PageBoy Magazine

True Sentences

2012-02-15T11:26:00.000-08:00

I spy with my eyes morgue is bored.

"I think that we cannot, indeed that we may not, use the old images because they would sound insincere coming from our mouths. We must find true sentences, which are worthy of our own zone of consciousness and of our changed world."
- Ingeborg Bachmann

True Sentence 1: Even the hardest brick is soft in the mouth.

T.S. 2: The best smorgasbords never speak their name.

T.S. 3: While it may be true that a bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush, it is also true that a hand in the bush is worth more than two on the bird.

T.S. 4: Hate what is evil, cling to what is good, unless what is evil is really really good.

T.S. 5: Know thyself: when in doubt, don't question just about everything.

choo.choo.

2012-02-07T12:57:00.000-08:00

Do you like to color trains?

"Reality circulates making objects appear as if they belong where they are."
-Lyn Hejinian

"In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen."
-El Wittgenstein

In the poem everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. Each line appears as if it belongs with every other line of course it does how else. I like to beat people up, my dream a crumpled horn, my horn a Norfolk train, my my, how the flies do time.

In the Funny Culture

2012-01-31T21:18:00.000-08:00

Steeped in cold beer.

"I want to stay funny I want to keep moving ahead of the straight culture. I want to stay in the funny culture ahead of it."
- Stephen Colbert in an interview at HardeeharHarvard College.

If you don't stay one step ahead of your audience (in comedy or in poetry) then where are you but in your audience. And if you're in your audience then you aren't writing, your being written: they are writing you. Hardeeharhar, you can't step in the same river once.

Ms. Used!

2012-01-26T10:52:00.000-08:00

Beckett, Samuel

"Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused."
-Samuel Beckett

write/unwrite

2012-01-19T11:53:00.000-08:00

Bachmann unwriting her fingernails.

"If [as Wittgenstein says] the limits of my language are the limits of my world, the writer's task is to unwrite the phrasemaking of our ordinary, everyday discourse, the prefabricated sentences by means of which business-as-usual is conducted."
Marjorie Perloff paraphrasing Ingeborg Bachmann in Wittgenstein's Ladder.

Oh Doctor!

2012-01-07T12:53:00.000-08:00

Theodore Geissel in Dr. Seuss glasses.

   "To produce a 60 page book, I may easily write more than 1000 pages before I'm satisfied. The most important thing about me, I feel, is that I work like hell - write, rewrite, reject, re-reject, and polish incessantly."
   -Theodore (Dr.) Seuss Geissel.

   In a later PageBoy interview, Mr. Geissel went on to say that he preferred not to write in cafes or in the rain,
not on boats and not on trains
not in church or after dinner
or while reading Lyn Hejinian or
Gertrude Stein
he never liked Wittgenstein
or The Fat Boys
Pound Eliot or Joyce
even Berrigan's Sonnets
gave him the vomits
and after reading Plaith
he always needed a bath.
The only poet he admitted to liking
was Anvil Hammerstriking
but only all the pre-early muppets and couplets
certainly not the blank verse or German horseshits.

Wittgenstein's Wiener

2011-12-14T13:23:00.000-08:00

Lud(e)wig

   "My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)"
   -Ludwig Wittgenstein

   I feel like Wittgenstein made a mistake here in his choice of metaphor. If his 'ladder' were instead a 'wiener,' as in wienerschnitzel, the statement would be both more logical and more senseless. At least more nonsenseful, for as every good philosopher knows, it is much easier to throw away the wiener once you've climbed up on it.

PageBoy: It's a Family Newspaper

2011-12-14T13:08:00.000-08:00

Here's the interview that Chris Rock was so gracious to do for PageBoy while the editors here get ready for the next issue:

Where the Line Is

2011-12-01T20:33:00.000-08:00

where the lion is

"...you know what I like to do, I like to bother people. I like to find out where the line is and deliberately cross it, and drag the audience with you, and have them happy that you did it, and once you get them over there they say, 'yeah that was good.'"
-George Carlin.

