlines in this essay. Sometimes, we cannot be what we want to be, so we be what we can be, and in Daniel’s case this has worked out well.

Let me admit that Daniel is occasionally inappropriate and does prove it in this book.¹¹ And there’s even evidence of this in his life: Daniel keeps telling me I’m going to do something for his students (speak to his class about blogging, teach his students about sound poetry), but nothing ever happens. For the past six days, I’ve bought a book of Daniel’s every other day, one in Niskayuna (this book), one in Hudson (a book of his poetry published by BlazeVox), and the last in the Borders next to Madison Square Garden (this book again, this time a copy for my daughter). Each time I bought a copy of his book, I emailed him a photograph proving the purchase (and I usually did this before I left the store). But I have received no word of thanks from Daniel. So is he upset that I didn’t make it to his reading in Hudson (in the very same venue where I bought his book of poetry)? Possibly. So is Daniel inappropriate? Absolutely.

Because of this, we know that he knows what he’s writing about, so I encourage anyone who doesn’t mind a little vulgarity to buy this book. Actually, I want people who can’t stand any vulgarity to buy it, too. It is in stores everywhere. The clerk at the Borders took me right to the display.

My train trip is about to end, I’m between Hudson and Albany, New York, right now, so I can think of no better way to honor Daniel than to retire to the restroom and nester¹² into the toilet, thinking of Daniel the entire time.

_____

* The less famous of the two bridges of Staten Island, both of which carry I-278 east and west.

† Last night was the first night I had ever stayed on Staten Island, which is also Richmond County, New York. I have been working to sleep in every county in the state, and after tonight I’ll be down to nine, most of which have no real hotel within their borders. There are 62 counties in New York, so it’s interesting that’s it’s taken me so long (16 years of fairly constant travel) to get so unfar.

‡ It seems to me that “practical humor” must be the more general term covering the realm of practical jokes.

⁴ This joke works every time, for the simple reason that I’m only trying to amuse myself. That is the point of practical humor.

⁵ Of course, I can’t be as outrageous as possible all the time, so I am usually reasonably palatable in person—at least upon first meeting me, so don’t worry much if you are ever forced to meet me.

⁶ Daniel asked me—and a hundred or more other close friends—to help him develop this list, but I (sadly) had to report that I knew of no words for mooning besides “mooning.” This means I missed out on my one chance of having my name appear in his book.

⁷ My congratulations, Daniel.

⁸ And which serve as the inspiration for these footnotes of mine.

⁹ Though maybe not as beautiful as a poem about a man and his imagined cunt.

¹⁰ And that she was joined this year by a baby sister.

¹¹ Inappropriate parts of Daniel’s book: Uses the US Postal Service abbreviation “NY” instead of “N.Y” or writing out “New York.” Fails to capitalize “Mass” in its capitalized Catholic sense. (Hey, I’m an ex-Catholic, too, man, and I know more than one word for “thurible.”) Writes “Once again, a doctor approaches my wife and I.” (Now, did he really approach “I”?) Sometimes does not add a comma after the name of the state in sentences like this one: "Albany, NY[,] is an indoor tanning mecca, a hotbed of hot beds.” Similarly, doesn't add comma in dates after the year: "Miriam Lee Nester was born at 10:48am on August 14, 2007[,] in Albany, NY." Doesn't hyphenate "African-American" when it's an adjective.

¹² This is Daniel’s word for “a verb for when a male ‘urinates in two or multiple streams,’” but he does not explain the conditions under which such urination is possible. (Sorry, ladies, you’re on your own figuring out this one.)

ecr. l’inf.

Buying Poetry (The Preceding Two Months in Review)

Hilton Garden Inn / Staten Island, Room 625, Staten Island, New York

I support poetry. Give me a bumper sticker. Give me a button to pin on my coat. Give me a banner. Give me a flag.

There are many ways to support poetry. Read it. Tout it. Ignore the bad of it. Live as if it were essential to your life.

But one measurable way to support poetry is to buy it. I do this constantly, somewhat to my detriment, but not too badly so. I buy it to read it, to have it on hand, to read it again. But I also buy poetry to show a commitment. Many people give me books of poetry over the course of a year, and I accept them happily.

