Truck

John M. Bennett / from VIBROMAX

2012-03-11T14:38:00.003-05:00

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino / Skips

2012-03-10T09:51:00.000-06:00

one bus,
said of certain places

which may, at sites, be
or, for such as certain sites

a, saying, or, for standing
a, may be holding places

and doubtless other combinations
one bus.

and if it is but agreeable
a hand or glove or calendar

as, he was
but not in certain places

which, when sounding
just above, and, sounding just above

are gone, or, for some time
by rote or involuntary action

between highest and lowest
is present, and absent, is gone and when

that aspect, to be events
alike, in which they are alike

between highest and lowest
the features

perceived or thought about
seem suddenly, to fit

also spelled insight or solution
the use of, or, as means his present station

and doubtless other combinations
which are themselves

his means
the skin, the hair, the coat

are fairly, then, it matches, either of the two
in which, unfit variations

are discarded
are held at mutual right angles, say

as when a new hat
or sometimes used as synonyms

is part
or,

as a rule, a new hat
is considered of involuntary action

or,
in respect to suspended judgment

in which, a measure of degree
they are, so alike

being highest, possible highest
the skin, the hair, the coat

an irrepressible action
or

due to lips
and doubtless other combinations

attained by involuntary action
as when a new hat is considered part

of one’s coat
or rival, or station

John Crouse / from REFRAINS

2012-03-09T01:03:00.002-06:00

from REFRAINS

Cheek derision cherry treasure bosom smart reprimand, accidental
Mainly infantile chill twitter chivalrous. Courtesy file throttle elect hew, routine
Chronic narrative chuckle buddy panorama enclose honest globular anxiety event
Assets cite. Contradict dweller uncouth aver, racket solidarity latent
Baffle, collision keep classification talon mop unclouded clemency.

Pastoral bungling sobriety, patron scar aura zenith clasp, cape effrontery
Solace glad nurture commode gnaw modish chide commander immature, frosty
Tweet uncivil. Knighthood dainty gag, opt mince duty unending, distortion
Giggle chum effigy orbit swerving bulbous indifference.

Factors quote denizen, boorish enlightenment tame uphold hush acrimony secret
Unfold. Harmony fastening caste masterpiece clause nail decontaminate
Dubious grace, typist backward sagacity, customer escarpment ambiance,
Anticlimax mount snip impertinent soothe.

Dishearten, dear chest, bite chic extol
Leading childlike heated chirp gentlemanly, courtesy thin
Strangle perennial etching cinema gainsay means metropolis allege acrimony,
Mismatch grip species. Index scratch dirty evidently priestly slow
Perspicacity, bluff atmosphere effrontery.

Glee undervalue commend, babyish gallant, ardent titter roundabout quote ignorance
Din decipher ordering scour, lucid platitude obstructed.

Jim Leftwich / not that

2012-03-01T14:24:00.001-06:00

not that

plagiarism cloud withheld necessary the.

hovering as volumes emulate invention.

linguistic because this your this.

implies semi-conscious all solely.

NEOISTS use the six forms of disgorgementation
to organize their revolutionary ideology:
plaguegerism [sick], multiplutraction,
immorltalismint, serpravity, love-machine/sex/
racket-ball and surrationality. In the current
world situationismist, we are confronted by an
infirmary of paradoxes. The Neoists realize that
these paradoxes at hat are the result of the
definity of false

their confusion around rationality
oppositions Neoists unite againsst
this into a reactionary force aare
considered the by capitalism and o
f truth. Our rejction of irrationa
lity has been for the Neoists them
selves. truth, beauuty and perhaps
infinity becomes our propaganda me
rely a step towards even the inter
nalization of confusion inherentnn

viable those because beyond state of attractive,

quickly darkness and meaning. the.

you cannot
between the which
less of the most.

it has been a construction wound-memory
of tactile referential

/world. the. in the first place. strik
ifs absurd. I dottt write autob. galle
iography, but I know that peopll subst
will read my books as autobiogra reale
phy. is the author of defiant prose, n
no pith, and stockhausen prize with ah
gun.

the is page temporarily you unavailable.
please try the following address bar in.
correctly not found. you may be at tempt
ed to your lucky visit a page a day to e
xplore what currently does not exist. jo
in us.

we realize through contemplation that th
e existence med to be osition, that is t
o say, opposition to what is assu ment w
e define ourselves as the pinacle of thi
s opp iation, through opposition and fri
ction, for the mo is a particular instan
ce of the universal different as a resul
t of the transformation of the human con

survival to authors, but
distraction.

point. and embrace ,m but rather
developing, the limit
our fear is not this sentence.

02.29.2012

Peter Ganick / from 'webern songs informed'

