Heliocentric

It's a fact
that the same sun that shines
on you, shines on me. Throat laid
bare, so a beam warms the blood
leading to my brain. Yours too.
And in the woolen, late December
march of time to some vast oblivion,
I think of the year that just went by,
and I quiver a bit, not from the cold,
but from the way it all goes by
so delightfully fast.

Happy New Year!
XO
Todd

Lambchop

TC's T's

If you'd like one, pop me an email.

Three

Sample Questions

1) What did you have for breakfast?
2) When was the last time you really cried? Like all out super crying.
3) Did you ever go through a rebellious period with your parents?
4) Did you ever slap or punch someone?
5) Have you ever thought about shaving your head? And if so, why?
6) Would you - fill-in-the-blank - for a million dollars?
7) Were you a creative kid? How did it manifest itself?
8) Were you ever embarrassed about yourself as a kid? Why?
9) How many bones have you broken?
10) Have you ever had to get stitches?
11) Do your parents enjoy your creative work?
12) Have you ever eaten a whole pizza or box of doughnuts or box of cereal in one sitting?
Why do you think that happened?
13) Do you believe time is moving faster for all of us? What are the top three indicators?
14) What kind of shampoo do you use?
15) Do you believe in ghosts?
16) Share two observations, in two sentences, on Paris.
17) Do you keep a notebook?
18) What color hair does your ideal reader have?
19) What music made you flip your lid recently?

New Collages

Lambchop - Is a Woman

Love

Cat Power - Willie (Live)

Goosebumps.

John Ashbery

"What is it to mend
and be shattered, weep and not know what you're
laughing about?"

-John Ashbery

from "Opposition Memorial" in A Worldly Country.

Lorine Niedecker

"W.H. Hudson says that birds feel something akin to pain (and fear) just before migration and that nothing alleviates this feeling except flight (the rapid motion of wings)." Lorine Niedecker

Throw Pillow Patterns

Saturday Top 10

1) Beverly Kenney singing "The Things We Did Last Summer."

2) Le Labo: Iris 39.

3) Can: Anthology (Remastered).

4) The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell.

5) Brian Eno: Here Come the Warm Jets

6) Black Point Mercantile Canvas Mats at John Derian on East 2nd St.

7) Excitability by Diane Williams.

8) Fats Waller.

9) Bix Beiderbecke.

10) Tara's new pillow. 

Slithering One

Had I known it was alive, I would never have poked it with my walking stick. The sound it made was a high pitched shrieking song that rose into the most beautiful melody I'd ever heard. Still, there was the slithering it did while emitting its lovely shriek song. That was not only upsetting to me, it upset the entire 5th grade class of Lilburn Elementary School. In the intervening years since chancing upon this beautiful, slithering creature, I'd hazard to guess, and I do mean guess. From the countless times I've done groceries, to the literally thousands of commercials I've seen for the very products that are in my home! I stood there, nonplussed, arched like a cat would be if it was under duress. Pushing a metal cart through the wide aisles always makes me think. When I get a new job, I'm going to make sure I talk about the benefits to me and what sort of joy it may bring into my life by asking pointblank, "What sort of joy will this job bring me?" I've always wanted to travel, so I did, a bit, here and there. Tuscaloosa was nice, and the Okefenokee Swamp had a peculiar, musky charm. I'm starting to get a grip on things. One thing in particular I'm getting a grip on is time passing; I get that now, totally. I also get that there might be someone else living in my apartment while I'm traveling. I can't say exactly how I know, but I've seen clues; uncovered traces. What I'm most interested in these days is the news, and how many sources there are to peruse almost nonstop. In fact, I'm so busy catching up with what's happening in the world that I almost have no time to eat! It's a musical I'd most like one day to star in, so I'm teaching myself how to sing. Later on, I'll take a stroll and reminisce about the old days before the hazards start multiplying, and leading me astray. "I'll always have you," I said to no one in particular. I need to stop biting my lips.

