Fuck You: A Blues

Can't say that I'm surprised that duncebrow won the election, but, damn, to win the pop vote by 3.5 million, it's just sad. An embarrassing day to be an American. The corporate theocracy empire is rolling up its sleeves (having spread our working-class cheeks). Worse, though, is the gaining of Republican seats in the House and Senate — can't wait till my social security gets pumped into the stock market so fat cats paying no taxes can pile up more buckaroos. I can't even think about it, the state of the union, literally a sick feeling all through work today. ..... So, what's good about America? Well, for just under $4 you can pick up a kick-ass collection of poetry, one of the best books in recent years, Kevin Young's JELLY ROLL: A Blues. Bush actually said today that we will continue our progress with the economy? And people cheered! How the fuck do you figure lost jobs and lower wages for progress? And Kerry in his speech calls for the country to unite now — forget class, race, and sexuality inequalities — unite anyway, because we're losing a war we shouldn't be fighting in the first place and so, well, we need to be united. Say what?

"The New American Economy: A Wal-Mart job for everyone!"

Fuck You.

Shampoo Issue Twenty-Two

"Clean hair / good poetry" with the new issue of SHAMPOO.

Google Blogoscoped Googles Favorite Words

Many people have Favorite Words and they're not afraid to share them. I have a favorite word, but only as it exists in my head, when I hear it, or read it, or say it (can't do it, not even in a whisper, and certainly not in a yell), it falls apart and depresses me.

Stephen King's Bosox Voodoo Glare

What reverses the curse for the Red Sox? The Stephen King factor. After every time the camera cuts to him, something good happens for the Sox. If nothing else I would love it if the Sox win the series so the fans can stop whining (what will they talk about? Ted Williams's cryohead, I guess.). Try being a Pirates fan in the new baseball economy. Or consider the Orioles, a once proud team stuck with a stupid (in terms of team building) egotistical owner, a stupdily serious, "realistic" bird which just sucks compared to the fun cartoonish character who used to appear on their caps, and in the same division with the bloody Sawks and bloodier Yaynks. (It's not whining when I do it, see.)

Sad Day For the U.S. . . .

. . . when geography tests for presidential candidates seem like a good idea.

from The New York Times Magazine:

Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. "I don't know why you're talking about Sweden,'' Bush said. ''They're the neutral one. They don't have an army.''
   Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ''Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.'' Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.
   Bush held to his view. ''No, no, it's Sweden that has no army.''
   The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.

Because there are some things that the President, at least, just ought to know.

Hibernation mode

Glad to see that NASCAR got a tax break. I don't know how they were otherwise going to be able to continue to provide us Americans with their first rate entertainment. And think of all the jobs this will create!

Hello hibernation.

Extinction News

Biodiversity: The sixth great wave

There Is A "Best Thing" About Poetry Daily?

New York Times Book Review article on "The Widening Web of Digital Lit"

Moron the Debate

"Memorable Moments from the Debate" by Jim Behrle

Bush, Kerry face off on Iraq

This has to be one of the most one-sided presidential debates ever. Bush keeps muttering the same prepackaged bit about Kerry being inconsistent over and over. Kerry, surprisingly, pretty clearly states how his position, his one position, has always been consistent, and Bush responds by repeating his script just with more emphasis. Kerry seems less petty than he often did during the early Dem primary debates when he was far behind Dean and could only catch up by misquoting and shoveling the shit. I might even be able to vote for Kerry with a clear conscience after this one—especially with Ralph Nader's continuing ballot-access issues. Nader would be wise to follow Alexander Cockburn's advice.

Art World Baby

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl. A story along these lines seems to appear every few years or so. I like "Asian Sun" though. Would look good in our back room.

* * *

On an unrelated note, we are all related: "a new statistical model shows that all human beings have a common ancestor, who lived just 2,300 years ago."

Fair Economy

Six Things You Can Do to Protest the Tax-Shift Agenda at FairEconomy.org.

Interstellar Cotton Candy

Space Sugar a Clue to Life's Origins (washingtonpost.com)

Turn on that TV and Stay Up Late

"Viewers of late-night comedy programs, especially The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on the cable channel Comedy Central, are more likely to know the issue positions and backgrounds of presidential candidates than people who do not watch late-night comedy." . . . "Daily Show viewers have higher campaign knowledge than national news viewers and newspaper readers—even when education, party identification, following politics, watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age, and gender are taken into consideration." Read more about this Annenberg Election Survey at The Business Journal.

Impromptu list time: Five shows I sometimes miss when I don't have "basic expanded cable" (which is April thru October, or the non-college basketball season):

1. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
2. Pardon the Interuption
3. World Poker Tour
4. Reno 911
5. Hardball with Chris Matthews

* * *

BTW, what man wouldn't want his obit to end with "His 'Bra of God' ... was never made"—?

Postage Due

"USPS does not acknowledge the authority of the Bush administration".

Creepy Day

It's not such a wonderful day in the neighborhood. Second murder case in the past week. At least the cops have a suspect now; it doesn't appear to have been a random thing, as the earlier Maria Rojas case seems like it might be.

National Anti-flarf Day

Having already hit the Village, flarf gets a little National notice.

Google flarf gas and Julia's Poems tops the list.

Google flarf torture and hit on a J.R.R. Tolkien Honor Seminar.

Flarf has reached the point of "shizzle" and should just be dropizzled like some gross thing you didn't know you were holdin. One thing that's puzzling though is that the flarfists flarf poems though very bad are not as bad as they would seem to be intended to be. A really really bad poem in addition to lacking form content vision integrity the sting of a thousand bees etc would need to contain no energy, have nothing be transfered at any point in the poem. To be really bad, would have to be really boring, like

flarf vision

because Silliman told me to
founder of the Flarf movement
he has been joined by hundreds of
poems

I quickly pieced together
the past, the future, the present
to see them stacked into a neighborhood
with a vision of arrows and ...

today at the request of Ron
Prevallet's "pluralistic vision,"
now provisionally gestured toward as
ferocious-little-kitten arts

derives compassion from its ironic
"movement" known as paydays
ferrall-vision holding everything
the New York Times Tunnel Vision

Even the nouns "Rose" to
A lively network of residents
Orbital ... first flarf
who ever wondered more natural

understand the feelings
for a space-based kinetic
embrace
legend won't explain

a lot of military equipment
lurking in my peripheral vision
Holman's pluralistic vision proves
behind the gesture
conception terminates in the vision of the closed

sense, at least in any language
alt.ferrall-vision ?? alt.fetish ??
milk rulez vision
creating dividend others health wall

[x]wee [x]flarf [x]mollie
It is moonbase ointment
through the field of my vision
called 1>2>3>4.

Arcanologist Wheel Of Fish
my head felt to the equivalent of
Touched
Supplemental Result

Though the tunnel of vision I look through is dusty and frequently
Sort of like "averted vision"
framed
discussion of the vision - x

O'Hara Makes the Fashion Scene

Normally I don't flip through T: The New York Times Style Magazine, but this week being the Men's Fall Fashion issue, and having just a few moments to kill before readying Vaughn for this morning's doctor appointment, and since it fell out and was placed on top of the rest of the paper, I figured I'd check out some of the often silly fashion statements. Found a surprise on page 92 (which comes after about 82 pages of ads, e-gads), a small picture of Frank O'Hara's Collected Poems. Michael Bastian, fashion director of something called Bergdorf Goodman, says "We wanted to capture that whole tweedy, rumpled city-guy feeling, like a character in Cheever of Salinger, or like the poet Frank O'Hara."

