Getting near, almost here...

My Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959-2008 selected & with an Introduction by Thomas Fink, is nearing publication from Eileen Tabios' Meritage Press.

Read Eileen's pre-publication post about it.

I'm so excited
& I just can't hide it....

somewhat de-railed

I
rail
against the
diminution
of my
senses.

if not
with

éclat

then

           at least
                      with

                                 

if not
          with
                    verisimilitude

          then

                    at least
          with
vermicelli

decreased

Today the
postman brought
me the kingdom
of the blind. It’s
from a club
I recently joined,
& it’s my turn
to be King
for a day.

Texas crude

Before the war, Saddam Hussein's regime pumped 3.5 million barrels of oil a day, but this has fallen to just 2 million barrels.

Dr Mamdouh Salameh, an oil economist to the World Bank & the UN Industrial Development Organisation, told a British parliamentary committee last month that Iraq had offered the US a deal, three years before the war, that would have opened ten new giant oil fields on "generous terms", in return for lifting sanctions. "This would have certainly prevented the steep rise of the oil price," he said. "But the US had a different idea. It planned to occupy Iraq & annex its oil."

Cataraction Item #2

A
single light
seen as firework.

She said / He said

What lips my lips have kissed, & where, & why, I have forgotten, & what arms have lain under my head till morning; but the rain is full of ghosts tonight, that tap & sigh upon the glass & listen for reply; & in my heart there stirs a quiet pain for un- remembered lads that not again will turn to me at mid- night with a cry. Thus in the winter stands a lonely tree, nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, yet know its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come & gone; I only know that summer sang in me a little while, that in me sings no more.

is no parenthesis & death i think paragraph for life's not a back in my arms laugh, leaning each other: then we are for which says eyelids' flutter is less than your ure of my brain cry—the best gest- all flowers. Don't lady i swear by than wisdom are a better fate approves, & kisses my blood world Spring is in the to be a fool while kiss you; wholly will never wholly syntax of things any attention to the first who pays since feeling is

If not
with the
Encyclopædia
Britannica

then

at least
with
Battlestar
Galactica.

If not
with
anonymity

then

         at least
               with
equanimity.

Cataraction Item

It's a full moon.

When I close my right eye & look only through my left, I see a white disk.

When I close the left, I see a white daisy, no separate center, many petals missing, those that are left stretching in towards where the carpel should be.

Dear Tom

Thank you for the titles. I think I’ve done them justice, even if what I’ve produced wasn’t exactly what you had in mind for them.

But I’m drawing the line at the last one. Not for any moral reasons, nor because it’s too great a challenge. It’s just that I sense a terrible potential to suck me in, to give the subject too much attention, to become overly-involved to the detriment of all else. Plus, in these salacious days, he’s a fucking boring writer.

So forgive me if I call finis. There’s a fragment below, just to show I did give it consideration.

My bill is in the mail.

Regards
Mark

The Marquis de Sade's Stand-up Routine

Citizens, Citizens. Great to be with you in Sodom on the opening night of this 120 day season of Anal & Banal or, as we call it amongst ourselves, Just Another Day at the Orifice. Hope I live up to what you’ve heard about me, hope you’ll keep coming back for more. Each night will be different, that I can promise you. But I’d come back during the first three months. We tend to run out of steam after that. After all, cantharides is in short supply, & Viagra hasn’t been invented yet.

My name is Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, Donny Osmond for short. (Starts singing, to the tune of Paul Simon’s The Boxer, “I am just a Mormon.”) I’m the master of ceremonies for this revue, chief writer, poser of all the tableaux, participant in some. With my two lovely vice-captains, Juliette & Justine, I’ll be trying to make the next few hours as pleasant as possible for you, but don’t be surprised if occasionally there’s a little pain.

Life
is an
anime, old chum.....

This is probably

a fairly good representation of my eyesight at present. My left eye still provides reasonable sight, the right is very much like the right image above.

+ / -

On the positive side, I have just completed going through the galley proofs of my Selected Poems 1959-2008 — amazing how you pick up things on the zillionth go-through — & will shortly be sending the corrected pages off for publication.

On the negative side, I have just discovered why my eyesight has been getting more shithouse of late — cataracts have developed in both eyes, & I'll be needing an operation to remove them.

I don't want to go "splat", he said, lispingly

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA launched a telescope Wednesday to scout out elusive, super high-energy gamma ways lurking in the universe.

Glast — a NASA acronym standing for Gamma-way Large Area Space Telescope — began its five- to 10-year mission with a midday blastoff aboard a Delta rocket. Everything went well and, in just over an hour, the telescope was orbiting 345 miles above Earth precisely as planned, generating applause in Launch Control.

"We couldn't be happier," said NASA project scientist Steven Ritz.

The $690 million telescope, supported by six countries, will pick up where NASA's Compton Gamma Way Observatory left off before its deliberate destruction in 2000, but in a bigger and better way.

With superior new technology and insight gained from Compton and other telescopes, Glast will be able to do in three hours, or two orbits of Earth — survey the entire sky — what Compton took 15 months to do. What's more, Glast and its particle detectors are much more sensitive and precise, and should provide an unprecedented view into the high-energy universe.

