To Imagine Evil

     "Poetry's function is not to oppose evil, but to imagine it. What if Shakespeare had opposed Iago, or Dostoevsky opposed Raskolnikov - the vital thing is that they created Iago and Raskolnikov, so that we begin to see betrayal and murder and theft in a new light."
     -Robert Duncan to Denise Levertov

McCaffery Verse

     "...an experience in language rather than a representation by it."
     - Steve McCaffery on an (un)certain kind of post-free verse poetry. Indeterminate as opposed to strictly referential. If that isn't clear enough, then refer to this by Marjorie Perloff:
     "I have no name for this new form of sounding and perhaps its namelessness goes with the territory: the new exploratory poetry (which is, after all, frequently prose) does not want to be labeled or categorized. What can be said, however, is that the 'free verse' aesthetic, which dominated the 20th century, is no longer operative."

Elevator Music XVIII

Ocean View Semi-tarry


stone used with zest, devoid of
vital pipe clay and pulverized

I want to write about you but
you are chairly and organ
     molten metal flows
     broken zinnia flowers
     strewn across the lawn

a cross says less than the lack of one
     it is nice to see a church
     but nicer not to

the grave is up, heartfelt
uncivilized
considered as a group
the cemetery lacks concupiscence
though is a kind of concubinage
     we come together
bring into one main body
     less dilute
and rise, we rise
take wing and coiffure
a frazzle of starlings
one's thoughts or attention
out over the Straight
     and into books

Douglas Miller New Works

I Thought of You When I Wrote This

    Are you kidding me? Check out this and other new works by Douglas Miller.

PageBoy Now at Left Bank Books

     That's right, you heard it here wrist! First but not least, PageBoy Magazine is now single-handedly keeping another independent bookstore/magazine seller afloat. How do we do it?.. Well, by your generous support of course. So next time you're reaching for Nit House, Sween Mickies, or DUNCE, just think to yourself: "PageBoy Magazine makes me happy, it really does."

Who Said That?

     "You don't listen to a symphony and ask, 'what did they mean by that?' You ask, 'did I have a meaningful experience, was I moved?' A poem is the same."

     I found this quote on one of my notebooks, I Magritte to say that it had no source written beneath it. It must be regret, though. It's consistent with the quote by him listed in this blog under the heading Rene Magritte Pipe Song. I can't be sure, though. When I google searched "you don't listen to a symphony and ask, 'what did they mean by that?'" I came up with How Do I Get My Wife to Listen to My Needs? (poor bloke) Perhaps he's going about it the wrong way. Perhaps instead of asking her to listen to his needs he should ask, "Honey, are you moved?" or maybe "Honey, do you need to move out?" Either way the quote above is neither his nor his wife's, pretty sure of that.

Robert Peter's Critoris

R.P. in his Marlon Brando phase.

     "For some readers criticism is a sexual act - the critic either rubs up against poets (virgin and seasoned ones) or ravishes them. Other readers regard such writing as among the least sexual of all cultivated postures - the arbiter of literary taste sponsors careers and moves into power with the abandon of a disinterested savage seated on a pile of freshly cut scalps."  

  -Robert Peters (from the preface to The Great American Poetry Bake-off)

Elevator Music XVII

such as a plain, highway or voyage
of these we're taught to idealize

I'll take the plain, the grass and sky
above it, a breeze, sun and rustling
whittling, curdling dry thymus
the sound of sound of, of saying
of someone saying Whitman, widow
willows saying listen, this is
your place amidst the broom
leave your singing here with me
marry me, never leave
there is no place better
than this one beneath these branches
stay

Anuthur Buckett

     "I see her still, propped up in a kind of stupor against one of the walls in which this wretched edifice abounds, her long grey hair framing in its cowl of scrofulous mats a face where pallor, languor, hunger, acne, recent dirt, immemorial chagrin and surplus hair seemed to dispute the mastery."
                 -Watt

The Puked Puke

     "it is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it."
                    - Beckett (Watt)

Pics from the Reading

     The PageBoy reading took place on Oct. 15 in an apartment on Capitol Hill. Everyone was there, even Mine. Emily Beyer, Paul Nelson, Thomas Walton all read. Garrett Hobba played a few tunes. 
     Here are some photos from the event.  

