O lymph pics

Issue twenty-six of Otoliths is now on line.

Issue twenty-six of Otoliths, the southern winter issue, has just gone live.

La Sagrada Familia
Mark Young
It's a great & wide-ranging issue as always, but I've run out of superlatives. So, instead, a minimalist introduction.

Contributions from: John Bloomberg-Rissman & Anne Gorrick, David Appelbaum, paul summers, SJ Fowler, Vaughan Rapatahana, Rico Moore, Kyle Hemmings, Philip Byron Oakes, Clark Lunberry, Arpine Konyalian Grenier, Kent MacCarter, Beni Ransom, Eileen R. Tabios, John M. Bennett, Jim Leftwich & John M. Bennett, John M. Bennett & Matthew Stolte, Douglas Barbour & Sheila E. Murphy, Richard Kostelanetz, Lakey Comess, James Mc Laughlin, John Thomas Allen, Donna Kuhn, Raymond Farr, Joshua Mostafa, Jo Langton, Elizabeth Welsh, Tony Beyer, Jordon Lofton, Mark Rutter, Eleanor Leonne Bennett, Howie Good, David Jalajel, bárbara mesquita, Jeff Harrison, Jill Jones, Bill Yarrow, Jeremy Freedman, Reed Altemus, Jim Meirose, Matt Margo, Andy Martrich, Tyson Bley, Deborah Poe & Gene Tanta, Andrew Topel, Roger Williams, Jason Joyce, Tom Beckett, Tim Keane, Charles Freeland & Rosaire Appel, Bill Drennan, John Pursch, Caleb Puckett, Matthew Stolte, Marty Hiatt, J.D. Nelson, Stephen Nelson, Marc Jones, Jack Galmitz, Márton Koppány, Francesco Levato, Cherie Hunter Day, Scott Metz, Sarah Edwards, bruno neiva, Keith Higginbotham, Dorothee Lang & Julia Davies, Felino A. Soriano, Emma Morgan, lindsay cahill, Bobbi Lurie, Marco Giovenale, Leah Muddle, Bob Heman, & sean burn.

Enjoy

plane speaking

What little I 
know about 
flying 
            comes from 
those who have 
never flown.

geographies: Broadmount

he made the decision to shape the dress on more traditional lines

geographies: Iron Pot

geographies: Parnassus

It was a 
   temporal re- 
      gression 
         from which 
            he returned 
               singing the 
                  Marseillaise 
                     between mouth- 
                        fuls of an egg 
                        & lettuce sand- 
                     wich. Arch-
                  ival footage 
               shows there
             were times
         when he had
      all four feet
   off the 
ground.

for Márton Koppány

geographies: Duaringa

fract ure

f r a c t    u r e
f r a c    t u r e
f r a c t    u r e
f r a c    t u r e
f r a    c t u r e
f r a c t    u r e
f r a c t u    r e
f r a c t    u r e

geographies: Lucas Park

50 years ago,

there used to
be a
bit

more
meat on
The Strolling Bones.

geographies: Stanwell

but that bain't no 'obbit, zurr...

geographies: Hedlow

Out from Otoliths—Nicholas Manning's Homo Sentimentalis

Now out from Otoliths.

Homo Sentimentalis: A Guide In Verse To Modern Emotional Intimacy
Nicholas Manning
116 pages
Otoliths, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9872010-4-1
$15.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/shop/nicholas-manning/homo-sentimentalis/paperback/product-20166234.html

"In a civilization of hysteria, the sentimental man is king. Troubadoured constructions have laced our European balconies with a string of rotting roses. Emotion’s event horizon is the condensation of cliché. Love is both an autonomous quality of the world and a conditional quality of our language. Extend a convention far enough and one arrives at life. Shall we explore love then as rhetorical device? The flowers among your hair are mere metaphors. Upper limit hyperbole, lower limit litotes. Kitsch and the commonplace set up the steps of the dance. To then trip over tropes is to attain a glittering singularity among stars: a stasis amidst the movement. Rhetoric and sincerity do not cease to be distinguishable; rather, their distinction no longer matters. Beyond the baroque and the rococo lie the limits of this spectrum, where all passion is at once passion and its show, all pathos at once ethos and its mask of Venetian glitter. The aesthetic posture and persona of our over-the-top Romeo takes then to moving while still sobbing in a comical cabriole. Let the tropes dance then, the ones amidst the others, and interchange forever their silken, saddened arms." —Nicholas Manning

Homo Sentimentalis: A Guide In Verse To Modern Emotional Intimacy is probably the greatest single-poet book of love poems in the field of “avant” poetry since For Love, by Robert Creeley. –Kent Johnson

geographies: Marmor

he boned up
on osteo-
logy

The Great (Media Tarts) Race, #6

Creativity is rarely shown by the competitors these days. Rather, it's predicability.

