Hmm. Jacob brings up interesting points about borders. And then follows Erika, who both lives and works right on the border (honestly, she can probably see the city limits signs while she's frothing milk...this is/is not a nuclear free zone). Erika told me she lives in Boakland. When does it start to "feel" like Ber(zer)keley, when does it feel like Oakland? Think of driving down Sacramento, San Pablo, College...there are different feels to each street, but is there a distinct Berkeley, Oakland division? I don't know. I know part of Dillon's point is that there seems for Oakland a lack of identity. Berkeley definitely has an identity, though it's identity is strongly linked to the campus and the 60's history, but what part does southwest berkeley play in that?? (as in south of university, west of sacramento or even mlk??) Don't we Berkeleyans seems to consider that part of town "Oakland," even though it's clearly Berkeley? (What could be said about the border between Oakland/SL or Oakland/Alameda--a manmade estuary dug out for ships to get to port???)

I guess an examination of borders is an entirely different piece than Dillon's focus on the identity crisis of Oakland, but it would be a fun project to encounter. Perhaps you post pics of walls, completed, uncompleted, all along the border with poems pertaining to them. That's a whole new problem.

I've been thinking of Dillon's project the last few days, picturing a poetry littered landscape--much more appealing than what's now littering this scrawl of a city. (Though I must admit...I live in Alameda). I've been thinking of a friend who dreamed of living in an artists loft and then did...in West Oakland. She constantly told stories of things occuring under her window and dubbed her street 'the lost corner of Oakland.' She swore the police didn't know the corner existed.


But how many many corners are like this.

How many many corners are not like this.

How many many corners are not even corners but large lushly landscaped curves in the hills where it costs millions to not live on corners like this.


I said in class that if you were going to include Spanish language poetry then you needed to make an attempt at recognizing all ethnic groups with a large presence in Oakland. In thinking further, I take back my statement, sort of. The poems will be scattered all over the city. No one will see them all--you probably won't even read all 10,000. No one will know what groups you've included, which you haven't. You could attempt posting them in ethnic specific neighborhoods, Chinatown for example, or by certain religious areas, strategically placed outside a temple, mosque, church. In that case, strategically placed outside a sex shop, Oaksterdam, bailbondsman, etc. Possibilities are endless. Finding poetry in unexpected places is going to be most effective when it relates most closely to the specific people that are going to find it--this seems so obvious now when I write it and yet somehow in my head it sounded much more astute (I hate that).

But, you were really looking for textual critique. On the whole, if you're going to do poster sizes and want people to read them, the poems could be a bit shorter. Not too much so that you're dumbing it down...I understand that getting them to STOP and read is part of the point. But the text is going to have to be large enough to catch some attention and big text=short poem. 'the real city' is the most succesful of these pieces for me, though I like the line breaks on the page and you didn't read them. I envision it as each stanza on a poster and seven trees/lampposts in a row each have a stanza. "(West Grand Avenue intersects Martin Luther King Jr.)" seems like something 'we' (not sure of 'we' or who that really includes, but I'll stick with it anyway) do in poetry now--the parenthetical, the placing--but in this case it is infinitely more effective. Its a much needed grounding--you are not dealing with a poetic readership, and the grounding is going to tell them, wait, this is about right here, this corner where I'm standing, and so then what else is this poster saying about where I'm standing. I think many of the poems could employ this physicallity succesfully. And if the project were to ever take a more cohesive form (cohesive as in collected in one place, in posters, in book) the parenthetical street signs could ring out as a chorus--the Oakland poetic choir.

We did not talk about the longer piece, but I want to briefly mention that the end is very powerful (from "if I owned a television.") This could be the entire poem. The language is simple, the problems immensely complex (and again there are street references).

Rock on.

I've been trying to catch up to writing something to/for everyone's stuff so far, and I'm realizing I'm yet to say anything to/about Sean or Jennifer's work. Right now I'm going to talk about Sean, since I saw him read bits of the Clerestory on Tuesday. Then I'm going to reread Jennifer's stuff and maybe have something to say later.