"In a sense what Glast is doing is giving us a chance to peek behind the curtain or look under the hood for how things are working, and it's only by doing this sort of exploration that we're able to learn these things. It's a form of scientific enlightenment," Ritz said earlier in the week.

Gamma ways — at the extreme end of high energy — go "splat" when they encounter Earth's upper atmosphere, so scientists must look to space observatories to uncover the secrets of gamma wadiation.

Physicists want to know more about the huge jets of particles and radiation shooting out of black holes at nearly light speed, and the gamma way bursts, or explosions, that take place in the universe every day. They also want to see what else might be out there shining in gamma wadiation, possibly shedding light on the mysterious dark matter making up so much of the universe.

The Universe is home to numerous exotic and beautiful phenomena, some of which can generate almost inconceivable amounts of energy. Supermassive black holes, merging neutron stars, streams of hot gas moving close to the speed of light ... these are but a few of the marvels that generate gamma-way wadiation, the most energetic form of wadiation, billions of times more energetic than the type of light visible to our eyes. What is happening to produce this much energy? What happens to the surrounding environment near these phenomena? How will studying these energetic objects add to our understanding of the very nature of the Universe and how it behaves?

another one for Karri

h'ernia

Flowers on the
tree outside

seen only
when they fall.

Anonymous. c. 550 CE

included in: Rivalling the Six Dynasties: Poems from the Eastern Turkish Khaganate selected & translated by Umberto Allegrezza; The Uzbekistan Historical Society; Bukhara, 2000.

Hay(new)ku

Available from Meritage Press.

Seepage

For a couple of years, at the end of the sixties, I made my living as a poet. A variety of gigs — readings, the sale of chapbooks — underscored by royalties from a book on painting & the money from a poetry prize . Mind you, living was cheaper then; bread & milk probably less than 10 cents each, cigarettes less than 50c, books weren’t that expensive. Plus I shared a low-rent house close to everything, & my regime then was to walk everywhere.

For some months, one of the gigs was a regular Sunday night spot working with the house band — the Claude Papesch trio, comprised of some of the best jazz/rock musicians in New Zealand (Bruno Lawrence on drums, Doug Jerebine (later known as Jesse Harper) or Dave Russell on guitar, the leader on electronic piano) who would otherwise have been “between gigs”) at a local nightclub. Some of the numbers we did were quite intricate & rehearsed, others kept simple — a medium tempo blues in B♭, or “just do it with a Bo Diddley beat.”


The Bo Diddley beat is a kind of rhumba rhythm — One & two & three & four & one & two & three & four & ..... — often pared to its rhythmic essentials rather than relying on chord changes. Probably the best known example of it is the Rolling Stones’ version of the Buddy Holly song Not Fade Away.

Ah, it’s amazing what the mind retains. Hadn’t thought of any of the above for years, until I read today of the death of Bo Diddley.

Vale Bo Diddley, oh Bo Diddley.

a curious Cabinet of Curiosities

Cornelius Gijsbrechts (1670):
A Cabinet of Curiosities with an Ivory Tankard
(showing reverse of cupboard door)
Oil on Canvas, Statens Museum for Kunst

A bit of a freakout

at the weekend, to discover that Blogger is now scheduling postdated posts & publishing them when that nominated time arrives rather than publishing them immediately despite the future timestamp.

With Otoliths, I get around the blog latest-post-is-the-top-post by giving the “cover” of an issue a post date somewhere out beyond the scheduled date of the next issue. This means that I can build the forthcoming issue without things surfacing until I want them to. (Sure, using something like Google’s blogsearch gives a window into what’s in the next issue, but I can live with that.)

Fortunately, after some rummaging around in Blogger help, I discovered that you can still postdate — though it’s a little bit fiddly — by publishing immediately, then going in to edit mode to overwrite the timestamp with the desired time & then republishing.

I breathe easier.

a found Saussure hay(na)ku

Genji Monogatari XIX: At Writing Practice

She was in a hurry to
be inspired; so, rather
than be bound by the
limitation of words, she
opened two additional
browser windows & used
satellite & aerial imagery
to explore brief snippets
of everything from the
lo-fi aesthetic of classic
reggae 45s through to
Mstislav Rostropovich
playing Bach. Too much
distraction—what she was
after was not conceptual
knowledge but keyholes.
It began to snow. She
watched it for a while &
went outside & wrote
heaven
            天
                       on the pathway.
Then she wept bitterly.

dancehall

  enTROpy.
casCADes.
    hEROics.

For Tom Beckett, in response to his comment below

Today the
postman brought
me the gold
chains I’d
purchased
thru eBay &
some pigeons.
Dinner was
a dressed-
up but noisy
affair—lots of
squab, bling.

Today the
postman brought
me some
pigeons. Sad-
ly, I no longer
have a cat
to set a-
mongst them.

I have been casting about

for a way to produce a news page for Otoliths Books. I’d thought about using Blogger, but wasn’t too keen simply because the temporal nature of a blog would mean ending up with bits & pieces about a single book — reviews & such — scattered throughout, rather than concentrated as I would prefer them to be.

An email from John Tranter, the editor of Jacket, has solved my problem. Google now has a new offering called Google sites. John has just started up the Jacket Notes homepage — News, book parties, readings, new books, new magazines, and what’s on: the world of contemporary poetry as seen by Jacket magazine — & was graciously inviting me, along with other editors, publishers, etc., to post news of new releases there. I’ll definitely be taking up John’s invitation.

