MY NEW GIG
From a distance, the houses built into the side of the
mountain looked like a community of bento boxes and apothecary jars. I have been
living out of a suitcase for the past few weeks, and keeping the
Thursday/Saturday schedule has been a challenge, but so far I’ve been up to it.
So after watching a tribute to Juan Gabriel on t.v. and reading
the semi-annual report of one of the investment products in my portfolio, I spent much of
the remainder of the morning at a café attempting to develop a new aesthetic.
The job is like
a volunteer vacation, except I’m getting paid. I miss my desert
abode, but the beach is cool. And it dawns on me (dawn: opening shot in a movie, first notes in a score, when the curtain
rises in a play, first line in a poem, opening sentence in a novel) that I tilt toward what
in this cultural meme is called Language Poetry. An affinity is what I have. In Tokyo I was
developing this style, studying poets and artists and filmmakers and the
choreographers (Balanchine: “There are
no new steps only new combinations.”) all to the background of Japanese
language.
ONE MAN SHOW
POSTPONED
I’ve had to
postpone for several weeks the opening of my one man show, where I will I play
all four roles in Edward
Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” modeling my performance on the
over the top work of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Sandy Dennis (ah, Sandy Dennis) and George
Segal. This for sure tour de force will be rescheduled for late winter or early
spring of next year. The postponement is out of respect for Mr. Albee who died recently.
STOP ME IF
YOU’VE HEARD THIS BEFORE
There is so
much good writing out there in the world. So much
from all over. The internet is
huge in making it available. Huge. Good poetry
showing up in my feeds, emails, and just from surfing. From India, Mexico,
France, Nigeria, translated into English, though most of what I’ve been reading
online recently is English/American.
SHOUT OUTS
Alexis Fancher: She is a poet of
acclaim (frequent publishing, Best American Poetry series, etc.) and a
photographer who chronicles the downtown scene of the most interesting city in
the world, Los Angeles. DTLA is how she acronyms it, and I re-live vicariously
through her images my old neighborhood. When I was a student at USC at would
get tired of the campus huff and fluff, I would go to downtown LA and lose
myself in its myriad ways. Ms. Fancher’s photographs remind me of those fine
hours.
Neil Novello: A video artist working
in several genres—journalism, arts, documentary, etc—and has also risked his
professional reputation by making videos interpreting my work—and he is currently
on a speaking
tour in the U.S.
VISION
STATEMENT
Sequences and
observations, episodic
threads of vocalized pauses, aural punctuation and verbal fillers that
accessorize discourse in public spaces and common places (such as offices,
snack bars, waiting rooms, etc.) written in poetic form (although maybe not
poetry in the usual sense of the word).
SHOP TALK
Kenner
in The Pound Era distinguishes
three “principles” that arise here and in Pound’s other workings from that
time. These are worth setting down here, as a way to get us started:
1. the vers-libre principle, that the
single line is the unit of composition [this has the vaguest
connection to classical Chinese but is crucial to how Pound sets out in his
“translations”]; 2. the
Imagist principle, that a poem may build its effects out of things it sets
before the mind’s eye by naming them; 3. the lyrical principle, that
words or names, being ordered in time, are bound together and recalled into
each other’s presence by recurrent sounds. [These last two
show a connection to aspects of Chinese poetry that Pound may have sensed
through Fenollosa/Mori and that Yip articulates more clearly over a
half-century later.]
These principles are money. Let me repeat:
each of these principles? Money.
SHOP TALK 2
Rothenberg continues:
Moving away from translation and appropriation as such,
Pound’s work in Cathay shows
a way of making poetry from lists of words – connected or not at their
origin. As a form of systemic or process poetry, this has been utilized
by Jackson Mac Low in his Asymmetries and Light Poems, by
David Antin in his Meditations,
by me in The Lorca Variations,
and by various other poets both in America and elsewhere. This we might
call, after Mac Low, the nuclei
principle.
Ditto this principle.
SLAYED
By these lines
by Gunter Eich,
from a poem about his simple possessions as a soldier or POW
The pencil’s the thing
I love the most:
By day it writes verses
I make up at night.
This is my notebook,
this my rain gear,
this is my towel,
this is my twine.
These appeared
on the Facebook recently: three and four liners, quite fine, some longer ones.
Highly recommended.
SHOP TALK 3
A villain is
William Carlos Williams to verbosity.
Here is a tribute:
SATURDAY
Fuck
Ing
Night
In
the sum
Mer
Time.
ALT 0199
aqui aquí alt161
tu y yo Tú
alt163 yo no
nòn
là alt149 + alt133 òà
alt162
and alt160
