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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.

You make me tired with your long, silky
reddish brown hair and ironic ideology;
you are a short syllable that should be long,
your stupid plan is “very clever” and your I.Q.
is white, malleable, and ductile, like inflammation
of the eye or Romanian paralysis. OK, so you’re
“heated with radiant energy”; so what?
Might as well be a seaweed dried and bleached
for use as a medicine, or a very large, heavy, powerful
dog with a hard rough coat, formerly used in hunting
a combination of circumstances or a result
that is the opposite of what might be expected or
what might be considered appropriate. A rainbowlike
show or play of colors is a kind of locomotive made of
fool’s gold, implying mental unsoundness and an
utterly illogical nature of that which is directly
contrary to reason, i.e. a round, pigmented membrane formed
of meat, potatoes, carrots, onions, and other vegetables.
You are tiresome, troublesome, tedious, quick-tempered,
silver-edged, Maltese, and conspicuous, like the apparent
enlargement of a brightly lighted object seen against
a dark background. Construed as sing, O little stain made
by rust or ink, you’ve got yr Irish up – for what? O Senecans,
Mohawks, Tuscarorans, Oneidas, Cayugas, Onandagas, Cherokees,
feign ignorance of this sinking fireboat, her tubular integers,
her infantile ballistic organization, grey like freshly broken
cast iron irenic muscles, her degenerate method a creeping
plant with showy leaves and trumpet-shaped prosody
enclosing all of the body but the head. Ipsissima verba!