& so ...

Bono

& the Dalai Lama

both seek out Aung San Suu Kyi for a photo-op.

The Race judges are split on how to allocate points for this stage. Half wish to reward the two competitors for the speed with which they reacted. Half wish to penalize them for exactly the same thing, for taking what was easily obtained rather than something more difficult.

In the end, only a single point is awarded, to the Dalai Lama since he also is a Nobel Laureate & therefore has an excuse.

In the summation of their deliberations, the judges commented on the frenzy of media attention that has greeted Aung San Suu Kyi in her journey beyond the borders of Myanmar, & noted that, should she ever become a formal participant in TGR, she will be hard to beat.

Eventually

I got all the colors of Google to appear...

b
Instead of a long chain
of nucleotides, think of
the body as being
comprised of an infinite
tape divided into cells,
a finite number of which
contain a symbol drawn
from a finite vocabulary.

To breath life into it
add a moving head to scan
the cells as they pass; &
depending on the present state
& the present symbol
to overwrite or delete what
it finds there & move
one cell further on. It is not
a sequence of purine or
pyrimidine bases but of
ordered quintuples. Birth
is the initial state; the subset
of final states includes
assassination with an icepick
suicide through cyanide
& the

crash of white plumes
in the night sky.

from At Trotsky's Funeral

Everything old is new again

Scientists have unearthed the biggest find yet of pre-historic "giant wombat" skeletons, revealing clues to the reasons for the species' extinction.

The find, in Queensland, Australia, of about 50 diprotodons - the largest marsupial that ever lived - has been called a "palaeontologists' goldmine".

The plant-eating giants, the size of a rhinoceros, weighed up to 2700 kilograms & had backward-facing pouches big enough to carry an adult human. Scientists equate them as genetically relative to today’s wombats.



The fossils are believed to be between 100,000 & 200,000 years old.

The "mega-wombats" appeared to have been trapped in boggy conditions while taking refuge from dry conditions.

The pigeon-toed animals were widespread across Australia about 50,000 years ago, when the first indigenous people are believed to have lived, but they first appeared about 1.6 million years ago.

Read more...

************

There are many things that could block a stormwater drain.

But a wombat?

Imagine the surprise on the faces of the people at the Launceston City Council when they stumbled across a furry critter while viewing video from a stormwater pipe survey recently.



Imagine the surprise on the faces of the people at the Launceston City Council when they stumbled across a furry critter while viewing video from a stormwater pipe survey recently.

The shy little squatter was discovered by engineering development officer Sonia Smith. Ms Smith said that one of the tasks council asked developers to undertake when building a new subdivision was to ensure all their stormwater pipes were working.

"They do that by conducting a remote video camera survey, and they then send the videos into us," Ms Smith said.

"The equipment they use is basically a remote controlled camera, driven by a joystick.

"Sometimes in these videos you see the odd rat or spider, but this is the first time I've seen a wombat."

Ms Smith said the wombat found his or her way into the pipe because it was open at one end.

"It's a 300mm pipe, which is the smallest we use, but it appears that it might be a perfect size for a wombat burrow," she said.

Ms Smith said the wombat will be respectfully nudged on to a new burrow and access to the pipe will be blocked.

Read more...

A line from Arthur B. Reeve

He felt happy & pain-free only
on stage, immersed in his music.
String Theory & the Geometry of
Hydroponic Strawberries. Listen

to, download, play & stream the
song. The elders only smile sadly.
I've bought eight t-shirts from
this guy. Californian worshippers

chose blindfolds. There is scepticism
in the mainstream media. Luxury
limousines drove up the stairs.
I have his posters on my wall. Will

he be able to go back to the boy
band life? Don’t forget to watch A
Thousand Kisses, Episode 37. In the
blank space alongside the photograph,

an anonymous letter-writer had
scribbled a shocking & hate-filled
message. Does it bother you that
tennis doesn't get that kind of adulation?