2012-03-01T10:40:00.001-06:00

as music is heeded an avantness **

pieces from itself befriend

earphones’ duet with spoken

arrangements thought* *truisms—

vacant from a startled impression

common tolerance one to evidence once—

a boat mid-range to pluck on shelf selfless

anonymity breathes your name—

maiden voyages delay overhaul—

ask the pinecones where suppressed

another-ing placates intentions

made or got by happiness—

once though not complicit

with etched familiarities—

epochal nourishment—

clannish & middling strophes

delay a status improbable

though itself—this than that—

incurs selflessness—

somewhere itself—

a nighttime evidence proclivity

for transit so a recurrence plotted

deployment to issues of surpluses—

the entire light-sound iffy

whose sixpence relays jet-ski themes

somewhere viewpoint-ing deliberate sadness

stepping where close fundamentals

inquire no longer

we contact surveillance

noteworthy through signals

enabling remission of cash invasion—

returnable intersection—

wiles of dramatic sleuth—

ions of demand seek what overturns—

a delay of front-to-back rhetoric

unrolling anarchy harmonized

within waitings from each—

there—signed to mittens

either assurances deploy

mottoes each is naturally conscious

of public remoteness—

one step before regulations start—

a dream follows another dream of

soprano lightness—

bass curvature—

natural altimeters & cinemas

energize tassels—

deterrents wait somewhere sleuthing

an advantage for major-minor facsimiles—

acausal somehow where we camp

dotted & egoic modulations—

some sunshine every sleeper is convinced of

essences a malleability—

call it ductile—

seeking neutrality one step from togetherness—

aware & watching evaluations—

present contrasts feint poseurs in their

mirage—balancing acts integrate mottos

unrolling addendas that surface

outer signatures watch so iterations—

where calls intersect

forcing a waiver

materially grit—

whose muscle ingratiates emptiness—

a vivace thoroughly surmounted—

obtains—

attentions are elsewhere climb

a settler’s mood—

elasticity wanes not

fractions—

either persistence deluges repartee

inertia clusters where signatures—

elemental assertions evacuating watersheds—the

finesse of somewhere—inculcation evinces deliberation some whatever—

agreement is formatted as evasion

replacement vanishes—literal

comprehension attenuates veneer

also calls frames to such grand spaces—

mannerisms whether or not

evacuated contemplate infinities—

lithe where absolute—degreed

while thickness elicit reflection

sought by the budding public sees

hollow boutiques—

numerous later tented with

wiles of stellar vin number

jettisoned where hastening

roughened tureens & implode on contact—

ingestion of doubts is certain contradiction—

a grammatical surprise invents felicitous

reports--

preliminaries—

topics—

what have you—

inserted as vitrines of long-time

premises are egalitarian from accent—

neither evasion nor confrontation

allows or disputes opacities emaciating—

straddling—waterfallen—

appearing as sunshine-dusted rooms—

ethereal sleuth invokes itself

elaborate cell-wise mouthpieces

denigrating wooly garage-bandages—

leaves on cutlery balance through

intentional corrections mentioned

aside valences spirals nothingness

unnecessary—

which scarified patience waits for

introduction to evidence?

when heresy becomes hearsay-in-reverse

amulets & innersprings overhaul anonymity.

Welcome Truck's driver for March

2012-02-29T21:56:00.000-06:00

Many thanks go to Gerald Schwartz for his work at the wheel of Truck
during February. And greetings go to our March editor/driver who
takes over tomorrow--Jukka-Pekka Kervinen.

Have fun, and stay on the road.

G. E. Schwartz/ HATMAN

2012-02-28T09:31:00.002-06:00

The lake checks its lapping on the shore

to lull late night and then to watch.

The breeze stills its breath in willows

to catch his soft footfall on the beach

as he and his shadow turn, a figure

glowing on its own, where sky and lake

join in the weak light across a beach

parched as bone. The ghosts of

sturgeon lift from the chilled depths

to expand the silent throng: slithering

lamprey, curled alewives, turned shad;

all beneath the surface of these waters.

Gulls halt in the sky, then turn frantic

in convoluted flight--as the night

finds words (All the living left to come,

all the dead long past) under a driven moon

by Point Gratiot's reaching cliffs.

G. E. Schwartz/ SHADOW PEOPLE

2012-02-28T09:23:00.002-06:00

I saw two shadow people standing

by the pond, against an afternoon's light

on rushes, the thin arm of one

reaching from between the small

planets of water-lilies, and saw

that a spider has strung threads

from the other's knees to silver

out over the water adjacent to

the paired black wings of damselflies

& their tiny dance of egg-laying. And

I was strangely at peace with both of them,

each modest eclipse reaching,

and I was at peace that whoever

had cut their forms, painting them black,

set them there as

additions to light.

G. E. Schwartz/ENGINE OF LIFE, FRANKLIN INSTITUTE, 1965

2012-02-28T09:22:00.000-06:00

I walked through The Engine of Life, the giant

walk-through heart, through its blood-pulsed places,

seeking the path, exploring valves, following the current

of my classmates. Touching walls, cardiac muscle was touched,

as were raised arteries clammier than my palms. My

feet shuffled through two chambers, feeling the fibre-glass

contours unyeilding through my thin soles. In near dark

I moved from venticle to ventricle, near deaf, thrilled

with pounding. All around the enormous heartbeat,

sensed, artificial, larger than all life, relentless. Just

there my heart was as small as a sparrow's, its living

compartments ready to seize in silence. Emerging,

my mouth gaped in wonder, knowing--just then--

where I was in this world, one untold millions have

since passed through.

Michael Rosenthal/ AT THE ALTAR

2012-02-27T14:09:00.000-06:00

We all die in anger

little time to learn
to say the tender words

"I love the rain."

The water that glazes the stone
also wears it away.

Andrew Burke/ THE ORPHAN IN MY ROOM

2012-02-27T13:32:00.002-06:00

In nineteen sixty three at age nineteen, I crossed
the Nullarbor, the longest straight stretch in the world sitting up on Australian National
railways, Sydney to Perth.
too old to stay with Mother,
I rented a bed in a boarding house
above a city cafe. Living on savings,
I shared a room with a stranger
to stretch the point to its limit.
An LP cost 52/6 back then.
the man in my room was
thick-set, of medium height
with curly close-cropped ginger hair
and cloudy hazel eyes, a fireman
from Perth City Station, a loner
who grew up in an orphanage, taken
from his mother in England and shipped
to Australia 'for his own good'. Try
asking him about that, 'for his own good'.
So much bunkum. As we came and went,
he marveled at the girls I knew and I
believed his dramatic tales. He had
no one, said he wasn't worth it, had
a beer at the end of the bar occasionally,
bet on the ponies with his loose change,
but otherwise, read popular magazines
on his bed, chin thrust forward against
whatever the world served up next.
Sunday's the cathedrals' bells
scattered pigeons, while in our quarter
the streets lay bare. Right by Perth's
central fire station was the Salvo's Citadel.
Sunday mornings their brass band would
set up music stands on a nearby corner
and play. The fireman and i would go
there, not for the message but
the music. talk of God was off limits, we listened in silence. Ten years
between us, curiosity kept us
in each other's company. That's the way
of poets and fireman, curious to a fault,
late night creaking on ghostly beds.
'Turn your light away, will ya?'
'Yeah, sure, sorry.' He huffed.
'And don't apologise every five minutes.'
'Sorry.' we both laughed and turned back
to Pix and Time.
One day I arrived
to find him throwing his possessions
into a duffel bag. 'What's up?' I asked.
He looked up, eyes clearer than ever,
and spat, 'I'm outta here, that's all,'
threw in two magazines and tied up.
I followed him to the stairs, bewildered,
silenced by the hostility coming off him.
The old bat who ran the joint waited
at the door. Sniffing came from the kitchen-
loud, melodramatic sniffing.
I shouted, 'Where're you going?'
from the top of the stairs as he
stopped at the door and turned.
The old bat barred the door with her body,
as he shouted over her shoulder,
'See ya, mate." I stood still as he took off.
She watched him, then shouted,
'Good riddance! and slammed the door.

