1. If we are serious, we find it difficult to assess a work of art, because the art is in the concealment of its meaning, its manner, and its purpose. Because of this, I allow the pieces of a work of art to accumulate upon me, like dust in a room left closed for decades because someone dear to me died there and I do not wish to experience that death again, let alone forever and again. 

     So it is with trepidation that I strew a few words about Dawn Nelson-Wardrope's “Remnants of the Red Ribbon Sect.” I will begin by noting I have no idea how two visual poets of such mastery as Dawn and her brother Stephen can be birthed from the same spring. Their imaginations take up the entirety of a large city, yet they create their work with ferocious yet not frantic intensity without being anything more than one sister and her brother. 

    This book arrived today after I had made two visual poems scratched onto stone, and each is good enough, yet I cannot see the graceful intensity in those pieces as I see in Dawn’s. (As an aside, Dawn once sent my wife Karen and me a few small visual poems a few years ago, and those gifted to me have lain on a bookshelf facing out at me until I packed them away this weekend to transfer them (and many other things) to my ridiculously huge archives in a couple of weeks. I hated to send them away, but I have sent away so much else already, and I must reduce my quantity of stuff before Karen and I move out of Manhattan in 11.5 months.) 

    Let me note that Dawn’s poems in this book are constantly beautiful, disturbing, and dense—never quite telling us what they must mean, because we must determine that for ourselves. 

    These poems are collage poems bursting with text and image. They are not meant to mean so much as they are meant to affect the percipient as they flip through page and page again to see repeated images and ideas, while every poem reamins its own unique and compelling gestalt. Out of fragments of text and image, Dawn makes a new world habitable only to humans who realize the power of text and image, of poem and the extent to which a poem may become more than itself. 

     Dawn’s verbo-visual tropes are myriad: tearing paper to stanch the flow of text, typing dense patterns of text onto the base page of the collage, adding circles of paint (gouache to my eye) on the page, cutting and pasting Madonna-like faces onto most pages so that someone is looking at us as we look at her and the collage she inhabits, sometimes holding pieces of the collage down with paper clips (and other fasteners) instead of glue, circling words in the collaged texts to make us focus on the artist’s own interest, collaging onto the boards of the book instead of merely on blank paper , including repetends to the text (often “solitude”), so certain thoughts stay in the mind of the reader longer, and focusing on rough-hewn collage techniques—thus working in the style of dirty visual poetry, the rich and loamy soil so many of the best visual poems are grown within. 


    Of course, none of these words of mine tells you anything important about these poems, so look at them yourself. Or buy a copy of the book from the wonderful Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, or order the book from Amazon. I received mine today. I did not wait to read it.

    ecr. l'inf.
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  2.  

    calamity is the whisper of a heart 

    still throbbing after all these many forgotten years 

    precarious, you might say 

    thinking of cavities 

    the sweetest being

    the wettest 

    my monsoon thoughts elapse across perimeters 

    kinda like kissing a kat and the consequences thereof 

    what is right is whatever it is we ever do 

    I sing with the slightest voice so 

    you might not hear it 

    unless you lean into the breadth of it 

    and the whole sense of it 

    close enough to inhale 

    its slightly putrid breath 


    ecr. l'inf.

     

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  3. Stones at the Reception for Robert Grenier's Language Objects: Letters in Space, 1970-2013 (Brooklyn, 19 May 2013)


    The word comes rough out of the body. A wind. Constriction. Friction makes the sound. We all hate speech because it forces us to believe we are human, because we are forced into the human horde. The only way to control it, to control the word, is to write it. To draw it.

    Last night, I attended the opening reception for a retrospective of Robert Grenier's poetry at Southfirst in Brooklyn. The show went by the name "Language Objects, Letters in Space, 1970-2013," and it included everything after his first book of poetry, Dusk Road Games. Poetry, an essay, an edited set of poetry by Larry Eigner, one photograph, a letter, some archival materials (notebooks with poems wrawn into double-page spreads and across the physical gutters of the books)--yet this was an art show.