The Heat Transfer Years

Warm tastes sweet
and sometimes bitter;
cold can seem salty
or sour. There are people
trying to sketch the wind,
talking like their mouths are
full of bread. The modern kids seem
vexed while they work on seizures
of sunlight. Everyone breaks
my face and I get hurt
by light blue. You can put the concave
part of a cool spoon against your lips
and practice kissing someone you miss
before eating your cereal. I come
to you in peace with the smell
of factory on my arms. To meld
with the world as only a martini
could once make you meld. Red and raised.
Aspirin tablets on brown dirt. To make
our hope real is to destroy it with red
and orange being warning colors.

Monday Top 10

1) Waking up to Fats Waller's song "Rosetta" on WKCR.ORG.

2) Soutache Embroidery. I googled it.

3) Black Ice. Warnings in the New York Times.

4) "When I think of finishing the work, when I think of the finished work, a great sadness overtakes me, a sadness paradoxically like joy." from "Homeless Heart" from Quick Question by John Ashbery.

5) The idea of an "audience."

6) Morning: the radiant hiss of pipes.

7) Rimbaud the Son by Pierre Michon. "...it was all played out in three short acts: his immediate reputation as a very great poet, his keen awareness of the vanity of a reputation, and its devastation."

8) How long until we're there?

9) Walter Benjamin's section on idleness in The Arcades Project (p. 379). Baudelaire to his mother, Saturday, December 4, 1847: "Imagine a perpetual idleness with a profound hatred of that idleness."

10) Napping to Stars of the Lid.

Help

Hermann Broch

"That which had overcome him was something other than shame and more than shame: he who looks back on his life, sobered, and because of his sobriety perceives that every step of his erring path has been necessary and inevitable, yea, even natural, knows that this path of reversion was prescribed for him by the might of destiny and the might of the gods, that therefore he had been bound motionless to the spot, motionless despite all his aspirations to go forward, lost to the thicket of images, of language, of words, of sounds, commanded by fate to be entangled in the ramifications within and without." Hermann Broch from The Death of Virgil, p 142

What was the title of the poem I was supposed to write for Marianne?

If you put a tree in the middle of the room
and then decorate it with shiny objects, no one
will think you're berserk. The roundness of the
pies all have an affable glow; some are golden brown,
and another, a fruit pie, oozes deep purple. I would
like nothing more than to take a walk on a slushy sidewalk
with some good looking people. Then, perhaps a bottle
of something warm and sweet. This is Todd from Brooklyn
writing to you from a certain place amid the stacks
of objects. We're all in for it; I'll follow you there,
but if you get there first, follow me.

David Lantow & Todd Colby: Four Collaborations

Paris

The 10 Best Books of Poetry of 2013

1) Hurt in Table Accident (Corinthian Leather Press, 2013) Mike Stevens

2) Caffeinated Oxygen Tent (Sign Up Press, 2013) Daniel Kitchens

3) Great Aunt Pantone Guide (Funzalo Books, 2013) Jane Gross

4) Knitting While Eating Ribs (First Warning Press, 2013) David Clements

5) Indigo Bullshit (Book's Books, 2013) B.J. O'Doherty

6) Forest of Metal Objects (Los Angeles Taco Press, 2013) Pam Pope

7) Chicken Puddle (Conserve Paper Press, 2013) Jennifer West

8) Poets are Mostly Dorks (Blueberry Stain Press, 2013) Celine McDaniel

9) Sprinting on the Moon Would Look Like Slow Motion (Leaky Things Press, 2013) Tammy Timms

10) The Invisible Sign Language of the Streets (Tallboy Books, 2013) David Lantow

A Sustained Flapping Motion

Christmas Ball Poem

You loaf like a deer in a medicine cabinet.
You get groggy and wobble with the maximum thrills.
You are in a booming city made of metal and yarn.
Go get the box of flash and read it to me.
Blow sax machines into the bright new oblivion.
Skate in the woods on the frozen lake.
Eat gingerbread, and eagles; and pout.
You have big baby status among smaller babies.
The roof is collapsing from sugar and punks.
All I have to do is whistle and the wreath
starts shedding. Settle in for the duration
of claustrophobic winter chills and wind.
You can see sparkles where once stood a dull formation.
You may now lick lemon jelly from the tip
of santa's hat. Do justice to the mighty,
serve treats to the passengers,
and light up, and lighter.