Jesse Glass/ poem about Cid Corman

2012-02-27T13:26:00.002-06:00

Let the poor mad bad man live for 50 years abroad

& tell us his poems are greater than Dante's

He camps in a burning house

His tiny wife an ember

A knuckle-bone

charred black

Is all that will show up

Come next turn of an orb

That poor mad bad man with taped-together glasses

Whose name means "asshole" in Japanese

Wears a boot with a hole in the toe

When he walks declaiming to

himself

Some wisdom only he will consider

5 syllables at a

time

Come pulverize that special man of stone

Reduce him to his shatter color

Deer horn pressure point strike & flake

Plate chip platform burr

Him song him tell him cry into our mouth

Long weed heads tremble

Drag forth an old bone shank bone

Strike, crack it on a boulder

That old man's voice

A blown-thru reed:

& hectic written levers

Shake his lips shut

Vanessa Paige/ choreography

2012-02-25T20:48:00.001-06:00

Vanessa Paige, who formally was a member of the Maud Baum Dance Company and EBA, curates and directs Soundance at the Stable, which hosts Vanessa Paige Dance. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Vanessa Paige dance has performed group and solo dances throughout New York and abroad. The company also has provided arts education services to New York public school students since its founding in 1984. The company also curates several showcases of independent choreography, including the annual Winterlight and Splendor of Desire programs, as well as an improvisational festival.

Here's an extraordinary clip of Paige in a 9 months pregnant dance solo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTVfNBS9Gk8

JESSE GLASS/ Jeffrey Dahmer at Grand Avenue Mall, Milwaukee, 1988

2012-02-23T13:32:00.003-06:00

I saw him passing & repassing
Among the young black men laughing

Tough in Bulls Jackets, hats
Raked at a threatening angle--the fixed look

In his eye, the prognathic jaw
& his oddly wooden movements.

I thought "how out of place," this white man
In alligator shirt new jeans almost every lunch hour

The polished floors of Grand Avenue
Food court, long blue windows: scoops

Of Lake Michigan Sky. He was treating
Them all to Kimchi Pork, Teriaki Chicken,

Mexican black beans, high-fiving,
Buying the boys beer & pizza. He'd

Bend near their testosterone sprawl, shaping
His lips as if to say, "Isn't life good,

My friends? Enjoy!" & I recall their laughter,
Their nudging each other in the ribs
An open joke

As he again heaped up their plates.

JOHN ROCHE/ Amazing Stories of Literary Rejection, volume 1.

2012-02-23T13:30:00.000-06:00

Journal run by hip twenty-somethings
(or so I construe)
rejects poems from ROAD GHOSTS,
including one about freaking out watching
some dude I barely know shooting up
coke and LSD combo
in men's room of Rte. 66 Esso station.

Editors say, there's a question about the reality of someone "shooting up/ coke and LSD combo" in an "Esso station". nobody's heard of LSD being shot up...

So I respond, Happy to look for something else. But if someone on your editorial staff thinks the above trivia impugns the integrity of the book, then fuck 'em.

Of course, the editorial board misses the point, as the poem is a tale told by a
17-year-old tripping fool being told something (maybe) in 40-year recollection
put down on paper, everything a priori indeterminate, except the fear, the black-out hole
in the universe, the blood-splattered needle, and the fact that, miracle of miracles, the
junkie came back to see if I was alive, just like William S. Fucking Burroughs'
immaculate conception Christmas card
and I apparently (at least all else predicated on) survived-
If not I'm living a pretty good facsimile of the previous earth dimension
(though how would I know?), and anyway, that was an analog world
so I'm no longer there, or there's no there there, as Rumsfeld might say
and at least the beer's better now than the Coors we drank back then
and the wine, too, better than Ripple and Boone's Farm
and the coffee a hell of a better than Denny's watery brew
though I miss that old Mexican dirt weed
not hydroponicked or super-sized or genetically modified
just plain ol' weed you could smoke all day and not get lazy.

Then I get to thinking, ah, a simple Google search! To find out what "nobody's heard of":

During the psychedelic era, Dr. Hofmann struck up friendships with such outsize
personalities as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley, who, nearing death
in 1963, asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes
of throat cancer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/world/europe/30hofmann.html

Mumbai Shooters were on coke and LSD:
"We found injections containing traces of cocaine and LSD left behind by terrorists and later found drugs in their blood," said one official.
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=73366.0

Intravenously Injecting LSD:
http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/6005985

And there are many more such evidences on the Worldwide Web.

Postscript: So I send this poem to guy I know on the staff (red-mustachioed Hotspur;
actually a most promising poet-scholar) who tells me a) they aren't all that hip, and b) the lead editor is actually a 50-something poet. So I GOOGLE editor. And there, emblazoned on his blogspot, in bold letters, is the motto, "Poets are liars. None of these poems represent actual people or events accurately. Any truths you find are inside of you."

DAVE ESPOSITO/ music and activism

2012-02-23T11:15:00.001-06:00

Dave Esposito publishes music and videos under the moniker Solomons RamaDa, a name he coined for a performance Music and poetry improvisational ensemble two decades ago and which remains ongoing to this day. Never quite hip enough to be a part of any music scene that would have him as a member, Esposito pursues a corporate career while surreptitiously making music and documenting events like OCCUPY BOSTON in his adopted home. His actual music career reaches back more than two decades and he's played with bands ranging from blues to reggae to jazz to alt rock, always injecting originality into the compositions.

Here's America, which documents Occupy Boston, as well as a commentary on the general state of these Unites States:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-uNn1KddMM&feature=youtube-gdata-player

His Your Own Mardi Gras shakes out as a powerful rant through, with and in religion:

httP://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zxCWmUPOOw&feature=youtube_gdata_player

And, live from the algae-covered murkiness of the Palais Royale, Albany, New York near twenty years ago, the ballad If It's What You Want (lyrics in this case by G. E. Schwartz):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG-8P-DE-zU&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Here's a darker version of Chicago's Poem For The People, recorded live at Joey's Basement Lounge, , Mass (2009):

http://sites.google.com/site/tuesdayswofred/Home/PoemforthePeople.mp3?attredirects=O&d=1

And here's an interpretation of Esposito's favorite Herbie Hancock tune--Dolphin Dance, recorded IMOB studios, 2009:

http://sites.google.com/site/tuesdayswolfred/Home/DolphinDance.mp3?attredirects=)&d=1

And, finally, for Solomons Ramada collaborations and individual works:

http://sites.google.com/site/solomonsramada/

ANDREW BURKE/ The Name of the Game

2012-02-22T10:11:00.000-06:00

Oh, I see it is the time
of the year for lace faced fungus,
woodlice and red-bellied ants, snails
that deckle our mail, and the trimming
of our curry tree.