    For many reasons, Grenier is my touchstone poet. In so many ways, he inhabits my interests. (Although, I admit, not in all.) He is a massive minimalist, a maximinimalist, a masculinist maker of micropoems that build into giant works, sometimes works of such massive size that we cannot well understand their extent. And he is a visual poet, one who grew into that state later in life but landed there tenaciously and has set up house, even though he does not wander in visual poetry circles, though his imagination is not that of the main herd of us. He is a worker of an idea all the way. As his namesake Robert Lax, he grew out of sentences into words, but then he grew further, into a realm of spidery letters that formed words if you worked hard enough to read them. If you tried to read them.

    He is commonly the poet of four-word poems, always short words, sometimes with words breaking across the line. He is a poet of patience. Maybe not his, but ours, the patience required of us to read his poems. He is the practitioner of slow poetry. He slows us down enough so we can see well enough so we can hear the words that are not spoken, even though only imagined so.

    People at the Exhibition

    The exhibition consisted of a few vitrines, a number of poems presented as art on the walls, and a few items, mostly the most booklike of Grenier's books, on shelves. The space was raw--exposed beams and supports, rough wood--but surrounded by clean white walls, order, control. The space, but a room, presented to us the poems in ways to allow us to interact with them, to read these often (physically) difficult to read poems.

    It was a good space, and it filled with people as I walked through it.

    The Man in the Corner

    Exhibitions are spaces for showing things, and often the things are people. I watch people as much as I look at art when I'm at a gallery. I'm more of a viewer of than a interactor with people. I take everything in. I slow down. I read. The roughness of the word, of the human being in space, softens. Everything becomes palatable, edible, digestible. I take them all in.

    Most people spent most of their time talking, but I spent my time watching, breathing in the words. When I spoke, it was with a kind of reticence born out of a deep shyness, a resistance to people, a writer's desire, maybe an artist's, to be alone.

    Still, I broke my silence quickly.

    Robert Grenier Holding a copy of "This" # 1 and Showing His Famous Essay, "On Speech" (19 May 2013)

    I recognized Robert Grenier immediately upon entering the room, and within a few minutes I'd introduced myself. Grenier knows I exist. I've written about his work enough to gather such attention, so I thought he would know who I was, though he was surprised, as everyone is, to learn that my last name rhymes with "truth."

    "Mr Grenier," I said, "my name is Geof Huth." Then I explained a bit about myself, enough to put myself (as a word) in context.

    Grenier was simply a New Englander, in his manner, his accent, the way he dressed, the careful way he spoke. There was an enduring simplicity to him--as if he were once of his own poems--a sense that he was merely who he was, a man without trappings. We talked for a while, but others shuttled him away since he was the reason each of us was there, and I ended up in a good conversation with John Batki about Grenier. Batki is a good friend of Grenier's and the one who suggested the spelling of "M'ASS" in BOSTON, M'ASS to Grenier, which was the reason (according to Batki) that the poem is dedicated to him (along with Anselm Hollo).

    Batki and I looked at Grenier's poems, sometimes reading them, often discussing them, and discussing Grenier's books, most of which I own. (Since Grenier's books are often quite rare and, thus, quite expensive, collecting Grenier's work is difficult).



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  4. Philip Guston, "White House" (1971)

    In the end, there is no beginning. Everything has always starts long before we realize it.

    We have now moved but a week since the day Trump was informally elected President of the United States,* and it seems as if my entire life has occurred since those dark hours. As the realization of the end game congealed in my head, a huge sense of dread permeated my body. Only sleep took it away, and I dream dreams that are mostly nightmares but always rich and interesting. Still, upon awaking that Wednesday morning, it was not my dreams I was awaking from but from the election of such a simply pointless and empty person. The dread returned hard and fastened itself to my consciousness.

    Yet, now, the reality has cooled a bit. I'm still aghast at the results of the race, but I have accepted the reality. It is as if I have lost a foot but learned to walk without it, so the loss is not so great anymore. Occasionally, during the day, I am reminded of its absence, but it passes through me as accepted regret. I cannot change it, so I must live with it.

