Hampton Inn Convention Center, Room 1223, Washington, DC

No time for anything today except this one thought.

I found myself talking to people today and suddenly realizing that Washington, DC, is my real hometown. Not because I ever lived here, though I did live here for a few months in 1970. But because this is where my family always returned to after an assignment overseas. The Department of State is like an ancestral home for me: the place I returned to have my photo taken for a passport, to undergo my regular medical exams, to receive innoculations to prepare me for our next posting.

I'm in Chinatown now, not really my neighborhood in the city. The Mall is more like my neighborhood. Though there's always Fessenden Street.

ecr. l'inf.
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Mark Young is busy again pushing interesting poetry out into the world. Living in a world of bits and paper, of webpages and books, of click-on-demand and print-on-demand, his Otoliths empire appears to grow daily. He is doing more and more all the time, and you can see some of the results by buying copies of the four books he’s just released.

Dan Waber distributes the following imaginative announcement. Try to avoid Line 70.

Last night, I took a nap at 8 that ended up continuing deep into this morning. That is a luxury I almost never see. Actually, I had no idea I could even sleep that long. I’ll make up for my recent indulgence by writing a late-afternoon blog post to be followed up (at least, theoretically) by an evening post.

This afternoon respite is simply a response to a meme-tagging by Tom Beckett, requiring me to submit a list of my ten favorite films.
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“George Van Houten,” American Hotel, Sharon Springs, New York (11 Feb 2007)

There are signs all around us. Sometimes, we gather no conventional meaning out of them; they tell us nothing to do, show us no way to go. These signs are, ironically, those most visible to us. We see them, rather than through them. They are telling, precisely because they tell us nothing.
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“never gonna get it Right” (18 Jul 2005 + 21 Feb 2007)

I was born on a Wednesday, leaving me to wonder later in life why a poem told me I was full of woe.

Wednesday falls in the middle of the week, marking the farthest distance between any two consecutive weekends.

Wednesday is the hill up which Sisyphus rolls his rock.

On a Wednesday, Lent begins: Ash Wednesday, the day our priests leave a cross of ashes on our foreheads, marking us and marking time.

Astoria, Queens, New York

In the plays of Brian Friel (at least those I'm familiar with), there are always long dramatic speeches. In Dancing at Lughnasa, the concluding soliloquy ties up the story, moving it decades into the future. These long speeches are devices meant to save time (at the expense of telling instead of showing us the story), but the speeches are also about eloquence. I might say that most plays are about eloquence, about the manifestation of eloquence as an artform.

Sheraton New York, Room 2739, New York, New York

Over the years, I’ve been reminded (again and again) that visual poets, digital poets, and others working in similarly intermedial fields frequently don’t want to apply labels to themselves or their work. They believe that language is a tourniquet that will restrict their creativity and relegate them to some box that doesn’t adequately contain the wide-ranging roamings of their imaginations or the broad veldts their creations inhabit.
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Sheraton New York, Room 2739, New York, New York

My view of musicals is fairly dim. Early this afternoon before seeing my first Broadway musical, I explained myself to Nancy (who shares my view): The musical is the lowest form of entertainment, just below simultaneously belching and talking.

None of this makes me qualified to judge the quality of a Broadway musical, but I unexpectedly found myself today watching Rent with Nancy and Tim, and was surprised to discover that I enjoyed it.
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Profile
Profile
Future Appearances in Space
Future Appearances in Space
This is a list of where I expect to be on the road in the future. If anyone knows of anything of possible interest to me happening in these places at these times, drop me a line, though I can’t be sure I’ll have the time for anything.

  • 3-5 October 2011: Buffalo, New York
  • 6-8 October 2011: Cheyenne, Wyoming
  • 19-22 October 2011: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

    • Upcoming Readings and Performances
    Upcoming Readings and Performances
    1 October 2011
    The Grey Borders Reading Series
    Niagara Artists Centre
    354 St. Paul Street
    St Catharine's, Ontario
    Geof Huth, NF Huth, and Angela Szczepaniak
    8:00 pm


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    Prospectus
    Prospectus
    A kaleidoscopic review of visual poetry and related forms of art over the centuries, joined with the recollections of one contemporary visual poet. Topics of interest include visual prose, comics art, illustrated books, minimalist poetry, and visually-enhanced textual poetry.
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