But viewing & looking around the Jacket site was definitely an Aha moment. So now I’ve created the Otoliths Google Site, have started to populate it, will continue filling in the back catalog. It’s an easy site to navigate & work with, especially if you’ve previously used a corporate website. Lots of formatting available, the ability to include attachments — jpegs, pdfs, docs — but it also has a hierarchal structure beneath the home page & an alphabetical listing of lower pages so that they’re all visible from the top page, & can easily be accessed & edited from there.

strgglue

New Books from Otoliths—Allegrezza, Cunningham, Grumman

To complete this quarter’s round of books from Otoliths......

The direct URLs are given below. The full list of what is becoming a significant catalog can be found at The Otoliths Storefront.


Collective Instant
William Allegrezza
108 pages
Cover design by Sheila E. Murphy
ISBN: 978-0-9805096-0-1
Otoliths 2008
$12.50 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/2368639

William Allegrezza’s Collective Instant brings together two chapbooks and a series of new works, including "Tracings from the Front," an extended piece exploring the language of conflict stripped and fragmented from its context. The poems in Collective Instant aim towards meanings, hope for meaning, while showing the inevitable absences between understanding and world, between the wild and ordered.

80 Beetles
Mark Cunningham
88 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-8-5
Otoliths 2008
$10.00 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/2392396

“We waved at each other because we were driving the same model and color car. Mark Cunningham said, hey, could you write something on my Beetles. There are 80 of them. So I tried to write something on one but it kept opening its little pincers, its tiny wings. This led to a certain amount of self-examination, from which I emerged stronger, more self-assured. I was then able to more closely examine the varying structure, the very specific ideational atmospherics, & dare I say the aroma philosophique, of each of these beetles. What I discovered is that these beetles are in fact poems. Unusually good ones; & now I dream of an alternate life.” —Rod Smith

April to the Power of the Quantity Pythagoras Times Now
Bob Grumman
72 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-6-1
Otoliths 2008
$24.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/2266718

"Collected in Bob Grumman's book April to the Power of the Quantity Pythagoras Times Now are almost two decades' worth of mathemaku, a personal genre of his that combines elements of visual poetry, mathematics, and haiku. Always the poet of the topical constraint, Grumman writes mathemaku that restrict themselves to a narrow range of subjects (spring, poetry, language, light) so he can divert all his effort into creating remarkable engines of poetic imagination where language, color, images, and mathematics conjoin to form stunning ineluctable gestalts. Drawing from his early pre-long-division mathemaku and his more recent forays into color and ever-increasing formal complexity, this book brings together a hearty sampling of the best of Grumman's mathemaku, including such masterworks as "Mathemaku for Ezra Pound" and "Seaside Mathemaku." A lifetime in the making, this book is not to be missed." —Geof Huth

In addition, the print editions of Otoliths eight and nine are now also available.



Issue eight, part one contains work from Geof Huth, Felino Soriano, Richard Kostelanetz, Louie Crew, Vernon Frazer, Audacia Dangereyes, David-Baptiste Chirot, Jeff Harrison, James Sanders, Thomas Fink & Maya Fink, Paul Siegell, Cecelia Chapman, Caleb Puckett, Sandy McIntosh, Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney, Gustave Morin, Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, Bill Drennan, Jill Chan, Paul Hardacre, Bobbi Lurie, J. D. Nelson, Joshua A Ware, Kristine Ong Muslim, John M. Bennett, Martin Edmond, Philip Byron Oakes, Thomas Fink, harry k stammer, Nicholas Manning & Michele Leggott.

Issue eight, part two contains work from Reed Altemus, Pradip Datta, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen & Spencer Selby, Laurie Price, Guy Beining, Andrew Topel, Sheila E. Murphy & John M. Bennett, Luigino Solamito & John M. Bennett, John M. Bennett, Eric Burke, Alexander Jorgensen, Spencer Selby, Patrick Gulke, Christopher Major, Cecelia Chapman, Andrew Riley Clark, Márton Koppány, & John Lowther.



Issue nine, part one contains work by Rochelle Ratner, Mark Cunningham, Suzanne Grazyna, Daniel Morris, Andrew Lundwall, Joel Chace, Bill Drennan, Christopher Major, Derek Owens, Steve Timm, Scott MacLeod, Simon Perchik, Philip Byron Oakes, Elizabeth Kate Switaj, Jeff Harrison, Geof Huth, Stu Hatton, Duane Locke, Eileen R. Tabios, Douglas Barbour & Sheila E. Murphy, Michael Farrell, Bobbi Lurie, William Doreski, Esa Mäkijärvi, Paul Siegell, Glenn R. Frantz, Adam Strauss, John M. Bennett, Thomas Lowe Taylor, Marcia Arrieta, Julian Jason Haladyn, Adam Fieled, William Allegrezza, Ernesto Priego, Raymond Farr, Mary Kasimor, Louise Landes Levi, Thomas Fink & Kirsten Kaschock.

