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Often I am permitted to return to a diorama

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Often I am permitted to return
to a diorama.  The diorama
is put together sloppily.
Items appear to be just “slapped on”. Pieces
are loose or hanging over the edges.
Tiny inhabitants hunt colored eggs
or enjoy a springtime picnic.
Horny doll takes off her wet white panties.
There are panoramas, dioramas, cosmoramas.
If I were tiny, I’d sleep
on a marshmallow, a mini
rosy doll or tiny forest naked elf
sitting on a mushroom top
in mint-green lace bra-and-panties set,
trimmed with tiny bows and crystalline beads!
O! Feel the spirit of the natural freedom
and ceaseless joy! You can create
your own little world of model figures!
It must be the heat but I keep looking
at these little Chinese Feeling Dolls
wistfully. I asked my daughter:
“What was this science module about?”
How To Draw Lord Krishna In Steps?
How To Make A Solar System
Out Of A Shoe Box? She smiled shyly:
“It’s about how all sorts of animals eat each other.”
Petite lass spreads her little slit to the max.
Brown haired asian takes off her tiny panties
to show her hairy snatch and to pee.
From that point on,
life without the spiritualism of the world
of illusion, a consciousness independent
of phantasmagorias, was unthinkable.
She would spend her last time
to buy us things like pizza, silky panties
(it was just her thing) and baby dolls.
For such tiny little fluffy babies,
they sure can chirp LOUD
and I just flow like a penis
at the Bean Ballet. It was not immediately clear
what the diorama was intended to be.
An owl? A scarecrow?
Strands of chimp hair
were sticking to the pieces of tape.
The Tiny Forest is a removed enemy (from Mother 3).
Oh, this is, why I love moss!!
Tiny worlds are opening up.
Yay! cute little pointless forest!
I am just a small girl in a big world
trying to find someone to love.
I put a skin and pants out
for the Starlust Panty Raid Clam Hunt
in My Tiny Forest: go ahead, re-arrange
the little animals and enjoy!
Butter big ass Perfect blonde doll
poses in bright little undies: “degredation
is always in the texture of everything!”
Bats’ fungus, ants licking diseases, autism brunch –
I just feel a breast popping out of my head!
Eyes do not open and close on their own.
lusciously fragile personal moment –
a remarkable creature with a long, snakelike body,
tiny legs and scales that shimmer
my female lionhead/dwarf is pregnant
with a rainbow-hued iridescence
this has helped me so much
The diorama was not accurate. The diorama
was somewhat accurate. The diorama was mostly accurate.
Creativity. The diorama was built on pink foam
aark
birdcalf
heelax
Mysterious Forest is absolutely clean.
Smudges. Stains.
…and into my panties. the sound
of … tiny foiled cheeses. and fruit…

Bespoke Room

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My wonderful student Marika Sorimachi designed this room for me as a part of her final exhibition assignment.  She designed rooms for her other three teachers, too.  Isn’t this wonderful?

There’s something about the layering of textiles on the bedclothes that reminds me of layered Heian kimono sleeves.  Glorious.

RIGHTEOUS!

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Thank you so much! My mom had cutted up some potatoes and stored them in the fridge, so i was unsure because I never saw her do this before. Alright, my potatoes had set out a little before I cooked them, so RIGHTEOUS! Alright, this is really good info! A sweeter potatoe? Okay, fine with me. Very good information I’m roasting potatoes as we speak!

I’m a dwarf and I’m taking LSD, taking LSD!