    I pay too much attention to politics at the national level, but which I mean I pay the amount of attention anyone should. The federal government affects our freedoms and determines how well or poorly we live to a good degree. The more power a government has, the more it has to use. So my goal is government doing the most good. For that reason, I am a Democrat, sometimes as a partisan, sometimes as a person who has no place else to go, since every other choice is worse.

    When this election began brewing (about four years ago), I dreaded it at this point. I did not want an election pitting another Bush against another Clinton. I despise dynasties. As an American and a small-r republican, I despise monarchies and the idea that blood must determine destiny. I hated the idea of another Clinton (even though not by blood) as much as another Bush. The country must grow and extend itself, so it had to allow new voices.

    What we had during the interminable election season instead was something richer characters but emptier in fact. The Republicans put forth a parade of people, none of whom I could vote for (maybe Lindsey Graham in a pinch). Trump was such a cartoon, such a moral morass, and such a thoughtless (in all conceptions of the word) person that I never thought the Republicans would elect him. At first. The Democrats put forth the pre-selected Hillary Clinton, the unexpected Bernie Sanders, and two others who lasted until debates began. 

    In the end, the two people who vied against each other were both the least and the most prepared to be president. 

    Trump was clearly least prepared. He was probably the only major party candidate for president less prepared to be president that I was. His understanding of the basic operations of government was skimpy at best, and his lack of depth--his almost total lack of rational thinking--was breathtaking. Not to say anything about his total lack of respect for the concept of the truth. His character was without equal. I have never voted for a Republican for president, but I was always impressed by the preparedness of most the eventual Republican presidents. G.W. Bush was an exception, but he was immensely prepared compared to Trump. What was worse, though, was his puerile temperament. Here was a man who would attack anyone he didn't like rashly, viciously, vulgarly, and yet he would whine incessantly if anyone criticized any of his stupidities or prevarications.

    Clinton (whose Rodham I will always miss) was probably the n
    _____

    * Informally, because the Electoral College makes the final decision in our strange system. Also, I do realize the election was not called until the next day, but it was essentially a foregone conclusion and all of the voting occurred during this day one week ago.

    ecr. l'inf.







