Thanks, notes, and some meta-blog talk

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**Thanks** to BKS for fyxing my lynx.

**And to Kent Johnson for telling me what I should have already known, that Shinkichi Takahashi died in 1988.

**Why not have a look at Brenda Iijima’s nifty essay on THE EAR on Jack’s blog, PANTALOONS? See lynx at left.

I’m finding the blogs, this new profusion among poets, intimate, not solipsistic. Spy-devices into each other’s minds. And there is the presentness, the quick response time.

The profusion keeps getting described as something biological. Algae? Rabbits? I think of the multicolored flowers, like lupine but (maybe a kind of vetch?), that one year covered the Bolinas sewer plant.

I like when they are diaristic (Jordan). I like when they are abstruse and loopy (Jack). I like when they are expository (Kasey, Gary, Ron) too. I like all the blogs. Heriberto’s reminds me of being elsewhere.

I like when the modes interweave. That’s what I want to do here. “Anything DOES go.”

Admiring Jordan’s rendering of poetic agon. I’d like to do more of that but I get so awkwardly discursive. So sorry. Indulge me, friends.

I like when one mode creeps into another, as when Ron so movingly described his experiences with his grandmother.

I DO love autobiography.

And then there’s the exhibitionism.

Don’t like taboos and proscriptions so much. In general and especially in poetry. An older poet was saying to me and Gary at a bar not long ago that he was disappointed by our generation, that he didn’t feel there was anyone who really carried on his legacy as he had hoped. Gary and I looked at each other in disbelief, feeling that, to the contrary, this poet’s influence had been enormous. We named a list of people who we thought followed in his footsteps. He gave reasons that each of these poets did not qualify as his rightful heir. So we asked what he had hoped for — he said that he had wanted to be outdone, he’d wanted to see his mind blown, that he’d expected to see someone come from more of a “street” background, take his ideas and run with them. He said that instead of rejecting all that 60s NAP “crap”, as his people had done, the youngers had embraced and resynthesized it. I said to him gee I was sorry to have disappointed him, but that his generation had presented me with too many don’ts. Don’t be bardic, self-dramatizing, lyrical, voice-based… and I wanted to be all those things (because otherwise, why be a poet? isn’t that most of the fun of it?). “And now you are,” he said, wryly.

A concrete feeling — no flying — heavy, marbled as meat — the discursivity.

Dante sleeps in the golden light.

Gary sleeps naked on top of the covers.

I should sleep too but I’m enjoying sitting here and talking with you.

I’m really in this for the conversation.

In the works: Krishnamurti on ornament. Krishnamurti and Wittgenstein. Ornament is still a problem. And then there’s Pakeeza…