A Poem About Vaporization

The focus is revolutionary
when not focused on the storm -
or this glitzy plaza - but an actual place
full of details that seem certain
or almost clear, certain though, of a storm.
I'm up to us in parts, so this day is
good to you in a new way or you'll assume I'm bringing
you good news for once. I'll just be singing and dancing
with the most spectacular news ever.
I am reaching into the future of this day.
If I were vaporized, you could breathe me in,
but that would not be so great for me.
So I'll just keep getting my skin on your hand.
The efficiency is important to notice.
I cannot decline you.

Hazy Evening

If your dad was my mother,
I'd call him mother. I would,
because that’s what you call your mother.
If it looks like us, I keep it. It’s safe to walk around,
considering the benefits of being amused
now and again. For instance;
you go on a safari and tranquilize a rhino,
and then you go and hug it, and take a picture
of yourself with it, before it
wakes up and stumbles away awkwardly.
The world looks so familiar to you,
doesn't it? Like you've been here
all along, only you just now started
paying attention enough to know how
to see it like you’re an alien. These days
will devour you if you let them.

December

Behold that wilted splendor; the trees
are the same color as hamburger. I know the song
of the cardinal and it goes a little
something like this. Pangs twist
a belly, until it dawns, eat! The light in
early December hurts my eyes, and yours?
A chilled apple, a lit candle, and early
blues on WKCR. The smell of wormwood,
somewhere, is making me think of Long Island
City. What a person does on a Saturday is
purposefully radiant and productive. If
a stroll under the Manhattan Bridge brings
solace, go there. If a hat is needed, they
are sold all over Brooklyn.

My dear friend & collaborator David Lantow and I in his studio (featuring our recent collaborations)

Allen Ginsberg on Breath, Shelley & Punctuation

Allen Ginsberg: "The other precursor, to get ahead in time to the 19th Century is (Percy Bysshe) Shelley, who, I guess, is more or less familiar to most of you. How many of you have read any Shelley? [Students give a show of hands] - Okay - And how many have read Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" here? [Students show of hands less than the first time]. So I thought there are (at least) three pieces by Shelley that will illustrate the phrase.. (or, rather)... illustrate the word - "inspired" - "Inspiration" (that was one of the phrases, one of the words, that I was using). "Expansive" (by "expansive", I really mean "expansive breath", lterally, a breath, that is [Allen exhales deeply] large, with the spine straight, that can only be produced when the spine is straight, (and) when the body is relaxed, when the body is a hollow reed, a hollow tube, and in that state of unobstructed inspiration, unobstructed breathing (inspiration means breathing, remember, and exhalation), a kind of cosmic afflatus is reached. It's a literal state, a physiological state, as well as a mental state, as well as a poetic state. And it's accomplished by a great many poets, who have left behind formulae to reach that state - and the formulae to reach that state is the text, (like "A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"), which, if you pronounce it aloud, properly, following the(ir) punctuation to show you the(ir) breathing (where you stop and take another breath), using the(ir) punctuation as orators, hints for breathing, literally, taking it literally, not reading past a comma with the same breath, but, in other words, stopping at each comma and taking a new breath.. (assuming that you have a text which is from the hand of the poet himself, and not a text which has been stupidly corrected by a scholar to add more punctuation and commas, which might change the breathing."

Read the whole piece (& countless other treasures from the Ginsberg Archives) here: The Allen Ginsberg Project

Lift

Out here in the urban wilds
the wind goes "whoosh" through buildings,
while the sun plops down over everything
at severe angles. The vacant lot of brown grass sways
a syrupy dance, undulating like hips
during a fuck. Heavy with rust, all the cars
creak over the dusty highway.
We drink snow coffee and pace
around our aluminum shed,
glancing at our reflections in
oily puddles to determine the effects
of the environment on our rush
through time. Gravity plays no
small part when we drop things.
In fact, it is because of gravity
that a baby can rest on a knee
without floating away.
By nightfall, the city is dark,
people stumble over curbs and cuss,
brushing themselves off, and breathing
through rags dipped in vetiver
to disguise the smell of the dark.
In the morning, we'll eat the things
that are least covered with gray dust,
stopping between bites to blow dead skin
from the back of our hands.