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  5. The poem, an isolated fiction, doesn't breathe, but it sings.
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  6. See a seen. A shape inviolate of wonder often has possi bilities unthought. Numbers expressed are an orb extended. Rays recall an orches tral set. The musician can do whatnot, exploring music. To restrict— district—them, a scattered cantata, a tested symbology, two beautiful songbirds are wrapped, caged, & freed, released to extension, allowed room, extrapola ting that value encompass ed via motions, thoughts, a simple cusp, intent of accident, stasis in glorious manifests, englobing, arousing, merged in, entirely one. That becoming, an ocean via duct: to 3, 4—counted, adding reality, intention, removing it, a subtlety. Subtlety moving around, a way, to convince, to see . . . . fisher, finder, what fingers eradicate, and foreskin, just what oceans encompass: beach, reach, tense reaction to it. Was I enraged by seven or seventeen ways? Relative I be, relative were numerals: 9, 8, 7. Forever were these to encroach from 1 to another, a resistant sea, ecstatic sways, to a 1. Waves, waves, waves, undulants, silver that must always be as blackened suns, constant, radiating, cooled, thus penumbral and and opening a carefully formed hole into an expected movement. A signifier extends every motion (motion again). Destitute, our aim must then reveal a or numerous ways (version sings slowly) that meanings be all our febrile reaction feebly creates. Dawdling, and a motion moves on several: I am a dispersed, disturbed, a lost pearl, wrecked, taut, achingly found. Reveal, dispel ponderous or, say, just limpid ore, that sickened, waste & fast depth that can be little, little more tortured by 1 way, our injurious way: curtly. Scented, an orange, or even essential, a same, O, an olfacto ry way, distant, to even fewer memories, serials: blends blonds blands for a sense, hints, devotion, demotion, a hurried time, faceless, heedless, a fever to eradicate, to imbricate scents, to remember, to dismember an often made reversion, a version, a verse for vision, made for simple hungers, handmade, burnished, or piled presently: our motion a 1 for our fewer: our manys have expanded, extended to make twelve timids tame, to 1, and severals made a beam. Plenty sharpened nails I sharpened more, & every 1 a sliver. Extension made her how fever severed it, severed. Any person makes money. Altogether, clients beget precision since particles I inanimate tried for centuries as 1 organism, enwholed, beyond a 1, entered, viz. hampered, 9 instances for 11 trials (1, 1), rightly forwarded for 7 races, & 1 constant: faith— thus, everyone (preacher, ward, lady, porter as oaf, servant, performer, purloiner, beggar as burglar, clod, pensioner, actor, mender, bailiff, and priest), a- temporal, apprized, lucid, berobed, aware of eighths of twos, reported, belatedly, 1 or 22 minutes (millennia) aft rememory, 9 moments ago: 0, 1, blindered, two, ttthrreee, 5, as encetera’d betwitch ire / air, sylvan symbols, for few relics as this full reason: quiet voices sipped from our oftenest debate or a try, perchance, once privately, once bereft, for ambitions bring, to an able general, all manners o’ barnacled reason to (I surmise) calculate purposes coming, opposedly, from our several or, perhaps, emptied faces, for comforted or a torqued 1 scented system to enumerate our (a) perfect system, perfect means to say whatever acts before perfect take absences. I appeared once hungry, harried, hungry, hungry—obsoleted, torn awake & she, oh, awoke hungry desolate & so intense I swerved & fell into sleep to arouse any ideas beyond trembling, to satiate desires’ absolute needs echoing outward & for days of however. twice, intermi ttently, visions occupied everyone’s intent: heartache. I remembe red nights and desires, O, desires abundant, despair as my 1 hope before everyone bled, died. Resembled I (if in many disguises) every one that was I even babies which tore paintings after sleeping. Every one another 1. Every process vocalized to de termine effluence stated internal sacrament as hopes building furiously to see above this as a furiously dependent organ enters a 1 or a, an, egregious— as I continued— though absently, thoughts arise from an I, therefrom, therefore, these missed (a, o, or I) as completed as I expressly wanted. Neverthe lesses exceed that one art, that word, I expected I would encounter {embraced}, 1 ark, meaning “remove it.” Temporary auction: that blessed blasted I, sin, cacophony, coruscate, damage—cover a sentence therein, or several of a 1.
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  7. The Last Pages of My Mother's Decades of Diaries

    Tonight, I went in search of Shirley Temple, but I could not find her. In the last week, I read the account my mother wrote about Shirley Temple Black, by this point the US ambassador to Ghana and my father's supervisor. Black was traveling to California, where I am from, and my mother made sure my father gave her my grandmother's name and number. The two later spoke on the phone. 

    But archives are complex, and I couldn't remember exactly where this story was slipped in among the hundreds of pages of my mother's and grandmother's papers. 

    Instead, I ran across the story of my mother's death, a strange little story about desires and responsibilities, and one filled with foreshadowing. A story she wrote before she died. The story of her death.

    My mother traveled to Millbrae, California--essentially my ancestral home--on May 1st, 1999, to care for her mother, and she recounted the usually mundane events of her day in her travel diary. My mother's plan was to leave on May 25th, my 39th birthday, so she could attend a bowling banquet and baseball games back in Nashville.

    But she almost didn't return.


    Two days before my mother would leave, she wrote this in her diary:

    Mom is so sad besides being in a lot of pain and I don't know whether to leave on Tues. or not. I'll see how tomorrow goes.

    If she'd stayed, she might have lived another decade, until emphysema took her down just as it did her sister twelve years after these events.






    She recounts the events of her last day with her mother up to the point when her plane takes off. Back home, she doesn't add any note in her home diary. She's probably tired. She has spent much of her pencil writing about being tired. The diary pages for my birthday are blank.


