Poetry's Dead And Jazz Ain't Cool

Jazz may not be cool, but that pink tie is.

     Here's a link to Nicholas Payton's blog and his poem on why jazz ain't cool: necrophilia. Some of his thoughts can be applied to poetry as well ... right?

Dead Letter Text

     "The logos of a bad writer throws words together in no order at all, perhaps beginning at the point where it should end and wholly ignorant of organic sequence. You can enter this logos at any point and find it saying the same thing. Once it is written down it continues to say that same thing forever over and over within itself, over and over in time. As communication, such a text is a dead letter."
     Anne Carson (in Eros the Bittersweet)

Baudelaire's Doggie Bag

Baudelaire with dog hidden in shirt.

     Here's Baudelaire's "The Dog and the Scent Bottle"

     Come here, my dear, good, beautiful doggie, and smell this excellent perfume from the best perfumer of Paris.
     And the dog, wagging his tail, which I believe is that poor creature's way of laughing and smiling, came up and put his nose to the uncorked bottle. Then, suddenly, backed away in terror, barking at me reproachfully.
     "Ah miserable dog, if I'd offered you a bag of shit you would have sniffed at it with delight and perhaps devoured it. In this you're like the public, which should never be offered delicate perfumes that infuriate them, but only carefully selected garbage."

Lips or roots?

whose lips as fat as roots

     "I love the world of wind and foliage / I can't distinguish lips from roots"
        -Neruda

Lizard Eyes

Still with eyes.

"I came into this world with eyes / And I'll leave without them."
     -Lorca.

Love Lavished

The thick smear of a blue spot.

     "The true sexuality in literature - sex as a positive aesthetic quality - lies not in any scene and subject nor in the mere appearance of a vulgar word, not in the thick smear of a blue spot, but in the consequences on the page of love well made - made to the medium which is the writer's own, for he - for she - has only these little shapes and sounds to work with, the same saliva surrounds them all, every word is equally a squiggle or a noise, an abstract designation and a crowd of meanings as randomly connected by time and use as a child connects his tinkertoys. On this basis, not a single thing will distinguish 'fuck' from 'frais du bois'; 'blue' and 'triangle' are equally abstract; and what counts is not which lascivious sights your loins can tie to your thoughts like Lucky is to Pozzo, but love lavished on speech of any kind, regardless of content and intention."
     - William Gass

The Flesh made Gass.

Where's William? (Hint: Gass)

    "It's not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word."
          -William H. Gass.

Mr. Ed.

Who knows why or should

     "How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?"
          - Steinbeck

     Steinbeck goes on to answer this question in his introduction to Cannery Row. But what good are answers? (If you're curious, find it in the Bantam edition [1947]). We all have to all of us be grateful for the question.
     Of course the book itself, Cannery Row, is an attempt to answer the question. What isn't?

     ... Incidentally, Steinbeck waxes Steinian in the same edition when he dedicates the book (without punctuation):

                 For
                 Ed Ricketts
                 who knows why or should

Douglas Miller's Ars

     Here's a link to PageBoy contributor Douglas Miller's Ars Poetica (warning: brief nudity [hands], viewer discretion is advised):

The Thoroughly Dead

The Thoroughly Dead

     "The trouble with most people is that they are thoroughly dead and do not want to be resuscitated."
          -Daisetz Suzuki

Serious Humor

The, um, frosting on the cake. aka 'Looking Inwardly Serious.'

     "If it is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humor. If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness. Neither one alone without the other under it will do."
          -Robert Frost.
     But then again, either one alone with the other over it will do as well. As will one or both with the other under it, or over it. And neither one not alone without the other under (or over) it. Any of these is fine ... seriously.

The Ungood and the Unbad

Nietzsche, moments after God shouted "Nietzsche is dead!"

     "...because in our time Nietzsche shouted 'God is dead' there are no generally accepted values, no universally valid systems, no publicly meaningful hierarchies. Without them all experience becomes equally serious or equally ludicrous."
         -Robert Corrigan in Comedy; Meaning and Form.
     One might add equally 'good' or equally 'bad,' in that there is no longer one accepted perspective to judge these things by. This is, of course, both a good and a bad thing. In relation to poetry, this is why nothing is no damn good nomore and everything is often always bad. And if you think otherwise well then you're right too!

From Your Heart

Surprise!

Sartre seeing against himself.