Poetry/Prose: Domingo Domingo Domingo!

2011-11-25T20:32:00.000-08:00

poetry and prose wrestle in france

Poetry and Prose

I came to the conclusion
that poetry was a calling
an intensive calling
upon the name of anything
and that prose was not the using
the name of anything
as a thing in itself
but the creating
of sentences that were self-existing
and following
one after the other
made of anything
a continuous thing
which is paragraphing
and so a narrative that is a narrative
of anything

That is what a narrative is of course

one thing
following
any other thing

-Gertrude Stein

When a Cage Falls

2011-11-15T13:00:00.000-08:00

Is he lying?

     "I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it."
                       -John Cage.

     The most amazing thing about this statement is that Cage was in the forest when he said it and there was no one around to hear him. The original citation has baffled critics for decades. Cage, meanwhile, has admitted to being alone but is unsure whether or not he fell while he was speaking. Conjecture ran rampant as soon as the citation appeared, and the controversy escalated quickly.
     At Naropa Universtity's Summer Writing Program later that year, Cage felt compelled to defend himself: "Some have implied, or even assumed, that I fell that day in the forest when I had nothing to say. I would like to state here that I am unsure if this is true, but resent the accusation nonetheless." Cage then went on to say that he had "nothing further to say and he was saying it again." When asked whether or not this further nothing was poetry as well, he quipped awkwardly: "I don't need to say nothing else there I have said it."

Love Fifteen

2011-10-30T16:07:00.000-07:00

Robert Peters' Critical Work - Delicious!

   "You shouldn't pay very much attention to anything writers say. They don't know why they do what they do. They're like good tennis players or good painters, who are often full of nonsense, pompous, and embarrassing, or merely mistaken, when they open their mouths."
   -John Barth.
   I agree entirely, but whether or not he was describing this blog is unclear. Probably not.

Your Immortal Need

2011-10-26T22:36:00.000-07:00

Baudelaire: satanic and perverted.

   "Rhythm and rhyme answer man's immortal need for monotony and symmetry, as opposed to the vanity and danger of inspiration."
   -Bowed Lair
   Okay I forgive you, you absinthe soaked madman. Thank the devil you wrote prose!

Fuck the Lotus Eaters May They Rot in Hell

2011-10-21T21:45:00.000-07:00

Otis Leader

   "Do you hear those voices, charming and funereal
   Singing: 'Come this way, you who wish to eat

   This perfumed Lotus! this is where men harvest
   The miraculous fruits your heart hungers for;
   Come and intoxicate yourself on the strange sweetness
   Of that afternoon which never ends'?"

   -Baudelaire (trans. Fowlie) "Le Voyage" Les Fleurs Du Mal

   This from the au pair of modern poetry? Save us from that afternoon that never ends! Who wants eternity? Let us all be grateful that we end. Yes. Done. No. The eternal is for the brain dead and lobotomous. They can have it, and find other vapor awful there.

Find Morass Here!

2011-10-09T16:43:00.000-07:00

Delicious.

In an essay on 'melody' in Gertrude Stein's work, Marianne DeKoven speaks of Stein's "assertion of the freed magic of the signifier over the repressed, hierarchical order of the signified." That is, the triumph of language as music magic over language as meaning morass.

Darius Polytonalius

2011-09-27T06:08:00.000-07:00

Darius Milhaud with G. Stein mug

Terminal Sound

someone has taken Darius Milhaud
and rhymed him with various rainclouds
this is not fair I know
but still he gets thunderous applause

BigFoot

2011-09-12T14:16:00.000-07:00

S.izable T.ennies Coleridge

     A weird anecdote in a Wallace Stevens essay:
     Once on a packet on his way to Germany Coleridge was asked to join a party of Danes and drink with them. Coleridge says:
     "I went, and found some excellent wines and a dessert of grapes with pineapple. The Danes had christened me Doctor Teology, and dressed as I was all in black, with large shoes and black worsted stockings, I might certainly have passed very well for a Methodist missionary. However, I disclaimed my title. What then may you be, a philosopher perhaps? It was at that time in my life in which of all possible names and characters I had the greatest disgust for philosophers.
     "The Danes then informed me that all in the present party were philosophers. We drank and talked and sang til we talked and sang altogether, and then we rose and danced on the deck a set of dances. My large feet and calves never were so sore as then, dancing on that packet with those men."

who nose

2011-09-08T11:51:00.000-07:00

   "I have, of course, been struggling with this thing, to say what you nor I nor nobody knows, but what is really what you and I and everybody knows."
   - G. Stein.