Segue Intros Spring 2012

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2/4 Peter Gizzi

It has been a sorrowful week for poetry, but I am determined that in this introduction to Peter Gizzi, who has known in recent times his share of sorrow, I shall not let elegy overshadow encomium. For what he shows us, and what poets know, is that writing is one of the most effective grief management technologies we have. In an interview with Leonard Schwartz, Peter spoke of his love of listening to poets read their work, which becomes, in his term, a kind of “lived social fabric” or dimensional space to inhabit –a kind of occupier’s tent, maybe – protective, but also exploratory, a staking out of new territory. At the same time, language, he says, comes from “that which is gone – it is aware of both the living and the gone,” and it is language’s “incredible job” to encompass both “grief and joy, the living and the dead.”  He speaks of art practice or poetic practice as a kind of “salvage” (as distinct from the totalizing notion of “salvation”) – picking up the pieces and, rather than simply reassembling them, transforming them into something new and galvanizing.
Poets, then, are transformers. I am thinking of electricity (and by extension, Spicer’s poet as radio) rather than toy monsters (although, come to think of it, both analogies work). Writing and reading, Peter says, “light up the system,” and our nervous systems, he says, are what constitute a poet’s style. His own style pays tribute to the authors whom he feels “authored” him – notably Spicer and Oppen – and carries the torch for lyricism and the aesthetic  of American modernism.
Wikipedia’s definition of an electric transformer grants us an instantly recognizable metaphorical overlay (almost an exact paraphrase of Olson’s “energy transferred from where the poet got it”) onto the figure of the lyric being:
A transformer is a device that transfers electrical energy from one circuit to another through inductively coupled conductors—the transformer’s coils.
Peter is a virtuoso at “inductive coupling, “ creating in the coils of his poems startling weaves of discourses and moody, subtle perceptions and receptions. His books include The Outernationale,  Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and, most recently, Threshhold Songs, which received just this very week a nearly two-page review in the New Yorker! The caption to the drawing that accompanies the article reads, “Gizzi is a lunch-pail mystic, at once ecstatic and mundane,” but I’d prefer to characterize him as the lyric soul singer of the Rust Belt. 
Listeners, please welcome… Peter Gizzi…

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2/18 Anne Tardos


It is so very right that Anne Tardos is reading here at Segue today.  I’ve spent a lot of time with her wonderful new book, Both Poems,  and I can’t help but notice how this space, and this community, have helped to serve as a hothouse for her writing.  Segue even comes up explicitly:
“Segue Zen coffee house Segue haunted lightning Segue offerings.”
So do names – Mitch Highfill, Bob Perelman, Adeena Karasick, among many others… and this serves to situate her work in a network of human connections. At the risk of sounding like Creeley, or like a Martian, I’d venture to say that Anne’s writing is marked by how very human it is. It’s about love and confusion and what are we doing here and other puzzlements.
One of the poems in Both Poems, Nine, is composed according to the following principle:  “Nine words per line and nine lines per stanza.”  Conveniently, that is also the first word of the poem.
I have written the rest of this introduction under that same compositional directive.  Here goes:
Anne Tardos’ poetry has everything I want from poems.
It’s formally inventive but not a slave to “inventiveness.”
It’s philosophical – without irritable-certainty-reaching – but playful, too.
Her meticulous sense of timing, as in koans.
I feel myself suffering, laughing, pondering, exulting with her.
Macaronic metrics and amiable speechlike measures amuse and welcome.
Dark humor, whimsy, sometimes tousled syntax – serious, and not.
Autobiography, community, love, mortality – all this in its sweep.
I love love love Anne’s poetry. Please welcome her!

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2/25 Corinne Fitzpatrick
 

Corrine Fitzpatrick’s poetry is serious, delicate, and spare. It gives a sense of care and also of tentativeness.
Rodney Koeneke writes, of Corrine’s chapbook, “On Melody Dispatch,”
“Fitzpatrick [has a] sure feel for internal rhyme, assonance, and sharp alliterative thrusts that turn the readers’ ear to relatively short but dense verbal units.  The writing displays a close-knit, tightly embroidered formal panache that reminded me of the work a boxer does up close in a clinch with opponents. Melody undefeated.”
Twin urges of description and listing seem to function as engines. I notice:
a catalogue of similes
lists of testimonials, time expressions, instances of waiting, physical disturbances
She describes a painting. This in itself seems a painterly gesture.
She describes a political uprising, using “the people” in each line, without commentary. Commentary isn’t necessary.  It builds to its own crescendo.
Please welcome, for the first time to Segue, Corinne Fitzpatrick.