In the shallow pond
across the road a white-faced heron
looks for frogs and freshwater snails
grateful for anything in this muddy water.
We walk by
dogs sniffing the news,
looking where new growth
grows green and bright from the late
summer brushfire. It looks so fresh against
the charred trunks.

In dried edges
of the pond, before its
low banks, the council tried
a re-vegetation program at the end
of summer, but

the heat hung on,
and now we see the few
survivors dusted off by late
autumn rain. I straighten bamboo
placed to prop up

new plants. Last year
and the year before that
we did the same - small areas
of fledgling trees and bushes
support each other

as their root systems
tap into the subterranean
water sources or spread out
laterally to catch what moisture there is
just below the surface.

Perseverance is
the name of the game,
returning to the earth what
is the earth's for the earth to
be continued.

STEVE SWELL/ music

2012-02-22T09:58:00.000-06:00

Born in Newark, NJ, Steve Swell has been an active member of the New York City music community since 1975. He has toured and recorded with many artists from main streamers such as Lionel Hampton and Buddy Rich to so-called outsiders such as Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, Cecil Taylor and William Parker. He has over 30 recordings as a leader or c-leader and is a featured artist on more than 100 releases. He runs workshops around the world and is a teaching artist in the NYC public school system focusing on special needs children.

Steve was nominated for the Trombonist of the Year award for 2008 and 2011 by the Jazz Journalists Association, and was selected Trombonist of the Year 2008, 2009 and 2010 by the magazine El Truso of Argentina. He is the recipient of the 2008 Jubilation Foundation Fellowship Award of the Tides Foundation. The Downbeat Critics Poll selected him for the Trombone category in 2010 and 2011.

You can see him in action here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v+yxEW89y4RzU

You can read some of his poetry at:

http://www.steveswell.com/SteveSwellPoetry.htm

You can learn more about him... tour dates, discography, etc. here:

http://www.steveswell.com/

Mark Weiss/ poems

2012-02-16T14:10:00.002-06:00

TRANSCENDENCE

In a world of gesture
three deaf teenagers
"speak," her hands
an electric dance, the boys
cruder, in a world
in which scratching an itch
may be a silent eloquence.

ONE HOPES

Based on the known,
imagining the confluence,
one hopes for a florid excitement, a spastic
flailing, some kind of
satisfaction.

ONE DOES

In time one decorates necessity.

A foot becomes a skein of bones.

What I said
and what I thought I said
and what I meant to say.

A QUESTION TO THE STARS

Are there any here
but us chickens?
Have there ever been?

A TASK

Not that I make this place
but that I make
its story.

END OF TIME

The season arrives with a clamor of geese.
And at the end of it.

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

Sometimes transcendence is a trick of harmony,
tonic to dominant-C major-
and the sky opens.

Lakey Comess/ Minus three, rising

2012-02-16T14:01:00.002-06:00

That's right. They should stop telling us stories,
as though we are still gullible children. It's really insulting.

What is it like to be lumped with vigilantes?
Did you say something righteous about hell (and return)? Did you find out by chance?
Keep hold of extenuating circumstance. It might come in handy.

I'm thinking in terms of strong mitigation. That's a choice cut of sarcasm you use.
Show me your memories, or are they all too unbearable.

Lakey Comess/ No flashlight, borrow mine

2012-02-16T13:53:00.002-06:00

Strike light on files marked personal.
Deviants cower in darkness entering ninth circle.
Surprise heated by sunrise awaits.

Perception flows over rock, glistening green algae.
You have discovered an enclave, but not a shelter.

Enter in silence. Dante is sleeping.

Set to right damage caused by natural disaster,
good intentions flow down the line, broad-handled in space.

History provides other occasion for outpour and edit.
Beneath bid bridges, troubled waters swirl and eddy.

Focus is on the heart, waiting for liberation.

*

Heather in blossom,

seasonal endeavor,

rock chastened hive.

Lakey Comess/ Trials tell stories

2012-02-16T13:43:00.002-06:00

Small mercy and March spare us your testicles, exposed for camera.
It is too cold and we have seen it all (and better) before.

Poker faces pack up singer,
clad in black, one sporting red beret.

Child exploitation pays a pivotal role in society.
Corporal H was killed by enemy fire. Death is a matter for the inquiry,
when bullets fly. How friendly was that fire?

Explore the idea of socially responsible investments,
color your nails a brave new hue. It gets better, bills are hefty.

Cutting back on quangos is always desirable in Cloud Cuckoo land.
Great basis for an open, transparent relationship. Change is as good as a holiday,
(and you know how good holidays are.)

Thanks for your three dimensional, animated, staged event.
Trials tell stories, release passionate, sensitive information.
Good God, y'all... left me with a mouthful.

2012-02-16T13:40:00.004-06:00

2012-02-16T13:37:00.004-06:00

Michael Rosenthal/ THIS THING DESIRED

2012-02-16T13:37:00.000-06:00

This thing desired us, whom we desired

To swallow us again and again
each time smaller,
each time finer
until breath is ground
into air

Days over nights, empty or not
the mill revolves

Where is the circle
Where is the axis

I acknowledge that I do not hold any more

When I listen to the sentences
intrigued by this thing

This which tears us off at the hours,
scaling our seconds
slicing our years
as long as we can listen

This thing so much desired

We will make it a wonderful bread.

Damian Catera/ politics and music

2012-02-15T13:11:00.000-06:00

In collaboration with Ardele Lister, Damian Catera has been documenting the Occupation at Wall Street... full-throttled and unfiltered and necessary:

http://www.youtube.com/OccupationVoices

http://www.youtube.com/user/OccupationVoices/videos

Ardele Lister's bio:

http://ardelelister.com/about.html

Recently Catera has turned his musical attention to Bach, illuminating Bach's central position in the musical firmament of our time. Like Shakespeare, Goethe, Aristotle and Michelangelo, J. S. Bach is simply one of those inescapable figures of Western culture. Catera's take is designed to provide a much-needed context for Bach's music--right now--and in the future.