   I know what you're thinking, that you and I and everybody's nose is right above what you and I and everybody knows, which is perhaps what is so difficult about writing what you and I and everybody knows. That is, if you think it's difficult. Perhaps nobody does.

Sigh Lends Come You Negation (shhh...)

2011-08-30T22:09:00.000-07:00

   Come visit us here:
     http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=102423046527180

PageBoy in City Lights

2011-08-28T22:25:00.000-07:00

PageBoy can now be found at City Lights Bookstore in SFCA. Grab it before the tourists do (grab it)!

The Poems He Would Have Written

2011-08-23T22:25:00.000-07:00

one of her best lines is of course her hairline!

"...when Gertrude Stein wrote the poems called Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded she began writing them as translations of a group of poems in French by her friend Georges Hugnet. They are far from being literal translations, even in the beginning, but they take their point of departure from his poems, and they remained 'the poems he would have written if he had written them.'"
-Thornton Wilder in his essay on G.S. "Four in America."

We're Not Shy

2011-08-22T21:35:00.000-07:00

PageBoy's been a-traveling, and this time we made it all the way to the big shy shoulders of Chi-cago. Purchase the new issue extrovertedly at Quimby's on North Ave. http://www.quimbys.com/

The One-Eyed Giant

2011-08-11T22:31:00.000-07:00

"Most of the time we see only a portion of the person with us, the other parts are hidden by a hat or clothes or by light or shadow. Every one is accustomed to completing the whole entirely by memory. But when Picasso saw a single eye, the other ceased to exist for him."
--Gertrude Stein

Whereas often the prose writer's business is to communicate in full—to deliver through seamless language the perfectly framed thought, the argument intact, the most artful reportage—the poet falls wholly in love with one-eyed language. With language's beautifully uncooperative profile. Heather McHugh describes, for example, Dickinson and Celan's lyrical structures as "a math of the missing." Says McHugh: "[Poetry's] economies operate by powers of intimation: glimmering and glints, rather than exhaustible sums...It is the space that defines the words, the skull the kiss, the hole the eye."

Cezanne's Debris

2011-07-28T11:21:00.000-07:00

     "Nine days out of ten, all Cezanne saw around him was the wretchedness of his empirical life and his unsuccessful attempts, the debris of an unknown celebration."
                            -Merleau-Ponty.

     Look how the garbage piles up! Still, if you could be successful one time out of ten, I think most of us would take it.
     Strangely, the word 'debris' comes from the OFr. debrisier, "to break into pieces," and carries with it as well the geological meaning "an accumulation of relatively large rock fragments." Both of these definitions could describe Cezanne's large block fragments of paint used to portray Le Mont Sainte-Victoire again and again. So then, has he succeeded one out of ten, nine out of ten, or ten out of ten?

PageBoy in the Bay!

2011-07-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

PageBoy Magazine is now being sold at Dog Eared Books on Valencia and Needles and Pens on 16th in S.F.'s Mission District, and at Pegasus Books on Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley!
PageBoy Magazine: If you don't get it soon, you'll contract it.

Some Pics from PageBoy Release Party (Arabica)

2011-06-29T10:46:00.000-07:00

Sarah Erickson provides rather unconvincing evidence that the cover image is actually a portrait of her.

Paul Nelson has eyes not only on his head, on the head in front of him and on the heads behind him, but also beneath his hat. It's true!

Whoa! These poems'll knock yr teeth out yo!

