Which to believe?

or
Threescore & ten I can
remember well: with-
in the volume of which
time I have seen hours
dreadful & things strange....

Macbeth, Act II, Scene IV

The snot-eel — how could I resist?

A deep sea fish that uses gill-clogging slime to repel attackers has been caught on camera for the first time by Kiwi researchers.

Video footage from a study by Te Papa and Massey University researchers of New Zealand's deep sea animal diversity shows the hagfish — also know as the snot-eel — repelling sharks and other fish when bitten.

The attacking fish appear to gag on the mucus-like substance before releasing the hagfish and swimming away.



N. Z. Herald

Once upon a time

I could multitask.

Could even manage to write the odd poem or two.

Now . . .

diptych

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

Out from Otoliths — Eucalyptus by Charles Freeland

Now out from Otoliths


Eucalyptus
Charles Freeland
108 pages
Cover image by Spencer Selby
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9808785-9-2
$14.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/eucalyptus/17792959

In which we are invited to witness the protean prose of Charles Freeland as it enters and bends around our improbably porous bodies like smoke from a library fire. Until one can no longer tell where one’s limbs or eyelashes begin and the author’s sentences end. If either can, in fact, be said to begin or end at all. Pick any one of Freeland’s expertly carved sonic doorknobs and turn to open. The room waiting there contains the very universe, if not the socks, you’re standing in right now. Beyond which: “The doors to the research labs fly open and when you peer inside there are still more doors and probably more doors inside those…” —Travis Macdonald

Eucalyptus is an unforgettable narrative about desolation. There are stories that we can do without, and this is NOT one of them. —Kristine Ong Muslim

Eucalyptus reads like a collaboration between Henry Fielding and Mina Loy. And here's Charles Freeland planning the caper, raising the stakes, and getting it down. —John Hennessy

geographies: Bay of Plenty, N.Z.

New Zealand Defence Force photo

Out from Otoliths — Densities, Apparitions by William Allegrezza

Now out from Otoliths.


Densities, Apparitions
William Allegrezza
80 pages
Cover image by Deborah Meadows
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9808785-8-5
$13.45 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/densities-apparitions/17278481

This book explores influence by crossing out or responding to poets who have influenced me. The Whitman and Andrade pieces are cross-outs, and anyone familiar with the first version of Calamus will notice that I did not respond to the entire collection. I left out pieces that I did not think would cut well for my project or pieces that have too much personal meaning for me. The response pieces to Leopardi and Neruda are probably even more telling, for in these pieces, it is sometimes difficult to see how the pieces directly relate to the original. Still, the influence is there reworked through my experience. —William Allegrezza

William Allegrezza edits the e-zine Moria and teaches at Indiana University Northwest. He has previously published five books, In the Weaver's Valley, Ladders in July, Fragile Replacements, Collective Instant, and Covering Over; two anthologies, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century and La Alteración del Silencio: Poesía Norteamericana Reciente; seven chapbooks, including Sonoluminescence (co-written with Simone Muench) and Filament Sense (Ypolita Press); and many poetry reviews, articles, and poems. He founded and curated series A, a reading series in Chicago, from 2006-2010. In addition, he occasionally posts his thoughts at http://allegrezza.blogspot.com.

Today the
postman brought
me a letter
for Abraham
Lincoln. He's here
only during the
winter months
so I sent it on,
c/o his Gettys-
burg address.

geographies: Tenerife

Today the
postman brought
me a blow-
up sex doll
which, it is
claimed, can be
      programmed
to become moist
whenever a
music of the
user’s choosing
is played. I tried
it out with the
pipes & drums
of the Southern
Highlanders. It
      worked. Un-
fortunately
the music didn’t
work for me.

Out from Otoliths — John Martone's Storage Case

Now out from Otoliths.

Storage Case
John Martone
72 pages, full color
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9808785-7-8
$24.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/storage-case/17278460

john martone’s collages splice images and text drawn from Buddhism, radio schematics, cell biology, and natural history to open the Storage Case of the Unconscious. All of martone's visual poems stand alone as individual works, but he assembles them into book-length sequences, where their effect is enhanced. This volume offers a triptych of these visual books, in full, for the first time.

john martone’s many collections of poetry include st. john’s wort, shooting star and ksana. He currently produces his handmade books and ebooks under the samuddo / ocean imprint.

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

The 2011 Ig Nobel winners,

awarded Thursday at Harvard University by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine:

PHYSIOLOGY: Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl and Ludwig Huber for their study "No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise."

CHEMISTRY: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami for their wasabi fire alarm.

MEDICINE: Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder, Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, Paul Maruff along with Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop for studying the effects of holding in urine.

PSYCHOLOGY: Karl Halvor Teigen for trying to understand why people sigh.

LITERATURE: John Perry for his theory of procrastination: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.

BIOLOGY: Daryll Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that certain kinds of beetles try to mate with certain kinds of Australian beer bottles.

PHYSICS: Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru and Herman Kingma for trying to determine why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.

MATHEMATICS: Assorted doomsday predictors throughout history for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

PEACE: Arturas Zuokas for solving the problem of illegally parked cars by crushing them with an armored vehicle.

PUBLIC SAFETY: John Senders for his experiments in which a driver on a major highway repeatedly has a visor flapped down over his face.

My paranoia

reaches the unconscious.

A fragment of a dream, from last night. & though I probably — must — dream, I rarely, if ever, remember them, so this one quite powerful.

Our garage, in sunlight, empty of cars. But curled towards one end, a black snake.

geographies: DeKalb

The energy other-
wise emanating
       from basement
birthed recordings

is often blocked
by big red candles
       decorated with
Chinese ideograms.

100 Thousand Poets for Change

This place may be built on a floodplain, but it's a desert when it comes to ars poetica. It would have been futile to attempt to organize anything significant to mark 100 Thousand Poets for Change day.

However, my heart is fully behind Michael Rothenberg's wonderful concept, & I would feel awfully guilty if the worldwide muster only reached 999,999. So at midday, I went outside &, in the shade of a mango tree, read a couple of poems to a hovering hawk & a transient troupe of rainbow lorrikeets, all of us unperturbed at the potential gatecrashing of the event by a six-tonne NASA satellite as it falls to Earth.

Today the
postman brought
me a compendium
of investigative
studies by Shop-
Wiki & others
that report an
average of 13
people per year
are killed by over-
tipping vending
machines but less
than one every
two years is
killed by under-
tipping a waiter.

Some names

should never be.

Instance:

Acting director of AUT University's Institute of Public Policy, Associate Professor Love Chile, said he was not surprised New Zealanders rated the rugby and the election so close.

OMG. Diana Ross songs as soundtrack wherever he goes.

(This post is dedicated to all those parents, family name Head, who have chosen to call their son Richard.)

These days,

calls to his erogenous zone go straight to voicemail.

geographies: Port Alma