So... On the page I'm always totally caught up in the latinate words you use- they just alarm my eye or something (not sure what to say about it). Hearing them read, especially without the text in front of me, I find they are more seamless. What's interesting about them aurally is the density of syllables (so few written characters per phoneme, as compared to clunky english words like "through") and the way they carry a line, especially a long line. I feel egregiously bad for begging Alyson to slate you early in the reading so that I could hear you before I ran off to play host over at Mama Buzz, because I would have really liked to hear your reading sandwiched in between Reed and Michelle or Michelle and Christine- as a kind of antitode to the very paired-down, American fiction they were writing (I might have brought out more of the occassional poetry Michelle achieved).

The new stuff in the Clerestory Tuesday night was really rivetting. I have the word "night" still ringing in my ears, and actually kind of started to construct a scene, I think cuing from an earlier page about the war correspondent- I kept seeing that night vision green all the streaming footage in the desert has, maybe as another stained-glass window. That was an interesting experience for someone who is really inept with visual language and visual metaphor. The word night is also tied to the place of "the lover" in the piece. The lover seems to come and go in a shroud, disappearing completely after each mention, or just going back out of sight. Taking the lover as muse or as poetry itself, I wonder if it isn't a kind of frustration too. I think if I ever let myself think of writing as a lover, the relationship would get very abusive, very quick.

"my lover stares at cunt
waiting for prophecy"

Should I find that line as funny as I do? The rejoinder "waiting to hurt her" is of course not funny. There is violence brimming in the piece all over, I suppose appropriately unexpectedly. I was reading a review today of the new Viggo Mortessen flick, which I doubt I'll see, and the reviewer has this theory that the film portrays violence as a constantly present force that could actualize at any moment. Hardly that novel a comment in light of Freud's late writing, but I was still sort of struck by it. Is the edging in of war and violence in Sean's piece metaphorical in the relationsip of the lover and prophecy/poetry, or just the actual background noise of history and the contemporary alike?

No answer out of me, bub.

Does anybody reading this have the info on the reading Jen mentioned thursday night?

I totally failed to get the actual address or anything that would even let me research what the address might be (man, do I suck)... If you're reading this before 8pm or so, e-mail (truthaboutus@mac.com) or call me (510-295-7759).

Cheers,
Dillon

It is esoteric saying "the Eichert Text," reminds me of Sappho fragments or other recovery.

on Jacob Eichert’s gang of 5.

Collective comments on the rule of dis/engagement: what do Jack Kerouac, Margaret Mitchell, Philippe Diolé, Margaret Mead and Walt Whitman have in common, and/or how does the poet Eichert relate to them?

There is the typical process of choosing published authors and their text and then responding to them with text. There is also that process of using that previously published text as title and as epigraph. But from class discussion the first was not the case. The poet’s text was produced and the previously published authors and their text were matched.