Garrett Hobba de Las Colinas Suaves. 

Paul Nelson slaughtered us all.

Sara Palin was there, though everyone referred to her as 'parasailin,' because she seemed to be doing so for quite some time.

Tuuli Kahlo Walton performs a scene from "One Hand No Hand."

Un hombre con un bigote

Unfortunately, we had to turn people away.

what is good english?

          PageBoy was out at a silly little dive bar one day when the regulars asked the barmaid if she knew the name of the movie where Danny Glover and Mel Gibson play cops and etc. and the barmaid said immediately, almost without thinking "Lethal Weapon" and all the regulars erupted in cheers and ohs and that's its and everybody was laughing and we were too because it was very happy there all the sudden and then one of the regulars said thank-you i've been trying to think of that all day and the barmaid said, "yeah and i ain't even never seen it," which was the most beautiful music that happened that day even though it was a day that everyone seemed to find beautiful, being all sunny and cool autumnal like leaves and the market was and kites even.
     Then I remembered Corso's line "that I speak good English before I die" and smiled smiled smiled, knowing he was wrong, and right, and that the bloody mary's were so horrid they were undrinkable, though of course we drank them anyway.

The Glass Slipper

   "It is a sort of equation with insufficient conditions for determining the unknown."
          -John Ashbury on Jasper Johns' painting "According to What."
     This quote itself is a sort of equation, a description of poetry, of art and its ineptness for determining the unknown. Yet it works in a way. Its ineptness is its wisdom. Aware of its insufficiencies, it goes out dancing just the same. Old ugly Cinderella and her little lost shoe.

That Bury Small Animals

     burying beetle - (n.) any of various beetles of the genus Nicrophorus that bury small animals on which they feed and lay their eggs.

John Burroughs After Onions

     "Thoreau's quality is very penetrating and contagious; reading him is like eating onions - one must look out or the flavor will reach his own page. But my current is as strong in my channel as Thoreau's in his."

     PageBoy wonders which metaphor is worse: the onion or the current. What does the eating of onions metaphor mean actually? How can you "look out" for something that you've just put in your mouth? Does "the page" here refer to some sort of foul bowel situation? And does it have anything to do with his "current" being so strong in his "channel?"

from his treasure

  

...he drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:

     a day of dappled seaborne clouds.

everyone suddenly burst out singing

     he is dead and gone, Lady.

they turned to him, who was listening, and smirked

     it is nice to listen to music, but nicer not to.

when the rains began then, that day
     though not really. it was long ago.

Veg

     "A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.”


     Gertrude Stein said this and as she was saying it I was thinking oh nothing will come from this and then but it did, something. something else. from the music around the thing it came. which is where what most people don't hear but why? it's too much for me to look at a fire pit. to see it there, like some eggplant sitting.

Some Words

     Hoecake - n. cornbread that is baked on the blade of a... hoe. (whoa.)
  
     Ho hum - interj. used to express
     Boredom

     Hoedown - n. A dance that is square and never
     Round.

     Hod - n. a trough carried over the shoulder for transporting
     Cod, coal or Al.

     Hog Peanut - n. the peanut of a
     Hog. But Not and never of a sow.

     Hokum - n. something impressive but which's (whose?) veracity is
     Broken (Who's veracity is broken? The Witch's)

     Hole - n.(?) a cavity in a solid, a kind of
     Bowl of lackingnousness.