Drawing: Hug Monkey

A monkey with extremely long arms.
The monkey can't walk.

Chris Burden - The New Museum

The Missing Book of Spurs (after party: slow motion drink spill)

Billy Cancel Told Me

Billy Cancel told me
air collapses into light
sockets and shocks the pubis
into a hip shake frenzy.
He said dance amid the cobwebs
that happen to be nutritious and
delicious smeared on your clothing
or melted on your tongue. Get your
walk on so the template is wiped
clean with blue Windex and some
soapy shovel with a napkin
at its edge for scraping
the dodgy bits from the panes.
You think you've got all day
to climb the stairs, Billy said,
but your collapse is imminent,
will come suddenly and so draws
to a close. Daisies stuffed into
the barrel of a rifle, Billy said,
look pleasing but stop nothing.
The future is now, Billy added,
it will ripple through your days.

The Visit

When we got to the lake
it was broiling in the car. The house was brown
and chalky. Next to it, a dead rodent lay on its side,
rotting. We expected these things in America.
An onion field provided a quick glimpse
into the void of summer. We felt a spasm of grief,
so we soothed ourselves with a thermos
of cold mint tea. Once the luggage was propped
next to the car, we walked stiffly into the house,
which quivered in the heat. Now and then a bluejay
or an airplane made us look up at the sky,
which was errantly blue, as though it
was overloaded with pigment put there by vandals.
Had we been scotch drinkers, we would have
sat on the porch in the faded yellow
butterfly chairs, and drank it from children's cups
with various cartoon characters on them.
Instead, we decided to christen the house
with a round of fucking, which we did, vigorously.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Wednesday Top 10

1) What are Megabucks?

2) Knife in the coffee.

3) A pot of crayons melting.

4) Little Velvet Things versus A Fully Functional Human Being.

5) A bunch of fancy marshmallows with tiny pieces of roasted coconut stuck to them.

6) Grey blue jeans.

7) Rainy & windy bullshit.

8) Lightning Bolt.

9) Splash State.

10) Tara.

Rest Stop

The slanted light of Bergen Street
blasts the back of a bus like it was
a metal shed. The blossoms have been
nipped off, pressed hard between
thumb and forefinger; establishing
a red juice thumbprint from the petals.
I'm loafing all the time now that the
volition of tasks has slowed
to a murky expanse of morning
into afternoon into the dark by
4:30 pm. The silver radiator
hisses red steam with the radio
on. The trees are almost stripped
bare by the wind, even. People used to
thumb a ride, wander in consternation,
do battle with evil spirits, that sort of stuff.
Nowadays, it's buddy-buddy chats, status
updates from the urine temple,
and a light dose of canker for the
tongue's laborious excursions.

You Can't Eat the View

You can't eat the view
but you can take a tumble
in that pile of golden ginkgo leaves
pressed against the gate. My actions
are frequently ill-advised,
but percolating anyway.
Fists pump to breakfast metal
while a plastic bag appears
to be struggling to stay in a tree.
Good morning, from the end of something;
where melancholia meets promise.
But first, this robust German bread
with a dollop of peanut butter
and a glob of honey.

