Month: November 2011

cream of zucchini soup
sourdough stuffing
wild rice pilaf with tempeh, wild mushrooms, pecans, and cranberries
roasted brussels sprouts with shallots
roasted sweet potatoes and apples
Japanese persimmons with whipped coconut cream

Pepper spray cop, pepper spray cop, where have you been?
I’ve been to the murky depths of human behavior to pepperspray
the Queen of Sunshine and her seven little ShiTzu puppies, that’s
where I’ve been.

First there was Oakland Riot Kitty, now there’s Pepper Spray Cop!

Pepper spray cop, pepper spray cop, you are a meme!
Yes, I just casually pepper spray everything: Queens, ShihTzus,
Jesus, family groups, constricting snakes, drool, suitcases,
things to hang hats on, some Halloween
costumes, parts of galaxies, hive dwellers, and no-goodnik
protesters whose pretty eyes get in the way of my pepper
spray.  I casually pepper spray everything.  I’m the pepper
spray cop!  Don’t mind me. I’m just watering my hippies.

I hear pepper spray is good for the sinuses. By the nineteenth
century,police rubbed pepper in victims’ eyes or packed chili
powder in their nostrils.  In the West Indies, British owners
rubbed pepper into the eyes if slaves dozed at work.  In applying
irritants, most modern torturer avoid the eyes, preferring to
insert irritants into the nostrils, anus, or vagina.  In the last
four decades, prisoners have reported this kind of pepper torture
in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Greece, Somalia, and Tanzania.
In 2003, American soldiers applied pepper to the eyes of one prisoner
at Abu Ghraib. Advances in pumping technology now allow torturers
to apply mace, pepper spray, or tear gas directly into keyholes
or the mouth or face of prisoners. I didn’t mean to spray those women,
but I’d do it again.

There’s pineapple torture, lemon torture, coconut torture,
pepper torture, torture soup, torture stew, torture salad,
torture and potatoes, torture burger, torture sandwich.
That–that’s about it.

Aww yeah I’m just the pepper spray cop getting
the bitches wet. I’m a fatty donut eater with a
wifebeater ‘stache. I’ll squirt the Internet
in the eye. I’m a pepper spray cop pimp!
I inspire art mash. I am where dandruff
accumulates. Dull cry of panic. May the
excessive force be with you!

Flarf’s tendrils reach far and wide. In this video, which I made for a group of Dutch Flarfists for a conference on new directions in Flarf, I discuss, in my kitchen and flanked by kitties, the relationship of Flarf to lyric, as well as my own poetic “practice.” [ahem] Then I read a poem, “Droop Loss Slave.” The video is almost twenty minutes long.

Special thanks to Wouter Beek for asking me to be involved.

Come with me to the world of pleasure! I promise you won’t be disappointed!

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

IMG_0124, originally uploaded by Ululate.

@font-face { font-family: “Times New Roman”; }@font-face { font-family: “Berkeley”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Berkeley; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }

It was an uphill ballet

Just to arrive with paradise pockets

and

one of those solar creatures whose face hurts from smiling so much

and

I’d like to thank the octopus

that gave its arms

so I could sing this song

demons handle route tasks

once we’re in the zone

they’re sexy because they’re needy, which degrades them

to be dressed is to emit virtual particles

after the apocalypse

we will all be in a band.

we will understand each other perfectly

the spurious pours forth as fish and circuses

How wonderful to be in the arms of cerebral creatures.

You taste garage, moon, strength.

You have only a live child and fresh water on your arms.

The serial poem attempts to demonstrate this attention to what is cyclical, returning, but empty at its axis. To me, the serial poem is a spiral poem.

In this poetry circling can take form as sublimations, inversions,echolalia, digressions, glossolalia, and rhymes.

….

The whirling that is central to bewilderment is the natural way for the lyric poet. A dissolving of particularities into the solid braid of sound is her inspiration.

….

What Shelley called “the One Spirit’s plastic stress” and Hopkins called “instress” is this matching up of the outwardly observed with the internally heard.

A call and response to and from a stranger is implied.

Or a polishing of a looking glass where someone is looking in and out at the same time.

Particularities are crushed and compacted and redesigned to produce a new sound.

The new sound has muted the specific meaning of each word and a perplexing music follows.

Themes of pilgrimage of an unrequited love, of wounding and seeking come up a lot in this tradition.

Every experience that is personal is simultaneously an experience that is supernatural.

….

The human heart, transforming on a seventy-two hour basis … in a state of bewilderment, doesn’t want to answer questions so much as to lengthen the resonance of those questions.

….

One definition of the lyric might be that it is a method of searching for something that can’t be found.