Rita Wong, Forage. It has handwriting in it!

Rereading Glissant's Poetics of Relation for billionth time this year. Oh genre!: "The promotion of languages is the first axiom of this ethnotechnique. And we know that, in the area of understanding, poetry--watch out for it!--has always been the consummate ethnotechnique. The defense of languages can come through poetry (also)." p. 108

Sporadic reading. No notation. Too much job induced reading. Too little time.

Today...
East Slope, Su Shi, translated by Jeffrey Yang.
the Straits, Kristin Palm.

Sometime in the past few months...
I've had the Grand Piano, part 5, on my desk for months. Seem to have noted each time the single initial letter and then a line was used instead of the first name. Wondering also about what is true and not about this from Steve Benson, "Today's young white-collar poets seem to know something I did not." p. 76.

Yesterday...
Pulled out Erin Moure's O Cidadan for a footnote for an article I am working on and fell in love with it again.

Day before yesterday...
Good essay: "On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of the Police in American Culture" in David Graeber's Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. "Cops hate puppets. Activists are puzzled as to why." An anthropologically influenced essay that is somewhat on the conventions of protest.

Kristin Prevallet, I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time. "I have come to compose a fragmented system of believing. I call this poetry." p. 45.

Can't stop being oxytocinated by Lydia Davis's "What You Learn About the Baby" in Varieties of Disturbance. "You are lying on the bed nursing him, but you are not holding on to him with your arms or hands and he is not holding on to you. He is connected to you by a single nipple." p. 119

And completely different, also Eileen Myles piece "Rene" in latest issue of Shiny. Makes me nostalgic for NY I never knew. "The houses are open and all you need is about three of you to go everywhere and make these gauzy invisible strings between people. It just makes sense that so many of us had time during the day and would stand in one another's kitchen. Smoking and talking and watching our faces change in the light." p. 41

From Barrett Watten's section in Grand Piano 4: "I associate the act of writing with the sound of doves in the neighborhood, at about eleven o'clock in the morning under a high fog, or late at night. The mournful sound of the dove indicates that writing is a matter of long duration that it will take a long time before we get anywhere with it." p. 64-65.

Also Kit Robinson on Oakland Mail Center. Rae Armantrout on writing in Rubio's. Ted Pearson on typing the "day's words" on index cards and taping them to the front of bus as he does his shift. Lyn Hejinian on the news, or what else was going on.

Tan Lin, ambience is a novel with a logo. One of many chapbooks that I've ordered recently via paypal and been very super glad I did. Beautiful pink color.

"For reasons unknown to me but are probably transparent, I was hired, along with four others, by the Port Authority of Marin County in late October of 1984 to set up a camera surveillance system that would clock in every event on a 384-acre port terminal."

It goes on and then this phrase: "the movement of everything."

Or this phrase "the Ecology of Midwest Corduroy":

"In my family, the collection of memories might be labeled: 'How I Was an American' Or: 'Making Americans (the Future)' Such a work would aspire, though such a work is rarely ever written and that is good of course, to a condition of transitory structures, lounge architecture, and books with photos in them. I guess it should look like a slide show. Or maybe a PowerPoint production. I think the work should probably be called 'The Ecology of Midwest Corduroy' because while everyone at school was wearing denim my parents believed I should war corduroy that after a few washings looked like faded gold Christmas bulbs and that reminded everyone, or so I thought, that I was dressed awkwardly as if every day was a holiday because I was different."



Rachel Zolf, Shoot and Weep. forthcoming. Heard also at New Yipes few weeks ago.

first draft...
Rachel Zolf has realized that one of poetry's potentials is to delve into perilous issues and dwell there, exploring the complications. Shoot and Weep does not leave us with any easy answers of what is to be done about the conflicts between Palestine and Israel. But it does insist that we think about it and that we hold several different points of view at the front of our brain as we do this thinking.

M. Nevin Smith Native Treasures: Gardening with the Plants of California. Chapters on the big showy natives. Really nice language in the part of each chapter called "Common Features." Chapter titles pun: "Toyon on My Mind," etc. Spent day thinking about currants and gooseberries. Ribes sanguineum. Also bigberry manzanita.

Dreamed I was reading Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract and in the dream it was about Marx and genre and media were popping up in the book as I read it and I was finally understanding in the dream how Marx was connected to the other things I was working on. (The power of books theme keeps showing up in my dreams; I am desperate for reading lately and missing it badly.) Then Souls of the Labadie Tract came in the mail a few days later. It isn't about Marx but about Jonathan Edwards (I am rereading Capital, or maybe trying to read all of it for first time; have memory of reading it as u/g but not sure how much of it, so I think my dream was about essay I am attempting to work on). But these phrases from Labadie Tract held some of the dream power to me: "an inexorable order only chance creates" (p. 14); "I wanted to transplant words onto paper with soil sticking to their roots" (p. 16); "No steady progress of saints into grace saying Peace Peace when there is no peace. Walking is hard labor. Match any twenty-six letters to sounds of birds and squirrels in his mouth. Whatsoever God has provided to clothe him represents Christ in cross cultural clash conscious phonemic cacophony. Because the providence of God is a wheel within wheels, he cannot afford to dishonor any typological item with stark vernaculra. Here is print border warfare in situ." (p.17)

Michael Amnasan, Liar. The stuff on work and anxiety is amazing. Really amazing. Wish it wasn't so easily juxtaposed with the stuff about women.