A line from Basic Geometry

____________________

geographies: Fairy Bower

geographies: Stannage Bay

Today the
postman brought
me a walking
stick. Now all I
need are a back
fence & a fruit-
filled apple tree
just inside it but
not too far out
of reach for the
young kids of
the neighbor-
hood. Those who
can remember
the past are also
condemned to re-
peat it. I never did
like Santayana.

ten pwoermds from the past two months

idiosynchronicity

beligeriatric

zootgoost

metabicycle

Tai Chic

mnemorize

contretemperatures

casualdehyde

pastalence

stringth


from won des laits

geographies: Cape Town

a review

geographies: Kiev

criss-crossing the weeken'd mind

Pablo Picasso
The Old Guitarist

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

Wallace Stevens
The Man with the Blue Guitar

Out from Otoliths — James Maughn's These Peripheries

Now out from Otoliths

These Peripheries
James Maughn
Cover image by Susan Harlan
100 pages
Otoliths, 2012
$14.95 + p&h
ISBN: 978-0-9872010-3-4
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/these-peripheries/12841058

In a kaleidoscope of shifting voices, James Maughn embraces world poetry in his immensely creative new collection. Maughn's poems unlock new ways for us to think about voice, poetic interactions, and the structures of free verse. Each poem is written 'following' the work of another poet, either a contemporary writer or a recent translation from earlier literature. "These Peripheries" tenderly and with great skill, create a formal and nuanced conversation on contemporary poetics. Maughn's poems, traversing geographies and cultural locations, unsettle the concept of translation as a concrete, fixed mirror and opens it up, like the door of a bird cage, to immense possibilities, infinitely expanding the journey of both the new poems and the source poems. It is a stunning collection which takes a new shape every time I come to read it. —Judy Halebsky

from today ...

 
 
 
passive
active
 
 

from some years back . . .

 
 
 
passive
active
 
 

geographies: Callide

s t r a t a s
t r a t a s t
r a t a s t r
a t a s t r a
t a s t r a t
a s t r a t a

geographies: Byfield

Youth Illustrated

                         Now that reality shows
              have developed some
                                 sort of deep metaphysical 
                    connection with live-action 
                            games where players 
                  dress up in costume & 
                                        get involved in areas 
                           derived from the Greek 
                       like weapon trajectory 
                                   calculations & image 
                                 processing, renting 
                                 Camelot on DVD &
               singing along with it
                               just doesn't register
                       any more. The competition 
                   to narrow down the
                                  pool is heating up—
                         not the contestant pool 
                           but the wannabe guest
                 judges all dressed 
                                  up & running behind 
                             the circus trucks.

Issue twenty-five

of Otoliths has just gone live.

a view from the moon
(from a music of the spheres)
Andrew Topel

This, the southern autumn, 2012, issue, marks the sixth birthday of Otoliths; & lined up in the impressive May Day parade are Charles Freeland & Rosaire Appel, Joshua Comyn, Sam Langer, Scott Glassman, Emmalea Russo, Ed Baker, Enola Mirao, Charles Borkhuis, Aaron Crippen, Louie Crew, Kristine Snodgrass, Bobbi Lurie, Jim Meirose, John M. Bennett, Anne Gorrick, Philip Byron Oakes, S S Prasad, Eszter Takacs, Christopher Brownsword, Tony Brinkley, R/B Mertz, Lakey Comess, Adam Fieled, Keith Higginbotham, Sandy McIntosh, Les Wicks, Raymond Farr, Joe Bussiere, Kirk Marshall, Walter Ruhlmann, Connor Stratman, Gary Barwin, Sarah Crewe, Joel Chace, Michael Ruby, Paul Pfleuger, Jr., Eryk Wenziak, Sam Truitt, Andrew Nightingale, Jeff Harrison, SJ Fowler, Catherine Vidler, Andrew Topel, Howie Good, Jill Chan, David-Baptiste Chirot, Leigh Herrick, Yoko Danno, Scott Bentley, Reed Altemus, Mathew Abbott, Tony Beyer, Sheila E. Murphy, Thomas Fink, Thomas Fink & Maya Diablo Mason, John Martone, Anne Elvey, Daniel Y. Harris, J. D. Nelson, Andrew Topel & Márton Koppány, Bogdan Puslenghea, Bob Heman, Elizabeth Welsh, Samit Roy, Jordan Lofton, Scott Metz, Paul Dickey & Ira Joel Haber, Spencer Selby, Stuart Barnes, Ali Znaidi, Kathup Tsering, Tim Gaze, Michael Brandonisio, John Pursch, Marcia Arrieta, & Alexander Jorgensen.

Color me naïf

but I believed we were a civilized people, at one with nature.

& then I come across this.

Now lets show support for our future Radio Free Texas members (our kids). If your kids like to hunt or fish post pics of them killing there first deer or there fishing trip. Dont forget to keep adding pics to "Got hunting or fishing pics " forum everybody wants to see and read about your trips.