    Once home, she returns to her routines, but she also has the "radiator" in her car replaced, attends her banquet and a baseball game. She is still tired, once her tiredness is preceded by VERY. 

    I'll note I assume the radiator in this story, is an alternator. She is alternating between California and Tennessee, between life and death. She is permanently tired.

    I realized only tonight that she always told me stories about the deaths of children: one in Millbrae, when I was no more than four, of a girl nearby who had been run down by a car on her street. I always think of that girl and what she was never able to be. One about a woman who had beaten her son to death with a broom on the SS Constitution. She told me that story as we were traveling to New York to travel across the Atlantic on that same ship. One she told me in Portugal (the reason we boarded that ship) about a German shepherd that had killed a young boy, maybe two. I've forgotten the details.

    Death inhabited her thoughts. Deaths of children, apparently, churned within her the most.

    So I wasn't surprised to read about death in her diary:



    Hear[ed] on the news about the accident on Briley PKW we saw on the way home last night. A female, probably drinking, lost control literally flew over the median landing on top of a car going the opposite direction which killed the driver. It wasn't more than 15 min Rick passed that place to get me. The road was clear. If he hadn't been late we could have been the victims[.]

    Foreshadowing.

    My second sister added this detail to the story:

    She [my mother] asked [my third sister] why someone inebriated would survive an accident but a sober person would die in a similar accident. [My third sister] told her an intoxicated person wouldn’t brace for impact.

    This second sister of mine told another story from mother tonight: 

    She told me a disturbing story about me being stuck in a house on fire. The set up was to ask what I would do if the house was on fire. I was five or six at the time. I said I would find my doll and run. She told me I was too late and died in the fire trying to rescue my doll...

    The pattern is not simply that people die, as we must all. My mother's stories often concerned the deaths of young children, maybe because that made the realities and possibilities more painfully real to her, or maybe because these stories scared us the most. I almost believe either is possible.


    The next day in my mother's life but written on the second page of the day before, she writes about other deaths, having encountered the funeral of one of the recent dead. Note how close she has come to death, to multiple deaths. She arrived home the day before.


    On the way home from Longhorns, a 5 min drive, I ran into detective Hicks['] funeral[.] He was shot to death aiding [in] a domestic dispute. The ex wife was also killed by the ex husband. It took me an hr. to get home. Too tired to do anything the rest of the day.

    My mother is still tired. The world is wearing her out. She has visited and cared for her mother, a couple of thousand miles away, and she is tired. She has been traveling to California since January to help care for her mother.

    She spends the next two days trying to contact the mechanic fixing her car, who had promised to have it repaired days before.


    She continues to knit throughout this story, in one case knitting a blanket for her gardener. By the 28th, her car is still in the shop and no-one answers when she calls. She says,

    Ripped out knitting & reknitted[.]

    She is alternating between states. She is in and out. She is making a transition to another mode. She doesn't realize this, but this is what she tells us. 

    On the 29th, she hurts her toe. This is her fifth day home.



    After eating breakfast I cleaned the top of the fish tank. The glass was full of algae[.] Put it on l. [livingroom] floor & walked into it. Split[t]ing inbetween [sic] toes. Gross. I decided to go to Nini's clinic. A hard area to stitch. They taped it & gave me a tetnus [sic] shot. Went to Kroger's. Knitted.


    On the 30th, she attended one of her baseball games. By this point, she may have concluded she had completed the tasks she wanted to reach at home. Her team, the Nashville Sounds, lost this contest.

    A hard rain dampens her already soggy mood, as she drives nearly blind through a Middle Tennessee torrent, at night:

    It began to rain. In the dark I was scared all the way home. Couldn't see. 

    What scares us, she tells us, is serious injury, and death. Even if buckled tightly inside one's car.



    The next day, she awakes early and tired, and she cares for herself:

    As soon as I got ready & said my prayers I went to the clinic to have my toe checked[.] they [sic] asked me to come back today. Toe is infected so I need antibiotics. It's a good think [thing] I went in.