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3/3 Ariel Goldberg
 

Here we are.  Bipedalian, large-headed, upright…sinuous and lipid, filled with all manner of bio-liquids and viscosities … each square inch of flesh covered with more than 1000 nerve endings… all utterly strange.  TONGUES also are very strange, but strangest of all, I think, are EYES – these little jelly balls, these headlights of our faces, the windows of our souls. That such devices should have evolved – with their little rods and cones and beautiful variegated irises –underscores a truth: we are creatures of light. More than any other sense, vision informs us that we are not alone, but in ceaseless dances of negotiation with others and with objects. That we have developed technologies that record patterns of light is even more astounding. Rolling about as we do in a constant bath of images, though, we scarcely even think twice about it, although the extent to which photography has bent, is bending, our world is something that we are only just beginning to investigate –  Benjamin, Barthes, Sontag, and their spawn having only just scratched the surface.
Enter poet-as-cultural anthropologist Ariel Goldberg, obsessed with the photographic revolution and its meteoric impact.  But before I write another sentence I need to say something about pronouns. In Ariel’s original Segue bio, “they” replaced “she” as pronoun of preference, while retaining the second person verb. Of course, “they” got edited out somewhere along the chain.  It made someone too uncomfortable. Not me, someone else. So now I will continue the introduction as I believe Ariel would want it. Their works explore the language of photography from myriad angles – the hobbyist, the pro, the fetishist, the tourist, and so many others.  I experience the multivocality as operatic. This operaticity, indeed, begs for the use of the plural, nongendered pronoun.
Ariel and I both work as ESL teachers at Pratt Institute. It is the sort of profession in which one’s own language is constantly happily being made strange for one – a poet’s dream. Yesterday, we took our students to see the Cindy Sherman show at MoMA. I commented to Ariel that so many of the people around us looked as if they could be Cindy Sherman subjects; they responded that “everyone is Cindy” – I might modify that to read “everyone is Ariel.”
Here’s what I know about them. They is a museum junkie, and they is always making art.They is a photographer and performance artist as well as a maker of artist’s books.  They loves photography – real analog photography- in that fervent way that makes them express disappointment that Cindy has recently switched to using digital manipulation. They does museum guide/talks about photography. They does performances in which they pass out writings to be read and then take them back, and then they gives away photos. They is writing an epistolary novel around encounters with photography. They created a talk show, in the Bay Area, with Charity Coleman. The mission of the talk show, called Write This Down TV was to  critique the form of the poetry reading. The shows are transcribed. You can find the transcripts online, and they are really great.  Here is a little excerpt:
AG: The thing with not using the mic is really obnoxious because I feel like people are trying not to have an ego, to be more modest.
CC: It’s like cheap rebellion.
AG: It is cheap rebellion.
CC: I’m not buying into it. And guess what? Not everyone can hear everything if they’re in the back of a room that has bad acoustics. You’re giving a reading, use the mic! Just own up to what you’re doing and don’t feel like you have to apologize for being a poet.
AG: I always want a mic. When I read, you know what people’s response is? “That’s intense! You’re so serious”. And I’m like well, what else is the point?
Indeed, what else is the point?  So, dear audience, ready your cameras, and say cheeeeese.
Here comes Ariel Goldberg.