The Myriad Minions, having emptied myriad bottles, now search the air for onions... and find them!

The editor being scolded for his loose interpretation of copyright laws and bow ties.

Sarah Galvin: laughing casually after threatening to tie the audience to a radiator.

Thanks to Duvel for sponsoring the event.

PageBoy Now at Powell's Burnside*

2011-06-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

*see blog entry title for information concerning the nature and purpose of this entry.

H.D. C.U.T.U.P.

2011-06-16T20:16:00.000-07:00

Vision is of two kinds:
   Venison of the womb
And
   Venison of the brain

Most of the so-called
   Artists today
Have lost the use of
   Their brain

Over-mind artists
   Usually come in a group
This is called a circle jerk
   And there is no

Great art period
   Without great lovers
Of course:
   There is no great art,

Period.
   Great lovers however
Hover forever
   In a kind of

Jelly-fish mind
   Lingering alongly

To sting you.

PageBoy Magazine Reviewed:

2011-06-16T17:01:00.001-07:00

http://www.hugohouse.org/content/tight-cozying-pageboy-magazine

PageBoy at Spine and Crown and

2011-06-08T06:03:00.000-07:00

PageBoy is now at Spine and Crown Bookstore (315 E. Pine St., Seattle) in addition to the other Seattle stores listed on this blog. Go get it.

PageBoy Reading Recording (Regarding Greg Bem)

2011-06-06T21:46:00.000-07:00

Philthy

The honorable Greg Bem has posted a recording of the PageBoy reading at Arabica. Find it here:
http://gregbem.com/wordpress/?p=3943

Over-mind not Over Mined

2011-06-05T20:50:00.000-07:00

H.D.

   Here are some quotes from H.D.'s amazing little sketch of a book Notes on Thought and Vision.

   "If you cannot be seduced by beauty, you cannot learn the wisdom of ugliness."

   "There is no trouble about art. There is already enough beauty in the world of art, enough in the fragments and in the almost perfectly preserved charioteer at Delphi alone to remake the world.
   There is no trouble about the art, it is the appreciators we want."

   "My sign-posts are not yours, but I have my own trail, it may help to give you confidence and urge you to get out of the murky, dead, old, thousand-times explored old world, the dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts.
   But the world of great creative artists is never dead. The new schools of destructive art theorists are on the wrong track. Because Leonardo and his kind are never old, never dead. Their world is never explored, hardly even entered. Because it needs an over-mind or a slight glimmering of over-mind intelligence to understand over-mind intelligence."

Reading Tonight!

2011-06-04T12:44:00.000-07:00

     We have magazines yippie! And will have them at the reading tonight, so come get one.
     PageBoy Reading June 4th 8pm at Arabica, 1550 E Olive Way, Seattle. Readers Sarah Galvin, Sarah Erickson, Paul Nelson, Erika Wilder. Artist Shannon Perry (portraits). Music: Myriad Minions oh my god!
     PageBoy: Better than a can.

Shklovskyshklovskyshklovsky

2011-05-26T18:35:00.000-07:00

"Go to the reading, pussy cat."

     "Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony - art removes objects from the automation of perception."
                  -Victor Shklovsky

     PageBoy has proofs, and the proof is in the, uh, printer. Issue III 11 will be out and all over everywhere soon - like pudding I guess. If you want to see the magazine FIRST, join us at Arabica (Capitol Hill, Seattle) on Sat. June 4th at 8pm. We will be celebrating with readers Erika Wilder, Sarah Erickson, Paul Nelson, and Sarah Galvin. Shannon Perry will be showing her (amazing) watercolor portraits (featured in the magazine), and Myriad Minions will be performing LIVE NUDE MUSIC!

Caveat

2011-05-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

Caveat (for reading a poem at a spoken word event)

Warning:
   I am going to read a poem. It may be metered at times.

Warning:
   It is not in first person. You is.

Warning:
   It may be too masculine for some of you.

Warning:
   It is not pc, why would it be?

Warning:
   It may be too feminine for some of you.