    The Sounds win their game. They alternate, between losing and winning.

    It is a good thing, she says.

    The first of June is the last entry she writes in her diary. She probably did what diarists often do. They put off writing for a day or so and then catch up. The diary never tells us she retrieved her station wagon, but we know she does, because that car is where she died.

    She died because she was scared of Dickerson Pike, and that is the road that killed her. She was afraid of Driving out of Goodlettsville Plaza, watching for traffic on her left and the right, pausing in the two-way middle lane, and moving to the right and turning right onto Shevel Drive at the next corner. I told her, emphatically, this was the safest way to cross the street. But she insisted it was better to exit onto Shevel and cross all three lanes in one movement. I told her that was too dangerous, noting the giant utility pole to her left would obscure her view of the closest oncoming traffic.

    So she crossed Dickerson without seeing the car heading right toward her, and the woman driving at my mother didn't see my mother's newly repaired car because she was looking for her phone on the floor of her own car. The Dickerson Pike car T-boned my mother's car right where my mother sat. The woman who killed my mother sued our whole family for damages.

    My mother was fragile. She fell once on our lawn in Cedar Beach, Ontario, and broke her arm. That is when I started to cook. 

    I know she died instantly. One of the first people on the scene was my third sister, a nurse. She frantically tried to help my mother, but the police officers held her back. My mother was dead anyway. 

    I do not love my mother. I never have. Never really had any affection for my parents, except when I was a small child. They didn't know how to care for people. Neither have I wished them death. If my mother had survived, my life would likely be radically different now, because she had an effect on my life even from the distance of one thousand miles I made sure was between us. 

    I can only guess what my life might now be if she lived. I can only imagine the slow death my mother would have endured.

    ecr. l'inf.









     

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  8.   

    Geof Huth, "The Dim and Wild West" (Albany, NY, 14 August 2011)

    I likely do not believe in wholeness, depending instead on fragments that I might arrange in some manner to suggest constellation if not a completeness. 

    So it is that I have read the tiny observations of Olivia Dresher (a writer and publisher of literary fragments) for many years now, on Twitter. Hers are quiet contemplations of a person involved in the process of thinking and feeling in an active way. She also demonstrates, by her presence among the political maelstrom and the personal invective that often infest Twitter, how wholenesses do not cohere even in the unrarified worlds of social media in the ways we imagine these down to be. Twitter is filled with quiet thinkers. It is merely that not everyone notices them.

    Olivia I have followed for years, because her puddles of words are quiet, revelatory, emotive, sometimes even painful, open, and given over to smallnesses.

    And I like the small. I like something tiny enough that we might peer into into deeply enough to figure out actually what it is. To feel, fully, what it actually intends to be.

    Certainly, my work has a wide range, even one poem in a form I call a yearpoem, that extended for 365 days and 15,000 pages. But what I am most known for--if, indeed, I'm recognized for anything except my constant joking and my overflowing prose--are the tiny poems I write, which usually extend across the span of but a single word but which can expand into nine or more words.

    Even as a college student (a form of human nearly ready to burst from its chrysalis), I was attracted to the aphorism and read all of those of La Rochefoucauld, along with the entire Devil's Dictionary of Ambrose Bierce, rather than bother myself with the novels I was assigned to read, let alone the execrable poetry of Pope's, which I hated so much I nearly did not graduate on its account.

    All I needed was the simple sentence, unadorned by brethren, designed to give us insight, even if I rejected its entreaties--for this was before I went below the level of the sentence for my literary entertainment. 

    Because of my inclinations, I found myself on the doorsteps of Twitter doorsteps at least ten years ago, and there I discovered Olivia Dresher, through the magic of people connected to people they know and then to those they do not.