So the Fall Fashion issue contains as many references to poetry as this week's worth of New York Times "Arts" sections: 1 (unless I missed something). The one was a music/poetry review of the Paul Auster evening at the Guggenheim, which contained this nice little anecdote: "The difference between Mr. Auster's reading and some of the settings raised questions among the composers themselves. Mr. Karchin, for example, wondered whether his gentle approach to the final lines of "Matrix and Dream" had been a mistake, since Mr. Auster read those lines more forcefully. But Mr. Auster once said in an interview that an author must surrender control of a work once it is finished, and he apparently holds to that view. He suggested that perhaps his own reading had been incorrect."

"A Huge Vital Intelligent Boot" or Ride the Donkey

Since KC has gone back to work, it has meant less time for blogging in the evenings. And when I have made it here to write a post, I get a few sentences in and decide I'm not really into it. So, anyway, here's a link and a qoute.

Link: What happens when politicians "Tell the truth but tell it slant" (audio link).

Quote: from American Heretic, from a Baraka letter to Dorn, October, 1961: "My grandfather (first man to open a super market in Alabama... but run out with fire when he prospered) came to New Jersey and opened another store... became a big Republican Politician. When he wanted to break with the organization, and run independent for Assemblyman they warned him not too. (A stupid, bullshit job like Assemblyman.) O.K., he went ahead and ran.... and on the night of the election with him winning, on the way home from his office he was hit in the head with a street lamp. 'It just fell on his head and killed him' they told my grandmother. A Streetlamp! He was over 6 feet and 200 pounds."

* * *

America, I love you, really I do, but I am always amazed how you find the millions now billions now trillions for war, when you can't ever find the way to make good on your promised atonements for your past. I hadn't realized that Al Sharpton snuck in the reparations issue at the Dems convention back in July. Interesting, though, to go to the official Dem Convention site and see his "remarks as prepared for delivery," which mentioned no acreage.

* * *

OK, the abandoned post from yesterday concerned the New York Times Magazine interview with new poet laureate Ted Kooser. It's just too easy a target.

Eratio 4

The new issue of eratio postmodern poetry is up, featuring Nick Piombino, Laurie Price, Jack Foley, Jake Berry, Mark Young & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen (excerpts from their work The Sketchbooks of Hieronymous Bosch), and many others.

Heretic in the House

Chicago Review's triple-issue, Edward Dorn, American Heretic arrived today, and it's a tome, a striking tome. It will probably be the weekend before I'm able to really sink my teeth into it. About 250 of the 400+ pages are given to the section on Dorn, which besides critical appraisals and memoir, includes a transcript of one of his workshops at Naropa, a 1990 interview, and reprints of rare poems that alone make this 3/4 of a volume worth the price. In his preface, editor Eirik Steinhoff, notes that this issue "is not exactly intended to introduce Dorn," then quotes Robert Creeley: "Not even a sunrise could quite manage that." But Steinhoff's preface itself, in the span of about 15 pages, offers a solid, concise intro for those new to Dorn—not just providing a context, but also flushing out Dorn's geocultural poetics.

After the intro, we get Dorn's "Tribe", which begins with the poetry of origins—"My tribe came from struggling labor / Depression South Eastern Illinois / Just before the southern hills start / To roll toward the coal country"—grows increasingly political, and ends in polemical fireworks while not lapsing from the lyrical.

Then I had a salad for supper, and then I came up here to do this, while KC tired out Vaughn and got her to sleep. Before starting to type though, I happened into Jennifer Dunbar Dorn's "chronicle" of her time working with her late husband on the literary newspaper Rolling Stock, a great little bit of biography that I couldn't put down.

The only other part of CR I've read so far is CSU alum Piotr Gwiazda's fair and balanced review of Robert Pinsky's latest book of criticism. Sympathetic to the book's shortcomings throughout his review, Gwiazda ends with "Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (note the singular) is a graceful, passionate, and somewhat snobbish apologia for poetry in the United States."

In addition to the rest of the Dorn section, I'm looking forward to Andrea Brady's response to New British Poetry (see Mayhew's comment) and new poems by William Fuller.

The Labor Day Special (Kenneth Patchen with a side of Siddhartha)

For Labor Day, a poem by American working-class hero poet, Kenneth Patchen.

Gautama in the Deer Park at Benares

In a hut of mud and fire
Sits this single man—“Not to want
Money, to want a life in the world,
To want no trinkets on my name”—
And he was rich; his life lives where
Death cannot go; his honor stares
At the sun.

The fawn sleeps. The little winds
Ruffle the earth's green hair. It is
Wonderful to live. My sword rusts
In the pleasant rain. I shall not think
Anymore. I touch the face of my friend;
He shows his dirty teeth as he scratches
At a flea—and we grin. It is warm
And the rice stirs usefully in our bellies.

The fawn raises its head—the sun floods
Its soft eye with the kingdoms of life—
I think we should all go to sleep now,
And not care anymore.

_____

Other links:

Mingus on Patchen, plus two poems, including "Let Us Have Madness"

at The Academy of American Poets site

A handful of love poems, including "For Miriam"

Three more poems, including "Pastoral"

On Starting A Thousand Devils

Just getting into the first in Combo's new line of books, K. Silem Mohammad's A Thousand Devils. First thing noticed is that the half title page (first page of most books on which the title is printed but not the author or publisher) is literally a half title: half of the "A", the "THOU" of "Thousand", and the "DE" and half of "V" of "Devil" are all that appear, along with an ant about an inch down from where the rest of the title would have been. Such play is characteristic of Mohammad's poetry, in which subjects, themes, images, whatnot appear only to disappear as suddenly as they announced themselves. And "announce themselves" is really what they do, almost as if the words, the lines have their own volition and Mohammad is pointing to them, like "check out what these words are doing." By "announce themselves" I also mean to suggest that there's a definite forcefulness to these poems. As in the way, the tone with which, they open: "You can't believe you / forded the whirlpool, // wormholed the fjord, / squeezed through the velveteen teeth // only to get bleached" (from "Write It Down, Make It Happen"), or "Give this America my Klan to massage" (from "Moving to Saturn"). [For those playing along at home, saying "Hey, 'Moving to Saturn' is near the back of the book, but you said you were just 'getting into it' "—it's true, I rarely read po' books in so-called order.]