Issue nine, part two contains work by David-Baptiste Chirot, Angela Genusa, Ed Schenk, Reed Altemus, Robert Gauldie, Joe Balaz, Scott MacLeod & John M. Bennett, Diana Magallón & Jeff Crouch, Irving Weiss, John M. Bennett, Randy Thurman, John M. Bennett & Luigino Solamito, John M. Bennett & Sheila E. Murphy, John M. Bennett & Sheila E. Murphy & Luigino Solamito, Daniel f Bradley, Andrew Topel & Jim Leftwich & John M. Bennett, Mary Ellen Derwis, harry k stammer, Martin Edmond, Jeff Crouch & Matina L. Stamatakis, & Toni Simon.

Nihonbashi

Bridges

span both

time & water.

Not much

at this year’s bookfest, the annual offering of secondhand books held at the Showgrounds & organized by one of the local charities. I picked up a few things — an autobiography of Stephen Spender, the complete plays of Joe Orton, In Search of Genghis Khan by Tim Severin & a mystery novel by Michael Dibdin (tho not one of his Inspector Zen series).

Only a few tables, groaning in the main with National Geographics, Readers Digest condensed books, children’s books, a plethora of text books (reflecting (a) that this is a University town & (b) that text books represent planned obsolescence in a captive market) & Mills & Boon romances. Not much else. Except, surprisingly, a rather extensive collection of reasonably recent German literature — Brecht, Dürrenmatt, Böll, et al — which, unfortunately for me, were all in German which ich spreche kein.

Karri one

c'old

                l
          o           l
                              a            e
     c
                                        s
                                   p

The Literal Meaning II

salon hair
gods false
trap death
bell door
rail guard
balance trial
idea bright
time prime
spectrum broad
room drawing
avant post
black token
drama high
fire forest

ANNOUNCEMENT FROM MERITAGE PRESS AND XPRESS(ED)

THE HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY, VOL. II
Edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young
Release Date: 2008
ISBN 951-9198-73-3
ISBN 978-951-9198-73-6
Page Count: 148 pages
Price: $16.95

Meritage Press (St. Helena & San Francisco) and xPress(ed) (Puhos, Finland) are delighted to announce the release of THE HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY, VOL. II, edited by Mark Young and Jean Vengua.


More information about the hay(na)ku poetic form is available at http://haynakupoetry.blogspot.com and http://www.meritagepress.com/haynaku.htm The former link identifies the poet-participants, while the latter shares some poets' thoughts on the hay(na)ku's attractiveness. The hay(na)ku has been one of the most popular new poetic forms in recent times; 39 poets participated in the soon-to-be-out-of-print first anthology. In Vol. II, 51 poets from around the world (and representing a multiplicity of poetics) participate.


Since The First Hay(na)ku Anthology's release in 2005, the hay(na)ku has appeared in many literary journals, anthologies and single-author poetry collections worldwide. Artists have created visual hay(na)ku. The form has been written in Spanish, English, French, Finnish, Dutch, Tagalog, and Norwegian. It has been taught in classrooms, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico/Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) features an hay(na)ku webpage in their online journal, Periódico de Poesía. Members of UNAM'S Faculty of Literature and Philosophy/Facultad de Filosofia y Letras are also preparing a full Spanish translation of The First Hay(na)ku Anthology for future release. Reflecting the hay(na)ku's continued popularity, THE HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY, VOL. II is released just three years after the first hay(na)ku anthology. A third anthology is also in the works:The Chained Hay(na)ku which would present hay(na)ku collaborations among three or more writers. We hope readers enjoy this volume, and are encouraged to try writing their own hay(na)ku! For this poetic form also was created as an Invitation to Poetry.

To celebrate its release, Meritage Press is pleased to announce a RELEASE SPECIAL OFFER of $12.00 per book, a 29% discount off of the retail price and incorporating free shipping within the United States (for overseas orders, please email first to MeritagePress@aol.com). This offer expires on July 31, 2008. You can send checks made out to "Meritage Press" to

Eileen Tabios
Publisher, Meritage Press
256 North Fork Crystal Springs Rd.
St. Helena, CA 94574

For more information, contact MeritagePress@aol.com

rock                          scissors






euphonium                     paper

remonsterate

Today the
postman brought
me a mid-
life crisis
& a Ferrari
in a color that
matched my
blood’s hot eyes.

Genji Monogatari XIX: The Ivy

A code trans-
gressed—mutual in-
fidelities compel her
to leave the family
vaudeville act. No
clear boundaries have
been drawn. Convent-
ional narration is both
cure & punishment,
transparency a weapon
of disorientation. The
evolutionary purpose
of more complex visual
narrative is to create
traffic jams & jostling
crowds, anger within
easy walking distance
of the beach. He offers
a cautious verse. She ex-
hales all unused breath
& waits for someone
to remove the debris.

Today the
postman brought
me a canteloupe
for my vege-
tarian zoo.

perhaps                mean






not                     idolatry

Today the
postman brought
me Tom
Beckett. Too
tall to fit
through the
door so I’ve
left his physical
self outside
as a kind of
toTom pole
& let his
spirit run
free to keep
me company.

the truth behind the news

WASHINGTON (AFP) — US President George W. Bush said in an interview out Tuesday that he quit playing golf in 2003 out of respect for the families of US soldiers killed in the conflict in Iraq, now in its sixth year.

