Poetry in the News

headline from yahoo:

Employment

drops in a pink

slip blizzard

Red Light! Green Light!

Permanently Handsome. Disjunct Series on Value and Aesthetics

Frank O'Hara on Rechy's City of Night:

"that atrocious fanfare which Rimbaud celebrated... a most compelling prose realization of derangement thorugh social confrontation since Day of the Locust."

"..an outrage against beauty is the only blasphemy...(Rechy, CN p.65)"

The previous statement "Ethics does not treat the world, it must be a conditions of the world, like logic." "Ethics and aesthetics are one. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.421)"

Deleuze's concept of Desire-Machines

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CEEDB1E39F93AA1575AC0A963958260

DEFINING CULTURE

Raymond Williams, the Welsh cultural theorist and late Professor
of Drama at Cambridge University, famously described ‘culture’
as ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English
language’ (Williams, 1976, p. 76). That complexity is nowhere
more apparent than in his own attempts to define its usage. In
his first major work, Culture and Society 1780–1950, he drew attention
to four important kinds of meaning that attach to the word:
an individual habit of mind; the state of intellectual development
of a whole society; the arts; and the whole way of life of a group
or people (Williams, 1963, p. 16). In the later Keywords, only the
latter three usages remained in play (Williams, 1976, p. 80). Later
still, his sociology textbook, Culture, reintroduced the first
usage, grouping it together with the second and third as ‘general’,
and contrasting these with the fourth, more specifically ‘anthropological’
meaning (Williams, 1981, p. 11). Williams distinguished
between the word’s physical and human applications; its
positive and negative connotations; its use as a noun of process
and as a noun of configuration; its politically radical and politically
reactionary applications; and so on. He was clear, however,
that these confusions and complications belonged to our ‘culture’
itself, rather than to any fault either in his analysis or in the term:
‘These variations . . . necessarily involve alternative views of the
activities, relationships and processes which this complex word
indicates. The complexity, that is to say, is not finally in the word
but in the problems which its variations of use significantly
indicate’ (Williams, 1976, p. 81). The range and the overlap of
meanings, the distinctions simultaneously elided and insisted
upon, are all in themselves ‘significant’ (p. 80).

More recently, Geoffrey Hartman, Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Yale University, has observed that
culture is ‘an inflammatory word’, which in some circumstances
can even kindle ‘actual wars’ (Hartman, 1997, p. 14). Culture is
a good thing, then, but also a dangerous thing. Hartman notes
the same complexity that Williams observed, and the way the
word’s use proliferates—‘camera culture, gun culture, service
culture, museum culture, deaf culture, football culture’—so that
it becomes a kind of ‘linguistic weed’ (p. 30).

Both Williams and Hartman attempted to trace the intellectual
history of the concept. In its earliest meanings, in English and
in French, it had referred to the tending of natural growth, either
in animals or in plants. Williams dated the word’s extension to
include human development from the early sixteenth century in
English usage; and its earliest use as an independent noun, to
refer to an abstract process, from the mid-seventeenth century
(Williams, 1976, pp. 77–8). His version of this history remained
overwhelmingly English in focus, leading to Eliot, F.R. Leavis,
Orwell and, by implication, himself. Hartman’s version (which
includes Williams) is more cosmopolitan and leads to Spengler,
Benda, Nazism and Heiner Müller. For Williams, the idea of
culture held out the promise of emancipation; for Hartman, ‘the
fateful question’ as to whether a truly ‘generous’ idea of culture
is possible remains only ‘precariously’ open (Williams, 1963,
pp. 322–3; Hartman, 1997, pp. 192–3).

For Hartman, the most crucial of the various distinctions in
the term’s meaning is that between ‘culture’ as a general ideal,
‘a “republic of letters” in which ideas can be freely exchanged’,
and ‘a culture’ as ‘a specific form of embodiment or solidarity’;
he believes there is a crucial need to protect the former against
the latter (Hartman, 1997, pp. 36, 41). For Williams, the most
crucial distinction was that between the term’s use in the humanities
and in the social sciences. The concept of ‘culture’, he
explained:

became a noun of ‘inner’ process, specialized to its presumed
agencies in ‘intellectual life’ and ‘the arts’. It became also a
noun of general process, specialized to its presumed
configurations in ‘whole ways of life’. It played a crucial role
in definitions of ‘the arts’ and ‘the humanities’, from the first
sense. It played an equally crucial role in definitions of the
‘human sciences’ and the ‘social sciences’, in the second sense
(Williams, 1977, p. 17).

Culture, then, may be counterposed to society, as ‘art’; but the two
words may also be defined nearly coextensively, as everything
that is left over after politics and economics. There is a clear
parallel between Hartman and Williams here, since ‘culture’ is
to ‘a culture’ as ‘arts’ is to ‘a whole way of life’. But where for
Hartman the key distinction runs between a generality and a
particular, a general public sphere and a singular subculture, for
Williams it ran between two generalities, the arts and the whole
way of life. Note the wider significance of this: while for Williams
society still remained a generality, or a commonality, for Hartman
it has already become a multicultural plurality of particulars. We
shall return to the competing claims of what Williams termed the
‘common culture’ and politico-social multiculturalism in the
chapters that follow. For the moment, however, suffice it to note
that this is an issue of quite fundamental significance, not simply
for academic cultural studies, but also for the future of our society
and our culture.

