"I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it"

 

grey day

I watched sombre

& thought about The Part About Fate

&

& all sorts of obvious stuff

.  I liked the

& the

aspects of it, but was pretty bored by the plot.  The film feels to be very much of its time: serial killers, Lynchian aesthetics, etc.; but then again it feels like it's trying to channel something 'archetypical,' something outside of time, by delving into the powers of love & virgins & bleh bleh bleh

 

In its better moments, it reminded me of Terry Berlier's video for Inkless Imagination IV & much of her video work.  Which is beautiful.  The video she did for Inkless was absolutely heart-breaking.  The plot of which being: a drive in the hills outside of Stanford when the fog's coming in.  The beautiful of which being: due to the hills, the camera going in & out of seeing and being verblendet, between perceiving & not perceiving, between beauty & unheimlich.

typos are hip as fuck

 The new Typo is up & at 'em

& I like it.  I like the Lucy Ives, the Tom Orange & maybe even the Laynie Brown.  I like the feeling of the Lucy Ives piece the most.  For me, this is a fine example of where language is not merely descriptive but where it also delivers the energy.  Projective Verse if you will

.  This

seems to be the new Unicorn / Wolf / Kitten / Pony.

Lately, they've been popping up in poems faster than under a six year old's pillow

; or so it seems (are my recent visits to dentist office to blame?).  Anyone who pays close attention to this blog might (& since no one does except me, I guess the task is for me) then object 'but wait, didn't you say Jennifer Nelson's poem at Realpoetik was rippin'? Shouldn't you criticize it too since it uses both a Unicorn & Teeth, which would normally gain someone multi-balls & comets & loud music in Hipster pinball?'  The other me would answer, but there you can't accuse Jennifer Nelson of mere trend sophism, since Renaissance art is forthrightly her jam.  Read her bio or her blog & all will be clear.  & besides there it starts out with chainsaws & who's going to argue with chainsaws & sharpening horns & teeth in the same poem?

 

& there also the poem brings you somewhere, I'm not sure where exactly, but you still want to think about it.  & also I could use a tooth-sharpening since I grind the fuck out of mine.

I guess there's nothing wrong with using such 'in' imagery, I just get confused & can't keep all them poems apart (which is probably more my fault than anyone else's).  & I still can't help but wonder how & why such phenomena happen.  Do we use such trends because we're always infiltrated with information on the outside?  Do we integrate it all merely out of a nostalgia for My Little Pony & He-Man?

 There's no reason to come down on them, so I won't.  & besides, as stated over at HTMLGIANT, a hatred of hipsters is a favorite past-time of hipsters & hipsters only (well, I guess people affected by gentrification might hate hipsters too, but they'd still use out-dated terminology, like metrosexuals, etc.).  Everyone wants to be avant-garde.  I want to be this

Or this

Or this

But without the bear.  (Get it?  Har-har-har).  See you next season my beloved hipsters!

geil geil geil

 
 














He changes the scene with its unique nobility into something quite
different he draws around the story a circle and then breaks up that circle
into angles so that the narrative line is abolished.  The linear lines of a
narrative line are obtrusive and when he breaks it up there will be more energy,
instead of lines he is free to deal with planes.  The planes join each other
to become cubes the entire outline of his life fits into a cube

-Barbara Guest, Stripped Tales.

"Unless you err, naught can be truly known. / If life you want, then find it as your own."

No this is not a celebration of ch-ch-ch-changes.

Nor is it a plea (to deaf ears)

I read the new Diagram today & I feel a bit like this

but worse.  Why do so many poets say 'X lives & writes in Y' as if their writing is separate from their writing, I mean living?  Maybe I'm just a stupid Romantiker who thinks that the one is an extension of the other but maybe this is also a sign that a lot of these people are getting MFAs or are teaching at universities & see writing as a job.  Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with poets getting paychecks (see my last post), but I wonder if this is symptomatic.