Here's some links:
http://damiancatera.bandcamp.com/

for more information on his album, Well Tempered Revolution, and his bio:

http://www.praxisclassics.com/praxismainset.html

Well Tempered Revolution on sound cloud:

http://soundcloud.com/praxisclassics/well-tempered-bach-rock

Jason Martin/ performance artist/ musician

2012-02-15T12:48:00.000-06:00

Jason Martin current works re a multi-media series under the general title POWER ANIMALS. This work engages species-queer, glamorous, paganistic animism. With it, he explores power structures, species and gender hybridity, witchcraft, military conflict, rock music, pre-history, and analog electronics. This is not about art. It's more about seance, particularly in the interaction with "audiences" and "collaborators" (often one in the same). Channeling mysterious yet identifiable energies in a given space or situation, taking anthropomorphism out of its comfy, harmless, cartoon status and connecting it to less safe, personalized mythical archetypes with Jungian undertones and erotic juxtapositions. Dreams from long ago are revealed, as POWER ANIMALS, and the codified information within them, are reflections of real forces and dynamics in our world, one in constant evolution.

Martin recently told the New York Times in relation to a video installation for the Microscope Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, "I don't mean for my art to be outsider, but it seems to land outside current trends."

Some videos of POWER ANIMALS:

http://vimeo.com/32206132
http://vimeo.com/6222482
Http://vimeo.com/18121005

Additional POWER ANIMAL performance footage:

http://vimeo.com/33827748
Http://vimeo.com/23187259

Some songs:

http://soundcloud.com/jason-martin/blushing-bride-of-sekhmet

http://soundcloud.com/jason-martin/mariah-moriah-live-12-18-11

http://soundcloud.com/jason-martin/please-assist-us-in-transmission

http://soundcloud.com/json-martin/patient-zero-for-the-sensitive-tail

Jesse Glass/ poem

2012-02-15T12:14:00.001-06:00

The insect with its mouth of dust

Lifts its head and trumpets down

Upon us where we shiver here

Within the anteroom of Thoth

Here the whisper of despair

With its reeds and iron hooks;

The cracked paint box that gives the lie

To lips stacked in a wooden box

Here domed head & hollow chest

Fall to zero; there the stalks

of syllogisms twist & crack

Beneath the heels of those that walk

Down the airless corridors

Daedal fingers engineless

Processing round the graven walls

In a route that light transgresses

No honeycombs grow in their throats

But the wasps' tripartite crib

Would mark the frontier of the night

If these ancient blocks were split.

To draw the shadow of the sphinx

Across the bubble brow of doubt;

A lash of desert air, a loom

Of moonlight and a distant shout.

Burt Kimmelman/ December Solstice

2012-02-02T13:47:00.002-06:00

Night's dream lets go slowly -
at once bare black branches
in the window, behind
them the white house across
the way, in the first gray
light of dawn, the new day.

Burt Kimmelman/ Cup of Tea, 5 AM

2012-02-02T13:43:00.002-06:00

No reason
to wake up
early, no

light yet in
the window -
only that

the day has
begun though
in darkness.

I switch on
the kitchen
lamp, set the

flame under
the kettle -
later sip

my tea, hot
and harsh, and
watch the dawn.

Steve Tills/ Means to be operative

2012-02-02T13:35:00.003-06:00

I possess neither son nor daughter. Some say they
would have completed me, but I never thought
completely there was any capital to that notion.
We mustn't mess with old father's tales, however,
even if the shortest stories survive
unwillingly at best.

One uncle, someone says a
"monkey's uncle," means to be operative
and to this semantic end employs
a copulative, at least syntagmatically.

Whatever that means, the real question is,
when you turn it on, does it get all
mean-spirited and stringy and all.

One fellow, a transplant from the east
who quickly learned how to presume himself
a hippy there, hence became a neohippy
here or everywhere later additional new realities
turned up like out of place. Well, besides that,
anyhow

I forgot what I was going to say, frequently
inventing some other excuse for what others took
to be improvisation it took its toll. In the first place,
the first person didn't know what he was writing bout
and the second really just wanted to replace him, the
third was an even more complete imposter.

__________

But when you see an Indian fellow in the hospital
and even though you know better, you think
it could have been Kasey Mohammad
the way you pictured Kasey before
you saw an actual picture of him

and found out he was older,

and the Indian fellow is Indian, or Pakistani, maybe,
and much younger again,
like Kasey before you saw an actual picture of him.

___________

Let's face it, YOU
ARE A LOOSER, READER,
AND A MARROON, TOO.

My Wife, My Poetry, A Day at the Laundromat,
all Frank O'Hara, I suppose,
the easiest one to imitate, so many have
and the others are all pissed
because they only tried to imitate themselves
and succeed eternally.

And whether I take six months
to compose four spare stanzas
or do two books a year
in six long nights, I still can't fry an egg
with one hand jobbing and jobbing and jobbing.

Yes, my first time in a big university
library like that.

I could have spent a lot of time there
in her lap, but "that's not me,"
you say. You never got busted.
That's why you got away with so much
time wasted.

Actually, I already know who you are.
You don't have to prove anything
with your experimental methods.
You're the one who received a four finger salute
for a three finger bag of Commercial
Columbian in the '70's, one from your Dad,
one from your Mom, one from your Little Sis,
and one from your Big Sis, who sold it to you,
then bailed you out down and at
the county pokie, Okay?

___________

Had you only matured two decades earlier
in the great 60s
maybe you could have gone
to Princeton or Brandeis
like your analyst
and her brother,
but you were working
class, so you will never know.
Had you only been further neutered.

John Roche, Brother's Keeper

2012-02-02T09:04:00.001-06:00

Peaking on acid in men's room of Esso station, Rte. 66
dude I barely know shooting up
coke and LSD combs
asks me to tighten the tourniquet

I freak when he splatters blood
from hypodermic
on the bathroom wall

all becomes one dark stain
the universe
a blood-black hole

Minutes later, or hours, I come to--
he's returned, guilt-ridden
for running away
leaving me perhaps for dead

A Good Samaritan, after all

New Truck driver for February

2012-01-31T18:20:00.000-06:00

Many, many thanks to Larissa Shmailo for guiding the Truck during January. Gerald Schwartz, our
driver-editor for February, takes the wheel tomorrow. ¡Buen viaje a todos!