"My 9 year old daughter H.... took her first deer last Saturday."

geographies: Kabra

Out from Otoliths — Sheila E. Murphy's American Ghazals

Now out from Otoliths.

American Ghazals
Sheila E. Murphy
68 pages
Otoliths, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9872010-2-7
$14.45 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/american-ghazals/18929550

The ghazal is a time-honored literary form dating from 6th century Arabic verse. Successive versions of the form attest to its appeal across numerous cultures and periods of time. Focal themes associated with the form have encompassed divine and earthly love to those of loss, longing, and isolation. Ghazals are voiced and sung in many languages, including Persian, Turkish, and Urdu.

Despite highly specific rules governing the form in its early centuries, more contemporary versions have relaxed such practices. In contemporary English, the self-containment of each couplet offers an appealing potential for discovering subtle relationships among the (minimum of five) different couplets within a single piece. Subliminal echoes of perception and emergent contextual linkages provide a renewal of sensibility for readers of the ghazal.

The pieces in this collection represent a selection of works written as ‘American Ghazals,’ based upon the distinctly American idiom in which the pieces have been developed. The more I read the form in translation and in English, the more apparent the fit of pivotal shifts in language, thought, and content. The American ghazal offers rich practice, replete with political, social, psychological, and meditative states that redefine perceptions in a new century.

Sheila E. Murphy

geographies: Wowan

geographies: The Caves

The / philistines are / back in charge

Campbell Newman, the newly-elected Queensland Premier, has, as the first act of his new government, scrapped the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, arguing the $244,000 saving was part of the Liberal National Party's promised cost-cutting drive.

more

geographies: Te Aroha

the citadel

geographies: St. Lawrence

another headline hay(na)ku

Sonnet
jailed for
failed contract killing.

Eight facts about Tatang Island

1.
On Tatang
Mountain
the birds
build hives.

2.
Pomegranates
grow in
profusion.

3.
Day is
one hour
long, night
fifteen minutes.
Nobody notices.
It has always
been that
way.

4.
There are
five
colours
in the local
spectra.

5.
Organized
religion.
Individual
opium.


6.
He left his child-
bride behind.

7.
Everyone
is
related.

8.
Music &

9.
melancholy.

Out from Otoliths—Resinations by Javant Biarujia

Now out from Otoliths

Resinations
Javant Biarujia
72 pages
Cover design by Sheila E. Murphy
Otoliths, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9872010-1-0
$13.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/shop/javant-biarujia/resinations/paperback/product-18929536.html

Javant Biarujia’s latest collection, “Resinations”, takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through, mostly, Western (pop) art, culture and politics, from Kant to Dorothy Lamour, the Inquisition to “Leave It to Beaver”, Tallahassee to Drancy, and much more. Resinations, itself a neologism, is echoic of resonations — every pun is intended in this collection — as well as resignation, at once an Eastern concept and a Western reality for many an employee. In sixty-four numerologically significant “pantoums” (Biarujia’s idea of such at any rate), in which “all pastiche and no parono- / masia makes the past a dull Lautréamont” (“Labdanum”), he mirrors the world back at us, always startling, distinctive, original. His poetry is at times complex and multilayered, but it is always rich, witty and meaningful, what Charles Bernstein has called “quixotically alluring,” and Gig Ryan, “fun and mock bawdiness.” Or, as Biarujia himself says: “through levity to levitation.”

“A subversive master craftsman, [Biarujia] propels the language through a cultural and political labyrinth”— Jaya Savige

“This is a poetry that leads the reader not only in and down but also, through re-sounding, across, crossing boundaries, making unthought of connections, exploring the fertile errata of translation. Biarujia sends out sounds that skip from language to language in a series of transformations/ interactions” — Geraldine McKenzie

“[‘Calques’] is a compelling, stimulating, intricately wrought, sometimes hauntingly beautiful and often very funny book, written in styles at once globalised and hermetic, archaic and futuristic” — Chris Edwards

“Decadence and postmodernism collide and combine in texts which are inimitably Biarujia” — Kris Hemensley

geographies: St. Paul

The Curse

                               When run through any
                      English-Icelandic 
                                     translation app, the 
                                  atomic hypothesis & 
                           its concept of cloud comes 
                                             out resembling a gothic 
                                horror screen-play. No 
                        consideration for classical 
                                         theory. No sensitivity 
                                      toward sociological 
                            phenomena. Persons 
                                   under the age of 18 are
                               included only if they
                                     play in a marching band 
                            or Drum & Bugle Corps.

geographies: Westwood

geographies: Vancouver

geographies: Gavial

geographies: Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi

Victims of the Spanish
trade monopoly in-
clude radical writers,
idealists, advocates of
1990s style populism,
& anyone with a fond-
ness for those musty
old artefacts of Russian
culture found in most
of the Black Sea cities.

geographies: Lammermoor Beach II

geographies: Lammermoor Beach

Up until

a few days ago, a Google search for

charischematic
would have returned no hits.

geographies: Bajool

Private equity muscles in

A man sleeps amidst the genome of the killer disease that is driving the remaining wild populations of investors betting on a Greek bailout by Monday.