 Back to Diagram: I did like Ryan Teitman's "Ode, Elegy, Aubade, Psalm" & Elaine Bleakney's "Chronology: Emily" (which I hated on first read, but then was able to appreciate much more -and only with the 'idiot notes' at the end).  I'm going to try & give the journal a third go because I think it's a good one, even if this particular Diagram doesn't fit my fancy.  But why doesn't it?  I think I'm having a hard time with a lot of poems that seem 'surrealistic' but which only base themselves on some slight etymological or logical 'perplexity.'  A poem (& there are a number of them here) that doesn't really explore what this perplexity is, but rather quickly changes up to the next one.  It's like watching a bunch of fireworks sputtering all at the same time.  There's nothing particularly grandiose or careful, but feels more like a malfunction.  Is this the aesthetic they're going for?  Am I just not getting it?  But I guess you always hate what's close to you; point in case, one of my poems has the line 'I know what you mean / & now it's inside me' as in, now I've internalized it.  Maybe it's not the gesture itself that's poisonous, but rather, the way the gesture is dropped like dirty pennies into the coin jar at a 7-11.

Dance Dance Dance

I got back from horses & horse girls & horse stalls & went straight to this

by this dapper man

with Daniel.  Tanzstück # 3 by Laurent Chétouane was something I had been looking forward to, especially after seeing Tanzstück # 1 with Frank

& missing #2 (with text from Faust part deux), but hearing really great things about it.  Tanzstück # 3, admittedly, was a bit of a letdown as far a theater experience went.  The music felt like it was out of a road movie, the text was lifeless (even if, at times, thought-provoking), & I think any sort of mirroring of bodies on the stage makes me go into an anaphylactic shock.  There were, nonetheless, some beautiful moments (Sigal Zouk's solo dance was stunning), I liked the movement from words to bodies to projections & the use of Hölderlin's poem Neue Welt at the end was without a doubt effective.

            und es hängt, ein ehern Gewölbe
der Himmel über uns, es lähmt Fluch
die Glieder den Menschen, und die stärkenden, die 
                                                              erfreuenden
Gaben der Erde sind, wie Spreu, es
spottet unser, mit ihren Geschenken, die Mutter
und alles ist Schein -
O wann, wann
       schon öffnet sie sich
       die Flut über die Dürre.

Aber wo ist er?

   Daß er beschwöre den lebendigen Geist

The most amazing sentence of the whole piece is 'ich bin da' which, literally, translates as 'i'm there' but which means 'i'm here.'  The poetics of this could & should have really been explored, indeed, the sentence, something I say all the time, really felt full of life afterwards.

Why don't more choreographers work with poets?  I know that Michael Palmer has been really active in the past, but here & now in Berlin, most choreographers (of the work I've seen) write the texts themselves or use something that they think 'fits.'  I think this is narrow-minded, like Lorca's interpretation of Poet in New York; & often feels superfluous, & even more, there's an intense friction between the expressiveness of the dance & the humdrum quality of the words  (most would then justify this decision with sophistry).  I think more choreographers should seek out poets & poets should get paychecks.  I think poets should write movements for the stage, choreographers should write text & then the two should sit at a table in a studio with scissors & big bottles of water.  Charles Olson did something in this direction with his Apollonius of Tyana.

I think that poets should look outside of their boxes more.  I think dancers could make a lot more pieces where people don't get naked.  & that's what I really appreciated about Chétouane's piece - there was nothing extraneous about it.  Everything fit.  But that was also the problem.   Maybe it would have been more interesting if it were more daring, where daring ≠ nakedness.  Maybe I would have liked it more if the melancholy subtleties of the piece would have come to the forefront (indeed, this is what I found most compelling, that the discourse & being stuck in our own bodies can also be seen as a tragedy), & if they would have been explored (emotionally) & not just referenced.  But then again, maybe I'm missing something.  Maybe the piece was all about surfaces & I'm living in the past.