JJPS Elevator Music XVI

Jasper Johns 0 Through 9


     "Revolutionary art and visionary physics attempt to speak about matters that do not yet have words. That is why their languages are so poorly understood by people outside their fields."
          - Leonard Shlain (Art and Physics)

Elevator Music

warm, dry grass, dry field
dry swatch swallowing rocks
dry sea tide and sea stack
in the sun (it must be in the sun)
whispering the order of sound
the singing fields constant
the lighted thisness thistening
as you lay down to die
an old falcon to be eaten
by new falcons
but first, to lie in the grass
to be the thing you've wanted
all your life for a second

ooOO That Smell! / Elevator Music XV

     "...poetry is offensive and readers must confront and pass through the offense, which is a moment of challenge, crisis, and decision generated out of the prevailing cultural view of language, its appropriate uses, and its characteristics."
          - Hazard Adams in The Offense of Poetry

     Of course, we're not talking about subject here, offensive subject matter is easy enough. We're talking about an assault on language, and an, uh, salt on language. And Dan, uh... it''s all tongue language. Of course it is.

Elevator Music

all the all the ceonothus
flowers covered in bees, they
buzz, a machete curves
but she did it with a
wire, not a
blade, she wanted to
hang, and
hangs
still in me who found her
hanging
she was right to do so
to pray in such a way
to offer such an image to the world
what image have you offered?
that has affected anyone so profoundly?
all you seem to do is
sit in gardens scribbling the names of bees
as if you were the stone beside you
as if you had never destroyed anyone

For God's Sake

     Writing in the early twentieth century, G.K. Chesterton lamented the state of art around him thus: "In the beginning there was art for God's sake, then in the Renaissance there was art for man's sake. Beginning with Impressionism there was art for art's sake. Now, unfortunately, we have no art for God's sake!"
     PageBoy Magazine calls this bit of art criticism written 100 years ago "the most clever statement on the state of art today," and has deemed him one of the "top five funniest men alive!" (For the remaining four on that list please buy a copy of PageBoy Magazine Issue II 10 either from the email above or your friendly neighborhood soon-to-be-going-out-of-business magazine shop... Cheerio!)

Douche Chomp

     "As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good. I use it because I have to but I don't put any trust in it. We never understand each other."
          - Marcel Duchamp

     PageBoy Magazine Issue II 10 is out. To get copies email us or go to various places of magazininess in Portland, Olympia and Seattle. Don't worry, like the universe, we too are expanding, and will soon be in other solar systems. PageBoy Magazine: Use it because you have to!

Ding. Dong.

     "You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of uneven color. If you have to invent some backgrounds you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, and valleys in great variety; and expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose stroke you may find every named word which you can imagine."
                       - da Vinci

Euclid / Elevator Music XIV

                                           GUILTY

    Euclidean - referring to parallel lines and right angles. geometric in form or effect.

  
you can't decay of a summer evening
it's no use, these archaisms
even if you want to, it's sung
though with a strange bird it's possible
to have a good rot in the grass
somewhere in the city park
where drunken men pee under
rhododendron tendrils, loggy
or in thick azalea villages
it doesn't matter where so long as they're peeing
that's how you know it's a city park

     we decomposed last night
     the weight of broken families
     pinning us to the grass
     the park like a haiku
     whose misery we couldn't escape

(Referential) Elevator Music XIII

last night
     she had a bee sting
and played for hours on it
until bath time
when the tears came
it was red and swollen and
looked incongruous
     on a child's foot
          otherwise so
undersized
     the ovenmit was a good joke
but helped only
     for a moment
her tears carried us in
          (again)
to that steady panacea
     sleep.

To Print

     Issue II 10 is going to print. No, it's gone to print. PageBoy Magazine issue II 10 includes work by the following artists:

     Erik Anderson's The Poetics of Trespass is just out from Otis Books/Seismicity Editions. He lives in Colorado.

     Emily Beyer continues to live in Seattle. Her poems have been published in The Seattle Review, Prairie Schooner, The Diagram, and are forthcoming in TriQuarterly.

     Amalio Madueño lives in the Upper Rio Grande region of New Mexico, near Taos. Long associated with the Taos Poetry Circus, he publishes and performs his work throughout the West in various formats. His second feature length book of poems will be forthcoming in Fall 2010 by MouthFeel Press (El Paso). He considers himself a Border poet & cruises at an altitude of 7500 feet.

     Chicago native/Seattle resident Paul Nelson founded SPLAB, wrote a book of essays on poetics, Organic Poetry, a serial poem re-enacting the history of Auburn, Washington, A Time Before Slaughter and hopes to be fully hydrated someday.