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3/10 Tracey McTague

 

Description: https://mail.google.com/mail/images/cleardot.gif
Edgar Allen Poe famously wrote, “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” Indeed, stare for too long at any gorgeous flower and one begins to be stunned by its essential grotesquerie, which then in some mysterious way doubles back to make the blossom more beautiful still.  I think of how Huysmans recognized this dynamic in his catalog of weird flowers in A Rebours. He described, for example,
the Cypripedium, with its involved, incoherent, incongruous contours that seem the invention of a madman. It was shaped like a wooden shoe, or a little rag-bag, above which was a human tongue retracted, with the tendon drawn tight, as you may see it represented in the plates of medical works treating of diseases of the throat and mouth…

 Similarly, Tracey Mc Tague’s poems tinker with the proportion of beauty to strangeness, finding just the right balance, as a Thai chef might with sweetness, acidity, salt, and spiciness.
It just so happens that Tracey has one of the most beautiful gardens in Brooklyn, so she has likely looked closely at a lot of flowers and been seduced by them. I’m not sure whether she has transferred the skill set of gardening into poetry or vice versa, or whether the dynamic is simply more complementary, but the poems are like enchanted terrariums, tiny organic assemblages in the “syntax of [an] unknown tongue.”  
The lines are short, rarely more than five words each, and this economy helps us not to lose such exquisite, sound-attentive moments as “prank mask feasts,” “double bloom Twombly,’ “porch minks,” and “faux pas paw prints.” I almost want to call these “euphoria infested” poems gemlike, with their strange and unembarrassed (i.e. uncontested) beauty, but perhaps it is more accurate to compare them to amber. With her fine and surreal sense of juxtaposition and arrangement, Tracey is sure to work in insects and delicate mischief among the loveliness: there is a “nymph detainment center”, a  “chocolate mingle turn-ons at herpes camp” and even a “Cartesian spider monkey [that] yells,
‘Titans – show us your tits’”!
To which one can only respond:
Tracey!   Show us your poems!
Please welcome Tracey McTague to Segue.
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3/17  K. Silem Mohammad & Rick Wiggins

 

Despite Flarf’s brilliant fluorescence flickering maniacally over the landscape of contemporary poetry, there are still and perhaps always will be those who regard humor in poetry as a kind of degradation of the art, saying that they are “deeply suspicious” of it, or that they do not “go to poetry readings to laugh.” I’d like to entreat such endorsers of modulation and gravitas to consider for a moment just how remarkable, how literally visceral, is the near glossolalic state of being possessed by uncontrollable laughter. In such states,
Fifteen facial muscles contract and stimulation of the zygomatic major muscle (the main lifting mechanism of your upper lip) occurs. Meanwhile, the respiratory system is upset by the epiglottis half-closing the larynx, so that air intake occurs irregularly, making you gasp. In extreme circumstances, the tear ducts are activated, so that while the mouth is opening and closing and the struggle for oxygen intake continues, the face becomes moist and often red (or purple).
The power of laughter, then, goes beyond even rhetorical forms of influence causing these profound, neurological, physical, and affective responses. It’s manipulative, to be sure, but also therapeutic, and there’s even a field of inquiry called Gelotology that studies the ways that humor and laughter act upon the human body. Among the health claims made for laughter are these:
Laughter can increase blood pressure, lower blood sugar levels in type 2 diabetes, increase heart rates which burns calories, boost the immune system by increasing antibodies, T-cells and B-cells, increase oxygen levels which aids in healing, and reduces anxiety. Laughter can reduce levels of cortisol, growth hormone and catecholamines and is studied in psychoneuroimmunology.
What better and more salubrious way, then, to down the bitter pill of poetry?
I mention all this today because the work of the two poets you are about to hear, Rick Wiggins and K. Silem, or Kasey, Mohammad, in that order, is hilarious almost beyond measure. Such hilarity doesn’t just happen. It is the product of obsessive prosodic craftsmanship and, and it lays bare the ridiculousness at the core of, well, everything.
For more biodata on these two you may consult the world-wide web, but here are a few salient facts. I found Rick in a crevice among some digital bulrushes – where exactly may become clear in his reading – and learned later that he has a great fondness for Popeye as well as inexpensive  peanut butter. Kasey is a nutty professor with a thing for Shakespeare, and I have it on very good authority – that is to say, Kasey himself – that he is good in bed, although I can’t attest to that from personal experience.  I do know that when he taught at Naropa a few summers ago, his young female students appreciatively tossed their panties at him at his faculty reading.
The tenor of their work is similar. They are both, in a way, writing multiple-personae poems, and surely their influences have a good deal of overlap – like, uh… movies? rock and roll? the internet? But there are distinctions, too.
Where one is crumbly, the other is thick. One is more fluffy, citrusy and dry, the other barnyardy and velvety.
One is perhaps more herbaceous, flaky, tangy, rich, aged, lingering, waxy, fresh, grassy, grainy, weeping, and fruity, while the other is soft, bold, mellow, creamy, veined, peppery, rustic, rubbery, and stinky.
As to which is which, I will let you be the judge of that, should you actually have enough presence of mind while your internal organs contract and expand involuntarily, your face turns beet-purple, and you are wiping away floods of hysterical tears.
So, without further cheesiness, please welcome to his Segue debut on this St. Patrick’s Day, the remarkable Rick Wiggins.