Also odd about the front matter is that rarity in publishing, a blank recto (or right hand page). The blank page 9 would have made a great second half title to "finish" the first half title, or—if that option would seem too (relatively) conventional—at least the reappearance of the ant. Though, maybe the blank page works: a big fuck you to the dominant publishing world with its arbitrary norms. And you can probably guess what I'm going to say next: such disregard for expectations is characteristic of Mohammad's poetry. Voilà:

              I'm a stand-in, a pink shampoo:
          a flickery western dimmed in me:
          so close any mimeographs forever,
          white psalms I can't squeak through

          you want some lamb, some hashish?
          that's a fake cradle of entrances:
          the naked sprite of a flyleaf
          is vapid festoons, a mistake

          there is no and then I glide to here:
              it is or isn't sexy I guess:
          it's ripping a thin slant out of not
          ever anything really as yet
                        —from "Poem Beginning with a Passage from Pascal"

Be Bright Star

The following graphs are sampled from the forthcoming book Can't Stop, Won't Stop: The History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang. I'm no aficionado of hip hop culture, but the chapter on Jamaica's "Roots Generation" as prelude grabbed my attention. For anyone interested in the subject, this looks to be a book worth keeping an eye out for.

Rastafarians followed in the tradition of the Black nationalist Marcus Mosiah Garvey. Born in 1887 in the northern town of St. Ann's Bay, Garvey's mother had wanted to name him Moses. His followers in the Black diaspora of the Caribbean, North and Central America, and Africa—which, at the peak of his powers, likely numbered in the millions—called him the Black Moses.
    Inspired by Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, and moved by the debased condition of Black farmers and canal workers he met on a visit to Panama, Garvey returned to the streets of Kingston to preach Black redemption and repatriation to a united Africa. He founded the United Negro Improvement Association in 1914 to formally spread the message. "Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!" he told his followers. "Let us work toward the one glorious end of a free, redeemed, and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations."
    Two years later, Garvey left for Harlem after followers discovered he had used organization funds to pay for his living expenses. In the United States, Garvey's fiscal weaknesses were further exploited when he became the political target of a young Justice Department official named J. Edgar Hoover. But while his reputation had been sullied, his words remained the stuff of prophecy. He had said, "We Negroes believe in the God of Ethiopia, the everlasting God-God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, the one God of all ages." And by the mid-1930s, former Garveyites found that God in the figure of Ethiopia's newly crowned emperor, born Ras Tafari—"Ras" meaning "Duke" in Amharic and "Tafari" the surname of the royal family—and renamed Haile Selassie, "The Might of The Trinity."
    To the followers of Rastafari, Selassie was god made flesh, the King of Kings, the conquering lion of Judah, the redeemer and the deliverer of the Black masses who had come in accordance with Garvey's prophecy. Rastafarianism was an indigenous fusion of messianism and millenarianism, anticolonialism and Black nationalism, and it gave the cause of "Black supremacy" spiritual, political, and social dimensions. The religion found a fast following in the impoverished western Kingston ghettos, especially in the yard called Back-O-Wall, where Rastas constructed a camp of wood and tin. Through the mid-1960s, amidst frequent and constant run-ins with the colonial authorities, their influence over the tenement yards grew.

Spicer This Is Not a Trilogy

Dear Spicer,
    I don't want to make poems at all. The lawn was a mistake, because it is a lawn. The writer is nothing but a temple in collapse. Poems should break out of the ether. There is no ether. How about the newspaper? Poems should break out of the newspaper and— fucking I don't want to say the sky. Do you know the moon? She is sweet, like they say, right? Are you feeling me? I get excited I cut myself this morning my middle finger I wasn't shaving I was shopping it was morning but it was lunch I was Stop n Shopping I felt so dirty I felt clean at work in my office chair. How cliche. There is no I in imagination. Poems should break out of the newspaper incomplete and whole and falling around I cut my finger. Sans I.

Dear Spicer,
    You and Lorca both tried to be free of shadows—in the Platonic sense. When poets, or anyone, start talking about Platonic shadows sliding along cave or bedroom walls, it makes me want to watch Fox News. It's not like listening to Clinic's "Internal Wrangler" in the mystery of one's own kitchen, which is like an orgasmic experience you can have even while mashing potatoes if you have the volume high enough, you should be alive the vocals are audible the guitar is genuine as a hard on if this were a poem the sound would be one of living stones climbing up a hill and the sun from a shorter distance suggesting a gurgling of salt water drained from one hell of a pulchritudinous ass. If shadows don't decay they consume their creators and join the work force.

Dear Spicer,
    When you wrote to Lorca that "Things do not connect; they correspond," you meant "Things do not correspond; they connect." That is what makes it possible for a poet to translate real objects. That is why I agree with everything you say which is otherwise an unhealthy spot to be in. Time in Spain is time in California, and yet it's not. Time in a lemon, that is a real poem. The poet is not the lemon. The poet is the air. You knew the poet is not a real object, coy bastard. Many years ago in a classroom far far away an inorganic teacher was discussing the Bible as literature I believe it was the Psalms my faith was shaken when the red-headed gorilla-jawed boy behind me handed me a scribbled lyric joke "Squeeze my lemon till the juice run down my leg" my faith in a world where things do not correspond I completely forgot about till now.

Dear Spicer,
    These letters do, then, correspond, I guess. They correspond with only the dead know what and perhaps some future poet. It's true what they say, poets always, even at their most nihilistic, always assume a future. Just like Johnny Rotten screaming "No Future" at a bunch of faux cynical children, the future is assumed. That is how we dead men write to each other.
    Bone garden lithograph,
    Yours in context,
    Scott

Cannary Vortex Protest Hmm

The computer is in the hottest room in the house. And it's just been too muggy to spend too much time in here, though I did get quite a bit of poeming done over the weekend. I haven't made it into the city for the protests. And not having taken time off from work, I'm sure I won't be. I can't even make up my mind about the usefullness of it all at this point. It just befuddles the mind that any voters could be undecided at this point. Unless, maybe, a few are considering Nader versus Kerry. But anyone who has stuck with Bush this far—I mean what more can the man do?

*   *  *

Today at work I caught some fragments about Calamity Jane. I'm not even sure I knew she was real. These paras are lifted from The Rocky Mountains. One in a series of regional reference books forthcoming from Greenwood Press. The lit section in this one makes no mention of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (they do cover the writing programs at the large state universities), which was surprising because it's an adequate section (it at least didn't overlook Dorn). Unlike The Great Plains, which besides being just generally thin, made no mention of Ronald Johnson or "Wichita Vortex Sutra".

A notable example of the historical creation of semifictional characters whose identity is then ripe for film exploitation is Calamity Jane. Calamity Jane, who was known to have lived in Virginia City, Montana, was the nickname of Martha Jane Cannary, a woman who dressed—and swore—like a man and who appeared on stage as "the Famous Woman Scout of the Wild West." Calamity Jane is perhaps less interesting as a historical figure than as a site of ambiguous representation in fiction and then in film. She was fictionalized in the dime novels of Edward L. Wheeler and then in such films as Will Bill Hickock (1923), Custer's Last Stand (1936), and two versions of The Plainsman (1936 and 1966). The best known screen portrayal, however, is that of Doris Day in the musical Calamity Jane (1953). As might be expected of a musical, Calamity Jane's foul language and heavy drinking are removed, her dubious morals are papered over, her buckskins are clean, and her character is reduced to, well, Doris Day: perky and full of vim. This gesture of simplifying and cleaning up history for the sake of the plot is common to Hollywood, but the case of Calamity Jane and the eponymous film gives us a measure of the Hollywood film's unreliability as a historical account. Calamity Jane suggests that film, whether documentary or fiction, drama or musical, treats and represents the Rocky Mountain region, but always at an aesthetic or rhetorical remove, so that we have to read between the lines or look for mythic structures hidden in the stories that are told and in the images that are re-presented.
 .  .  .
Calamity Jane received her name from a Captain Egan. During a battle with Indians, an arrow struck Egan, and Calamity Jane turned around, put Egan's body across her horse, and delivered him to safety. Upon waking, Egan humorously nicknamed the former Martha Canary, Calamity Jane.
    During her time in the Rockies, Calamity Jane served with several military units as a scout but also as a participant in numerous battles. Known for wearing men's clothes and her hard drinking, she rode one of the most dangerous Pony Express routes, encountering little opposition, and she saved a coach filled with six men, all too timid to grab the reins when their driver was killed. She is buried in Deadwood, South Dakota, next to Wild Bill Hickock, with whom she is said to have been in love.
—I'll have to wait for the revised pass of this book to see how "Cannary" vs. "Canary" plays out. (Googlefight gives the slight edge (of 159 hits) to "Martha Jane Cannary".)