Warning:
   It may be offensive at times
   Remember
   These are just x's and lines.

Warning:
   There is nothing poetic about pc, Pussy Cat.

Warning:
   I am offended too.

Warning:
   I am not mad at anyone. Thanks for letting me read anyway.

Warning:
   Is it spoken word, or 'broken word?'

Warning:
   There is no chip on my shoulder, Chip.

Warning:
   There is, however, a chip in my head.
   Say 'hello' Chip.
   "Hello."

Warning:
   Is it spoken word, or 'broken girl?'

Warning:
   Poetry as therapy
   Is mental midgetry.

Warning:
   Was that an off rhyme, or an offending rhyme?

Warning:
   Everything rhymes with everything.

Warning:
   Boys get broken too. (boo hoo hoo).

Warning:
   Rimbaud's line was: "I is an other,"
   Not "I against other."

Warning:
   Poetry is not therapy.
   Therapy is therapy.

Warning:
   Who speaks more clearly:
   Gertrude or Franken Stein?

Warning:
   White guilt, Black power.
   Can't we all just take a shower?

Warning:
   Perhaps I'm a midget
   and I just don't know it.

Readings!

2011-05-14T08:50:00.000-07:00

     PageBoy is hosting a reading in celebration of its third issue, which is due out any day now!
     When? you might ask... at Arabica on Capitol Hill in Seattle at 8pm sharp on Saturday June 4th (and other prepositions). Readers will be announced soonly. Mark it on your calendar Mark, Gene and Jori.
     PageBoy Magazine: Better than indie pop.©

   P.otato S.oup: We will also be celebrating in Portland on June 25th at The Waypost. And maybe in Olympia too (thirdly). We will let you know the details when we know de tails. (You still can mark it on your calendars though, just very bigly.)

what american lit needs

2011-05-07T09:39:00.000-07:00

Malcom Cowley

"What American Literature needs is not more poets (we could dispense with most of those already writing), but mature poets who are willing to devote their whole time to the most difficult of arts."

-Malcom Cowley

Critics have argued for over fifty years as to what M. Cowley meant by "the most difficult of arts." It seems clear to me, however, that he was either referring to teaching undergraduate creative writing classes, or flash animation.

Boom.

2011-04-25T05:55:00.000-07:00

   explode < Lat. explodere meaning "to drive out by clapping."
   What an odd form of exile!

   (Medieval court, rural Europe. JUDGE, cloaked in black robes stands to deliver his verdict; a rather meek and filthy BEGGAR hunches before him obediently,)
   JUDGE: Do you have anything to say for yourself, sir?
   BEGGAR: Please Your...
   JUDGE: Silence! (pause) Well then, due to the heinousness of your crime, the Court hereby and forthwith sentences you to... explodere!
   BEGGAR: No Your Honor, Please not that!
   JUDGE: (forcefully) Exlodere! Bring in the Band of Clappers!
   (Enter several men and women, all expressionless, clapping, who walk up to the BEGGAR, forcing him from the courtroom and out into the street.)

Horrible

2011-04-02T11:16:00.000-07:00

   "a horror picture really should have moments where you kind of rest up and laugh, even it's a nervous laugh, and then go on to another horror."
   -Samuel Z. Arkoff (B-movie monster mogul)

   A poem really should have moments where you kind of rest up and laugh, even if it's a nervous laugh, and then go on to another horror. This probably could be said of any work of art. It is the thing that keeps the work from "flat-lining."
   In the same way that all horror all the time at some point ceases to be horrible, if it's all beautiful, then none of it's beautiful. Or: if it's all this, then it isn't this at all

Elevator Music XX

2011-03-17T22:35:00.000-07:00

No.

low hills, how binding
a mesmerizing klezmer band

apple blossoms off the porch
listen: the shadows pool

across the sunset painting
gin is crude, I know

but really, how can you bear
the inanity of music

without lens, cairns
are too pretentious, zinnias

painting dumb, song
it's true you have to have a

kind of faith in stupidity
to be happy here, and love

News Flash: Poetry Is Everywhere!