     Natalie Phillips is an artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. She grew up in the East Bay in California and studied at the University of Santa Cruz, where she received a BA in art with a concentration in painting and drawing. She's an only child, and very special.

     Collin Tracy has work forthcoming in Alligator Juniper and in a microfiction anthology from Cinnamon Press. She lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a lazy eye.

     PageBoy Magazine Issue II 10 will be out sometime in the next two weeks. To order copies write to pageboymagazine@hotmail.com, or look for it at local bookstores / magazine shops / libraries in Seattle and Portland. PageBoy Magazine: yay!

Proof

     PageBoy Issue II10 is in its proof stages. There will be proof soon (of errors and oars and the airy outdoors)! In the meantime, here is a word for you:
     Langrage - n. A type of shot consisting of scrap iron loaded into a case and formerly used in naval warfare to damage sails and rigging.
     You have to admit, there is an attraction to misread that. To invent a langrage language that might shoot a load of scrap into the sails and rigging of, say, language itself, or maybe into a more general cultural fabric. Not to destroy, but certainly to alter dramatically. DADA, Gertrude Stein, Joyce come to mind. It's an old aspiration, whose perfection lies in its very impossibility of achievement. That is the odd thing about poets. It's not that they don't achieve, but that they can't, yet continue on nonetheless.
     This is why, in the early 20th century, when Picabia is asked, "Why would you choose painting, when everyone accepts the fact that photography has brought about the death of painting?" he responds: The death of painting is precisely why I've chosen to paint.

All Sores

     "The only inspiration worth having is an inspiration that clarifies the form of what's being written, and that's more likely to come from something that already has a literary form."
          -Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination)

     One day, while traveling in Taiwan, I visited the home of an old Taiwanese poet. He spoke very little English, and I practically no Chinese. We sipped tea and read each other poems from our notebooks. Neither of us understood the other, though we both nodded enthusiastically on hearing the music of a foreign language used poetically. After each poem, we would discuss in English the nature of that poem's meaning. There was a big window in the living room overlooking what seemed like endless rice fields.
     After I read him several poems, Li Pa asked me quite matter-of-factly, "what do you write about?"
     "Many things," I replied, in the simplest English I could manage. "These poems are all written about words I found in the dictionary."
     He thought about this for a few seconds, then seemed to understand: "You cannot write good poems about words in the dictionary. Good poems are about life." He gestured toward the rice fields outside. "Good poems are out there."
     This conversation has haunted me ever since. Indeed, it haunted me before I even had it. I decided Li Pa was right, and I decided he was wrong. That there is no source for good poetry, it's all source.

PageBoy II 10 Out Soon! / Elevator Music XII

     PageBoy issue II 10 will be out shortly! with poems by Amalio Madueno, Paul Nelson, Emily Beyer, and Collin Tracy, artwork by Natalie Phillips, and an essay on the nature of (non)fiction by Erik Anderson. Until then, here's more elevator music:

Spring Walk

part of a living body may decay
and may aster or wounded pride
rectangular in an irrigable field
where moss and grass and vetch and stone
or the old beheaded cherub statuary
lay in semi-ruinous perfection
it's always something else that's perfect
and the appetites of self-denial
walking there, touching this, touching that
like a child who touches, who sees
first with its skin, birthed into
this inferno of light and gravity
screaming its head off all the while

David Antin Take Off That Hat!

     "...now there were things about this painting i didn't understand     in some sense it looked very low pressure     the way a lot of painting looks in america     that is it looked as if it was not urgent about anything     painting is embarrassed to be about anything     its been embarrassed for a long time     theres a grave sense of embarrassment before the possibility of being about in painting     which they call being literary     and literary is a bad term for a painter because everyone knows that if you paint a painting of anything it shouldnt be about anything but painting..."
          -from David Antin's "remembering   recording   representing" (1973)

     This, said PageBoy Magazine, is one of the funniest and most pointed comments on not only painting, a certain kind of painting anyway, but much of what we all do these days, whether it's writing or painting or badmintoning. Navigating the world of contemporary art is difficult, to say the least, in any era, which volleys a shuttlecock over a high net by means of a light racket touche!

