Category: Uncategorized

I’m wondering if Aase Berg is my Swedish sister. Our writing isn’t similar, but our poetics are:

From “It’s Not Acceptable to be Fatso”:

“… I hope for poetic expressions that are aggressive, baroque and esoteric; I prefer ridiculous and embarrassing to perfection. On the literary market, which is dominated by the aesthetic and social ideals of the upper middleclass, it is unacceptable to be excessive in any way – one adjective too many and you’re out. There’s a stubborn cliché that the sober, quiet and elegant, the so-called “simple” is categorically more informative than the noisy. The fleshy, screamy and overdone, the vulgar, desperate and pathetic are so taboo in our culture that there must be dog buried in the phenomenon.”*

My horoscope today:

August 05, 2008

1. Capricorn (12/22-1/19)

   This is a wonderful day to expose yourself to new art, especially if it’s from a different culture. Turn the dial on your radio or television to a channel where they’re not speaking English. Leave it there for a few minutes and you’ll be surprised how intriguing you find it. There are many ways of journeying through life, but you will only ever know the path you choose to travel. Every now and then, it’s wise to travel down an unfamiliar side street.

Dreamed last night I was a contestant on Project Runway. Problem: the instructions were confusing. Maybe there were no instructions. I think the first outfit I made was a very 80s tunic & leggings in black jersey; I decided I hated it and ripped it up, started making a scallopy layered dress out of the same fabric… but then I heard or remembered or realized or something that the judges didn’t want to see black, that it wasn’t “risky” enough. I was not on the usual set, it was in some half-abandoned institutional building in the country. There was some issue about shitting, I don’t remember what it was. But I do remember that one of the other contestants made this amazing Marie-Antoinette style dress out of peacock feathers, and I was trying to do this totally amateur thing in black jersey. It was very anxious-making, this dream.

Anyway, I am working on a dress, in real life. And NOT on Project Runway time. How do they do it? And why didn’t Jerrell’s AMAZING gown even get in the top three?

The blog world has gotten really boringly lint-free. Come on, people, update!

Last week, Josh Corey wrote, of a course he’s developing:

So we’ll start out with Whitman and Dickinson, ancestors of us all, then read healthy chunks of Williams, Eliot, Pound, and Stein. After that I’d like to shift the emphasis to the contemporary, and to get a little more diverse vis-a-vis race, politics, and gender. My pedagogical theory here is, familiarize yourself with the strategies of these six poets and there’s no poem whose tactics you won’t be able to figure out.

and thinking…limited to those six, I’d be hard-pressed to figure out which of them most contributed to the tactics of my own poems. A tiny little bit of each, maybe, with some more dominant notes of the two ladeez? Maybe someone else could figure that out better than I could? But honestly, I don’t feel that directly connected to any of them, so I’m not sure Josh’s formula works.

The totality of a person’s actions
in one of the successive states of his
existence are like large African birds
of prey with a bunch of penlike feathers
sticking out of the from the back of their heads.
That worries me.
Our circular motions against the current
leave semiliquid, greasy secretions
of fatty or waxlike substances,
obliterating memory and moving
irritably sideways, do they not?
Sometimes I feel we are stretched over
a frame of toy musical instruments so
sharp and cutting , like ontology, that we ferment
before we dry. Are not our arias, recitatives,
choruses, duets, trios, etc. left open to
vociferous opacity, even when undergoing
alternation of impurities, as in ferns, eels, etc.?
Any edgeways process involves
a change or transition, refracting light and then reflecting it
in a play of colors, like taxation, or a man’s tall,
collapsible silk hat, but how to twist it more oozily?
Vociferous atomic bikini : soft mud or slime.
Hortatory sumac. Scrumptious scroop.
Gaping, as in astonishment: I have to end this screed now
with a clamorous swollen oomph: Oomph.