Judith Larner Lowry, Gardening with a Wild Heart: Restoring California's Native Landscapes at Home. "I had hoped to rewire unused pathways in the brain, connections having to do with setting out looking, with matching the image in the brain to what was hanging from bushes, drooping from trees, swaying with grasses in the wind." p. 145 Also good description of fights in the local Bolinas newspaper about eucalyptus. Recommends, among other titles, two I have not read: Gertrude Atherton's The Californians and Robert Louis Stevenson Silverado Squatters.

Nora Harlow and Kristin Jakob, Wild Lillies, Irises, and Grasses. There are cool season and warm season growers among grasses.

Most mesmerized by "A Collective Letter to the Women's Movement, July 24, 1973" in the collection of communiques from the Weather Underground in Sing a Battle Song. Also the part of the Jeff Jones introduction where he talks about how the environmental movement was not part of the Weather Underground: "From where we stood in 1970, the environmental movement was bourgeois, irrelevant, and white, a distraction from the more real and urgent tasks at hand: ending the war in Vietnam and fighting racism. But we were appalled at the US military's use of the defoliant Agent Orange (dioxin) in Vietnam and came to understand how it poisoned not only the Vietnamese but also American GI's who were fighting in the contaminated areas. We did not see the centrality of the environmental consequences of rapacious American imperialism, or the potential of the environmental movement, even as it was growing--like the women's and queer liberation movements--out of the oppositional 1960s." (p. 48-49). The "A Collective Letter to the Women's Movement" also has confession in it: "We keep examining the reinterpreting the period 1969-1970 both because it was so decisive in each of our lives and because it is our image at that time which is stamped on people's memories. We have reread all our old leaflets and articles about women recently, some of it stands, some doesn't. Three years ago, we denied the legitimacy of white women's demands. Although we had been assaulted, underpaid, brainwashed, aborted, raped like women everywhere, we--and the left as a whole--did not recognize that women's demands for power over their own lives is fundamental to any revolution we would care to make." (p. 200). Something about the ability to rethink into new dogmatisms that is moving?

Our Band Could be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991. Michael Azerrad. Very big nostalgia trip. Although don't remember it as a series of oedipal moments. And don't remember the sense of rules within that had to be rebelled against.

Laura Moriarty An Air Force. Somewhat a memoir. I tell everyone who comes over this weekend that they have to read it.

And also that my new favorite poet right now today at this one moment is Aime Cesaire. For the word "hoo"--"I cry Hoo to you!"; for !--they are throughout!; for invocation--"O my earth!"; for hyphens that gather:"a-wounded-open-hand." All these examples from "A Salute to the Third World / for Leopold Sedar Senghor." Rereading also "Notebook of a Return to a Native Land" which is long time favorite. All from the U of Kalifornia P Collected.

One blurb every other month or so:
Since his first book in 1999, Truong Tran has been skillfully walking a delicate tightrope between the lyrical and innovative. His work is distinctive for how attentive it is to the politics of language and yet how skillfully he wields richness and beauty. Four Letter Words continues this investigation as it delves into the many ways one is shaped as a writer, as a human being.

Susan Briante's Pioneers in the Study of Motion belongs on a yet to be created list of new border crossing works. Border here is Mexico/US. Also belongs on list of books about place.

Chris Nealon's essay on Jennifer Moxley finally out in Critical Inquiry. "The Poetic Case." Summer 2007 Volume 33 Number 4. This link, alas, requires institutional access or subscription.

Carter Ratcliff's Arrivederci Modernismo. From the note at the end:

Until I was five, I lived on a street with tall elm trees. One spring, I noticed that the tips of their branches were covered with velvety, purplish flowers. It occurred to me that these odd-looking blossoms were in some way a language. I didn't think they were making remarks, saying things that could have been translated into English. Rather, they were conveying something about themselves, something more than their startling appearance. This wasn't about form and color. It was more about meaning. To anyone who was paying attention, the elm blossoms were saying what they were, what it was like to be them. Or so I felt. I already understood that people and animals do that with the way they look. Now, I realized, plants do it too. Making themselves visible, they made themselves known. They let me know how it feels to be whatever they happened to be. When I was much older I realized that a concept can do the same. Concepts, too, have feelings.

And then...

...now I wanted to address something major: modernism, which was wracked in those days by all sorts of unmanageable feelings. Brainy and gorgeous, modernism was difficult to ignore but impossible to live with. That is why my poem on the subject had to be a poem of farewell.

Interested in thinking more about... "Promissory Notes" in Japser Bernes Starsdown and also Rachel Zolf's Human Resources (book came with one page interview that is interesting press piece by Coach House). Keep thinking some "new" emphasis is showing up in various forms in various places lately that feels like a reworking of essay/juxtaposition/fact/document, maybe reworking of social realist poetry, although those into social realist poetry are unlikely to be swayed (doubt I will see this work in Cary Nelson anthology anytime soon). Not sure how to talk about it yet. But Zolf and Bernes has it. And seeing something related in several more conceptual readings Suzanne Stein did, the SPT one and the Pegasus one. And also Stephanie Young's recent New Yipes reading. And, and, and... Might want to talk about it as whatever it is that is going on in Watten's Bad History, a book I am slightly obsessed with.