Actually, his advisors told him to quit playing in the Gulf, because of the growing unpopularity of the war, but once again he fucked up.

I
become fix-
ated on people,

on
things. I
stare incessantly. Sign

of
senility? Or
just failing eyesight?

Today the
postman brought
me a flamenco
dancer. Some-
thing clicked
between us—
her castanets.

running round in my brain

unbidden this morning is Charlie Mingus' Fables of Faubus.

Name me someone who’s ridiculous, Dannie.
Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous?
He won’t permit integrated schools.
Then he’s a fool!

The Flowers of the Abyss II

A curious eclipse—
traffic regulations now
require night to have
a bell that absorbs
light without refraction
fitted to it. Times past,
an event happened, we
rushed out & ran to it
in rampant schaden-
freude. But this is no
accident, is mechanistic;
so we stay within the
ice-blue interior of a bare
carcass of concrete &
play chase the dog or
describe Nigeria or clean
graffiti off the wreaths &
potpourri. Shorn of its
exits the sun is quiet.
Time stands still, bells
hang heavy in the air.

the ants in harriet's pants

The following piece of spam was found in the comments boxes of a page at the Penis Foundation's website.

There are poem enlargement pills in the market, but finally, a safe, all-natural solution for a stronger, longer poem.

What is the effect of poem enlargement pills based on? How does herbal poem enlargement work?

Read more at the poem enlargement pills url.

is Ron branching out?

"What Silliman has done is to go into the backyard of his critics and examine, mechanistically, why their salt marshes are diminishing....."

The Flowers of the Abyss I

Hélas! tout est abîme
wrote Baudelaire—all is
abyss, a completely
automated world of self-
assembling machine-flowers
made possible by an
emergent form of video
expression. Each change
brings out new curves in
the shoreline; in the same
ambient space there is a
region where the perception
of the image is still affected
by the dead blue screen. A
message appears to say
there is a problem with
the file. All windows
bare the infinite to me.

monochrome

The print editions

of issue eight & nine of Otoliths are now available from The Otoliths Storefront.

brkoen

New Books from Otoliths—Stempleman, Gabbert & Rooney, Koppány, Beckett

This quarter’s round of books from Otoliths is being released in two instalments. The first lot is listed below. The second instalment, which will follow in around two weeks’ time, will include books by William Allegrezza, Mark Cunningham & Bob Grumman, plus the print editions of issues eight & nine of the Otoliths e-zine.

The direct URLs are given below. The full range of books can be found at The Otoliths Storefront.



The Travels
Jordan Stempleman
60 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-5-4
Otoliths 2008
$10.00 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/1984840

A rewriting of The Voyages & Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Knight

A book taken and returned and taken again
from Sir John Mandeville; of darkened artifacts
and incipient wonders; and of the sadness left
from passing through actual and imaginative sights




That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness
Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney
104 pages
Cover design by Catherine Bourassa-Hébert
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-4-7
Otoliths 2008
$12.50 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/2210697

This collaboration between Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney is “Just more entertaining than poems are supposed to be. And I'm not using the word "entertaining" as some kind of sly putdown either. These poems have more human interaction going on in a couple of lines than many writers manage in a couple of books. The linguistic energy and, really, virtuosity, can be stunning. These are poems that know what people are like when they're around people.” —Mark Wallace




Endgames
Márton Koppány
76 pages, full color
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-3-0
Otoliths 2008
$24.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/2183260

"The extraordinary thing about Koppány’s work is the way he takes gaps in thought and elaborates on them. How he expands the unsaid. How he crafts a visual grammar by framing it in verbal settings. The way he’s able to create more surface area than is originally given. This is a book of billboard puzzles that reveal in the subtlest way. These are posters that disturb meaning. Koppány’s destination seems to want to disrupt logic by executing it perfectly askew. Perfectly."
– Nico Vassilakis

"A completely infectious sense of humor which ridicules no one and degrades nothing makes sense of the inescapable circuits in which his work moves." – Karl Young




This Poem/What Speaks?/A Day
Tom Beckett
44 pages
Cover painting by Thomas Fink
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-7-8
Otoliths 2008
$10.00 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/2266888

"This is not a quest for epiphany: it is a rigorous modus vivendi. Tom Beckett’s is a poetry which, in accompanying us in our questionings — more than this, in feeling with us throughout our errancies — is as much phenomenological inquiry as it is intimate emotive play. It is at once the voice inside our heads and those voices outside, which we love, but cannot understand. From out this space of inquiry and intimacy, Beckett’s work emerges as that poetic praxis most necessary to us in our time. It is a consciousness seeking answers to itself." — Nicholas Manning

A Dali hay(na)ku

Sometimes I spit
for pleasure
on

the
portrait of
my sacred mother.

dealth

Okay,

I know I'm two days late in acknowledging May Day,


but I brought a note from my Mother.

A gentle lob back

to Bill Allegrezza.

The new Moria has some wonderful work in it, and it also has a few of my poems.

elephgant

Issue nine of Otoliths has just gone live

It is with both pleasure & sorrow that I announce the going live of issue nine of Otoliths. The pleasure is because this issue marks the beginning of Otoliths’ third year, & once again contains a great variety of text & visual work. The sorrow is because Rochelle Ratner, a frequent contributor to this journal, passed away on March 31^st. I’d like to dedicate this issue, in which she has new poems, to her.