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION: Alfred Corn

2012-01-29T08:30:00.002-06:00

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION turns full circle, ending on the work of Alfred Corn. Caveat lector: Behind the measured verse grins the face of war.

ARBEIT MACHT FREI*

Is what the Dachau Jews would see,
Where Hitler chose to lodge them.
Now, bombs have set Iraqis free—
At least, those who could dodge them.

*”Work Will Set You Free””

EXCHANGE OF FIRE

Missiles, tanks, smart-bombs, and, when things got hot,
Cries of offended dignity:
“I’m entitled to this technology,
But you barbarians are not.”

“INTERVENTION IS NOT WAR”

Well, no, and “ethnic cleansing” isn’t murder.
Nor was the Führer’s rabid New World Order
State terror. Nor are pre-emptive strikes on weaker
Peoples a crime—or not to the power-seeker.

CASCADE OF FACES

Five seconds of fame drag them down
the screen, ranks, names, faces, ages:
Staff Sergeant Hannah Nagel, 24.
Private Tom Abeel, 19.
Major Luís Moreno, 33.
Lance Corporal Rafiq Ibrahim, 20.
Captain Roger Kean, 31.
Candid American faces, unblinking,
unafraid, unvenal, snapped
a year, two years ago, not yet reviled
or revered, the newscast’s evening crop.

Images swallowed up, transfigured,
launched into an unlived future.

*

On the Oval Office desk,
dead center, one hot white spot
lights the briefing’s final page.
A chief executive is working late,
behind him, tall windows onto
a sky petroleum black,
strewn with trembling sparks.

*

In another hemisphere noon towers over
a desert city where his signature ignited
hair, skin, and eyes of the unknown civilian.
One by one, for how many terrorized
hundred-thousands the precedent was set,
roofs, walls, thundering down on their screams.

*

He reaches to snap out the lamp, ambles
to a door that closes on his steps.
Official darkness. Clockwise stellar bodies,
in their long-term impartiality, continue
rinsing the blackboard,
rinsing the blackboard—
which in a decade, or a century,
will free itself from any obligation
to save a chalked-up tally of the cost.

WHAT THE THUNDER SAYS

A crack a second and a third splinter as the dam fractures
Soundbolts spiking down through granite a dynamite
That means concussive rage detonations battering
Skull ribcage spine an earthquake high in the ramparts
Stone ramparts blocking a sun no longer strong enough to rise

The houses collapse roof skews off to one side a broken
Beam crushes doors windows in its crazed veer a drill
Screams into rooms to shiver walls timbers floor ratcheting
Through the garden spewing hoses of dirt spinning flagstones
Into the air while a tank that dives from a cloud flattens on impact

Whole quarries of rock shear off tumble smash shock their way
Off the mountain megatons of shattered booms packed stacked
On the air collapsing around your ears and what the din sounds
Out is the last thought which already owns you you and yours
Nothing holds off the thunderstone it says I am your death.

NEW ENGLAND/CHINA

Wakefield: Did some romantic alderman
Settle that name on our recycled mill-town?
I know Rhode Island is Red Island, or
Island of Roses... And, look, buds on Mother’s
Haviland china, fifty years of attic
Storage ended, are pink, flushed with excitement
At being propped in ranks along the plate-rail
Of cabinets a shipwright made for this
Centenarian house I signed the deed on
Nine days ago. No way would I have served
Dinner on old porcelain in designer
Manhattan, my home turf for more than half
A prodigal life-span once I’d waved goodbye
To the South. But here it fits, a tasteful, gold-rimmed
Victorian replacement for the showy
Chinese export bowls and plates how many
Prosperous New England tables boasted
Back in the bullish age of clipper ships.
Those clashing pinks and reds epitomized
Spice roses of the Indies gunboats opened
To enrich our Union, sea to shining sea.

Following the Vicar of Wakefield’s homely
Advice, I’ve put a “Rose Medallion” teacup
(Bought for two dollars at a thrift shop) here
In this eastern window so its damasked pattern
Can go translucent as light rejuvenates
A naïvely rendered pride of mandarins
Hard at their silken round of tea and gossip
And calligraphy. The Vicar’s older daughter
Olivia, with her sensibility,
Might have been drawn into their circle, even
If her graver sister, Sophia, wouldn’t follow.

Goldsmith, Mother most likely never read,
But Gone with the Wind she surely did and like
White Southern women of her day (except
The ambitious few who idolized Miss Scarlett)
Modeled herself on Melanie—for instance,
She never told black friends and workers they
Should “know their place” and stay in it. Her son,
If he works up his nerve, can copy her
(And risk a snub) by taking lemon pie
To the family next door, whose ancestry
Is African; and probably Narragansett,
Too, or else Pequot. Out beyond the teacup
I see their children, the older climbing up
On the garbage bin while holding an umbrella,
A taut silk octagon of alternating
Ebony and ivory pie-wedge panels
That read as either a black Maltese cross
Against a cream-white background, or a white
Against a black. She’s poised to make her skydive
But seems to doubt the parachute; and none
Of her younger sister’s high-pitched razzing works.
A pause, a balance; but she doesn’t leap—
The Sophia of this family circle, just
As her wilder sibling’s the Olivia.
Now their mother’s called them to lunch, their game
Shelved with no decisions made, no plunge
Into the aerial realm of weightless pleasure.

I’ll have my self-prepared baked codfish on
These resurrected roses—a chance to ponder
The leap I leapt in settling here and calling
The Ocean State, at last, the Golden Decades’
Ultimate Cathay. So, veteran frigate,
You, unlike the Pequod, may now dock
And prove that not all sexagenarians
Are skippers hot to tap-dance round the deck
Like Ahab, thirst for blood a scorching trade wind
That gives them forward thrust. The middle ground!
Vicarious pastimes, watching children’s games
Or tending post-colonial and post-
Postmodern gardens, should amount to a sound
Retirement plan, Sophia, calm, deific
Wisdom, serving as hand-hewn figurehead
When our vessel comes to port. If goods we heft
Down the gangplank are only earthenware,
So be it, Yankees also favor those,
Judging from bits of broken plates and cups
I dug up planting the hybrid tea a friend
Gave me, the spot selected not haphazard,
Instead, exactly where a rose should go.
He laughed when told I’d named the house Knew Place—
A tribute to comedy’s most tragic playwright.