Prequel. Letter. Spicer.

Dear Jack Spicer,
    You are dead and the dead are very patient enough for poetry. My dreams will be prose. Even though the subconscious is not patient prose, I will go home, sober and dissatisfied, and sleep—and other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking to destroy each other or attract each other. Listen to each of these two poets who speak to me. And I to them and we to he speak in prose. Presciently I should go to a bar and there be one with a mad man who is talking to himself. But in the room next to mine: image. Prose invents poetry, discloses temporary untruth, unable to yield to the substance of a single. If fifty poets in fifty languages, they still would be these paragraphs—poetry couldn’t be translated, transformed by a chain. See how weak prose is? I invent a word like invention is merely the enemy of poetry, but calmness, classicism, temperament, or anything else? Invention never loses anything. This has nothing to do with losing something. With each transformation, such as, of course, telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining on generations of different poets in different countries, patiently worded: tradition means much more than that. It means Pantheon, which is used to cover up the nakedness of the bare town, or obscure hints of obscure bits of magic and published bygones, of Elizabethan quotations or guide books. Oh, the poet’s hone cements lately into an historical patchwork like weather made up for these letters that will think by this. We mean what tradition seems to. In my last letter I will speak of the tradition. The fools that read precisely written letters are unnecessary because they must be in our poetry and nothing of our poetry is left in it. It is paragraph by paragraph, day by day, until nothing of it is left that it will not appear in our poems. Let it be consumed and digest the pure word. We will use up our rhetoric here so sour-stomached contemporaries demand to help. Let them swallow their permanent teeth. They will establish the bulk, the wattage that, my, these letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be Love.
    Arc hill night,
    Scott

Letter to Jack Spicer

Dear Mr. Spicer,

When I read one of your poems and I come across words I understand, I never guess at their meanings. I am randomly getting it. A really perfect poem (of the kind you wrote) could be perfectly understood by a person who knew all of the words and had many interpretations. A really perfect poem (of the kind you wrote that cannot be written) is an infinitely small black hole.

It is somewhat simple. We want to obliterate the temporal object, explode the material emotion into the poem—and yet the temporal always sends out hundreds of its own ideas, prickly and depressive as mosquitoes. It is fine to tense your arm as they pilfer your blood, and watch them explode. A poet is an agent of nature not a saint. The ideas cast by the temporal harden and crack like a failed plaster cast of a wasted rock star's cock. No lipstick of oldest tradition can be used to stop the process. Objects, words, must be obliterated and reimagined outside of time.

I hear "Fire" from the back of the proverbial cinaplex. I grip my lover's hand and laugh. We have heard "Alas." But if there is a real fire, with real smoke, the word "Fire" will arrive outside of time, and we will hurry our asses for the nearest "Exit" sign, trusting it accurately signifies "this way out," trampling those in our path if we must.

Everyone I know is enthralled by ideas. They spill them out onto a table under the interrogative light of the poem, and count them up; they group them in any number of ways, trying every combination, invoking countless binary profundities—as if an idea could become an enlightenment by mere addition, or subtraction, of contemplations. Others pick up ideas from the sidewalks, from their coffeehouses, from their classrooms and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, "Look what I have collected from the Postmodern age. See my tattoos, my blog roll, my baseball cap!" What does one do with all of this flotsam and jetsam?

Ideas bounce off the imagination. We throw them at the imagination only to chart the various deflections. They are the ricochet, nothing more. They are as valuable in themselves as giant, bright red clown shoes in a brothel.

Let me repeat—the perfect poem is an infinitely small black hole with meaning only on the other side.

Broken golden lip-synch, or
Yours in passing,
Scott

If I Had a Blog

Reorganized the sidebar, adding a section for webzines, such as Robert Kelly's Matter. For some reason, maybe because I'm a sucker for self-imposed constraints, I decided (way back when I started Nobody) that I would keep the blog roll and such lists maxed out at ten links. Besides, Spencer Selby's list of experimental poetry magazines and Ron Silliman's blog roll cover most of the bases.

*    *    *

Bad news of the day: Armed Robbers Steal Munch's "The Scream" in Oslo, as well as his hauntingly seductive "Madonna".

*    *    *

Top three jealousies of the week:

3. Eden Prairie Couple Claims Powerball Jackpot. I rarely ever play Powerball, or any lottery, but I always talk about winning it. Especially come Monday morning.

2. Moneymaker: How an Amateur Poker Player Turned $40 into $2.5 Million at the World Series of Poker. First he gets balls-out lucky at the 2003 WSP—okay, more power to him—but now, voilà, he's an author. God bless America.

(What's with all this money talk? Am I really that superficial? Um, apparently.)

1. Lisablog. The shout-outs, the world leaders of the day, the fall curriculum preview, the attitude, and hocking of hats and "asses of evil" T-shirts. If I had a blog, I would want it to be this funky and cool and free of bitterness.

*    *    *

Hey, score a point for democracy (sort of)! Nothing's a "gimme" these days. Federal Court Rules That Commission on Presidential Debates is a Partisan Organization.

*    *    *

For good measure, here's another poem by Robert Kelly, "Mapping". "I know where I am in the world by loudness alone."

Anniversary Post

Much thunder and lightning here in the hills of western CT the past two days. It's keeping me off the computer pretty much. Today KC and I celebrate our first anniversary: neither of us would have remembered it if not for our relatives. We will celebrate it today by having brunch out tomorrow. We traveled to Vermont to get hitched because there, at least, any two adults can have the same legal rights regardless of whether they happen to be the same sex or not. This was just before gay marriage became (suddenly) a national issue, and before, I admit, it occurred to me that merely achieving the same legal rights, via "civil union," might not be enough. Although, such legal rights are really the main reason we got married anyway. In fact, civil unions are all that should be recognized by the government. Let marriage be a religious designation which the various churches can knock themselves out over if they want. I hadn't seen this view expressed anywhere, but it has started to appear in recent months. For instance, Ellen Willis contributed this piece to The Nation's symposium on the marriage issue. Here comes the rain again.