In this issue are Rochelle Ratner, harry k stammer, Adam Fieled, Bill Drennan, David-Baptiste Chirot, Joel Chace, Michael Farrell, Reed Altemus, Andrew Lundwall, Douglas Barbour & Sheila E. Murphy, William Doreski, Duane Locke, Stu Hatton, Joe Balaz, Jeff Harrison, Raymond Farr, Esa Mäkijärvi, Bobbi Lurie, Julian Jason Haladyn, Simon Perchik, Suzanne Grazyna, Eileen R. Tabios, Diana Magallón & Jeff Crouch, Jeff Crouch & Matina L. Stamatakis, Thomas Lowe Taylor, Glenn R. Frantz, Angela Genusa, Randy Thurman, Philip Byron Oakes, Mark Cunningham, Geof Huth, Andrew Topel & Jim Leftwich & John M. Bennett, John M. Bennett, John M. Bennett & Luigino Solamito & Sheila E. Murphy, John M. Bennett & Scott MacLeod, Scott MacLeod, Robert Gauldie, Adam Strauss, Marcia Arrieta, Elizabeth Kate Switaj, William Allegrezza, Ernesto Priego, Ed Schenk, Irving Weiss, Mary Kasimor, Christopher Major, Derek Owens, Paul Siegell, Daniel f Bradley, Daniel Morris, Steve Timm, Mary Ellen Derwis, Thomas Fink, Louise Landes Levi, Toni Simon, Martin Edmond & Kirsten Kaschock.

As always, there’s something there for everyone.

Silence

on these pages, but I've been flat out putting together issue nine of Otoliths which will be going live in just under eight hours.

Let me just say that the time spent is well worth it! It's going to be another great issue. Full details tomorrow.

The mood took us

& we drove north on Wednesday afternoon. 700 kilometers, into the sugarcane growing area of the Burdekin. Put the feet up for a couple of days, used the "internet café" — the local video store — to catch up on emails but did nothing else. Drove back today, more or less sans pause.

The only major thing to report is that the koala signs which I've always been convinced are there purely to keep tourists happy are actually genuine, there really are koalas in the parts the signs say they are — we picked up one in the headlights scuttling rapidly across the road, fortunately on the other side, as we were driving home. There was a family of wallabies that weren't so lucky, three of them newly dead near a culvert. But on the other side of the ledger, we also saw an echidna disappearing into the grasses on the roadside.

Have been

giving Series Magritte a bit of a hit out of late.

Today the
postman brought
me the two
Democrat
Presidential
hopefuls. I’ve
set up a
lockedsteelcagefighttothedeath
match for them,
pencilled in a
couple of months
away. Have
borrowed from
the Mexicans &
they’ll both have
masks on. That way
the winner won’t be
identifiable until the
victorious one exits
the cage & un-
masks themself.

Today the
postman brought
me a carrot on
a stick. I said
neigh to it.

sobterfuge

The Lucretius ficcione

Based on a number of observations, the seminal one being that not even death stops the college football machine—

.....such tumblings are a sign
That motions also of the primal stuff
Secret and viewless lurk beneath—

Titus Lucretius Carus proposed in his 200-page poem De rerum natura a number of radical & anachronistic concepts.

Unfortunately for TLC, Aristotle was still The Man, would remain so for 1500 more years, & only Virgil—felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas—had a few good words to say.

Fortunately for us, Lucretius also understood the grammatical structure of conceptual metaphors & wrote great Latin.

The poem survived; & with it kinetics, gravity & the first determinations of indeterministic quantum physics.

Today the
postman brought
me a vortex
on a special
try-before-you-
buy offer. I
got sucked in.

A reminder

that submissions for issue nine of Otoliths close in a couple of weeks. It's HUGE already but there's still a little bit of room.

It'll be celebrating its second birthday, entering its third year. Ah, the proud parent.....

in   tuition

THE SKYLINE OF   A   SMALL   TOWN IS   NEARLY ALL SKY

I have always thought of

dragonflies as beautiful but benign insects


until I saw one today snatch a small butterfly out of the air & make a meal of it.

I have cheated a little,

because the poems in each of the two preceeding posts are Series Magritte poems, & they've also been posted there.

Am getting back into SM again, because (a) I've once more got the time & (b) the putting together late last year of the video embedded below gave me quite a charge.

via The Continental Review

Three poems from Series Magritte



Read by Miia Toivio & with graphics by Marko Niemi

The Night Watch

i. The endocrinology

I stroll out to Wilshire Boulevard.
A group of part-time soldiers are setting out on parade.
There are bits missing.
A lot of raw fish has a tendency to do that.
"I'm a NASCAR fan," she said at a
birthday party in little osaka one recent night.

ii. The interval between first & second sleep

Marie-Ange sounded determined.
It was reflected in
her elegant handcuffs.

iii. Prolactin, a pituitary hormone

There's no longer a difference between theatre & shadow—
“I saw Brazil last night, Terry Gillem. Never saw it before. It was boring. I had to watch Chronicles of Riddick to clear my head of thagt junk.”
Today I get to prep for a colonoscopy.

iv. Unlike meditation

Montanna's
just a
pathetic
wannabe troll
with no sense.

v. Altered consciousness

He prepared a candle-lit gourmet dinner
that would end up being eaten
by the mangy dog on the front lawn.

vi. Benign states

The babysitter got bored & went to watch TV.

espoir / désespoir

She drove_dialectics west. Enthusiasm^forensic. Aspirations. Hope^polyhedron. Then everything particulate disappeared^polyhedron in front of her. Life’s like _catafalque that some^shadeclothtimes.               Time                went                       by.                                Things began _dichotomous to reform.                Dream?                Reality?                No matter.           She decided _entourage to try it again.

the pause & the comma

One the examplars I remember on the use of commas was the fact that

The hairy-nosed wombat eats roots & leaves.