     Sartre says (among other things) "I think against myself." By this he attempts to avoid falling into patterns, stasis, sterility. He is trying to outthink himself, to be larger than himself, or to be alive in himself.
     If you apply the same approach to writing, you get "I write against myself." If you are suspicious of that which comes easily, too easily, you might arrive at something outside yourself, larger than yourself. You might. You might not, but you might.
     It's recognizable at readings when a poet/writer is comfortable writing in some certain way. The poems are difficult to distinguish from each other, difficult to distinguish from the poems he/she read at their last reading, or perhaps they've been reading the same poems at successive readings, for successive (gulp) years even. Not only is this a creative bog for the writer, but it's also a wriggling morass for an audience, who can't possibly be expected to be surprised by the same thing again and again and again ad nauseum.
    Or, as Frost says: "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader."

Interview Re Issue V

Magritte's little known painting, Thinking Moustache.

     The venerable documentarian Paul E. Nelson has graciously posted an interview with myself and Sierra Nelson re the magazine. You may find it here: Yellow Snow.

Stranger Review

     Reading PageBoy might make your face do this! It might transport you to exotic climes (or wherever he is)! So loosen your tie, and put on a pair of (special-spy-issue-unscrambling) sun glasses and read child read!

     If you're still unsure, you can find Mr. Constant's review here: Please Amy, Use Lube.

Oh Beautiful Useless

Gautier: Beautiful or Ugly?

   
     "Only that which serves no end is beautiful; everything useful is ugly."
          - Theophile Gautier.

Issue V Release Party Pics/Vid

     Some photos from the Issue V release party:

the seeing fields and the hearing forest

the four hoarse men harassing 

Paul Nelson playing 'I Spy Pim'

Bill Carty impersonating Bill Carty

George Ciardi casting an analog spell

Alex Bleecker reading five poems at once

Sarah Galvin in Sarah Galvin wig

Jeremy Springsteed cropping his fingers off

Sierra Nelson has published more books than she has hands

The Editor drank so much wine his hands, even, were blurry 

     And if pictures aren't enough, video has been posted here: Wow. Enjoy!

I'm a Monkey!

Self Portrait of Myself Writing This Blog

     "What can be said, can be said clearly. What cannot be said clearly, is not in the world and one must be silent about it."
          - Wittgenstein.
     I have this quote written in one of my notebooks. I just realized today that I've been misreading it (because my handwriting is so horrible) as saying "What cannot be said clearly, is not in the world and one cannot be silent about it." As in, one is compelled to art by those things outside of the world that we cannot say. The very fact that they cannot be said necessitates the attempt to say them. I've long thought that poetry was an attempt to say what is impossible to say. To speak the unspeakable. And anything sayable isn't worth saying at all.
     Wittgenstein though is talking about God. He has said that he likes the idea of a silent religion, and I agree with him there. He was not referring to the arts, so I am not only misreading, but taking the quote out of context and applying it to a different subject altogether. This, I guess, is also what poets do. That ruthless and unethical race of baboons.

Hate Gass

City of Hate

     "Getting even is one great reason for writing. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. My hatred is much of me, if not the best part."
                 -William Gass.

PageBoy Reading 12/1 Seattle!

Happy Holidays! 

     PageBoy Magazine is pleased to announce the release of its fifth issue! We are celebrating on Saturday, December 1st at 7 p.m. The party/reading/show will be at Kaleidoscope Vision (1419 10th Ave) on Capitol Hill (Seattle). 

     Readers will include current contributors Sierra Nelson, William Carty, Jeremy Springsteed, Sarah Galvin, Alex Bleecker, and Paul Nelson. Photographer George Ciardi will be showing prints. The We Don't Know Yets will be playing music. Also: I don't know what else, it could be anything!

     Magazines will be for sale! Wine will be for free! 

     Please join us in this pre-emptive pagan event so that together we might end this endless yuletide squabbling, and begin again the beginningless pagan offering. Okay?

Invisible Trolls

Dylan Thomas with several invisible trolls searching his chins for an apple.

     "I far prefer reading other chaps' work to my own: I find it clearer. An hour of me aloud is hell, and produces large burning spots in front of the mind . . . At the mere thought of reading only myself, I begin to feel hunted, invisible trolls shake hands with my Adam's apple."
     - Dylan Thomas in a letter to J.M. Brinnin. This published in Dylan Thomas in America, which three out of three PageBoy Magazine editors agree is a very lovely and very trashy little book.

Vote YES on BS!

High Turnout, Long Lines for PageBoy Vote!

     Don't forget to vote YES on Proposition BS #1: The Legalization and Subsequent Public Funding of PageBoy Magazine!

A New(d) Poetics

DT: Damn Tfool

A Damned Fool

     "These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damned fool if they weren't."
          -Dylan Thomas.
     Hmm...

George Carlin Is Never Satisfied

Right (T)here

Rubik's Cube Marilyn

     "The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known."
              -Wittgenstein

     The answers are here. Right here. Over there.