2011-02-27T16:42:00.000-08:00

   Ann Sexton while at work on Love Poems (1969)

   Poetry is everywhere, and because it's everywhere it's ridiculous to transcribe it. Why capture something that is all around us. Like water, when we try to hold it in our hands it only slips through our fingers. There one moment, gone the next. At its very best it leaves us wet.
   Then again, that may be reward enough for the depraved. PageBoy, at least, seems to enjoy it.

Dueling Haiku

2011-02-20T21:15:00.000-08:00

   Poetics Haiku

   a cutup's not an essay
   it's an easy knot
   so cut it out, cuteypie!

   This from PageBoy (2008-). The following rebuttal is from Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), who, incidentally, in addition to writing haiku was a literary critic.

   on how to sing
   the frog school and the skylark school
   are arguing

Pu-tai Says Laugh

2011-02-16T17:03:00.000-08:00

   "... to talk too long, to examine too meticulously, to pile qualification upon qualification and add theory to theory, is to be in danger of upsetting the delicate balance of that life which one wishes to understand, or of destroying the fragile tissue into which one wishes to breathe new life. Here too, 'the letter kills, while only the spirit gives life.'"
   - Conrad Hyers (Zen and the Comic Spirit)

   Hyers could easily be talking about poetry here. Sontag's Against Interpretation comes to mind, as well as the famous Zen Master Pablo Picasso, who put forth the following koan:
   "Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird?"

Ludwig the Skeptic

2011-02-11T23:13:00.000-08:00

"It appeared to have little connection with reality and was more concerned with the study of language. 'Distrust of grammar is the first requisite for philosophizing.'"
-Strathern referring to Wittgenstein's concept of philosophy, and then quoting him. He could be discussing poetry, and in essence, is.

A Series of Follies

2011-02-03T21:54:00.000-08:00

   "For Levi-Strauss, the great ruptures that had thrilled him (namely surrealism, DADA, cubism) in his youth had led nowhere. The path to abstraction had become a story of failure as modern art degenerated into a series of follies and empty aesthetic gestures."
   -Patrick Wilcken (C L-S)

   The following is chosen at random from American Hybrid; A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (Norton 2009 ed. Cole Swensen and David St. John).
   Empty aesthetic gesture? Or great rupture?
   The excerpt is by Etel Adnan and is listed as from IN/SOMNIA. Here is "XIX"

1. Night falling. again. Not again.
   long / line no help help / less
   terror stop the terr...
   terribly all over / over
   what?

2. blows bellowing blowing
   paper and doors and what
   else? Is is it? is it coming?
   Yes. time. Last time

3. lasting timing ever-ever
   snoring orderal or deal
   dealer of cards of smoke
   tick / no no end

4. shhh - weee - buzzz
   buzzing pele-mele
   keep held hold-it! keep
   insane in / sane the right
   to wait wait! waited for
   for wait a minute for / the /
   dark / light of morning

5. collapsibles

   Note also that often today poems are "from" something else, something much grander we are to assume. We are also to assume that if we were reading the entire something else, we would surely think "Wow, that was something else!" Unfortunately, we rarely get access to this mysterious place all of these fragments are "from," but are nevertheless asked to say "Wow!"
   This alone could be a very important distinction between the American avant-garde of 1913 Armory Show New York, which somehow didn't seem to need to qualify its fragments, non sequiturs and general 'avantfulness' by claiming they were "from" some place else, and the avant-garde of the present day, which almost always does.
   Levi-Strauss had noted the avant-garde as a "story of failure" in 1959! Fortunately for him he didn't live to read the above-mentioned anthology.

Poetry as Alchemy

2011-01-23T10:24:00.000-08:00

   ...if 'everything happens so often that speaking of it makes no sense,' the poet must find ways of representing those happenings so that their actual feel, their texture is re-experienced."
   PageBoy quoting Perloff quoting Hejinian quoting.

PB in PN

2011-01-16T09:21:00.000-08:00

Can I Get Piano Lessons?