An Artforum photo from last night's performance of The Missing Book of Spurs

The Missing Book of Spurs

Performa 2013 and MV Studio presents

THE MISSING BOOK OF SPURS
a new work by Marianne Vitale with music by Mike Stroud starring Todd Colby Cole Mohr Walter Gambín Caleb Addison Billy Cancel Susannah Liguori Jingles Boiler Janelle Miau William Burgess Olimpia Dior Bennet Williams India Menuez Amanda Topaz Anat F Chichton Atkinson Janet Castel Chole Rosetti Victoria Crowbar Rukhsana Farman Jack Shannon Stephen Franco Simone Cole Blumstein and Adrian Caridi with Michael Gerner Bogdan Teslar Kwiatkowski

costumes: Diva Pittala & Francois Hugon makeup and hair: Andrea Helgadottir lighting: Kiki Lindskog, Matthew Reily and Ross Epps sound and light coordination: Rosey Selig-Addiss sound tech: Tommy Malekoff and construction: Louis Perez

NOVEMBER 20, 21, 22 and 23, 2013

8PM SHARP

DOORS OPEN AT 7:30PM

Queens, New York

FOR TIX, VISIT: http://13.performa-arts.org/event/marianne-vitale
photography: Silja Magg

Colleen

I'm Just Saying

Basically, I’m about as crisp as a frozen duck.
I sleep so lightly that my bed could be a boat
drifting out to sea. I’m aware of the wires under the world
that are just nerves along fault lines that startle the city
awake late at night. When dried rice is dropped on the sidewalk
it springs back up. That’s just the nerves in the earth
snapping back. I’d like to thank today the same way
I would thank a mechanic for fixing a machine.
Such an odd way to be walking around thanking things.
I’m alert to this bland mode of my becoming.
I mean really: if I were a sailor in the Atlantic
with swells lapping at my boat,
I’d be all like, I’d rather be home.

The Captain

We taught the Captain how to interact better with others while playing the piano. He was a tremendous showman, and he displayed his showmanship by behaving seductively when he performed. He was not a monster. He was hungry after he played for us, so we made the Captain walk, and he was good at walking. We never approached the Captain if he was eating, sleeping, or chewing. We exposed the Captain to many different situations and many different people so he knew how to act appropriately in a lot of situations. We enjoyed watching the Captain move after we applied oil to his body. We never left the Captain unattended. We stroked the Captain affectionately until he fell asleep with his head in the crook of his arm. The Captain was not aggressive or territorial. When people outside bothered the Captain, we removed him from the window. Please: no pinching, hitting or pulling on the Captain, no matter how playful he may appear. The Captain’s personality and physical demands complement our lifestyle. We don’t ever allow anyone to play tug of war with the Captain. We monitor the Captain until we hear a tinkle and bonk sound coming from his piano. If the Captain appears nervous, anxious, or afraid, we immediately remove him from the situation and reward him with a deep tongue kiss. We made sure there were no holes or gaps in the fence so the Captain couldn’t escape. We observed the Captain in the yard a good many hours. So tired was the Captain, so very tired.

Colleen (Cecile Schott)

Colleen's music (Cecile Schott, from France) has been the soundtrack to my writing and editing mornings of late. Her music is enchanting and hypnotic, a soothing balm for the mind. Her website is here.

Collage #13

Jonas Mekas

Dan Weiss's drum interpretation of auctioneer Ty Thompson

Washing My Face

How small my head feels
when I wash my face. Like a peach,
my head. While applying water
to my face I think,
"My peach is so small."
But my head is large
and heavy. Actually, it is unwieldy.
My head is a burden, so to speak.
In confined spaces it
bumps into things, a lot.

Lou Reed

I'll be singing the song "The Blue Mask."

Program for the Day

What you can do is stop being gloomy
long enough to eat an entire lemon;
skin, seeds, and all. Or, become one
of those people who eat an entire bulldozer
by sawing it into small, lozenge-sized chunks,
eating it bit by bit. You could do that.
Or you could play a stacking game, where you
stack things in your apartment by their approximate
size or color, starting with the largest objects
on the bottom and working your way up to the smallest.
That could take all day, or at least until nightfall,
when a new threshold is crossed, and all the snow
reminds you November is here and that you should
bring your mind back from September and join us.

Donny and Joe Emerson - Baby

Franz Kafka

"Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair. Just when everything seems over with, new forces come marching up, and precisely that means that you are alive. And if they don't, then everything is over with here, once and for all."