Steal This.

My arms were never long enough.





(what can it say for you? leave it in the comments.)

that's the sun and you are holding my hand

i used to have no speech. i gummed my mother's nipple and the milk grew my brain and my lima-bean kidneys. i did not know what the letter A was. I had no understanding of torture or grief or bicycles. i needed first to be held. i needed to feel i also belong. i rocked against my father's body--but it was not my mother's--he sang different songs in different tones. but they sang similar lyrics. grow strong, i love you, don't be like them or you'll be a shitface. guess what my small baby body did? it rocked back. it heard or felt or smelt the song. i go to whitman now and he says yes you are always an old young witness:

"These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and all lands...
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing..."
--17

as in youth as in poetry: if we're told too much "i love you" (like Billy Collins) we're not quite sure how to help ourselves uniquely. how to be bold and stand for own identity. the value of being included in life and poetry is that you're only told "i love you" after its been earned, worked for. as writers, as parents to our readers, how do we earn trust and requiting?

d. young confuses the reader. his exclamatory and seemingly random pathology disarms the reader to the dangerous point of mere entertainment. he's on the right track. he's got the powerful stride, but he has to pass the baton--and his teammates, us, have a hard time believing he wants teammates.

we have to infuse our art with the imagination of children. then translate it seamlessly into a broader, accessible world (without the sacrifice of ingenuity, freshness). remind me what the letter A is. Tell me how the church bell is a mushroom, the mushroom is a man with a ten-gallon hat, the man is a wall-street banker with an umbrella. the child's interpretation is important. there's a blurry yellow circle and a black snake on the five-year old's construction paper. the child says that's the sun and you are holding my hand. construction paper.

Instant Messaging

I want my mother back

I want her to know that

I tap my heels

I am wishing to come home but

I am not Dorothy

I am not a band not Toto

I am in high regard with courage

I am paying my regards to tin

I am not my machine

I am not a brain but that is all

I am thinking not well

I am immaterial me and my moat

I am impassable and unhinged

I am sick abasic other-absorbed

I not walking away too perfectly

I want my mother back

I want my mother’s immutability

I want you to grow strong

I want you to talk to me

I want you to talk to me even after

I am gone and she was

I am my mother leaving

I am her leaving

I am imbalanced

I ambulance

I amphora of nothing held

I umbilical tied to nothing

I amplify

From A Distance

a letter from me to a co-worker clarifying my poor handwriting. i couldn't have planned it better.

my handwriting stems from hieroglyphs. i'm a reincarnated servant of the pharohs. aren't i supposed to move up in the next life? maybe if i give better service my next life will be better. or maybe peter at the gate is just a disgruntled toll both willy. (what was once a four letter word), who knows. my life is directed by a god that invented hail. go figure my head hurts,

c.

Your message contains words or phrases which could be considered inappropriate and cause offense. This message has not been sent and a log of this warning has been made. Continual mis-use of this system will result in disciplinary action.

god is watching us. god is watching us. from the nsa.

Subliminal: A Simple Destruction of the False Emotional/Rational Dichotomy

The etymology of subliminal describes a world, the world of human experience, as separated below (sub) the heavens - as marked in this case by the moon (luna, lim)(Steven Pinker, Blank Slate). Yet, these worlds are not separate. The same laws which operate on Earth operate on the Moon. The human eye may retrieve a concept or sudden grouping of concepts in poetry through the eye or ear and for this information to be processes by "reason". This is the ultimate first level. The second level would be the emotional responses to these groupings. Words, phrases or overused images no longer incite an emotional response due to the over stimulation of these groupings that lead to diminishing effect. Yet, Deep Image poets utilized very simple images to profound effect (bone, cold, ash, rain) as in Wrights Poem. It can work, when we first sublimate the reader with images associated with many since-proven-false-associations that come with that simple object or image. As children we associate feelings and premonitions to objects of overlapping lessons. Our experiences are individual, of course, but they are simply "adaptations to an ancestral environment". Outside of Deep Image poetry, the goal would be to find these common experiences through the common ecosystem of the home and reach the memory and emotional centers by re-evaluating accepted truths by inquiring: invariant human action (answering phones, starting a car, anything a mime can do to cue you into what action they are describing) ,observing environments of contemporary ritual (malls, parks, freeways, god damn anywhere really), and finding moments of faith in daily process (credit card approval, driving). The subject is your own. The emotion is your own, but the method is perhaps something WE can investigate and collaborate in. I want to know how to operate in the subliminal. I want the infant's mind in the car seat left in front of the television. I want the imprinting information of duckling of t.v. I understand postmodernism as disappointment in the television as a transcendental signifier. I love nonsequitars and how they operate in religion, these systems of faith I hope we can enumerate together.

The question is.

The Question is how do we clear the slate, make a temporary tabula rasa (the important thing is that there is a slate, and if its clear, well that's a distinction,too) in order to mark our route to meaning or emotion or experience, whatever the end goal. Franke, James. I think we touched on this talking about Gilbert how he uses the not...but coupling in order to create a contrast that eradicates noise from his direction. We are after all using both the instruments of making and receiving sound, simultaneously, when writing. We must have something in mind while insuring the reader has nothing in mind. More later. I"ve arrived though I missed my flight.

Arriving In-Town Without Travel

I promise I'm going somewhere with this.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8653070935342522390

Soon. Very soon.