"Cold cliff, dead tree,
this knobby-headed me
who thinks there's nothing better than a poem.
I mock myself, writing in dust, and
damn the man who penned the first word
and steered so many astray."      
                       -Ching An (1851-1912)

Ping Pong

Mr. Wang (with broom) representing Ping, and Mr. Shan (sans broom) as Pong.

     8th century Chinese poet Han Shan had this to say about his predecessor, a certain Mr. Wang:

"Mr. Wang's degree says Flourishing Talent.
He loves to find fault with my poems.

He says I don't follow the regulations,
and don't use the right techniques.

He says I don't use the four tones correctly,
and just stick in words any which way.

I laugh at what he calls poetry: a blind man's
rhymes in lukewarm praise of the sun."

     to which Mr. Wang replied:

"Mr. Shan's degree says Master of Subversion.
He loves to find fault with my poems.

He says I don't follow his regulations,
and don't use the right techniques.

He says I don't use the four tones correctly,
and choose my words too carefully.

I laugh at what he calls poetry: a blind man's
rhymes in lukewarm praise of the sun."

Title This Blogpost Please

Please Fill In, Dear Reader

"Anything your reader can do for himself leave to him."
     -Wittgenstein

     It was after reading this Wittgenstein quote that I wrote the following epic poem (published here in its entirety):

Why Don't Hejinian Nunchucks Exist?

Your search - hejinian nunchucks - did not match any image results.
                                (use your imagination)

     "To some extent, each sentence has to be the whole story."
          -Hejinian.
   
     That is, each sentence has to be a hole (read 'rabbit hole') within the, um, story. Not simply le mot juste, but lemon juiced in just the precise Hejinianian way. These such Hejinianianisms are the nonesuch and nunchucks of obsessively paratactic poetry nerds such as haunt the hallowed halls of PageBoy Magazine's corporate hindquarters. It was cold outside.

Get Out of the Way!

How poets should compose.

     "Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it."
          -Wittgenstein.
     Language also takes care of itself. As does poetry. The challenge for poets is not to manipulate language, but to get out of its way.

Irish Football Coach Korg Delusional!

Korg during his time as Poetic Consultant to Ireland's football team (2010). The Irish failed to qualify for the World Cup, though Korg stated famously "won, we've won, before the games've begun." He was sacked shortly thereafter under suspicions that he was "delusional." When asked to respond, he stated simply: "I'm unaware of any accusations against me."

     "Reading poetry does not help us to do anything; it simply helps us to gain a greater awareness of our experiences than we can achieve ourselves."

     "A poem does not offer a copy of, or a comment upon actuality, but a sensation of insight peculiar to itself. Its value does not depend upon its 'truth' to reality, but on its ability to provide, within itself, a clear and coherent experience."

     -both quotes from Jacob Korg in An Introduction to Poetry, sometimes it's nice to be reintroduced.

Monkey Mouth

"In the beginning was the word..."
     Gospel of John.
"In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words, words came out of the womb of matter."
     Lao Tzu.

     I wish these two would end their endless squabbling over words. The word is that in the beginning was the beginning of the word, but even so there were no words that came out of the womb of matter. Can we all just agree, finally, that words came from monkeys. And note the trends in new poetic writing: the return to monkey mouth!

   

Reading Lolita in London

Olympia Press's evocative cover. (oh the understatement!)

     "The filthiest book I have ever read. Sheer unrestrained pornography."
          - John Gordon (ed. of the London Sunday Express) in a review of Nabokov's Lolita.
     Obviously Mr. Gordon needs to get better porn, and filthier books! Were the '50s that bleak?
     This quote reminds me of Umberto Eco's comment on the Marquis de Sade (who Gordon obviously never read). It's something to the effect of "The most disturbing thing about Sade's work is that just when you start to get turned on he goes off on some philosophical rant that lasts upwards of 50 pages. How is one to enjoy onesself, there's way too much philosophy!"

Muppets, uh... Critics.

Critics par excellence!

    "I read the poems I could find by the critics, and I pronounced them not very good. I wondered then just what it is about critics that enables them to know so much about poetry when they obviously don't have the faintest idea how it comes about."
          - A.R. Ammons.

Ludwig Lovelace

    "Even to express a false thought boldly and clearly is to have gained a great deal."
           -Ludwig Wittgenstein.

     "I never realized how many lies you have to tell to sell a book."
           -Linda Lovelace.

     It is estimated that Linda Lovelace has sold up to 10 times as many books as Wittgenstein. Interestingly, Lovelace's book Ordeal begins with the wonderfully philosophical line "My name is not Linda Lovelace." If Wittgenstein had enjoyed anything (he evidently didn't), I think he would have enjoyed Lovelace's double entendre. It's a kind of pornographic version of Rimbaud's je est une autre.