Alien Vowels

"Words are what stick to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to." — Jack Spicer, After Lorca

Picked up a copy of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer last weekend. Nearly jumped out of my kicks when I found it misshelved with the "new" used fiction and marked for four dollars. Nearly a week later and I'm still wondering how the hell I went so long (at least five years) between reads. It also got me realizing I hadn't been writing much else since starting this blog. Thought I would have to change that, went to sleep and woke up with two or three projects in mind. Worked on the first, rather small one (ten poem series) Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Time to let it sit for a while and see what it amounts to. Hope to start on the second project this weekend. It wil be longer. Book length. Which isn't promising for me. Most of the longer projects I start end less-than-half finished, abandoned due to some sudden change of aestheitc or whatever. But, in the beginning, the field is open, waiting for crop circles like alien vowles, waiting for trim marks, registration on the page.

Lost In

The Most Untranslatable Word In The World

Beating an ass is not governing men

On Good Writing and off

Nader Redux

Okay, Kristin Prevallet's poetry kicks genuine ass. And I'm enjoying her new blog, Letters from Citizen Kay. But, damn god it, here we go again with the Nader thing. Kay has no problem with Republicans "mocking idealistic liberals" who want Nader on the ballot, and she proves it by joining in. But supporting Nader's campaign is not idealistic. In fact, it implies an understanding of the reality of political reform. Namely, that it will not happen without one of the two parties reluctantly greasing the wheel of change. The best way to bring a party, okay the Democrats, into that position is through a prolonged, systematized disorganization of the senses. Failing that, the only way to push the Dems to the point where they incrementally pass legislation that dismantles the two-party power structure is through a constant, threatening pressure. What is being threatened? Political victory. The very thing that Kay mocks the Republicans for focusing on because it treats politics as a "game to win." Who's idealistic?* Besides, winner-take-all elections guarantee a politics where gamesmanship is foregrounded. Third-party power is the means to better representation, to true representation period.
What's even more idealistic is Kay's "this day is not now" argument, which looks to some idyllic future where a progressive third party can run a strong campaign and not draw votes from the Dems. I'll admit arguments that say "This is not the way," but let's have no more "This is not the time" nonsense: it's just a cop out. Progressive-minded Dems and independents need to stand strongly behind Ralph Nader, speak out in favor of Ralph Nader, write to John Kerry and tell him you will be voting for Ralph Nader and against the racist, classist, homophobic, patriarchal system which winner-take-all elections perpetuate. Then, in November, vote for Kerry and send Dubya packing.

* Actually, Kay seems to be aware of her flip-flop into role of idealist—"Oh Republicans, where are your ideals"—but gum it all, I'm trying to make a quick point here.

Combo: The White Issue

Did I say I'm normally not a big fan of interviews? Funny. Because I have added Here Comes Everybody to the blog roll, and HCE (hickey, I guess) is all about interviews. And not just that: There's an interesting interview with Jerome "(and Diana)" Rothenberg in the recently released Combo 13, which I'm sure will come to be known more popularly as "the white issue" because of its pure white, nearly logoless cover. Among the topics Rothenberg discusses are how he came to his groundbreaking Technicians of the Sacred anthology and anti-war poetry in the time of Vietnam. Many of Rothenberg's anthologies are mentioned, but not Revolution of the Word (reprinted a few years ago by Exact Change), which disappointed me a bit, because it was the most important one personally, as it was really my introduction to Modern poetry. It was probably a year before I realized why I generally received a blank look when I asked someone, a bookseller say, about Eugene Jolas or Harry Crosby, and that they were not as "important" (as poets, at least: Jolas the publisher does qualify as one of the unheralded literary heroes of the twentieth century) as, for instance, Louis Zukofsky. Anyway, Combo, which is more aggressively experimental (in so far as that has come to designate more signifier-oriented work) than the other magazines I've mentioned in previous posts, has been focused on presenting younger writers alongside two or three of their most-established immediate forerunners for about seven years now. With content that rarely ceases to upend expectations and the most original cover designs going (one issue actually featured a silly-menacing photo of "The Rock"), Combo focuses serious attention on the politics of verse even while it has its own good fun (in the tradition of carnivalesque subversion). Other highlights in the white issue: a long poem by Ray DiPalma, a prose poem by Stephanie Young, a piece by Kristin Gallagher which demands returning to ("1842 / 'I have done it . . .' / dart darting / endless chain of buckets / emerging 'ugly monster' // 1891 / anonymous / 'They break up the skyline, / like huge / chunks of darkness . . . // nightmare buildings'"), and a series of poems by David Hadbawnik which riff off lines from other poets but shift into their own forms:

        but will I be        pure light or breath
        or just a hand on somebody's wallet
        will I be     (am I already)
        the gist of someone's dream
        the cc of a circular email
        crash of door        wind chimes
                        piece of mail
        will I be    I want to know
        what happens                            will I be

Let me add that if you're going to make one lifetime subscription to a literary magazine any time in the foreseeable future, commit to Combo. It has the best deal going. The many subscription options have been posted at Lime Tree.

The Poker 4

One of my favorite literary magazine sections was the "Reviews and Noticings" in Clayton Eshleman's Sulfur. Though it included the regular reviews commonly found at the back of poetry journals, it also presented more casual responses to readings, as well as commentary (the section was titled "Commentary" in later issues) on poetic goings-on of the day (or, sometimes, of the "New American Po" heyday) by the editor, contributing editors, and readers. Another favorite was "The Free Speech Corner" in Larry Smith's Caliban: instead of bios, contributors were given space to speak their mind: you might have Rachel Loden writing about her surprising experience with a Down syndrome child, or, as in the first issue, Ron Silliman considering the question, "How does a poem constitute its audience?" directly followed by Raymond Carver listing the books he had recently read. Then there was Exquisite Corpse, which, though printed on higher-quality paper, was the closest thing I've seen to a poetry newspaper; lively responses to the poetry scene(s) were scattered throughout its pages. I had imagined that the "End Notes" section of The End Review would become one of these places, and maybe it would have, had I shown the fortitude necessary for independent publishing.

With its fourth issue, The Poker introduces "what is projected to be a regular feature," a section manned by Steve Evans called Field Notes. The gist is that his essays will cover "the interlude between [issues of] Poker" with respect to the poetry world, especially its relation to, and situation in, the larger social and geo-political realm. Though one voice, Evans approaches his subject in a variety of ways, with the result that it almost seems more than a sole perspective—this is the main reason The Poker has me remembering Sulfur's Noticings. Among the issues Evans touches on: the hyperproduction of poetry (measured in books published), the allocation of prize money and awards (including a profile of the ideal winner, and the portion for established avant-garde poets), the make-up of an "independent" publisher, the zeitgeist (by way of a "kaleidoscopic account of the past eight or nine months" similar to a prose poem), and the value of numerous recent poetry volumes (via constellations, mini-capsule reviews, and a pure list of books reviewed in four prominent publications).

Good as Field Notes is, its place is augmented by the dialogue occurring in the rest of the magazine, which begins with a letter responding to an interview in Poker 3. Next is a short essay by Juliana Spahr also responding to the previous issue. And there are two reviews and an interview—normally I'm not a big fan of interviews, but this one with Ange Mlinko was the perfect length, and even made me want to get off my ass and write.