The placement of a comma after “eats” creates another fact, this time about the sexual habits of the marsupial, if “roots” is used in the Australasian sense of sexual intercourse.

The hairy-nosed wombat eats, roots & leaves.

(& an aside—oh the foibles of a senile memory where the things that caught your eye when young are as if they never went away tho you haven’t thought about them for fifty years—bringing into play the U.S. use of “rooting” as a synonym for “cheering on”; a line from a U.S. news magazine—most probably TIME—describing how Cambridge University lost its annual boat race with rival Oxford “despite the rooting of ex-Cambridge cox Antony Armstrong-Jones & his fiancée, Princess Margaret”.)

The comma is a formal punctuation mark, an interruption of the meaning, a break before or isolating another thought or phrase, tho oft not recognized as such in speech. The pause is a thing of one’s own choosing, in time & spacing, not usually specified in writing tho I & others / following on from Olson “(wishing) a pause so light it hardly separates the words, yet does not want a comma....follow (the poet) when (they) use a symbol the typewriter has readily to hand”.

All of this prerambling because, interested in seeing how Barack Obama comes across away from the rally, still on the platform politicking but as a talkshow guest, I watched him on cable. & was intrigued, in a series of statements about “what the American Public want”, to hear him say the following

they want healthcare if they get sick they want the best schools for their kids

no doubt conceived with a comma after “sick” but spoken without it, & with the only pause in the words inserted after “healthcare”.

I’m rooting for him, btw.

I'm tempted

by this sidebar ad to a gmail email.

Poetry Writing Software
MasterWriter is everything the poet needs in one program. Free Trial.

Put my /feet up.
Churn em out.
A book a day, an
MFA in a morning.

solétude

Rochelle Ratner

I don’t know if there is such a word as intenuate, to increase, an opposite to extenuate, to lessen, but if there isn’t I’ll invent it anyway. My sadness of late has been further intenuated by a midnight email telling me that Rochelle Ratner has died from cancer. I had known she had been ill, passing references in emails—“I just wanted to be back in touch. I had a few health issues which prevented me...”—but I hadn’t known how seriously.

One of the things about starting a magazine is that it gives you a chance to work with people who you know of, but probably, in other circumstances, wouldn’t get to know. The ripples created by the first issue of Otoliths, contributed to mainly by people I had had previous correspondence with & who I reached out to, brought in a second round of writers & artists which then brought in a third & that it is how it has grown.

Rochelle, whose work I knew but whom I didn’t know, was part of that second round. She has graced the pages of three of the subsequent issues.

When I moved into the book publishing side of things, she asked if I’d be interested in seeing a manuscript, a collation, something that she later described as “Poem? Journal? Memoir? Found text?” Though I had no firm publishing mission statement—still don’t—one of my beliefs was that there would be books out there that, for one reason or another, mightn’t otherwise see the light of day, but which definitely deserved to.

Rochelle’s Leads was one such book.

"The germs of this book began in 1977, when I visited friends in London. As a child, I’d been told I had a speech impediment, but I vehemently refused voice lessons. Then, in a London pub, talking with a friend from the Lancashire/ Yorkshire border, it was almost as if I fitted in at last. Without realizing it, I’d probably inherited aspects of my grandmother’s accent. And I’d never missed her as much as I did at that moment. That was when I began planning a trip to Leeds, where my grandmother was born and spent her childhood. I knew I had to write about it, and began a series of poems as the journey took shape. Once there, I copied from books and records I’d found in the Leeds library. I began writing down what people said. What I hadn’t expected was that, as I later tried to shape the materials, I would find other peoples’ words more powerful than my own. Poem? Journal? Memoir? Found text? Think of Olson’s Maximus or Paul Metcalf’s writings."

We had fun putting it together, seeing it take shape, adding photos to the text assemblage, adding more photos, seeing it build into what it finally became, something we were both proud of.

She sent me some poems for Otoliths in early February which I quickly accepted. In the covering email she wrote:

“Did you see Anthony Rudolf's great review of Leads?
The London Magazine - August / September 2007
If not, I can scan in a copy. This book has gotten more attention than my last 3 books put together. I'm delighted.”

Unfortunately, that’s a scan I will never get to see.

In a post earlier on today to the Spidertangle list which has been forwarded on to me, Karl Young gives a beautiful summation of the sense of Rochelle that I got from our correspondence.