Hexagram #65

斑馬
The Zebra

America's got a Darwin problem -- and it matters.

"According to a 2009 Gallup poll taken on the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, fewer than 40% of Americans are willing to say that they "believe in evolution." When another study asked if humans had developed from earlier species of animals, the American public split right down the middle. 40% said they had, while 39% rejected any suggestion that our species had emerged from the process of evolution. Even more worrisome is the fact that rejection of evolution correlates closely with political views, with a majority of the members of one of our major political parties casting themselves as Darwin rejectionists. In this election year, the strength of anti-evolution sentiment has been on full display in the presidential race, as one candidate after another declared their distrust of the scientific consensus around evolution. One member of the group, however, broke ranks with the others and boldly declared, "I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming." How'd that turn out for him? Jon Huntsman's early exit from the race confirmed something else he said at the time. "Call me crazy" for trusting science, he tweeted. And sadly, it looks like he was right.

. . .

"In American today, anti-evolutionism matters because it has become the vanguard of a genuine anti-science movement. To be sure, opposition to evolution isn't new. State laws against the teaching of evolution actually go back nearly a century, and the famous Scopes trial took place 87 years ago. However, if you thought such things were behind us, guess again. Laws designed to encourage the teaching of non-scientific "alternative" theories to evolution were introduced in 11 state legislatures last year. This year, Darwin's 203rd birthday, on February 12th, will see an anti-evolution bill, already passed by the Indiana State House of Representatives, awaiting action in the State Senate. Its fate there is uncertain, but there are plenty of reasons to be concerned."

Kenneth R. Miller The Huffington Post 2/10/2012

geographies: Midgee

geographies: Karehana Bay

Now out from Otoliths — Mark Cunningham's Helicotremors

Mark Cunningham
Helicotremors
88 pages
Cover image by HoMeBoY
Otoliths, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9872010-0-3
$13.45 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/helicotremors/18793906

The piece/pieces here (a single long poem, or 220 separate poems? both at once? each alternately?) sit (move) somewhere (sometime) between a series of otoacoustic emissions (hair cells in the cochlea of the inner ear, moving in response to waves generated in the fluid of the ear by two frequencies simultaneously, often create a third tone) and a series of deferred actions (“our psychic mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory traces being subjected from time to time to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances—to a retranscription,” Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss, December 6, 1896).

It/they wait for your inner/outer ear/voice to hear/remember/complete the next extension of their incompleteness.

geographies: Rarotonga

post-Arthurian hay(na)ku

She'll
be right
on the knight.

The new issue of Otoliths is live

Cadlift
Spencer Selby

Issue twenty-four, the southern summer issue of Otoliths, is now live.

It's as eclectic & full of energy as ever, has as a special feature Michael Gottlieb's new essay, Letters to a Middle-Aged Poet, & contains new work from Grzegorz Wróblewski, Noha Al-Badry, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Tom Beckett, j/j hastain, Arhm Choi, John Martone, Philip Byron Oakes, Bobbi Lurie, John M. Bennett, Raymond Farr, Donna Kuhn, Calvin Pennix, Cecelia Chapman, bruno neiva, Travis Cebula, Theodoros Chiotis, Adam Trawick, Sean Ulman, Ana Viviane Minorelli, Lakey Comess, Spencer Selby, James McLaughlin, Katie Berger, Caleb Puckett, Stephen Nelson, Andrew Topel, Jeff Harrison, Claramarie Burns, Zachary Scott Hamilton, Marthe Reed, Kit Kennedy, Jill Jones, Márton Koppány, Andrew Taylor, Stu Hatton, SJ Fowler, David Harrison Horton, Daniel f Bradley, Susan Gangel & Terry Turrentine, Howie Good, John Pursch, Joseph Cooper, D.J. Huppatz, Cherie Hunter Day, Stuart Barnes, Bill Drennan, Charles Freeland, Adam Fagin, Marty Hiatt, Eva Heisler, Helen White, dan raphael, Bob Heman, Tim Wright, Michael Brandonisio, J. D. Nelson, & Mark Cunningham.