Annual Bucket / Elevator Music XI

                       Samuel Beckett

     "All needed to be known for say is known. There is nothing but what is said. Beyond what is said there is nothing." - he said (I'm quoting him from nothing, though it's true, I am saying it in a way).

Elevator Music XI

     Round spots forming a pattern poof! There it is, and we spent the rest of that hour fleeing from it, or trying to make sense of them (in our way).
     The Venetian traveler seemed old simply because he was Venetian. I apologized, and told him it was an association I'd had since being young - that Venetian somehow meant antiquitous. My father referred to his steins as 'Venetian,' at least that's how I remember it, and though my father wasn't old then he seemed so to me and the steins certainly were the stuff of old age to a child interested only in running.
     I ran on and on and the traveler, whose name was Charles, listened politely, pulling on his cigarette and straining to comprehend what I said. We paid our bill and left. He the one way and then we and then I.

cou rouge

red neck

Our tour in boat

I was asleep when he died.

David Antin / Elevator Music X

     "the one thing I think a poet ought to do is respect what he doesn't understand, respect its unintelligibility."
          - David Antin

Elevator Music X

at the reading last night you
                    rubbed my leg
and so my leg went
                    home with you
what was I to do
hopping around in the bookstore
                    so suddenly armful

outside, the night air
froze the nerves of my stump
and no amount of stars
could be a salve for them

so I went looking
for a language expansive enough
                     to lead me to
                     the both of you
and found.

How It Is

ah my young friend this sack if you had seen it I could hardly drag it and now look my vertex touches the bottom
I could hardly drag my vertex and now look my young friend this sack it touches the bottom if you had seen it ah
tom I could hardly sack this friend now look my ahbot had drag and vertex it touches if you seen my young it

and glow and blaze and fade and disappear

     Samuel Beckett on Finnegans Wake:
     "Here form IS content, content IS form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to read - or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. Joyce's writing is not about something; it is that something itself... Here is a savage economy of hieroglyphs. Here words are not the polite contortions of 20th century printer's ink. They are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear."
     It strikes me that this was written in 1929. To think that the overwhelming majority of work that is being published now (in both microzines and macrozines), 80 years after a comment like this and a book like FW, is still not much more than "printer's ink," is baffling. Our need for comfort, for familiarity, to vacation where others have vacationed, to go to the same restaurants, cafes, to write the same books and movies, story and syntax is strong indeed. Every one of these works is disposable. Every era is, of course, inundated with mediocrity, so strong is our need to communicate and be understood. The degree to which we repeat ourselves is nauseating.
     Grahm Greene has said that "when we are not sure, we are alive." To be unsure is the way, I'm sure of it.
    

Melody as Death

     In an essay entitled "Melody as Death," the philosopher Raymond Geuss writes that, at the age of eleven, he sat on the floor at his friend's house listening to Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries." He goes on to say this of his experience:
     "I distinctly recall two impressions I had in quick succession that are among the most vivid I have ever received. The first was that of simply being overwhelmed by the richness and complexity of the sound, and the electricity of those crisply executed initial upward reaching flourishes (in B minor, as I now have learned to call it) in the first four bars. More indescribable flourishes on the horns and bassoons followed, and then the alternation of the ascending motif with descending slurred quintuplets in the violins.
     "The second impression I recall is my disappointment, in fact complete and utter dejection, when the horns and bass trumpet entered forte at bar 13, and an easily discernible motif emerged very clearly as an individual theme from the general whirl of sound. I remember thinking, 'Oh no! There is a tune in this after all.'"
     Understanding is perhaps more fatal than anything else.

Back in the USSA / Elevator Music IX

     PageBoy has returned from Mexico and is gearing up for the next issue, which is due out this summer. Send work now! or forever Reverdy, Heather.*
     Having studied the literature and language (y empenadas rajas con queso) of Mexico, we feel that we editors here at PageBoy Magazine have sufficiently lost our language (y nos linea), and are now thoroughly confused by various spellings and capitalizations, word genders and syntactic differences between Spanish and english so that you can rest assured there will be many typos in the next issue hurray! Don't fret, however, it's only language, which is, as you know, both a comma splice and everything else(,).