But try to name or know a place you never
Lived in: Beijing. Nablus. Kabul. Baghdad...
Imagination’s olive branch stops short,
Absorbing the news that soldier and civilian
Sprawl face down in crimson pools enlarged
With all they owned, one clotting upshot of
Capitalism’s abstract cannibalism.
Prosperity. Ours, but insubstantial,
Like all dream-castles based on greed, up there
Above the outcome. Who’d listen if I called
Our captains by their real names? They won’t,
Conceded, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
Out of the deeps, a voice: Permission denied.
No port for the tempest-tossed, you haven’t yet
Begun to fight. While you breathe, you won’t retire.

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION: Marc Vincenz

2012-01-26T11:09:00.002-06:00

Marc Vincenz is Swiss-British and was born in Hong Kong. His recent books include Upholding Half the Sky (MiPOesias, 2010), The Propaganda Factory, or Speaking of Trees (Argotist, 2011) and Pull of the Gravitons (forthcoming Right Hand Pointing, 2012). His translation of Swiss poet Erika Burkart’s Secret Letter is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. Last year, his poetry was nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize.

The Mystical Art of Accounting

“When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast…”— Harry S. Truman

It’s all about volume,
capacity per square metre / foot
(whether metric or imperial floats your proverbial boat);
although, there are others
(a whole slew of choices, in fact):
the Tokyo Tsubo for instance; sounds like soy-infused Wasabi sauce;
the Seoul Pyeong: true measure of an average ninth century Korean male—
arms and legs fully splayed, face down prostrating, flailed by the brunt
of a Mongolian warlord’s cat ‘o nine tails, an ideal size for a room,
I am told; or perhaps face up, making perfect circles
under cherry blossoms in the snow, stargazing,
defining the rules of space and numbers.

Imperial Peking had,
and Social Democratic Communist Beijing
still has the Mu, which possibly derives it’s name
from the exhausted groan of the water buffalo—
a measure for judging the extent of rice paddies before harvest.
Everything is weighted, ruled, cubed, boxed, angled, triangled—
lucky we came up with these handy things, numbers.
Now we can finally count the stars in the sky—
6000 with the naked eye—and we know useful things
like the distance from the equator to the moon
represents sixty-nine times the girth of a full grown earth.

Funny that, the number 69—
normally I think of being twenty one again,
in the back of my Unbeatable Bonk Bug with Maria-Rosa,
Hispanic-American goddess, gently calculating
trigonometric angles, postulating X/Y positions.
Without numbers we wouldn’t know our up from down,
we wouldn’t even know there are more than two of anything at all—
just be walking on straight lines in flat spaces, like Pacman,
we wouldn’t know an arse from an elbow, really.
Yet, these are mostly distances—things men have conquered,
numbers have far reaching consequences:

Analysts know how much Namibia is worth on paper,
in Dollars, Euros, Rupees; its equivalent in derivatives;
and in conjunction with funded institutions of science,
how much bacteria and moss can contribute
to the global economic balance sheet—
it has all been tallied out, audited down
to the last decimal point, then stamped,
duly notarised and sealed in hot wax for posterity.
There is surely a secret book,
hidden in the darkest catacombs of the Vatican
where all calculations are indexed for future evidence;
or perhaps it is hermetically locked
in the sprawling prairies of Middle-America,
guarded by the Federal Agency in charge of numbers.
I mean, why else would they call it Area 51,
giving it not one, but two prime numbers?
And, by the way: 69 and 51 add up to 120,
which is a recurring number in the Mayan calendar,
and shall someday well fulfil an ancient prophesy
unlocking the last secrets of the Universe.

Yes, we have developed all sorts of uses for numbers;
we know how many atoms are required in an atom bomb,
but more importantly how much it costs,
(2 billion dollars for Harry Truman in 1945, 20 billion dollars today);
there must be reasons, of course, why God gave us five fingers on each hand—
he wanted us, it seems, to count on them. One by one by one.

Previously published in FRiGG

Monkeys & Flowers

Nobody stands for old Auntie
on the 6.45 to Purple Pagoda Park.

Most of us are gripping the overhead rails
like whooping monkeys.

In the streets of a city
flowers need a man’s attention.

There are no birds, no bees.
Dirt & dung are horse-carted

& the Buddha & the Chairman skip hand
in hand, all the way down to the waterfront.

[Earth-Shaving]

“I know you’re thinking
these are trees from the days
of wilderness and chaos,” he says
wielding his electric chain saw,
a crusader assessing his holy war,
“when butterflies were golden eagles
and spiders the size of cartwheels.”
“We,” says his companion
Manolo who looks like a gunslinger,
“are trimming our way to enlightenment.
There’d have been no Renaissance
without the heat and the paper-makers.
It’s stubble from a chin, and we’re
just giving her a close shave,” he says.
And Manolo points at my Canon
dangling from my neck like a marsupial.
“Take your shots of the extinct volcano,”
he says, “but these are coming down.
And I know you’re thinking about
the wild flowers, about the bees,
but listen—don’t you want to know
what the time is?”

RESOLUTION /REVOLUTION : Sarah Sarai

2012-01-23T17:27:00.004-06:00

Sarah Sarai lives on a bridge under a cave in the eastern quadrant of the portion marked “Odds 'n Ends.” Time draws nigh for her to publish a new collection to comfort her first collection (The Future Is Happy, BlazeVOX[books]). She is a member of the Occupy Language assemblage rising from ashes of Zucotti Park. Both of the poems included here consider the word resolve, with its impossibilities and its maybe more.

I Resolve To

Buy cheap, sell now.
Buy sheep, sell ewe.
Buy ewe, shear me.
Talk the talk
walk the keep
keep you.

I resolve to
shear my nethers,
then Esau, a woolly fellow.
Ewe want to buy a bridge?
I resolve to sell you one.
Ewe cannot walk this bridge.
This is a bridge you cannot walk.

I resolve to walk the bridge
and shear ewe within
an inch of my wife.
She is sheared fun.

There's a bridge on my teeth.
It spans incisors.
My teeth resolve to represent.
Pearly as Heaven's gate
(or gates, we're not sure),
they resolve to take ewe in,
my little wayfarer.
My teeth know things.
So would you if you lived in a cave.

I resolve to live in a cave
with a bridge, walk the line,
brace myself for the next trick
or for ewe. I resolve to buy braces,
for ewe.