I was engaged by how Eichert responded to his culling of fragments from the above writers. These fragments are documents or artifacts, and therefore the poetry that was paired to them are and are not articles or commentary. That’s the tension of my reading—trying to find logic between the selective process, the pairing, the intention (the intension). Added to the tension is how the previously published material are given priority—as titles/epigraphs—as if to say the Eichert text is subsidiary to the found text and was composed in homage to the found text, when in fact it was the reverse. Could not the Eichert text stand by themselves? At least Eichert did not title his poems “After Jack Kerouac,” “After Margaret Mitchell,” “After Philippe Diolé,” “After Margaret Mead,” “After Walt Whitman.” And I am thinking of many poets famous and underserved who have done this, and the homage seems more of a disservice,--and I am thinking of Ann Lauterbach’s “After Mahler,”—who describe her relationship to the composer: “Gustav Mahler...represents for me a number of complex engagements with modernity in relation to lyricism, where lyricism is not simply a poetic mode, but a sign of linguistic specificity.” Now do I expect Eichert to make a similar claim—perhaps in the conclusion of the 20 interlocking pieces, of which I have read the 5? So back to the question can the Eichert text stand by themselves? Perhaps not if one theme is historical. Perhaps historical is not the correct word. An example is the word “wave.” “[A] lot of waves” is Kerouac’s definition for the universe. Eichert employs “wave” in his Kerouac (“the wave is really a lip, a moon, eclipse, ellipse of roofs, changing in shape and / volume / ....”), and Whitman (“casts of waves as keys / castaway...”) poems, and hints at them elsewhere in Mitchell (“jet stream”) and in Diolé (the title: “...sea water...”). So how is this historical? Perhaps tectonic or climatic? History is authoritative—rather whomever writes history often has authority and is written by those in power/empowered with language and the permission to write---history does not have to be factual. On the page, the “found” titles of aforementioned 5 authors appear to shift or even grate against the Eichert text. Perhaps they are rubbing against each other tectonically causing some rupture between title and Eichert text. How does one see or read that rupture. There is no text, and the subtext is in the supposed relationship between Eichert and the gang of 5. Does the Eichert text appear to assume its own kind of authority? Likewise climatically (as there is a slough of climatic themes, weather themes, microclimate themes that I can go into detail), the text on the page appear as weather fronts, and as we know when two come together or confront each other---storm, hurricane, rain, fog, etc. So what does this suggest of the space between Eichert and the gang 5. That interpretative or relational space is so consuming as to create rupture and storm? So before I forget—in the Diolé poem, Eichert renders microclimates or “closed ecosystems” as Tupperware, as songs, as the storm cellar (although these three are conflated as one), as a head, as a tear, as a pomegranate seed (although these two are conflated as one). There is this possibility of questioning and interpretation similar to Kerouac’s definition of the universe. Eichert’s employs the wave, but one has to reread it as a stand in for Kerouac’s universe. Likewise, the microclimates suggested in the 5 poems can be reread as Tupperware or seed. Somewhere Emily Dickinson sticks her head out—rather her mind out. How large is the sky? No larger than the mind and its possibilities. How often when we (re)package leftovers, do we stop and ponder the possibilities of Tupperware, the life of Tupperware, the space occupying Tupperware—that Tupperware occupies space inside a kitchen drawer as well occupies space when its lid is applied. Ironically deep. Now there is the relationship between the Kerouac (“air-stream / constricted to produce fiction.”) and the Mitchell (“Healthy friction of contrails skywriting....) and. Fiction = Friction. Is this Eichert’s proof. Why he is a poet? Fiction is not grounded or lofty—as ephemeral and tenuous as skywriting—is not as lasting and documentary—although the fragments drawn from the novelists suggest otherwise. Yes the tension asks much! Or is the text after the epigraph—epigram? Speak class. Hmmmm...I didn’t quite explain dis/engagement---shucks.

first: an aside: I do write on your actual copies, but most of my notes are to myself (word definitions, etc.) and nothing that would be of any help to you in a poetic sense. and I prefer to keep your poems, for my own reference in looking at your future work, etc. I much prefer to respond on a seperate page, or here in the fleeting realm of hypertext, where perhaps someone will respond to something I say and then more and more feedback resounds and my silly rocks gather constructive/collective moss.

thus:

on Jacob—

yes, yes, long overdue. you’ve been asking, politely. perhaps I have been too weather influenced to think poetically—this thunder on Tuesday eve through me for a freakin’ loop. “air-stream constricted to produce fiction…we this distinction made between the tip and the back of the tongue.” “we” does not use the tongue per se, and is of course the first pronoun. (though the distinction is really meant to refer to the constriction of certain phonemes, but the grammatical ambiguity works for you here). its moments like this in your work that I find most interesting. small glimpses of conflict/or, as Laura would say, rule-breaking. up to this point, the piece is dealing with the large scale—weather and language—both huge topics. WE--a grounding. where did people come from and now there are two? shit. like Laura said in class, weather is such a huge subject, that it helps when there is something else to connect to: in this piece you connect very strongly and consistently to the language metaphor, and for this reason it seems to me the strongest of your poems. I am not sure if the quotes as titles works for me in this case though—I find that I’m searching for a stronger connection between the quotes themselves, either biographically or textually. they may have served a great purpose as your muse, but their relation to the actual finished piece of the poem may be less essential. Since you said this was going to be a collection of pieces, they may serve better individually untitled with a collective title.