    I found Olivia was writing observations on life and her life, sometimes in full sentences, sometimes not, sometimes aphoristic and at other times diaristic. And she presented a world and a way of thinking observantly about our place within it. By this time, I was deeply in my longest project (begun in 2004), one that will die only with my death, One Million Footnotes, which was a series isolated sentences, though rarely aphoristic and usually nothing more than present mundane observations (at a microscopic level) about the life I was living. 

    I saw a connection between her work on Twitter and mine on a blog. But there was something else about these. Her words were more real than mine, likely more careful, too. Hers were aphoristic and philosophical poems squeezed into the space of 144 characters, but often much shorter. Also, hers were autobiographical in a palpable way, and autobiographical in the sense of encompassing both the mind and the spirit. 

    She was (and still is) working through the process of living in these poems. And I love autobiographical work, because to do that honestly is to make oneself vulnerable and to allow others to see how another human works and to make comparisons. We can learn through open communication from another about their life. We can heal, even in those cases where the writer cannot. (I'm thinking here of the diaries of Spalding Gray, which ends with a sprawling miasma of fragmentation and decay just before he drowns himself in the body of water to my left and across the street from where I am writing this right now.)

    All of this is to say that I have finished reading Olivia Dresher's A Silence of Words today, which is an edited and revised collection of those tweets she wrote quite a few years ago now. I did not recognize any of these small aphorisms, poems, and observations, but I recognized the voice and the life she was experiencing at the time. Her words are often about loss, the most human of events, but to me they are all about the power of the fragment, the fragment of a thought, the tiny grain of knowledge that allows us to see an entire universe all at once.

    But I'll give you only one of these, because it's late at night, and I have more writing to do, and because I do not want you to miss the feeling of reading through more of these in her book, A Silence of Words, or on her Twitter feed (@OliviaDresher). So here she is:

    All day, night waits.


    ecr. l'inf.

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  9. The work in twelve parts is an explanation of layers in the context of human churn: 

    1. the physical being that is the city performed as a piece of earth representing the dehumanized view of a city as viewed from space; 

    2. the physical space of the city inhabited by humanity as represented by the viral off-circles of "never sleeps" (thus, the conjoining of the physical--the landscape of a city as it is--with the human--their processes of moving of constant wakefulness of at least some all the time); and 

    3. the slicing away of the city, that physical space, and the representation of humanity as unmoored, afloat in the darkness of space, without grounding or purpose but operating as if the ground that bore them, supported them, was actually meaningless to their sense as human beings in the active process of being alive.

    ecr. l'inf.
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  10. See a seen. 
    A shape inviolate of wonder often has possi bilities unthought. 
    Numbers expressed are 
    an orb extended. Rays 
    recall an orches 
    tral set. The musician 
    can do whatnot, exploring 
    music. 

    To restrict— 
    district—them, a scattered 
    cantata, a tested symbology, 
    two beautiful songbirds are wrapped, 
    caged, & 

    freed, released to 
    extension, allowed 
    room, extrapola 
    ting that value  
    encompass 
    ed via 

    motions, thoughts,  
    a simple cusp, 

    intent of accident, 
    stasis in 

    glorious manifests, 
    englobing, arousing,  
    merged in, entirely 

    one. That becoming, an 
    ocean via duct: 
    to 3, 4—counted, 

    adding reality, intention,  
    removing it, a 
    subtlety. 

    Subtlety moving around, a 
    way, to convince, to see . . . . 

    fisher, finder, what fingers 

    eradicate, and foreskin, 
    just what oceans 

    encompass: beach, reach, 

    tense reaction to it. 
    Was I enraged by  
    seven or seventeen ways? 

    Relative I be, relative were 
    numerals: 9, 8, 7. Forever 
    were these 

    to encroach from 1 

    to another,  

    a resistant sea, ecstatic sways, 
    to a 1. 