And, of course, there's poetry. Rachel Blau DuPlessis has perhaps the most striking piece, "Draft 63: Dialogue of self and soul", which covers six pages. Here's a taste: "I yearn to see the moon, to have clouds / break apart. Instead they close. / No metaphor. All flatness. No results." And later, "You say you want to see / what you do not see [. .. .. ] / Vision's blocked at every turn. / Accept it. This failure is the vision."

There are also new translations of Giuseppe Ungaretti, sections from Nathaniel Tarn's War Poems Yet Again, four poems by Hoa Nguyen, and impressive work by some I hadn't read before, such as Anna Moschovakis ("Because the couple felt Platonic that day / they tiptoed around the perimeter / and yelled at each other"), and Elizabeth Marie Young ("You pump the gas, / Blood rushes to my head. / Move over, numinous, this thing's on automatic.").

The Poker 4 is 92 pages and costs $10. There are other good magazines that give you more pages for the same price (i.e. Fence 13, 187 pages; Court Green 1, 168 pages; The Canary 3, 127 pages), but The Poker is 99% lean. On top of that, a three-issue subscription means only $8 per issue. And I'll even give it this stock phrase of praise: If you order one magazine this year, make it The Poker (well, or Skanky Possum).

Miklós Radnóti / Rabid Sky

Reading Trakl got me thinking about other war-torn poets, and in particular, Miklós Radnóti. Radnóti's "Tajtékos ég" is a poem I had been interested in translating ever since I first encountered it back in 1992 or 93. Not surprisingly the main stumbling block was that I didn't know a lick of Hungarian. Still don't. What caught my attention were Steven Polgar's remarks about the difficulty of translating the title (in Clouded Sky, trans. Polgar, Stephen Berg, and S.J. Marks, and now available in a revised edition I haven't checked out yet). Having discussed the literal translation of tajtékos (which basically comes down to foamy, frothy, or spumy, whether of a liquid, a mouth, or the ocean), Polgar notes that "'tajtékos' is still commonly used . . . in the Hungarian equivalent of the phrase 'foaming at the mouth.'" What's more, the verb form "is most often found in the phrase "tajtékzika dühtól," which is best rendered in English by 'boil over with rage' or 'foam at the mouth with rage.'" My immediate thought was that the sky was foaming because it was rabid, and I was surprised the Polgar team didn't even mention this as one of the many possibilities they kicked around. Visually, the image worked for me, conveying the threatening clouds of a stormy sky. Aurally, it was similar to "clouded"—a little faster, not as full, but harsher. And though it may lack the sophisticated understatement of "clouded", "rabid" still seems more precise, and is at least better than "foamy" (which was used in the other generally available edition of Radnóti's poems in English). As Polgar accurately saw it: "'foam' has become connected with such things as soap, cleansers, plastics (as in 'foam rubber') . . . images that have nothing to do with the association of a Hungarian reading the word 'tajtékos.'" But, like I said, I can't pretend to know myself what associations an Hungarian would have. All I know is that after many years, and half as many tries, I finally think I have something. It still owes a lot to the Polgar-Berg translation. And, really, I shouldn't post this when it's still so fresh—I may regret it in the morning. But hell.

RABID SKY
                        by Miklós Radnóti

The moon dangles in the rabid sky.
To my surprise I am still alive.
Death watches us avidly, carefully:
Those it finds whiten violently.

Sometimes a year will pause halfway and howl
Before dropping to its knees.
The fall overwhelms me: it lurks once more,
And winter lurks, too, with its bruising dark.

The wilderness bleeds. The hours bleed.
Time itself spirals overhead
And the wind scribbles shadowy numbers
Large as trees across the snow.

Yet I remain. And now I know why.
I understand the heavy air—
Warming around me, a silence of light hums,
The way it felt before I was born.

I come to rest on the roots of a tree.
Its leaves twitch with rage.
A branch reaches down. To strangle me?
I may be exhausted, but I'm no coward.

I'm no weakling. Just mute as the branch
Wrenching my hair even while it trembles.
I should forget it, but no:
I shall forget nothing.

The clouds devour the moon and leave
Only anger's poison-green bruise.
Slowly, carefully, I roll myself
A cigarette. I am alive.
                                   June 8, 1940

Tom Hibbard c.1997

Speaking of Tom Hibbard, here's an unpublished review I wrote in the summer of 97. I've resisted the temptation to rewrite it, but I have deleted some parts that were too overstated (and confusing). I was pretty excited by the book, but knew it would be getting very little notice. I sent the review to one magazine, but never heard back one way or the other (though I moved a couple times soon after and may not have sent the forwarding address).

Enchanted Streets by Tom Hibbard. Introspect Publications, 1997, unpaginated (52 poems), $5.00 [includes shipping]. [Introspect is gone, but some copies are still available directly from the author.]

The irony of the title is evident from the cover illustration: a ragged down-and-out worker sits on a curb, shoulders hunched, one hand gripping his forehead, one exasperated eye aimed at the reader over an angry frown. What’s "enchanted" about these streets? "Wheelchairs," "sewage," "pillars of agony," "Arby’s Roast Beef," "a lumber yard," "a small liquor store." But Tom Hibbard’s poems are not Bukowski or Ginsberg imitations, as so many "post-beat" poems of working-class America are. Writing in the age of the Service Economy and In Stock We Trust, Hibbard’s poems read more like those of a post-industrial Pierre Reverdy.

        street signs say "quit"
        pots and pans say "one way"

        past the K-mart of the skull
        past the squirtguns the foil the tips
                (from "running")

In fact, Hibbard has published translations of Reverdy’s poetry and the influence is apparent, beyond the lack of punctuation and economy of words, in his eye for the marginal detail, his juxtapositions of the concrete with the abstract, his ability to create an ominous mood. Metaphors often remain implicit, so that the real world beneath "the real world" is evoked, or rather, allowed presence. In this sense Hibbard’s work may be situated in a long line of writers/thinkers that includes Reverdy and Robert Creeley (e.g. "There is a world / underneath, or / on top of, / this one—and / it’s here, now." Creeley, Collected Poems p.621) and goes far back as Heraclitus (e.g. "Nature loves to hide").

        payback time
        7:04
        the sunset
        pair of scuffed shoes

        . . .

        checking
        water the sink
        big tire sale
                (from "harassed seated river")

Yet, Hibbard isn't ransacking the surface world for "interesting details," desperately trying to be a writer, as is so often the case in the post–workshop-boom poetry scene. Rather, details accrue in all of their natural spontaneity, in a way that has its end in questioning, What is natural anyway?

        at the shaven monument
        a pilgrimage
        leads us out of slavery
        not into it
        thirty-five is the veil of collaboration
        so is thirty
        the landscaped hill
        the tattoo
        is a nickel worth more than six cents?
                ("the rainbow")

Hibbard takes his cues from the outside world, explicating the urban landscape in his own post-surrealist way:

        pervasive bottle of Sprite

        dirty lids
        a star’s light dies
        a fish jumps onto a bus
                (from "the forgotten trick")

Hibbard is one of the few poets in the world enough to observe "vending machines the size of fear", or to remark that "manna is non-Cartesian", and his book is uniquely of the American heartland: "a candle / for the UN / security council."