Our interview with Natalie Phillips has been reprinted in.Poetry Northwest. Check it out.

Is it Still?

2011-01-11T09:47:00.000-08:00

While doing anthropological "field work" in a remote section of the Brazilian outback, Claude Levi-Strauss handed out sheets of paper and pencils to a tribe of native Brazilians known as the Nambikwara. They had never seen or used paper or pencils before, had never written or drawn "aside from rudimentary decorations - the dots and jagged lines with which they adorned their gourds. After initially ignoring the paper, the Nambikwara began scribbling a series of wavy lines, from left to right across the page. Unprompted, they had begun 'writing.' The leader of the Nambikwara went one step further, requesting a notepad from Levi-Strauss. Quizzed on ethnographic points, he 'wrote' answers in the pad, handing his doodles to Levi-Strauss. When later, during bartering between two different factions of Nambikwara, the leader made a great show of 'reading' the list of exchanges and beneficiaries from a sheet of scribbles.
"Somewhere in those scrawled lines lay meaning, not of the literal kind, but in a metaphorical sense. The Nambikwara had intuitively grasped the power of paper, notebooks, pens and markings in Western culture... The leader's approach had been a pragmatic one, slotting into an alien culture with a certain ritual fluency, trading symbols alongside beads, arrowheads and lengths of cloth. Writing, Levi-Strauss concluded, was first about power, and only afterward used for the purpose of aesthetic or intellectual enlightenment. Far from being mankind's crowning cultural achievement, it had initially been used to create hierarchies between the scribes and the illiterate masses. 'The primary function of written communication,' Levi-Strauss concluded, 'is to facilitate slavery.'"

Post No Post (Dizzy) / Elevator Music XIX

2011-01-04T11:17:00.000-08:00

   "I see some guys try to transcribe my music on paper, but if you play it like that it will sound corny. That's because they hear notes that I didn't even play. It's there without being there. It's implied. And although people can't really hear it, they feel it. It's an auditory illusion."
   - Dizzy Gillespie

   How to create an "auditory illusion" in poetry? Double entendre is one way, but that is more concerned with meaning than music. So how to make one word, or a phrase, sound as if it contains other words. Words that aren't there. The equivalent of bending a note in music, or simultaneously playing different notes. To make words sound that aren't even there.
   Here is some elevator music to listen to while you figure it out:

All That Is Normal or Possible

if glassful is
the quantity a glass can hold
then how awful
an awl can be
it baffles the crows caw

indeed, what is
the quantity a crow can hold?
what lawful reasoning
determines the count of caws
their fullness?

   the blacker the better the richer the darker
   when it comes to a crows caw or coffee

somehow the sunken panels
in a ceiling or soffit
are in fact higher than
the ceiling or soffit itself

sunken, sunglass
sunglassful:
the quantity the glasses hold
   of reflection, of light, of eyes
   of faces, cheekbones and rooms
of sunflowerful August afternoons

and what then simply of full?
the quantity an of can hold
a quantity that can be held
   full of full of full of of
the quantity of music
   that can be held

One of These Frogs Is Doin Its Own Thing

2011-01-03T16:27:00.000-08:00

(can you find his frog?)

Frog - a wedge-shaped horny prominence in the sole of a horse's hoof.

Frog - A loop fastened to a belt to hold a tool or weapon.

Frog - An ornamental looped braid or cord with a button or knot for fastening the front of a garment.

Frog - A device on intersecting railroad tracks that permits wheels to cross the junction.

Frog - A spiked or perforated device used to support stems in a flower arrangement.

To Imagine Evil

2010-12-29T09:49:00.000-08:00

"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

2010-12-23T17:04:00.000-08:00

   "...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

2010-12-23T16:37:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-16T19:47:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-06T22:03:00.000-08:00

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?