    Waves, waves, waves, 
    undulants, silver that must always 
    be as blackened  

    suns, constant, radiating, cooled, 
    thus penumbral and 

    and opening a  
    carefully formed hole into 
    an expected movement. A 

    signifier extends every motion 
    (motion again). Destitute, our aim 
    must then reveal a  
    or numerous ways 
    (version sings slowly) 
    that meanings be 
    all our febrile reaction 
    feebly creates. Dawdling, 
    and a motion moves 
    on several: I am 

    a dispersed, 

    disturbed, a 
    lost pearl, wrecked, 
    taut, achingly found. 
    Reveal, dispel ponderous 
    or, say, just limpid 

    ore,  
    that sickened, waste 
    & 

    fast depth that can be little,  
    little more  
    tortured by 1 way, 
    our injurious way: 
    curtly. 

    Scented, an orange, 

    or even essential, 
    a same, O, an olfacto 
    ry way, distant, to 
    even fewer memories, 
    serials: 


    blends 
    blonds 

    blands 
    for a sense, hints,  
    devotion, 
    demotion, 
    a hurried time, 
    faceless, 
    heedless, 
    a fever to 

    eradicate, 
    to 

    imbricate 
    scents, to 
    remember, to 
    dismember 
    an often made 

    reversion, a 
    version, a verse for 
    vision, made for 
    simple hungers, 
    handmade, burnished, 
    or piled 
    presently: 

    our motion 


    a 1 
    for our 

    fewer: 
    our 

    manys have 
    expanded, 
    extended 
    to 

    make twelve timids tame, to 
    1, and severals made 
    a beam 
    Plenty sharpened nails I sharpened more,  
    & every 1 a sliver. 

    Extension made 
    her how 

    fever severed it, 
    severed. 

    Any person makes money. 
    Altogether, 
    clients beget precision 
    since particles I inanimate 
    tried for 

    centuries as 1 organism, 
    enwholedbeyond a 1,  
    entered, viz. hampered, 9 
    instances for 11 trials (1, 1),  
    rightly forwarded for 7 

    races, & 1 constant: faith— 
    thus, everyone 

    (preacher, ward, lady, porter as 
    oaf, servant, performerpurloiner, 
    beggar as burglar, clod, pensioner,  
    actor, mender, bailiff, and priest), a- 
    temporal, apprized, lucid, berobed 
    aware of eighths of twos,  
    reported, belatedly, 1 or 22 minutes 
    (millennia) aft rememory, 9 moments 
    ago: 

    0, 1, blindered, two, ttthrreee, 5, as 
    encetera’d betwitch ire / air,  
    sylvan symbols, for few relics as 
    this full 

    reason: quiet voices sipped from 
    our 

    oftenest debate 

    or a try, perchance, 
    once privately, once 
    bereft, for 
    ambitions bring, to  
    an able general, all 
    manners o’ barnacled 

    reason 

    to (I surmise) calculate 
    purposes coming, 

    opposedly, from 
    our several  

    or, perhaps, 
    emptied 

    faces, for 
    comforted or 
    a torqued 1 
    scented system to 
    enumerate our 
    (a) perfect system, 
    perfect means to 
    say whatever acts 
    before perfect take 
    absences. I appeared   
    once hungry, harried, 
    hungry, hungry—obsoleted, 
    torn 

    awake & she, 
    oh, 



    awoke hungry 
    desolate & so 
    intense  
    I swerved & fell 
    into sleep to arouse 
    any ideas beyond 


    trembling, to  
    satiate desires’ absolute  
    needs echoing outward  
    & for days of however. 

    twice, intermi ttently, 
    visions occupied everyone’s 
    intent: 

    heartache. I remembe  
    red nights and desires, O, 
    desires abundant, despair as 
    my 1 hope before  
    everyone bled, died. 

    Resembled 

    I 
    (if in many disguises) 
    every one that was 

     
    even babies which tore 
    paintings after sleeping. Every one another 
    1. 

    Every process vocalized to de  
    termine effluence stated internal 
    sacrament as hopes 
    building furiously to see 

    _____ 

    Somehow, this year, I remembered to work on this piem, even though I returned home around 10:30 tonight. It wanders a bit, but it is a challenge to make such a thing.
      
    ecrl’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

  • 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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    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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