What Dawn Hath Wrought and Twilight Can't Bring
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.
Within Sight of the Bloom
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 wha
What We Heard
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.
As We Sit Down to Consider the Unthinkable and the Unknowable
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.
105. Breathing
The poem, an isolated fiction, doesn't breathe, but it sings.
One , 1, None (Eleventh Draft)
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.
My Mother's Death in Her Own Words
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.
We Yearn for Silence because all the Talk We Hear is Yelling
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.
In Response to a Draft of "Twelve American Cities" by Nico Vassilakis
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.
One, 1, None (Tenth Draft)
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.
A Great and Tiny Immiracle
Cabinet 2 (for Erin Mallory Long) from The Four Cabinets (2013)
When I was a young boy, 13 or 14, and living in Bolivia, I took a camping trip with my scout troop up from my home in Calacoto, a bit down the mountain from La Paz, and traveled up further to the Altiplano (literally, the high plains),
Mother's Day
On Mother’s Day, we imagine a celebration of mothers. Yet I celebrate little, and few people, and certainly never either of my parents.
One, 1, None (Ninth Draft)
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.
On a Cold Night, We Dream of Darkness
I have known, without knowing, Jon Cone for years. I believe he has lived in Iowa for each of those decades. I know he is Canadian. I know the sound of his voice, upon the page.
Yet I have rarely communicated with him directly.
Year of Movement and Wonder
New York, New York
Some years are better than others, and I’ve had enough bad ones for a lifetime, but some years are beautiful and life-giving, even as they demand much out of you—as this one has for Karen and me.
Westward South
After finishing Joan Didion’s most recent book, West and South, where the paragraphs became shorter and shorter as she wrote it out (a book that was centrally about her despairs, her regrets, and especially her more than failing health), I expected no other book out of of her—and, in a real sense, I
Red Risotto
Karen and I spent the day packing to move, planning to move, and carrying out activities that lead us forward to that move. At moments, I stopped to say how many days it was until our move or to note what a good job we were doing packing or how organized we were.
I Will Arrive Half an Hour Ago
Language wants to be poetry.
It wants to do more than tell. A story, it realizes, has some magic in it, but it isn't of magic. A story repeats an event (real or imagined). A poem is the event.
Dreamslip
Historic Boone Tavern, Room 312, Berea, Kentucky
Coming in over it, the world (as it is, so small and distinct beneath me) resembles imagination more than fact.
My Only Poem is One of Broken Words
My only poem is one of broken words. It eats your heart and leaves a hole for bleeding. It steals a breath from every breath you take.
My only poem is open strands of meaning. It leaves a ringing in your ears you might believe is music. It rises out of muck to cry a call to chase.
The Light on Star Island
Montauk Yacht Club Resort and Marina, Room 124, Star Island, Montauk, New York
I arrived here today, on Star Island, in Lake Montauk, itself a bay almost completely separated from
the Long Island Sound (and, thus, the Atlantic Ocean), all of it within Montauk, New York, when the sun floated in the
The Final Final Mathemaku
On the second of April of this year, Bob Grumman, an old friend of mine, died in a hospital near his home in Port Charlotte, Florida. The reason for his death is not certain to me, but his death is one that haunts me for a number of reasons.
71 is I
I am announcing today that "1" (the world's only journal of the pwoermd*) is now open for submissions.
This will be an occasional journal, published under my dbqp imprint. And, at the outset at least, this journal will appear in very small runs and be handwritten by me.
Parsing the Phrasing: Obergefell v. Hodges
My feel for language is deep. In a simple conversation with someone, I may start unraveling the rhetorical features of my co-conversant's speech. Almost effortlessly, I can write rhyming accentual-syllabic verse or sing extemporaenous rhyming songs.
5 Continuences
1
I sit and sing the song until it doesn't end.
2
I believe there is a way out of this without moving.
3
I create a thought that continues unabated.
4
I extend my arm until my hand disappears around the corner.
5
I wait.
ecr. l'inf.
Techriture
This simple tiny chapbook reproduces linear doodles of Raymond Queneau that appear to precede much of the 20th century work in asemic writing. The doodles are extracted from a small notebook of Queneau's and they demonstrate a form of expression that seems balanced between drawing and writing.
AverbalAsemicAsemantic
The poet, the pure poet, the one minding only the abstraction of words, is enchanted by the word. But the visual poet is enchanted by the suggestion of the word, the hint that a word may be in existence within a visual field, the fragrance left behind by a word now gone.
Bob, Where Are You?
I've known Bob Grumman, mostly through the mail, but also in person, for almost thirty years. In the early years, we handwrote and typed long letters back and forth to each other. We mostly argued, and Bob loved to argue.
2An Essay of Ordinary Thoughts
Teresa Brinati allowed me to have this book. She presented it among others for me and others to take, and she allowed my taking.
It is a small book, published in 1989 and mailed to the Society of American Archivists in Chicago in 1990.
its only elf
A word of Rae Armantrout's, more than most words, more than mine, whether a usual word or suspiciously camouflaged as intellect, has a power to it, the effect of attention making, an unrandomness.
There is a fulcrum to it. These so few words so many'd by the use of them.
A Poetics #102: Ossature
Everything is a poem. Everything is some ossature of information. The breathing may be gone from some, but the breathing once was there. The webbing of structural bone remains. The outline of meaning endures.
ecr. l'inf.