W de GDL

your smiling was waiting, it flew off
to roost near perch, the ranch
on the road west of Guadalajara
was blue with agave and old tractors
rolling into us as we rode and
turned into dust, slow as fermentation
slow as swallows, as owls slow
leaving the filthy catholic afternoons
for the pagan sea hungry to touch our
every inch without shame





* a word about Heather: Heather is you.

In the Cathedral, GDL

     Inside the church the people sit or kneel in silence, or make the sign of the cross in the air before them, in the direction of the altar, which supposedly is built over a tomb containing the remains of former clergymen, including "the mummified heart of renowned Bishop Cabanas."
     I am silent as well, and filled with sadness. The ceiling is impossibly high, the art work overwhelming, everything is garish and holier than thou. I am disgusted, in awe, tearful, respectful, dwarfed. I watch as the devout file through at their leisure, asking of their god...what? I don't want to know.
     In the chapel next to the main church is the "Virgin of Innocence." I go to her, but find only her bones in a glass case. She was 12 years old. She is now nearly 2000. 2000 years in this glass case. I wonder if, like snow white, I might kiss her and wake her and wander the streets of Guadalajara with her on my arm. Through the plazas, the arches, the endless barrios, and out eventually into the hills. But then I think, what do the hills offer us that is more or less than the church she now rests in? What does life offer that is more than death? What could I do besides hold her in my arms as the wind slowly wore away at her, and left me by morning alone.
     I wonder instead if she should not kiss me, and bring me into the glass case with her, to watch as thousands of years of faces and prayers fail to move us.

Elevator Music VIII (para La Banda Oficial de Zapopan)

     PageBoy will be gathering material in Mexico for most of this month. While we continue doing so, please enjoy some music from the suave sounds of La Banda Oficial de Zapopan. Es muy rico!

Domingo En la Gloriata Chapalita

in the park La Banda Oficial
de Zapopan, all thirty some-odd
wind instruments under palms and
baroque gazebo, within the
lazing throngs of dressed up
señores y señoras, abuelos y abuelas,
across whom is pushed a refreshing
breeze by the storm north of town
(lie still dry hills,
                   bosque del pino triste)
en camisas blancas y pantalones negros,
around whom waltz women in
four inch heels with spinning girls
hanging on or laughing chased by
sus hermanos traviosos,
eating ice cream or drinking
jugo de caña or simply spilling both,
este Banda Oficial de Zapopan plays

(Frank Sinatra's Nuevo York Nuevo York!)

and I catch the old woman
sitting on the bench beside me
mouthing the words that are somewhere
in her youth, somewhere in her
dreams, somewhere once where
anything was possible
before she found herself here beside me
alone on the bench, seeing me
                              seeing her
                              she stops singing
and I am one more man who's
caused to end her lovely dreams

En la Terraza

Alejandro Carrillo Etienne

     Twenty things I've realized while discussing language, translation, and poetics with Mexican poet and translator Alejandro Carrillo Etienne on his terazza in Guadalajara, Jalisco evenings:

1) the more sources the better.
2) beware of those who subscribe to a single poetics.
3) the parrots in Guadalajara are very big and mostly green.
4) Ashbery's comment on Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation that they are a "hymn to possibility" somehow ceases neither to be beautiful, nor haunting.
5) double negatives are confusing in Spanish and in English, and generally not a good idea.
6) do not cross the street in Guadalajara with out looking both ways twice.
7) Mexican poetry is unfairly invisible to most estadounidenses.
8) languages create false borders.
9) Mexican beer is shit but it's better to drink than Mexican water.
10) write.
11) any style (form) is a style (form) of possibility.
12) content is not important.
13) form is not important.
14) citrus flowers in the evening can be overwhelming, it's okay.
15) form and content are everything.
16) chilis are a sacred fruit.
17) you know the music is there and that it will come to you, but you have to be ready for it, you have to do the work. (Philip Glass)
18) all schools in the americas should be bilingual, north and south, except in Portugal where they should be trilingual.
19) the more you read, the more you can draw from.
20) the moon is bigger and fuller in Mexico than it is in the U.S. - that's just true.