But to buy something is to show commitment. And, occasionally, I like to show my commitment (and to show, in part, the range of my reading in poetry) in public. So here are the books I’ve bought over the past two months, presented in reverse chronological order, as if I were posting each set of purchases on a blog.

[This is the first night I'll ever sleep in Richmond County, New York. Once tonight is over, I'll have only nine counties in New York left to sleep in. I've finally made it into the single digits.]


2 December 2009

from the authors

Greenstreet, Kate. The Last 4 Things. Ahsahta Press: Boise State University, Boise, Ida., 2009.

Poe, Deborah. Our Parenthetical Ontology. Custom Words: Cincinnati, Oh., 2008.


The Spotty Dog Books & Ale

Koch, Kenneth. The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2005.

Nester, Daniel. The History of My World Tonight. BlazeVox: Buffalo, N.Y., 2005. (Autographed copy)


1 December 2009

Collins, Billy. Picnic, Lightning. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, Pa., 1998. (Purchased as a joke gift for Ann Gorrick.)

Nester, Daniel. How to Be Inappropriate. Soft Skull Press: New York, 2009. (Sure, not really poetry, but there’s some poetry in it. And Daniel is a poet.)


21 November 2009

from the author

Levitsky, Rachel. Neighbor. Ugly Duck Presse: Brooklyn, 2009.


7 November 2009

Grolier Poetry Book Shop, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Antin, David. i never knew what time it was. University of California Press: Berkeley, 2005.

Armantrout, Rae. Veil: New and Selected Poems. Wesleyan University Press: Middletown, Ct., 2001.

Forché, Carolyn. Blue Hour: Poems. Perennial: New York, 2003, 2004.

The Great Machines: Poems and Songs of the American Railroad. University of Iowa Press: Iowa City, 1996.

Scalapino, Leslie. New Time. Wesleyan University Press: Hanover, N.H., 1999.

Scalapino, Leslie. The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence. The Wesleyan University Press: Hanover, N.H., 1999.

Scalapino, Leslie. R-hu. Atelos: Berkeley, 2000.

Shapiro, Karl. The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late. University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1998.

Wolff, Rebecca. Figment: Poems. Norton: New York, 2004.

Wright, Franz. Wheeling Motel: Poems. Alfred A Knopf New York, 2009.


12 November 2009

bought from author

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Torques: Drafts 58 – 76. Salt Publishing :Cambridge, 2007.


13 October 2009

Dove and Hudson, Albany, New York

Ashbery, John. A Worldly Country: New Poems Harper Collins: New York, 2007.

Bidart, Frank. Star Dust. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2005.

Cummings, E.E. Complete Poems, 1904-1962. Liveright: New York, 1994.

Palmer, Michael. The Promises of Glass. New Directions: New York, 2000.

Riding, Laura. Selected Poems: In Five Sets. Persea Books: New York, 1993.

Rothenberg, Jerome. New Selected Poems. New Directions: New York, 1986.

Rothenberg, Jerome. A Paradise of Poets: New Poems & Translations. New Directions: New York, 1990.

Rothenberg, Jerome. That Dada Strain. New Directions: New York, 1983.

Snodgrass, W.D. Heart's Needle. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1960.

Snyder, Gary. Danger on Peaks. Shoemaker and Hoard: Washington, D.C., 2004.

Str and, Mark. Man and Camel. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2007.

Williams, C.K. Flesh and Blood. Liveright: New York, 1994.

Wright, Franz. God's Silence. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2006.


11 October 2009

Bergvall, Caroline. Fig. Salt Publishing: Cambridge, 2005.

Lehto, Leevi. Lake Onega and Other Poems. Salt Publishing: Cambridge, 2006.

Share, Don. Squandermania. Salt Publishing: Cambridge, 2007.

Tardos, Anne. I am you. Salt Publishing: Cambridge, 2005.

Wheeler, Susan. Source Codes. Salt Publishing: Cambridge, 2001.

ecr. l’inf.