Signifier vs. signified: “Beware of Dog” – image of a snarling Doberman – while inside, I see only a grizzled, exhausted-looking Golden Retriever, head resting on paws.

Made friends today also with a miniature Pomeranian named Ruby.

Story of my life: brought the old-lady shopping cart all the way to Boro Park to the nearest copy shop (not so near). But it’s Sukkot, and it was closed, and all the men were walking around with palm fronds they’d bought to decorate their sukkahs. Oh well.

Trying to copy poems for my second PoProj workshop – the focus of our next meeting is “using really old language.” So… John McNally (Milton), Susan Howe (various) , Jen Bervin (Shakespeare), Gary Sullivan (olde English), Bernadette Mayer (Catullus), Rick Snyder (Catullus)… and myself (Herbert). Oh yeah, and of course David Melnick (Homer).

Joel Kuszai, sleepy after his reading at the BPC on Saturday, sitting on our couch watching selected Bollywood scenes: “It’s like a dream come true.” We think so, too.

I’m exhausted, trying to regroup after the SF whirlwind and face the coolness of autumn at the same time.

Thinking of dinner last Saturday, sitting next to an experimental fiction writer (she adored Brossard and above all, Stein) who asked me what my work was like. “It’s verse, mainly,” I said. “Sort of vaudevillian, melodrama, and invective.” “I like the invective,” she said. Yeah, OK, the invective passes the po-mo shibboleth. Why not the vaudeville? “Does the song and dance enter your work?” she asked, surveying me through her glasses I want to call bauhaus-y. “Yes.”

New York — hard angles, gum spots.

Where’s the rose geranium, the lavender, the rosemary all infused with bright sun and bay breezes? Oh well, New York remains ugly and glamorous.

Kasey’s phrase on the back of Stephanie’s book, “Let Stephanie Young take you into her confidence…” seeped into my consciousness until I thought it was my own. It’s not :- ( — but it’s so apt. That is exactly what her poems do, not so much as “confession” but as “let’s interact” and also, “be here with me.”

I want to write more about it but have to go to work. More anon.