2010-12-03T16:01:00.000-08:00

"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

2010-11-29T12:54:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-10T18:35:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-08T21:54:00.000-08:00

"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

2010-10-30T12:30:00.000-07:00

"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

2010-10-20T23:35:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-10-18T22:14:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-11T22:29:00.000-07:00

"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

2010-10-11T22:11:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

"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

2010-09-18T22:12:00.000-07:00

...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

2010-09-07T22:16:00.000-07:00

"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

2010-08-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

   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

2010-08-13T23:12:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-28T22:56:00.000-07:00

   "...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

2010-07-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-20T11:40:00.000-07:00

   "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.

2010-07-11T09:52:00.000-07:00

"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

2010-07-09T23:13:00.000-07:00

   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

2010-07-09T22:44:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-08T08:35:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-30T08:52:00.000-07:00

   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

2010-06-16T21:52:00.000-07:00

   "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

2010-06-06T21:32:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-05-23T22:44:00.000-07:00

"...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

2010-05-20T20:47:00.000-07:00

                       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

2010-05-16T20:26:00.000-07:00

red neck

Our tour in boat

2010-05-16T20:19:00.000-07:00

I was asleep when he died.

David Antin / Elevator Music X

2010-05-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

     "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

2010-05-09T13:47:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-22T10:34:00.000-07:00

     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

2010-04-15T15:01:00.000-07:00

     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

2010-04-07T10:51:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-17T18:47:00.000-07:00

     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)

2010-03-08T06:53:00.000-08:00

     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

2010-03-01T16:49:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-23T13:43:00.000-08:00

     "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

2010-02-20T20:35:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-15T11:14:00.000-08:00

     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

2010-02-11T13:03:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-10T11:55:00.000-08:00

     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.

Madueno Reading

2010-02-06T19:16:00.000-08:00

Pageboy Magazine has made a resolution to go to as many readings as we possibly can. One that recently stood out was Amalio Madueno, who is a lovely mix of formal and free, Spanish and English, Native and American, comedy and tragedy. A self-proclaimed descendant of the black mountain school, his work seems to extend those boundaries, all boundaries in fact - border poetics at its best.
We are currently courting him for the next issue of PageBoy. In the mean time, check him out.

Elevator Music V

2010-02-01T20:59:00.000-08:00

from Toward A Poetics

what's worse than a cornfield?
a cornfield cut, threshed and

cleaned of corn. a dog runs through it.
concerning art: be careful.

be careful in all things, I tell her
over and over again and over and over

I hear myself telling myself,
ridding myself the husks and dust

that clog the air no matter the precaution.
be careful not to heed too well

the advice of others, else be thrown into the well.
you will never be so cold as when

you find yourself in a field in Indiana,
doubting the corn and the ground you stand on.

concerning art: be careless in all things.

PageBoy in the Library / Elevator Music IV

2010-01-30T13:04:00.000-08:00

     PageBoy is now cataloged in the library at The Evergreen State College, where, due to the special non-biodegradable fibers I had the printer impress into the cover stock, it will remain for the next 5,000 years or until 2012 when the Mayan calendar ends, whichever comes first. Until one of those things occurs, here is some more elevator music:

from Toward A Poetics

that fire hydrant hasn't moved in months
I've been watching it
waiting for it, resisting it

for in resolve endures
happy yellow deistic rain
and nut trees

I'm trying to say something here
     that I love you
as Groucho Marx loved
all oblong and obfuscated
awkwardly truncated of a leg-like evening
and then
             suddenly
with resolve
     I love you! can't you see that I love you!
clear as a moustache
gushing forth in platitudes
and fine hyperbole, irreverent cliche

I want to give you
     all the things
I'm not supposed to give

morning summers and hands
beach shaped boxes and hearts

I want to lay a head cheese in your lap
and put my tongue in it
my feet, my hog
all of my boiled parts and jelly

Some Photos from PageBoy Reading!

2010-01-29T12:54:00.000-08:00

Thomas Walton and photo-documentarian Justin Hamacher affecting the comedy/tragedy schism (marriage?)

MCE backstage (that is a full size guitar!)

Some of the dharma.

Thomas Walton, Jesse Morse, and Ryan Newton in utero.

There was a streaker.