wildcats can be revealed

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Unbridled daphnomancy – for rockers…
I walk on hay
The future’s surprise is its
demise – all
I hold deer
and rubbing
velvet antlers
I loved a little
fool – unloved like
a battlefield – ear
to the honking sky
When love wilts
the chickweed comes
up – inquisitively,
I guess.  The monsters
are problem pain, killers
of blind trust. The weepers
have a fluid body, they rock
back and forth,
hopelessly. Another
wide-eyed child
makes sucking motions
and gazes around
space – it “congelates”
into a kind of sense.
I thought. You loved
me.  Hanging hooks
for miniature chandeliers
inside my poor skull –
poison Victorian flowers,
rumpled cravats, sun on
giant diamonds, etc.
I should have been a ragged
maharani scuttling across
the threadbare tapestries
of dusty palaces. I should
have been a marine
mammal with an aggravated
sense of space and a feeling
of feelings.
Stampede.
Psychotherapy – for
goldfinches.
Where are the knots
 of tears? The knots
of tongues? A familiar
and bulbous plateau.
Null. Secret mills.
Language low as
the bush.
Then I have a nightmare
about nightmares – the putz
or quartz of life.
What are the tears
of their gripping? Their
sent twist? Rest with
whatever it is that you
go native. Rest with
counterproduction
and “arm vintage”
furband immersion.
It is wordling –
wordalong.
Wildcats
can be revealed –
in your chemistry
and in your
vocabulary.
 Bridges – wheels –
twists – oxycontin
for the soul. Call
for a free evolution.
Today I’m beautiful,
rowdy, gingham, and
time. Amber can –
Amber corn – the world.
Precious – like a hooligan.
Muzzling softgels, counter-
revoltutionary arm.
Entering the salmon
of cadence – its flighty twist –
and a doll – of nothing.
My limbic system says
“softgel” to a herd
of tiny monkeys. A rabble
rouses the overdetermined
grid in the fine gala
of critical thinking – yep.
Step into it – awful bursting
magnolias – poetry’s hurtful
squeal. Solfegging my life
away. The books – their
doctrines – gang up on me,
quince torpedoes in the
staleness of presence. Smith
and Ninth becomes suddenly
exquisite. I open a door
of perception to find another
tinier door.  Behind that door,
graceful debris:
miniscule infants
a tiny worn combat boot
a miniature Ouija board
miniature black spectacles
a tiny crumpled packet
    of Veggie booty
I don’t know, I’m on
some journey
that pain makes
free and the drugs
 change my cells
into lilypads – and
all the world’s
a murky pond
A heron comes
to land there – a blue one
with a weird eye.
Hello, heron.
And spears a frog that has
a giant diamond in it.
It was the diamond of Utopia,
ha ha, too large for the heron
to shit out.
It’s stuck in there until the heron dies,
but the heron is immortal. Oh well!
I take a walk on some honey,
The honey is from the moon.
It blasts radio sound.
Yeah!

dollhouse

Nada Gordon2 Comments

I have been posting lots of pictures of the dollhouse on flickr, where Suzanne Stein recently asked a question. Here it is, with my answer.