Rene Magritte Pipe Song

     "People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it. They are afraid. By asking, 'what does this mean?' they express a wish that everything is understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks other things."
                                           -Rene Magritte

     PageBoy Magazine promises not to ask. We will only ask other things. Such as:
What is that little black square next to the mirror?; and,

Ceci n'est pas une pipe
ceci n'est pas une pipe
ceci n'est pas
ceci n'est pas
ceci n'est pas une
                             pipe?

Rimbaud vs. Baudelaire / Elevator Music VII

 

Rimbaud vs. Baudelaire

"an oscillation between representational reference and compositional game"
          -Marjorie Perloff in The Poetics of Indeterminacy
     Striking this balance seems to me to be what, ahem, great poetry is all about. At least from the half of the world (read: the world) represented by a statement such as "In the reaction of Rimbaud to Baudelaire, lies the germ of half the subsequent history of French poetry [read: all poetry]." (Charles Tomlinson)
     That's why Pageboy Magazine only publishes great poetry... duh?

My Life (with haiku), She Said

they cannot kill large barnyard fowl
but you can, you can kill us
and if you can kill us
then you can kill a Jupiter or several

I'm then there was her
oh shit! what do we do now?
No, I don't love you

that pretty much is the all of it
so far (lot tea dough)

Skoog

     PageBoy sent emissaries to the Ed Skoog reading last Saturday night. The reading, evidently, was exceptional for two things: a wine glass that was kicked across the tile floor without breaking. and the development of a new word, 'skoog.'
     skoog n. 1. one who is self-deprecating or undervalues their work almost to the point of obsessiveness. 2. a very large man who makes up words and may be prone to soiling his underwear and discussing it in public. 3. v. enbourgeois. - adj. skoogy.
          Usage: The speech was good, but the speaker was such a skoog that it was difficult to take her seriously.

Mother of Us All / Elevator Music VI

 

 

     We are gathering speed, moving toward our next issue. Studying Charles Bernstein (all that I am is my work), Gilbert Sorrentino (those lovely girls dreamt leaning on our arms), Juliana Spahr (Fuck you aloha I love you), and Gertrude Stein - always Gertrude Stein, who increasingly seems to be the mother of us all, in the way Dostoevsky said we all come from Gogol's overcoat (bet it's stinky under there.)
     The next issue of PageBoy is due out this June. Send us your work if you have it, send us your have it if you work. Until then here's more elevator music:

something drapes the walls
and I must watch it
as if it were drip, or droop
the way it moves
to keep from thinking of it
aplomb in the midst of chaos
the broken sky, the fissured child
the pear trees about to shoot

I'm anxious for spring this year
not as I usually am
but this year to see
if it too will pull off its blossoms
and say no! I'm not happy
I need to leave this leaving

and whether I will object
arguing for its worth, for its beauty
the essence of which crawls between us

or if I will watch quietly
in disbelief
as it gathers its shoots
its daffodils and rain
and walks out
closing the door with a click
that is as cold and insufferable
as any winter ever was

An, uh... Other Reading

     So not all the readings one goes to will be as stimulating as the Madueno reading mentioned below. Case in point:
     Tuuli and I went to see what turned out to be a very Byron affair (as in Cape rather than Lord), complete with interpretive Butoh dancers, a Buddha gong, and conga drums. Tuuli (she's 4) loved it!
     Tuuli's favorite parts: the dancers and the San Pellegrino Limonata.
     My favorite parts: watching Tuuli with her 'smart face' on (wide eyes, open mouth) as she watched the dancers, and the harpist's harp song drowned out irreverently by an amateur gong gonger's exceedingly ambitious improvisations.
     Still, walking home through the park, Tuuli and I sang harp song, harp song / little bitty Buddha gong endlessly, and that, I guess, was worth it.