All the air knocked out of air

Rinsing Feeling -- not so bad
what you knew would happen
has only happened later
than you expected
the delay: a blip.

Saturday Top 5

1) Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato's Republic by Ramona A. Naddaff
2) Fragments of a Journal by Eugene Ionesco
3) The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
4) The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius
5) Area Lights Heights by Larry Eigner

Rancher Todd Colby (Hoppy Serves a Writ)

1) "After rancher Todd Colby reports several rustlings, Hoppy connects the rustlings to the stagecoach bandits and crosses into Oklahoma alone to investigate. Posing as a cattle buyer named Jones, Hoppy encounters rancher Ben Hollister, his daughter Jean, and her boyfriend, Steve Jordan, who are suspicious of strangers and advise Hoppy to leave their ranch. Hoppy then checks in a hotel in town, and immediately has a run-in with Steve Jordan's brother Tom, who has a scar on his left cheek."

2) "Machinist Todd Colby of TJ Mold & Tool Company in St. Johnsbury says, "I think it helps out in our local economy to be able to share the wealth, so to speak." Colby helped Jeff Nummelin with his new, "green" company, called Earth Tractor."

3) "Within days Todd Colby claims the resin from the thick low pine trees stained the sleeves of his green velvet jacket."

The Neighbors Are Talking (Top 10)

1. The Manic Box
2. Central Air
3. Bogus Ring
4. Plasma Drill
5. Pine Cone Dinner
6. Finger Pulp
7. Eagle Slinky
8. Peppermint Ace
9. Silver Butter
10. Inky Slit

George Oppen

"Impossible to doubt the world: it can be seen
And because it is irrevocable

It cannot be understood, and I believe that fact is lethal..."

-George Oppen from "Parousia"

Robert Musil

"You load the space that surrounds you with a charge of increasing strength. The difference in intensity between imagining and actually being there becomes a joy that I feel."

-Robert Musil, from: Diaries: 1899-1942 p. 179

Swimming

Master of Air

You've got to think in terms of poor sleep quality
and how it impinges upon your ability to play air
in the meeting you call to order watch this
standing up and does it look real? That's what
you've got to ask yourself if you're sacrificing
your ability to look authentic playing air
we're not entirely convinced that you are losing
yourself in the strokes of air that
you called the meeting together to explain
your idea about solidifying air and this
would eliminate the need for cots
or hammocks that we could rest anywhere
lay down in midair but your air
would be thick and heavy and we all know
you can't text a message to a cohort
in solid air in the middle of a conversation
any more than you can ride a bike through a wall.
We're pulling for you to pull through, to get some rest,
to play more convincingly so that we can lose
ourselves in your mastery of air.

Top Three Poetry Books of 2008

1) A Teeny Tiny Book of War (A Teeny Tiny Chapbook, 2008- teenytiny.org) by Sandra Simonds

"The scent where organs once exchanged gasses from cut plants."

2) Either She Was (Marsh Hawk Press, 2008) by Karin Randolph

"To the average flatlander, a daffodil is a loud yellow belch."

3) The Romance of Happy Workers (Coffee House Press, 2008) by Anne Boyer

"I will want like splinters,
astonished spit, also like alphabets and minnows."

Charles Olson

Robert Creeley

Taken by Trees -- Julia

The New Shampoo Poetry is out now (click here)

I'm in it, and I'm in good company.

Thomas Bernhard

"In winter I think spring will be my salvation, and in summer I think autumn, and in autumn winter, it is always the same, I hope from one season to the next." -Thomas Bernhard, from: Old Masters: A Comedy, p.135

Toumani Diabate

Conversation

When you interact
with certain people --
-- only if you must interact with them --
it's like chess
but the movement
not being in any tangible sense
but still the frustration
not wanting to damage anything
so hurting the inner
part of the lip from gnawing
while speaking how words
are not really
at all a part of it
they are props
on a filthy stage
wanting really to hand over a drawing
instead of a sentence
representation not literal enough
for an icky cleansing
misremembering late
at night wanting
only a recording
to be sure of what
the mind rearranged.

From Salon.com, me

listen in

Morning Reading

"I think there is a lot in ordinary language and in received grammar that constrains our thinking – indeed, about what a person is, what a subject is, what sexuality is, what politics can be – and that I’m not sure we’re going to be able to struggle effectively against those constrains or work within them in a productive way unless we see the ways in which grammar is both producing and constraining our sense of what the world is." - Judith Butler, The Judith Butler Reader

The Menace of Gifts

It's what you expect
in return that gets me down
you're burned out
the flame retardant
on your childhood pajamas is still
giving me a headache
what were you doing in the kitchen
mixing fudge with a wooden spoon
stoned on actifed
a lanky medicine machine
fact: they exiled poets
in Plato's republic of charming
mistakes like all contemporary
things music is also a commodity
I'm throttled by the pleasure
your money provides
a censor to my glow
a coin piked in the grass
fact: the professor claimed
the manager
can't read
even with notes etched
on thighs ink protrudes
and makes the jeans look
fashionably used
the day is old
lasting longer than not
having you around anymore.

Jennifer L. Knox Interviewed me over at the Best American Poetry Blog (click here)

Thanks Jennifer.

Friday Top 5

1) George Oppen:

"Van Gogh went hungry and what shoe salesman
Does not envy him now?"

2) Lorine Niedecker:

"To sense
and sound
this world

look to
your snifter
valve

take oil
and hum"

3) Sunlight:

Right on!

4) Vic Chesnutt: Soggy Tongues:

"All those wagon fingers
are silly little stingers."

5) Gorilla Coffee:

Good vibes.

Saturday Top 5

1) I might suggest abbreviating the apocalypse by shedding your romantic tendencies.

2) Fantasy escapes no one. People are getting dead.

3) Fearlessness leads to injury and injury leads to romanticism--that's just one way of saying there's nothing like a bone poking out from your shin to bring things into focus.

4) The day is blustery and revolting as the oddly crooked mouth of a leader telling us things are okay.

5) There has never been a romantic movement among mathematicians.