  1. I’m really into this dollhouse, Nada. What is the magic?
  2.  
    I’ve been trying to think that question through for a while, Suzanne. For me, I feel like there’s a lot going on in this. I don’t want to call it a “project” even though it is, because I need for it to be low stakes – something outside of any kind of self-conscious “art frame,” even though it is not, entirely. Lately, with the season, I have been feeling so contracted. I don’t want to do much of anything. I’ve been turning down invitations. I don’t want to go to readings or parties. I have hardly wanted to write. All I want to do is play with my dollhouse. I understand that that is almost stereotypically ‘eccentric’ – I won’t go so far as to say ‘crazy’ – but it’s as if this is a place I can put my attention that is far away from the problems of Other People, The World, Literature, the Meaning of Existence. It’s a kind of refuge. 
    It’s a space to live in, too. I’ve been living in my apartment since the charmed year of 2001. This was the nest I set up for me and Gary. When he left, it became a kind of dollhouse – a totally femme space. I painted the bathroom pink. I took over all the closets. But still, it’s haunted. I see him in corners sometimes, or hallucinate his stuff in what used to be his closet. I needed a space that he hadn’t inhabited. Perhaps that’s one thing. So there’s a kind of magic in creating this little house that is really only for me and my cats.
    It’s also a space that I can manipulate in ways I can’t easily manipulate in my real apartment. The other day I bought an organ, a tiny detailed old-fashioned organ, to put in the dining-room study of the tiny house. You can see also the accordion and violin. This is a way of bringing a musicality into my life that I always thought, when I was young, would be there, but actually isn’t. In my real apartment I have two little middle eastern drums, a harmonica, and an ocarina. That’s it. And none of them ever really get played. More and more I want to make the dollhouse into a kind of ideal environment for living. This room is the studio! She sews, she embroiders, she paints, she makes up songs…
    At first I thought that I wanted to make it sort of Joseph Cornell-y and play with scale and odd materials and absurd juxtapositions. You can see that a little with the animals in the dining room (they feel very “Alice,” to me, actually – and that would, for better or worse, be the book around which I seem to have molded my world view) but more and more I am making it the sort of place that I would want to live, instead. Still, I see it as something that can constantly evolve.

    The magic, I’m sure, is simply the tininess. Since childhood I have been in love with miniatures. The little doll I made in this photo is testament to that. Years in Japan of course grew the love.

    Just after Gary and I got married at City Hall, we went to Film Forum to see Godzilla. I blogged about it:
    I didn’t think the effects were cheesy at all. I didn’t take them as an attempt towards a simulacrum of reality. I saw in them a worship of the miniature
    and they were infused with the sadness of the destruction of the miniature. (After all, the Lilliputian scale models through which the guy in the rubber suit playing Godzilla tromped had been clearly lovingly assembled by some sort of fanatical team of hobbyists.)
    Japan is all about “the miniature.” Smallness of scale a necessity for survival in cramped quarters. Keeping order and sanity through the elevation and cultivation of tininess. Godzilla is the reluctant (and pathetic) destroyer, awakened against his will by the machinations of The Large. The Axis of Large, if you will.
    I suppose I wanted to talk about this. I am going to export this comment over to Ululations. Thank you, Suzanne!
    these colors came out a bit strange in the photo… actually the velvet cushions are a greener turquoise, not quite so clashy
    She hasn’t arrived yet, but she will be “me,” for obvious reasons.
    This color scheme will change, too, especially once my doll-avatar arrives and I will need to make clothes for her. I don’t like all this blue. I love the tiny zabuton, though.  Please note:  the tiny hangers on the knob of the armoire. The copper envelope on the little table is a real Valentine. ❤
    the wallpaper will change, I’ll get a bigger rug… there will be an organ, a plant altar, and a bookshelf in this room soon
    making little things… for now the elephants are enjoying them…