Franz Kafka, July 21, 1913 from Diaries

The Missing Book of Spurs (Rehearsing)

"It doesn't hurt at all. That's awesome!"

Sunday Night!

The singular work of Paris-based Spanish filmmaker, playwright, poet, and artist Fernando Arrabal defies categorization, utilizing humor, shock, and confrontation while embracing excess, irrationality, and the grotesque. In a celebration of Arrabal’s provocative oeuvre, poet Todd Colby will MC an evening of poetry, cabaret interventions, and impromptu performances at the Bowery Poetry Club. Drawing inspiration from Arrabal’s 1992 film Farewell Babylon!, in which a modern-day Nadja traverses the streets of New York in the chaos of the city, the evening will feature a collage of vibrant characters. Featuring interventions by Amanda Alfieri, Gage Boone, Todd Colby, Mel Gordon, item idem, Joseph Keckler, Irvin Climaco Morazan, Ariana Reines, and Jacolby Satterwhite.

Presented with Martin E. Segal Center, CUNY and Spain Culture New York-Consulate General of Spain. Curated by Marc Arthur and Charles Aubin.

Sunday, November 10. 9:00pm

The Bowery Poetry Club
$15

Tickets

Good Morning

Metal

Enthusiasm is a silver tonic hot for teacher.
These candles flicker in the night. A bedspread
soaked with peach schnapps. Solve the most kinked doubt
with a unit built for speed marked GET OFF.
On a map the bits of color signify states.
I shall name them in the order of my awareness
of them, their names, not my arrival in the actual
places they represent. I mean nothing to you.
Let this all boil down to confusion, followed
by a shortness of breath, pacing, METAL MACHINE MUSIC
on REPENT, which masks the highway sounds
and helps devour RENE DAUMAL in my sleep,
even. A rosier tonic was never, or ever was.

Colleen - The Weighing Of The Heart

Thurston Moore

Thurston and Anne Waldman will be reading this Wednesday night at The Poetry Project at 8pm. I'll be introducing Thurston.

Stephen Mitchelmore

Stephen Mitchelmore, always compelling and insightful, has a marvelous review of Reiner Stach's biography of Kafka, Kafka: The Years of Insight. Here's an excerpt from Stephen's review:

"While readers of The Years of Insight receive a rich and moving account of the pressures of one man's life in a certain time and place, the true authority of the biography is felt in what is glimpsed around the accumulated detail, and even more so in what gets lost: photographs taken with Felice Bauer ruined because she inserted the film back to front, the stash of notebooks written in Berlin confiscated by the Gestapo, the life not lived because it was ended prematurely by a disease that would soon be curable and, most of all, what happened to his friends and family years later. It is not an authority of power." -Stephen Mitchelmore

Read the entire review here: This Space.

Blue Empire

The Missing Book of Spurs

George Bataille

Poetry Crush

Poetry Crush.
Assignment: 10 Dead Poets (I would fuck).
Participants:

J. Hope Stein
Miracle Jones
Todd Colby
Jennifer L. Knox
Lauren Hunter
Janaka Stucky
Joanna Penn Cooper
Gabriel Don
Gregory Crosby
Lisa Marie Basile

Read it all here, over at Poetry Crush.

Sound in Space: An Essay

The amazing Amy Fusselman from Ohio Edit published my essay here.

Sound Rough!

Give me a bid.
Give me a bid.
Give me a bid.
Give me a bid.
Give me a bid.
Give me a bid.
Give me a bid.
Give me a bid.
Give me a bid.
Give me a bid.

My Amusements

I built a chamber and added some scarlet bunting
and a chicory tan sash. It gave my visitors pleasure
and enlivened their responsiveness to my cunning ways.
I used a live electric microphone to address them, always.
I put egg crate baffles on the ceiling to direct the sound
of my voice coming from the public address system.
I had them march in a circle, all three of them.
When we got tired, we slept on a huge canvas cloth
that smelled of mildew and lavender.
Every morning there was coffee and a forecast
of grief, slovenly put, but apropos of nothing.

Ride into the sun...