on Jen—

Language so rich that I am inclined to look up words I know just to learn other (4th, 5th) meanings to (idealistically) fully appreciate all available options. Ex: Warner Brothers and bison in the title/first line of the first poem from an SF thrift store “hipster” (used loosely and hopefully unoffensively, and probably only because a friend was talking about a book which satirically categorized hipsters into 6 apparently mutually exclusive categories) who, from the looks of her, would shun all things corporate and where is there a good thrift shop in Wyoming? Thus, a deeper look--and I already mentioned in class that I saw this as an attempt to relate a new landscape to something previous. Oh the richness of language. Bristled: so many meanings I wouldn’t have realized had I not looked it up. Errant: #3—moving in an aimless or lightly changing manner—interesting knowing what I do (and what I don’t) about your geographical history. Cataract: waterfall/deluge; cloudiness—both meanings so beautifully fit here. I could fill the page of all the language so skillfully exploited. A divergence from the simple pastoral/natural poem—a kick in the ass follows and it contemporizes the form.

more on Laleh and Dillon to come later...for now I want to spend time writing my own poetry...

drinking chocolate stout and listening to a montage of pissed off music--getting warmed up in hopes of writing some poetry/creating some artwork tonight...

lara wrote me interested in the word "nepenthe." i thought i'd elaborate. there's the definition she found:drink/drug/opiate capable of letting one forget pain. from homer--a potion used to erase memory. there are more meanings: mainly, it's the site where the phoenix goes to self-combust and resurrect. in geographic relation to the poem, its a restaurant in big sur with an amazing view overlooking the pacific, which is conveniently just down the road from the henry miller library--the poetic landscape is endless. i have more stories on the word which i will divulge if you want to know, but they move into the personal and wouldn't be available to the reader, etc, etc.

mr. jeff: "The [D]construction of V": LABIODENTAL. love it. one of those moments when there really is only one perfect word for a poem and the poet, among the myriad of words available, actually found it. not only did it fit your denotative needs, but it hinted just enough at the vaginal. in "V" i also saw the roman numeral for 5. i don't know what that means or where you could go with that, but it could be incorporated into form, adjective groups of five, a few (five, perhaps?) paragraphs/stanzas of five lines each--i don't know. (i know that you wrote 22/5/vector...but i honestly didn't know what the numbers meant here. i also played with the possibility of the first word being "mean" instead of "means" for several reasons. first, it's a command, you attempt to force a meaning on her/it. you are so f-ing frustrated with her that you are saying, "mean _____ already damn it!!!" second, it can punn on the meaning 'mediocre'. mediocre vagrant. mediocre variable. mediocre vagina? hmmm...lets not go there.

"Ships in Bottles": rock on. you make primordial mush sacred. fish:darwin/jesus. communion wouldn't have the same weight without the mention of brunelleschi. i appreciate the brevity packed with so many diverse references that amazingly play off one another (i write long poems because i can't accomplish this, though perhaps making a long poem hold together is just an entirely different type of art--of course). okay--that last sentence sounds like a convoluted way of saying the dreaded, "i love this poem." oh, well. but another thing sean noticed (and gave me permission to blab about)--it seems quite funny that the poem seems to respond to the class...or at least to me, sean, and jacob. sideways text, have we seen that? a quote from cousteau? waves? catholic architecture? if jeff wrote about catholic architecture, how would he do it? if this was an intentional response or not, it worked for me.

technicalities...so last week I read norma's article and the first 15 poems in each of the collobert books. should we have the collobert books finished for this week? and then jen[n(ifer)], dillon, and laleh...

...just don't want to look like a goon on thursday.

warning: i'm coming back (tonight)...promised jeff i'd post on his poems. also jacob emailed, i'll post on this too.

