Or “Inter faeces et uriname nascimur,” as St. Augustine originally put it. (We retreat to Latin when the meaning offends our sensitivities, especially if those sensitivities avoid particularly human, particularly animal, activities.)

Manuscript Pages of F.A. Nettlebeck's Bug Death from Visual Poetry in the Avant Writing Collection

F. A. Nettelbeck’s Bug Death is a classic text in my world, whatever that is, but I’d never read it until now. We wonder what we wait for.

The text is fragmentary, dark, dark as night, haunting, and—ultimately, unmistakedly, and unavoidably—poetry of great power. The I-less loveless lyric.

If I can read a few words skittering down a page in a narrow column and feel something different from boredom or hope for sleep, something is there.
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Radisson Riverside, Room 212, Rochester, New York

Yes, I suppose, I would have to say that time is slipping away from me, though my meaning of that might differ greatly from yours.

I lose time as much by experiencing it fully as by letting it slip by unnoticed. I think I told you once that we never really lose anything—and to some degree I will continue to believe that, until I die. But in another sense, the experience of living can be sometimes more intense than the life of the mind.

Today was the day of the Stockade Walkabout, an annual event in the Stockade Historic District of Schenectady, New York. My role in the walkabout was to dress in eighteenth-century garb and read poetry to the attendees. I decided to read a selection of forty poems, most from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but a few “faux poems” by me. What I didn’t know was how to read to people, or how to find people to read to.
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I tend to write poems (occasionally, but not occasional poems) against any audience or reader reading my poems. It is an artistic stance, I suppose, some silly idea that no audience is necessary since the writer only writes for the self. (Who else, after all, can we know?) So it is not surprising that my first attempt at writing a faux eighteenth-century poem is also such a poem, one designed to be read beside a street to passersby who listens or not.
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Sometimes, I wonder why I agree to do some things.

A few months ago, a woman I don't know (but who knows someone I know) called me to ask me to read poetry, in eighteenth-century costume, on the streets of Schenectady's stockade district as part of the 50th Stockade Walkabout.
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Chris Piuma Reading a Poem that Rewrites the Opening of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, at the Cadmium Text Reading Series, Kingston, New York (19 September 2009)

The Cadmium Text Series, curated by Anne Gorrick and featuring writers of innovative poetry from in and around the Hudson Valley, always provides us with a good reading, but this one last Saturday was especially good.
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My expected post tonight on the reading by Chris Piuma and Don Byrd yesterday afternoon has been delayed until the videos of the event finish uploading. In its place, I present the poem I wrote tonight, which includes many phrases appropriated from a poem Don read yesterday: "Abstraction: Sample and Remix." My (very drafty) poem below is itself a sample and remix. The one I wrote yesterday, using lines Chris had read aloud to us, will have to wait for another time, and maybe even another place.

Two and a half years ago, Nico Vassilakis, Crag Hill, Jim Andrews, and I gave a poetry performance in Seattle. It was a great evening, and part of what made it great, beyond the joy of the performance, were the people who came to see the performance, including Chris Piuma, whom I met for the first time that night.

This afternoon, I met Chris for the second time, this time to hear him reading at the Cadmium Text Series in Kingston, New York.
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Tonight, I finished reading Robert Duncan's Bending the Bow (the last word of which I consistently pronounce as "bough" in my head, even though that makes no sense), and the last fifty pages or so were quite painful to me. The strong sense of meter, rhythmical but not metronomical, remained, but the poems devolved into dry retellings of classical myths, quaint 1960s political poetry, and macaronic impertinence without the frisson of pleasure hoped for from incongruities.
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The visual poet is the person who sees text where others see words, the visual poet is the one for whom words are not invisible portals toward meaning but concrete structures that harbor meaning, the visual poet is the person who loves the letter and the structures of sequences of letters over the word.

ecr. l'inf.
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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

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