So Safire

Wrote a letter to William Safire yesterday. Here's part of it, responding to his column on the word so.

This note may be a week late, but the following info has no sell-by date. The ironic use of "so" to refer to something outdated when it's not actually that outdated, was popularized before Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In Heathers (1989), a black comedy and cult favorite which satirizes high school culture, the character Heather Chandler tells Heather McNamara : "Grow up, Heather, bulimia is so '87." I suppose one might argue that this source is a bit obscure. But this was the movie (well, along with the not-so-good Pump Up the Volume) that catapulted the young Christian Slater to his short-lived stardom.

Points Elsewhere

Been a little short on time and content lately. Here are some points elsewhere:

As part of his platform in the 2000 campaign, Jello Biafra called for a ban on SUVs. As it turns out, such a plan has something of a head start: California's SUV Ban—The Golden State has outlawed big SUVs on many of its roads but doesn't seem to know it (by Andy Bowers).

A couple weeks ago at Crag Hill's poetry scorecard, Hill posted on the reviews of Tom Hibbard. Great to see some notice for Hibbard, who contributed work to both of my short-lived publishing projects, Brass City and The End Review. He has also done many translations from the French, including these from one of my all-time favorites, Pierre Reverdy.

Found Egg Brain

Nothing breaks up the drudgery of a too-long workday like finding out you hold the winning Powerball ticket. But the next best thing is looking down at your desk and projecting artistic value onto some random piece of text.

       gammahydroxybutyrate (GHB)
       goddamn      but god damn you
       good night
       (have) gotten
       guerrilla
       gun hand (actual hand)

This from the publisher's style sheet to Tom Clancy's Power Plays, #8: Wild Card. And, wow, does it look like a real thriller.

  *  *  *

Not that I should be complaining about my job. KC went in today to earn some summer dollars (doing administrative tasks I guess) at the high school where she works. What an atmosphere. They even provide the construction helmets which are required when walking in the halls. Although, signs warning not to use the bacteria contaminated water seem to have been only randomly placed. Well, at least, school doesn't start for three or four weeks.

  *  *  *

Hell, here's a scrambled egg using the Clancy style sheet that so amused me today. ("This is my brain. This is my brain on alienated labor.") Let's call this piece "Femme For Real Fatale."

café
calloused
naive
night vision

sizable
whiskey
voice mail
oughtta (dialogue only)

heat=seaking
axe
hooves
seigneur

off balance
backseat
bandolier
blonde (fem n)

machine gun
awhile      meaning "for a whie"
the Sunglasses
okay

In the East

Recently picked up a collection of Georg Trakl's poems (German/English, trans. Getsi). Had one of those experiences you get when you're reading a translation and you hit on a word or phrase you think you can do better. Maybe later you realize it's not actually better, but it does get at the original in a different way, with a different shade of meaning. So you forge ahead, see if there's anything else that can be made new, check out other translations to make sure what you think is new is new. If you're lucky, you have something. If not, you've just played an intricate game of connect-the-dots. Here's my take on "Im Osten".

IN THE EAST
by Georg Trakl

Frenzied organ music of winter storms
Like the people’s dire rage—
Dark purple waves of combat,
Deciduous stars.

With shattered brow and silver arms,
Night calls to the soldiers dying.
In shadow under the ash trees of fall
The ghosts of the murdered sigh.

A wilderness of thorns grips the city.
Down bloody steps the moon
Chases traumatized women.
Frenzied wolves have trampled the gates.


The English language doesn't exactly lack Trakl translations, but at least there's not too many of this poem online. There is the ubiquitous James Wright and Robert Bly version. And then there's this wild one by Joel Sloman posted at Mark Lamoureux's blog.

Move On Kerry

The post-convention Democrats, via MoveOn.org, are starting up a get-out-the-message campaign, complete with pre-written letters you can use to send to your local newspaper editor. These templates have inspirational titles like "Hope and Positivity " (ick), "Real Family Values" (2x ick), and "Proud to be a Democrat" (no comment). Alright, the Republican propaganda machine has to be answered somehow, so I guess this may be acceptable. But, presenting John Kerry as all "hope and integrity" should just be a small part of the Democratic strategy. What is really called for is a vocal criticism from the disenfranchised left. Yes, the Kerry faithful should support a focused, Nader-led attack, because it will help those still fence-straddling voters recognize that John Kerry's record is by no means "liberal," that he represents a compromise, and that he better qualifies as a fiscal conservative than does our good ol' President.

In Advance of the Broken Link

Blogging has really drawn me into the Web further than I ever thought I would get. It took my so long (well, 18 or 19 years) to get into books and reading, that I sort of naturally resisted many things Web. Though I was a fairly early user of Prodigy (around 1992 and 1993), and though I've spent the last six years working on a computer as a book compositor, my Internet experience remained basically email and message boards. But lately I've become more curious about this machine I'm spending so much time on. Digging around a little, I found this fascinating story. It seems to be common knowledge to propeller heads and technophiles, as excerpts appear frequently on the Web, but a scientist writing in the wake of the second World War issued a challenge to the scientific community to "turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge" (to quote his editor at The Atlantic Monthly). His name was Vannevar Bush, and his visionary essay was titled "As We May Think."

In his essay, Bush presages much of what now constitutes modern electronic computing in general and the World Wide Web in particular. From the hardware, such as scanning "machines" (which surprisingly already existed) and touch-screen monitors, to the all important technology of hyperlinking. At times Bush is so on the mark (um, unlike a certain other prominent Bush) that the intellectual/imaginative leap his vision must have required is practically transparent and easily overlooked. As when he writes that "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified." A memex is basically a computer; here is Bush's definition: "A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility." In fact, Bush goes so far as to call the memex an "intimate supplement to [one's] memory." The emphasis is mine, just because I find that an extraordinary thought. No doubt, we're not quite there yet, virtual sex notwithstanding (though virtual sex seems like a dream of the late eighties that never quite came to fruition, or maybe it has and I missed the cruise ship, after all I seem to be one of the three or four men in the U.S. who hasn't seen the Paris Hilton video—who was in that with her? The Lawnmower Man?).

For anyone reading this who might want more supporting information, but doesn't have time to read the whole essay: the Computing Science department at Simon Fraser University has put up a neat little list of Web-related elements that Vannevar Bush anticipated.

Alter It, Man

I admire Eric Alterman's political writing, respect his opinions, and look forward to his biweekly column in The Nation almost as much as I look forward to the alternating column of Katha Pollitt (whose politics, happily, are as progressive as her poetics are moderate). But I've grown tired of Alterman's ad hominem* filled arguments against Ralph Nader's candidacy.

In the latest Nation, Alterman refers to "Republican stooge Ralph Nader and his misguided supporters," in what essentially is a throw-away sentence that wouldn't be in the column if he weren't hellbent on getting a dig in. Now, I don't intend to vote for Nader this time, because I'd like to see Kerry beat Bush by as wide a margin as possible. Nonetheless, I support Nader's candidacy, and even see it as necessary. I don't think progressives in swing states would best be served by voting for him, but that's up to them.

