i'm a single cell on a serpent's tongue

May
29th

Thu

folksinger, anarchist utah phillips has died

“ ’You’ve got to give up the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed.’ ”

helio / trope

is what we expect of our writing…can that be true of our lives?

i’m worried that the post below is too shallow, doesn’t go deep enough, but the question is compelling, and this is where i currently am. something is here.

radical / roots

digging, is there semina? what is it’s nature and form? what is imposed upon it?

does it stand a chance? is it in topiary? in pavement slats? in open field? the opening of the field.

i just refuse to negate these questions before they awaken. cause maybe they are heliotropes, grow by light of intellect and being embedded in black dirt.

slippage

what is it to EMBODY negative capability?

in poetics, in personal life, and in a broader political / civil / social / cultural context? i’m considering this, and admittedly at the very beginning of this consideration. it is a personal consideration, and it is a radical personal consideration.

is it possible to be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason beyond the poetic / artistic realm? yes, of course. but i find that while i am always looking to do this in writing and art, it’s much harder in the realm of the personal (which necessarily extends to the political / civil / social / cultural).

there is slippage

this is the kicker: it’s about constantly coming up against habits. habits come from everywhere: they come from the grooves i’ve made of my life, and those that my family has made, they come from my community…they come from the culture.

habits in what love looks like, what sex looks like, what my engagement with my worklife looks like, how i perceive issues of class and privilege. habits about what art is, what writing is — though this is thankfully, constantly challenged and honed by my reading and by the extremely vibrant and rigorous sf poetry community.

i’m very consciously challenging these habits, throwing my body against this invisible walls.

so this is the very lip of this. i have no solid thesis. i only have right now what i feel and know experientially: there is revolution in re-imagining new forms.

——

from keat’s letter:

I dined with Haydon the Sunday after you left, and had a very pleasant day, I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith, and met his two Brothers, with Hill and King ston, and one Du Bois. They only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment-These men say things which make one start, without making one feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their eating and drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter-They talked of Kean and his low company -Would I were with that Company instead of yours, said I to mvself! I know such like acquaintance will never do for me and yet I am going to Reynolds on Wednesday. Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Shelley’s poem is out, and there are words about its being obiected to as much as “Queen Mab” was. Poor Shelley, I think he has his Quota of good qualities, in sooth la!! Write soon to your most sincere friend and affectionate Brother

John [Keats]

May
27th

Tue

AFTER ZUKOFSKY’S CATULLUS

that my love is love giant as light

cascades in terza rima in arthritic spinal

columns of light giant in aging seas

sons

head deep, defeated in raging hades i love as i hate

these failed systems, thunderstrucked moon a sack

of ungulate sperm shot in head on euphrates fucked

in bed with my love’s head deep in colon that to

get fucked is parenthesis i hate as i love these corsical

cartograpy, seasons undulate my love is swine is pig giant

maw as light

tears pig from bone-pig

————————-

may 25, 2008

sara m larsen

May
23rd

Fri

lordy, it's tonight !!!

brandon brown and erika staiti kick it out tonight at my place…poems, beer, whiskey will abound.

info:

http://earthwormpressandprojects.blogspot.com/

May
20th

Tue

i am pedro almodovar

my poem I AM PEDRO ALMODOVAR just came out as a tiny book from 24th street irregular press. the whole book is half the size of a business card! i love it!

the series is called poems-for-all and it’s a publishing project richard hansen has been working on since 2001. in that time, he has done roughly 800 of these books (some w/o permission such as the artaud, the spicer,.. some with permission), usually in editions of 100-150 for each book. a really wonderful labor of love.

his dictum: scatter like seeds.

.

check out the checklist of tiny books on his site, some of which you can open and read online:

http://www.sacfreepress.com/poems/

May
16th

Fri

becoming a shape of sort

i thought it would be interesting to put up a poem i started last night, which is neither revised nor finished…much of this is drawn from some poems a friend was reading me aloud in both the original language and in translation, while i was writing…a sketch to be continued—-

.

they ate wind, walked sideways in wonder

who, Baby, do you love, this transformation, this ease

to shape, lying in my bed, the neck disguises herself, “she

is foxy”, Helen, polis o Hera, stay in nest…

.

May
14th

Wed

hence, i know someone who probably DIDN’T have such a good time: