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Bernadette Mayer: Titan

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Yesterday Laynie Browne and Bernadette Mayer read at Segue.  I forgot to take out my notebook during Laynie’s reading, but I loved that she was reading from a book called The Desires of Letters that was a response to Bernadette’s The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters. She ended her reading with a “micro-play” that she had written  collaboratively with Bernadette, enlisting several readers from the audience so that the room had a kind of quadrophenic effect. It was splendid.

So was Bernadette’s reading.  She read some epigrams, and a long piece she had read at the Guggenheim, and selections from the new complete Studying Hunger, and some hypnogogic/hypnopompic writing.  I wrote some lines down:

My mind’s become digital.  Oy vey.

shoelessness and paleontology

philosophy and clams that live

an appropriate sense of wonder

my dog Hector never wore shoes

Philosophy chicks kiss better than paleontology chicks

What does “actually” actually mean?

What does it mean for a soul to have no shoes?  Does it mean my soul lacks support?
Maybe my soul needs an inner sole.

I always thought the soul was a giant communion wafer in the middle of your body.

Was that my sleep or everybody’s?

Time is getting more animal

Tjere is a monkey in the parking lot.  Oh boy. I can’t predict everything.

There is something peculiar about the girl.  Besides being me, she may have only one eye or something.

Ocean: not a good name.

Aggressively soothe the butter

I feel like naming some druids.

The collision of hemisected man and woman.

Xerox half of $45.

Need during school lunch song

penis and embassy

like twisted-up slinkies

chicken with many-colored O-shaped flags

 Listening to her I was once again aware of how crucial her writing and thinking have been to me.  Happy birthday, Bernadette: you are a Titan.

menopause party report

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 tampon-festooned chandelier
delicacies
 free clothes (Sharon, Cynthia, Toni)
 Jen in a Nada Gordon original (note button detail at neckline)
 the wisdom and poise of Melissa
 different curl and wave patterns:  Rachel Z., Laynie the visiting dignitary, Lee Ann
 a tender Eileen/Leo moment
I made it.

Menopause Party

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In a post on Harriet with the same name, Eileen Myles writes:

My title for this post refers to an invite I received from a poet friend who is celebrating her menopause. I bet there will be some poem reading happening at her party, but a lot of talk about female bodies as well so what does this have to do with the craft of poetry. I’ve thrown the gauntlet down with that question and it won’t happen, my answer, till after the poetry month is over. So we’ll just have to see. I’ll see. And I’ll try and make it that you’ll see too. With of course considerations for privacy. The invite said women and transgendered people only. Is this starting to constitute political poetry. I don’t think you necessarily have to think of it that way. But it’s somewhat embodied. Don’t you think a book is an embodiment. That’s the part I resist. But I’m excited about this and other group non-group ways of being a poet. It’s all of us bellying up to the bar in a multitude of ways. What does a poet give – to herself and anyone else. Does she only and always give poetry. A poet gives widely in a multitude of ways. I’ve used that word twice. Multitude. There now I’ve done it again.

 I’m the poet who will be having that menopause party, this coming Friday. If you are female or trans and my friend and you didn’t get an invite, it was an oversight. If you would like to come, send me an email and I will send you the details.

Some people seem to think the idea of a menopause party is quite bizarre.  It’s actually more common than one might think. Google returned “about 4,170 results.” I mean why not? Baby showers, weddings, birthday parties, quinceañeras, coming-of-age days, wedding anniversaries, and funerals all celebrate major life passages, so why not menopause? It’s not a big secret anymore, people, and in my experience it’s TOTALLY FUCKING GREAT.

So the party is Friday evening, and then Saturday is my seventh wedding anniversary, for what it’s worth.  No presents, please. Everything is just… too funny!

The Language of Fancy

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an immense bowl of smoldering lace

a filigree inferno crowded with spires
and statues in wailing colors
distance imperfectly spreads
a grotesque lavender haze
across the pinks of glowing
where seductive goblins dwell
on the ravages of Oriental time
in painted glory
we go down
into the morning sun
of an iridescent basin.
a gorgeous chasm
bursts
uprising
 with decoration

Idealic

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Grab
some
buds
from the tree of perplexity
while they’re hot
as the known universe
its friable chips, mounds
of light fragments signifying
worms struggle under
in the dawn epistles that flood
these leopard underwear –
a kind of covenant
with bitterness, and vengeful
doves, their mouths full of herbs
and lambs, and hard-boiled plots
in the burnt-up bush of humid
fascination
Amateur descriptions of amateur
artworks bite the sky into friable
parts that speak their minds
as whirring motors in (and of) (a) vengeful
dawn.
A pliable incantation
for the new city of the droning
heart. Then I am tall and delirious
and wise with curiously elegant
stochastic buds.
In this numinous world, trumpets
are recast as alto saxophones
ravenous for the studied
innocence of inbred blossoms.
In the milk of a primordial
coconut, a nose doctor
hiding in Italy
awaits a complex
sentence
the little fruit
bat worries about
in a slather of 
conceptual haze.
Then
the leopard underwear
sing
an annoying melismata
to all sextillion gassy
stars, pushing furiously forward
into an exact
cataclysm

made of lace.

Seven Twelfths: TETRACHORD & INCANTATION

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Seven Twelfths: TETRACHORDS
Seven Twelfths of the students mispronounced the word chic.
Closed Hexagonal Kaleidocycle: Number of faces: 24
The sum of my occipitofrontal measurements was seven hundred and twenty-nine inches and seven-twelfths of an inch for one hundred and fifty crania.
Seven-twelfths of a grain of morphia were injected in the evening.
I want the Internet to erase itself and for chords to work backwards and Sharpies to retract ink and entropy to reverse and the Sun to dim and for polygons to become more perfect.
I had to make a choice as to whether to merge my consciousness with an AI in order to rule the world with justice and rationality or to reduce humanity to a new dark age as to prevent domineering conspiratorial government rule forever.
Wings large, rounded, the first quill eight-twelfths long, the second an inch and seven-twelfths longer
Women and negroes, being seven-twelfths of the people, are a majority; and according to our republican theory, are the rightful rulers of the nation.
So, I’m curious — is Uncle Earl bald now that seven-twelfths of his hairpiece has been consumed? Seven-twelfths bald.
Wings rather short, concave; the primaries strong, narrow, tapering, pointed; the first an inch and seven-twelfths shorter than the second
Tetrachords?
Seven Twelfths: INCANTATION
re , mister.”
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incantation maut enough trees
and flowers bloomed id
seven-twelfths of heaven.
why don’t you
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hunger, I was already plotting my meow
 he realized that it was possessed
I have been awaiting you and grown
because he
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repeatedly and
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‘coulor are time
and space immutable. It s knew.
her racism, had been light lavender
and well equipped with communic love,
but there are a few other fool powers
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the confused
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Knocked id in divorce “Weth you.”
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Stare work young
incandeent is waita menace.
All through themight