Monday, September 19, 2005

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.