A Reading this Tuesday at Mama Buzz Cafe (2318 Telegraph Ave):

Just in case there's anyone reading this who didn't hear about a reading this Tuesday (20th) through the eng_grads list-serve: come to Mama Buzz cafe this Tuesday at 7pmn to hear some Millsians (former and current) read some poetry. I asked them to bring work that incorporates or interrogates idioms: like speech idioms, academic idioms, architectural idioms, advertising idioms. I'm not sure what will come of this request, besides interesting poetry, so come find out with me. My friend and KALX DJ Dynamite Schultz will be making some soundwaves move via the wonders of a Macintosh. The reading starts well after the Works in Progress, so you can and should go to both. Here's the blurb I wrote for Mam Buzz's website:

Idiomat and Drycleaning: Poetries Various and Various Musics
Featuring Loretta Clodfelter, Dennis Somera, Jeremy Thompson, Dynamite Schultz
Tuesday, Sept 20, 7 to 9pm, free!
An idiom, like, the smallest idea that can make meaning but no sense. Not the "form of the thought", but the thought of the form. Ya know, like boxing (the sweet science). Three readings and one set of music which suffer greatly from the current state of language-oh, the humanity!

(and no, I'm not posting on Friday night 'cus I have nothing to do- I'm waiting to be fashioably late to a party, honest)

blogs = poetry/poetics/criticism. or = top 10 lists/unrequited feelings/dreams. in one sense, the codes are more easily accessible when staring at a keyboard (for those of us w/ 2-finger typing styles & no tech knowledge), but at the same time the code could be somewhat dictated by what possibilities we are limited to within the parameters of available fonts/spacings/etc. -- perhaps it creates a digital esperanto by which we discuss in similar codes items/ideas that might exist in disparate codes. there's a temptation to play w/ fonts/colors/spaces/etc. on here to create a sense of confusion, but again, my knowledge of how these things work is a bit spotty. maybe that's the point. it's like language and poetry and art -- we all make up our own rules as we go along, and if nobody coincides it doesn't really matter; we can step into someone else's code for awhile and gain something from it. hooray for anarchy.

by the way, my e-mail has been shut down; please update your list w/ whatever type of link my username creates.

Alright, alright already...I'm on.

I'm anticipating what Sean has to say about voyeurism (also in relation to his stained glass windows--what they do not permit us to see, or how they deliberately filter our perceptions). We have not discussed this.

Perhaps weekendish, I'll have things to say about tomorrow eve's poetry, but for now I'll sit on it.

Rock on. Let the prolific discussions begin.

Workshopping such versifying labor that I hope each and all appreciate and utilize their own language to talk about the featured poetry. I myself have the fortune to live (amongst other things) with fellow poet(s) and classmate that I/we cannot escape discussion and locating our own specialized though not exclusive language. That said---to speak of Jennifer Dearinger's "Night Lamp" I need to speak of "Nepenthe." Nepenthe that mythic space of ambrosia simultaneously is that Big Sur window a few hundred yards from the Henry Miller library. But Nepenthe maps a larger poetic landscape other than Miller's archives, including Kerouac--if not the poet, but the San Francisco alley, and Josh Clover now of UC Davis, although I am not sure if he still has his atrium in the Berkeley flats. Somewhere triangulated in this landscape is the personae's aethetics. And in this space I inscribe "Nightlamp." It is an evocative invocation to suggest poetic time (conflation of now and then, future and past, digital clocks and 50s era poets, although again Clover perhaps is a timetripping ex?-punk afficionado). The digital clock illuminates this poetic landscape and is a permissive landscape where Boticceli recapitulates a brown Venus, and from a doorframe, mindframe, pictureframe. Is it architecure that permits the man, certainly not mollusk. It is in this mythic/poetic time, that the personae observes "men performing masturbation." Mind you emphasizing the exhibitionism of "performing" as well voyeurism (more to be said about that later). "Performing" reminds of the labor and deliberateness of masturbation. Further it is also a time/space permitting "nude performance." Okay I am at work and dinner has arrived (while carbon dating physicist from LBL drink microbrew). Next time. --sean manzano labrador

English Department Faculty Poets

A Reading

featuring

Mark McMorris

(2005-06 Roberta C. Holloway Poet)

with faculty poets

Anne Cheng

Ron Loewinsohn

John Shoptaw

Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Lyn Hejinian

Robert Hass

September 7, 2004

7:30 pm

in

The Maude Fife Room, Third Floor, Wheeler Hall on the UC-Berkeley campus

This Event is sponsored by the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. It is free and the public is cordially invited.

Hello again el blogo... dig the unmitigated inanity...