“During her last months, she was bald from chemotherapy. In our telephone conversations, she said that she didn't like people feeling sorry for her or acting like the funeral was already going on whenever she entered the room. One of her responses to this was to buy flamboyant hats when she went places other than the doctor, the hospital, etc. She said that her capacity for "attitude" had been diminished by the chemo, but that the right hat could reactivate it so she could face whatever situation she might find herself in.”

Genji Monogatari XV: The Oak Tree

The rock is rough, the
walls tumbled &
crusted over with
lichens, healing
crystals persist. Oriental
Tofu (Frozen) 300g. is
temporarily out of
stock. The magician,
in his Bono style semi-
transparent sunglasses,
gestures again. German
winter faba beans
decode what his cutting
lines truly mean. Only
in dreams are biotech
companies attacked
by wild animals.

One of these days,

hopefully in the not too distant future, I’ll get around to starting an Otoliths Books blog. In the interim, some recent reviews & such.

Geof Huth stratifies Spencer Selby’s Flush Contour at dbqp: visualizing poetics.

Thomas Fink at critiphoria & John M. Bennett at Mad Hatter’s Review look at Sheila E. Murphy’s The Case of the Lost Objective (Case).

Sam Trimble at Philadephia citypapernet & Jesse Jarnot at paste (jpeg of the article here) talk to Paul Siegell about Poemergency Room.

Jack Kimball follows up on Rochelle Ratner’s Leads at Pantaloons (post date 2/21/08).

Genji Monogatari XIV: A Boat upon the Waters

The camera is a kind of
surrogate supervisor, colon-
izing bare stones from
beneath the water surface
& then rough tumbling them
to remove the matrix—truth
values, brandname medication,
YouTube videos of girls fighting
in suburban schoolyards. It is
a repository of spatial memory
where everything retains
its own personal space, their
heavy burdens & polemical
charges. There is a small picture
of Genji sitting on a massive
flower under a crescent moon.

ambi-dexter-valentino

As the speechtrack to a cable series about a serial killer serial killer — or should that be serial serial killer killer? — creeps down the staircase from the living room, I’m reminded of the “morality” prevalent, thanks to the Hays code, in the Hollywood movies I grew up on, in which “evil” could never be portrayed in a “good” light & nobody could ever benefit from a crime. I have no memory of the name, or who was in it, but I do remember seeing a movie — fifties? sixties? maybe even the seventies — that, possibly for the first time, shifted away from this premise. Not too far, mind you. Sure the main characters got away with a million dollars, but they would have got, had they stayed around, a million dollars through legitimate means.

Tuxedo inJunction

The only time I have ever worn a tux was fifty years ago when I played at a New Year’s Eve Ball for the local Polish community. We didn’t play a polka all evening — they had a separate band for that — but there were 57 varieties of potato salad for supper.

Just
another proof-
of-existence hay(na)ku.

Famous disasters #739

He
went down
on the Titanic.

Let me admit

to using digital time as a kind of mini-omen. 12- or 24-hour displays, around the house, in the car, occasionally in the wider world. Something comforting about them. Equal—12:12; sequential—10:11; the year—20:08; the day, the month—22:03; pi—3:14. A small warm buzz. No downside to them. Something else & they’re just the time.

Do pubescents dream of electric sheep?

What, early on, shapes our beliefs? Why, contra parental values, prevailing current opinion & a reasonably straightforward upbringing, should I have believed that left-wing politics—socialism, if you like—was the greater respecter of human values, that capital punishment, nuclear capability, totalitarianism, armed conflict were wrong. No-one I knew shared these values, certainly not my parents. There was no television, the most radical films I’d seen were Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator & Modern Times, DC comics hadn’t reached New Zealand, there were no alternative newspapers, TIME told us it told the truth, rock ‘n roll hadn’t beaten a path to my door, wasn’t even beating yet.

What I got from my parents was a love of reading. What I got from my brother, twelve or so years older & away from home, was the collection of science fiction that he’d left behind. What I got from that were alternative views of the world, supposedly the future but written from the perspective of the present.

There was a dichotomy of perspective. The fascism of people like Robert Heinlein; the socialism of writers like Philip K. Dick, Fritz Leiber, C.M. Kornbluth & Theodore Sturgeon. The political tags came later, when my reading widened & I recognized them for what they were. The preferred beliefs stuck with me immediately.

five years on / forty years on

Marking the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion with a touch of the swagger he showed early in the war, Bush said in a speech at the Pentagon, "The successes we are seeing in Iraq are undeniable."


She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.
— Bob Dylan: Love Minus Zero / No Limit

spam(na)ku

Do
I want
to fill her

mouth entirely with
my new
nine-

inch
pecker? Certainly
a talking point,

but how to
talk around
it?

even if it’s
just to say

i’m still
propping up

my little
corner of the

universe

for Richard Kostelanetz

FACT     /     IONS

Who's the Boss?

A woman stabbed her de facto husband to death after he stopped her listening to her favourite Bruce Springsteen CD.

Karen Lee Cooper told arresting police she was sick and tired of Kevin Lee Watson telling her what to do during their two years of living together.

Today the
postman brought
me a catalogue
raisonné of
found objects. The
catalogue was in-
cluded in the
catalogue. Gödel
wouldn’t have been
happy about
that inclusion.

p




a




t




i




e




n




c




e

The weather has improved. It is time for my homage to catatonia to end.