(Actually, what I'd really like to see is a Wayne's World-like "Scooby Doo" ending where Kerry wins the election but then pulls off a mask and turns out to be . . . Dennis Kucinich, and everyone laughs as Edwards says "Ah shucks, Dennis," and Congress is cool with it, and the Supreme Court is cool with it, and Dubya-n-Cheney are charged with war profiteering, and al Qaeda disbands, and third-world slavery and first-world serfdom are finally abolished, and borders cease to exist, and above us only sky . . .)

Bush's unrelenting, far-right attack on the environment and his arrogant and negligent foreign policy (unnecessary war in Iraq, outright dippiness regarding North Korea) are enough to justify a vote for Kerry. But then how can I claim Nader's candidacy is also necessary? Part of the answer is hinted at in Alterman's own column when he bemoans "the Democrats' weakness in Congress." The Democrats are weak because they've been pandering to the so-called center for way too long. Most supported NAFTA; most accepted The Patriot Act without so much as a chirp; most refuse to stand up for relationship rights, reproductive rights, or even workers' rights; most could not rise to the challenge of the Enron scandal because they themselves had taken Enron money; most were quiet as Bush passed on the Kyoto accord, passed on the biological warfare treaty, passed on the International Criminal Court (lest we have no Guantánamo Bay); most have raised no voice against the increasing presence of religion in policy-making, as with stem-cell research and "the morning after pill"; ALL stood by silently as Tom Ridge was rewarded a new, couchy position, when he should have been booted for civil rites violations in his treatment of protesters before the 2000 Republican convention (The Nation reported on this story in the first year after it happened, but it's never made it to the mainstream media); the beatdown goes on and on.

The underlying problem of all these issues, the complicity of the Democrats, can only be truly resolved by dismantling our two-Party duopoly. America's antiquated republican-model democracy is failing, has failed. Regime change? Better a paradigm change. Only by running a national campaign which threatens a Party that needs to win, and whose long-term health may be at stake, is there even a remote chance for this issue getting the attention it deserves. Our government is not adequately representative. If it were, there's a good chance we wouldn't be saddled with those first two urgent problems which force a vote for Kerry. It's a cycle perpetuating itself. Nader is one of the few patriots willing to challenge the bipartisan hegemony which stands in the way of progress, of justice. Don't tell me he's egomaniacal for running. An egomaniac wouldn't take on an absolutely winless situation. He gets shit on from all sides. He's acting on principle in a land where public officials have washed all principle from their hands. His crusade is of a fundamentally democratic nature that will never have "the right time," because the establishment doesn't allow for it.

As Lani Guinier puts it: "our system of representation, based on winner-take-all elections, means that a majority of citizens in the nation at any given moment are not represented by people whom they chose to represent them and are thus alienated from meaningful democratic participation." Clearly something—it's almost to the point of anything—must be done to force one of the major parties to call for electoral reform. Instant run-off voting would be an improvement, but a system of cumulative voting would be the most fair, democratic, and truly American.

* Worried about using "ad hominem" as a noun, I turned to the super duper American Heritage Dictionary (which I just learned can be accessed online here). Not defined yet as a noun, it is mentioned in the usage note: "Ad hominem has also recently acquired a use as a noun . . . This usage may raise some eyebrows, though it appears to be gaining ground in journalistic style."

Vaughn Says Hi, Etc.

I guess it's official. Vaughn's first word is "Hi." KC took her for a scheduled doctor's appointment today, and while there Vaughn made her usual sound of acknowledgment. The doctor's unprompted response: "Oh, she says 'hi.'"

    *    *    *

Yesterday Vaughn completed her first, completely unassisted walking lap around her crib. She has repeated this staggering feet once or twice. This afternoon, though, at the doctor, she received four shots: the dpt vaccine, two others to guard against blood diseases, and then something else. Vaughn was a bit upset when KC and I were talking about this, so I didn't quite hear the whole story. Ever since coming home from the doctor's, she has seemed down; when she cries, it's less demanding and more sorrowful. She has a fever just over 100, and when we put her into her saucer-o-toys, she didn't stand as usual, but slouched, legs folded under her, all of her 16 pounds weighing down the cushioned side. We worried there might be a negative reaction from the shots. Called the doctor and the docter on call said "Tylenol." So we'll get Tylenol and see how it goes tomorrow.

    *    *    *

Last night I added a subtitle to my blog. It's not very interesting, so I colored it recede-into-the-background green. Later, I came back and added the word "satori" to the subtitle, though I doubt I'll be presenting any moments of enlightenment. I mean, it's been years since I experienced anything like that. Thousands of years. . . . expect thousands more will pass before it comes again. I just thought "satori" sounded cool up there, gives it a ring, ring of recurrence, and all.

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Speaking of recurrence, the other day at the end of my post on Lederer's Winter Sex I mentioned a few poets deserving more appreciation. I can't believe I didn't put at the top of that list someone even more unrecognized, and most deserving, John Taggart. To top it off, his poetry readings are exceptional, far and away the best I've heard. Anyway, here are a few links to make up for my previous oversight:

    Question No Question (poem)

    Pastorelle 2 (poem)

    Pastorelle 11 (poem)

    Pastorelles (review)

    The Necessary Word: A Tribute to John Taggart

My Own Private Conspiracy Theory

I've been harboring my own private conspiracy theory for a while now, guess I'll drop it here in the semi-open. I haven't seen this one put forth anywhere else, but then most of my news on the Iraq atrocity comes from sources, such as The Nation, that aren't likely to print unfounded, hence irresponsible, statements about the government no matter how much they disagree with the current policy-makers. But I can do it. Here it goes: The Dubyadministration decided it was the right time to attack Iraq, not because they believed Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction, but because they knew there were none.

True, the Senate intelligence committee didn't come to this conclusion in their congressional report. But who really believes that the CIA is going to let a congressional inquiry learn anything that the CIA doesn't really want them to know? The CIA has taken a lot of hits for mistakes that clearly should have landed on Dubya's chin. We've had almost three years of pin the tail on George Tenet, even still after his resignation. My scenario actually offers some solace to Americans because it means the CIA is less inept and more, well, let's say "pernicious"—in its archaic sense. Besides, playing the butt that gets kicked isn't all bad for them. As if in a game of Texas Hold ’Em (we know how much certain powers-that-be love card-game metaphors) where you want to project a table image quite different from the way you actually play, the CIA allows themselves to be presented as an incompetent, disorganized organization, when you know they're not that bad off.

There's also the fact that the Dubyadministration contains known, long-standing hawks on Iraq, most notably Donald Rumsfeld, who have been itching to go there for some reason. The whole profile of the situation fits with the Dubyadministration, which constantly tells the people the opposite of what they plan to do. The big example here is the "Clear Skies" Clean Air Act, which has all but dismantled environmental regulations and let a number of large corporations off the hook for long-overdue fines. But there's also the less recognized Dubyadministration push to limit the number of workers who qualify for overtime pay, even as Dubya himself continues to portray himself as the good buddy of America's working class.

Anyway, knowing that casualties would be minimal because there were no WMD, the
Dubyadministration figured on a short, soaringly-popular war. This helps explain Dubya's premature masquerade on the battleship in May 2003—the point's been made by many others, but every time I think about it I'm taken by the idea that it's so long, over a year now, since our President declared "victory" in "the battle of Iraq".