Probably Prose

Armstrong at last month's Cascadia Poetry Festival

     In the seemingly endless argument over what is a poem and what is prose, what fiction, essay, lyric essay, memoir, autobiography, etc. Louis Armstrong offers this morsel of wisdom concerning his own art:
     "If it sounds good, don't worry what it is, just enjoy it."
     He later went on to say, "but if it doesn't sound good, it's probably prose."

PageBoy Hedreen Recording!

Greg Bem is front left, dressed as Khaela M. of The Blow.

     If you want to relive the Hedreen reading, you can, thanks to Greg Bem and his ubiquitous, spy issue fountain pen tape recorder (series 5.01). And if you missed it, you can now laugh, cry, and sigh along as if you were really there then when we did that thing we did.
     Here's the top secret link: awp award.

The Worm in the Apple.

This is a red apple.

     PageBoy Magazine can now be found and fondled at Green Apple Books at 506 Clement St. in SFCA, so go get it, what are you waiting for?

     PageBoy Magazine: Better Than Dolores Park.

Help! Literature Is Not Self Help.

     Maggie Nelson, in discussing Alexander Trocchi's Cain's Book, claims that the book "disallows the delusion that writing necessarily connects us to humanity, that it will help us quit noxious substances, that it will restore us to love lost, or at least serve as a consolation. Literature," she concludes, "is not, after all, self-help."
          - from The Art of Cruelty.

Lyn Hejinian in the Bath

A Thick Egg.

     "If words matched their things we'd be imprisoned with walls of symmetry. As for we who 'love to be astonished,' thicken the eggs in a bath Marie."
          -Lyn Hejinian.

Don't Eat the Baby!

     The message of the flower is the flower. A rose is a rose is a rose. Je est un autre. Etc. etc. etc:

Look at Me Don't Look at Me!

Cioran picking the nits from his eyebrows.

     "Next to the contemporary 'maker' with his sufferings and his sterility, the creators of the past seem embarrassingly healthy. They were not made anemic by philosophy. These days no one escapes this exacerbation of the intellect and its corresponding diminution of instinct. The monumental, the spontaneously grandiose is no longer. The best thing an artist produces now are his ideas on what he might have done. No age has been so self-conscious."
          -E.M. Cioran (1956)

     Ouch. Fortunately for him, I think (though maybe I shouldn't think), he didn't live to see what we've become (I think). I hope that's clear, maybe I should change it. You should've read what I was going to write. Namely mostly that Cioran was a self-professed "Hitlerist" and an overall dickhead. Really. Still, he's right. We are infested with our own we ares. It's become a kind of In Fest, Ed.

Swallow the Yellowbrkrd

Frye just before eating his glasses.

     "The writer is neither a watcher nor a dreamer. Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn't escape or withdraw from life either; it swallows it."
           -Northrop Frye.

     I just found this quote on an old receipt from 1/2 Priced Books. Neither of the books listed on the front of the receipt belong to me, at least I can't find them. The receipt was in a coat pocket. It was half-eaten.
   

Susan Sontag Has Worms

The apple and the worm are more than the apple itself.

     "We have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice."
          -Susan Sontag

     I love this quote very much, and even the fact that Sontag goes on to say that "music, film, dance, architecture, painting, and sculpture" are all worth more critical attention than literary forms. This was true in the 1960s when Sontag wrote it, and possibly even more so today. So it is, so.
     The question then, I guess, is whether poetry is being overthrown or throwing over. Is it a rowing thing, over now, a woven ring or owing then? Is it a throwing up or a winged river?
     Personally, I'm grateful it's fallen away from popular culture, and relegated to a kind of parasitical state, freed from obligations to entertain and even to be 'understood.' The parasite has the host and it has itself.
     Poets have a long, rich tradition of slithering around in the dark. Darkness, after all, is full of possibilities, lightness of limitations.

   

Bunga Bunga!

Virginia Woolf is far left

     On Feb. 7 1910, Virginia Woolf, along with her brother and Horace de Vere Cole dressed as "Abyssinians" to fool the British Navy into showing them their flagship, the HMS Dreadnought. The disguises worked, and the supposed Abyssinian emissaries were allowed on board. 
     The group inspected the fleet. To show their appreciation, they communicated in a kind of porridge of words derived from Latin and Greek, as well as the oft repeated phrase "bunga bunga." They asked to pray on the ship's deck and bestowed fake military honors on the officers.
     The disguise's only limitation was that the "royals" could not eat anything or their make-up would be ruined. At a luncheon served for the Abyssinian delegates, the group's interpreter (Cole) had to explain that Abyssinians never eat "on board a ship or off in this way." When asked what he meant, Cole offered, "things such as this are quite nuanced," at which the matter was dropped.
     When the real Emperor of Ethiopia visited sometime later, British children called out "bunga bunga" as he passed on parade.