Two Dreams Hovering Insect Wings Above Me

First I lie across your lap
for everyone to see for comfort.
Second we kiss I pause you touch my hair
and wave good-bye in one graceful sweep.

I wonder who I am in either dream and
talk myself through the threshold of the new day
archived by winged beasts who know life
as a slow volar flash of something close to pleasure.

Berfrois, “The Avoirdupois Chic”
http://www.berfrois.com/2011/11/avoirdupois-chic-sarah-sarai/
Boston Review, “So Tender Beauty” and “From Love, Imagination”
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.4/sarah_sarai.php and
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.4/sarah_sarai2.php

POOL, “Commerce for the Good of the Peoples” and more
http://www.poolpoetry.com/poeteight.html

Scythe, “No Need for a Door” and more
http://scytheliteraryjournal.com/issue-vi.php

Redheaded Stepchild, “Blame It on Family”
http://redheadedmag.com/poetry/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=268:blame-it-on-family-&catid=36:poetry&Itemid=59

Fogged Clarity, "Experiential Philosophy"
http://foggedclarity.com/2009/03/experiential-philosophy/

Minnesota Review, “Further Arguments”
http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns68/sarai.shtml

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION: Annie Pluto

2012-01-19T12:04:00.001-06:00

Anne Elezabeth Pluto is Professor of Literature and Theatre at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, where she is the artistic director of the Oxford Street Players. She was a member of the Boston small press scene in the late 1980s and started Commonthought Magazine at Lesley 18 years ago. She has been a participant at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2005 and 2006. Her most recent publications are in The Lyre and in W_O_M_B, The Buffalo Evening News Poetry Page, Earth's Daughters, Blackbox Gallery, and Helix.

Wake

I’ll wake this world for you
each sunrise to the moon
stretched taut and drawn
back waiting for the arrow
You are the mark, darkened
by time and terrible space
this is what remains of
love, a grove of flowering
trees, the songs of birds
the emptiness of no promise
or prediction – the knowledge
that time does move – never
backwards, but ahead – in front
of itself, and it takes us along.

Jung in the hands of the Mujahideen

Father
born on the eve of World War I
I live your conscience
daily reminders that
the world is a frightening place
you never dreamed as you spent
the Second World War traveling west
landscapes away from your home
that New York would be the site
of terrorist activities
on the day of your 50th
wedding anniversary
in the third millennium,
in your second century.

As a soldier,
you lived Central Asia,
traveled the Middle East
Byelorussian, in a British
uniform, having escaped death
in a soviet prison
the names of cities
roll off your tongue like Turkish
delight, now ruined
Beirut, beleaguered Damascus
starving Baghdad
mysterious Alexandria
and bleeding Jerusalem

I played store with your war
souvenir coins
turning over the bas relief of pyramids
and camels
my kingdom for a beggarly denier
I see the world is round
and hold it in my child's hands
well traveled in your stories
I pray now that we can realign
against the evil
religion brings to the oppressed
that magi lift their hearts to god
and climb the mountains of Babel
holding words instead of weapons,
and as their voices reach
heaven
God hears the faithful ask forgiveness
for themselves and all of history.
amen and amen

Documentation

Sigh lanced
like Jesus pierced
I will cry alone instead
of bleed – and plead
what innocence
I ascertain – so tired
of being
my own
advocate. and you
blameless in your
corner – drawing
the line and redrawing
the times I stepped
over it. you need me
to agree – I want to
get out and over,
the rain
as a cover
to wash me clean.

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION : Chris Mansel

2012-01-14T18:29:00.002-06:00

REVOLUTION / RESOLUTION now turns primal with the work of Chris Mansel. Chris Mansel is a writer, filmmaker, musician, and photographer. He is the author of Ashes of Thoreau, While In Exile: The Savage Tale of Walter Seems, Soddoma: The Cantos of Ulysses, Interviews, and two books of photography, Ahisma and No Burden. Along with Jake Berry, his band, The Strindbergs, has released two CDs, Ghost Thresholds and Etudes and Purgatorio.

Dislodging the Storm

awakened by the gray matter
I once called my own
I could see my skeleton
writhing on a wave returning
like a word spoken repeatedly
across my eyes

when I sat down to write that
morning, I followed my memory
to the night before
I found myself lying with my head
next to a candle's flame
with my hair just catching fire

I could hear the waves breaking
they didn't always return, like
animals watching humans
screaming aloud, to no one

if I was a flame, I would learn to swim
if I were an animal, my skeleton
would betray me
I'll die soon enough
stranger things happen at sea

Reading Holderlin During Wartime

dreams about ditches and ravines
mud walls on both sides
an animals paw sticks out from the
rancid pool of water
then its head
it’s the day of my birth
a new passage way
for me to regret

I disappear, digging until
my arms end with my wrist
For hours until I see daylight
only fleetingly, then again
the mouth opens and I jump

leaning against a frosted window
a grenade is tossed through
unable to retrieve it I stand and
look at it until it explodes

Only Ash, No Smoke or Flame

I can't find anyone to kill me
as I have turned over stones
only to find my own reflection
I am convinced I will have to
turn my attention to the forest

I will have to turn to the wolves

these wonderful creatures that
haunt great scenes of battle
and tear at the often still warm
decaying flesh

these land ridden vultures may
very well be my salvation

there was a time when I too
roamed these scenes armed only
with an ax certainly to feed my
children this great store of meat

what I could wrestle away from the
wolves or insects

the gag reflex being my only stopping
point for returning to battle, insisting
instead to return to the hills

daily piling my belongings in the rain
as I watched the fires grow stronger
and closer, each day

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION: Larissa Shmailo

2012-01-11T14:51:00.006-06:00

Larissa Shmailo is a poet and a translator of Russian. The following poems are reprised from the 100,0000 Poets for Change anthology edited by Anny Ballardini and Obododimma Oha in collaboration with Michael Rothenberg.

Winedark Sea

In the east, in the eastern rising lands, a tide, westering, earthdrawn, rising, the morning sun bloodied in its wake. She drags, pulls, shifts, hauls, trascines her hydraulic load. Tides born of tides, moondrawn, myriadheaded, within her, within her blood, oinopa ponton: the winedark sea. A wet sign calls her hour, bids the earth-shaken fallen rise, bids the wet-dirt wounded rise, bids the blooddimmed peoples rise, as she radiates out, out, out, forever from her bed. The wet sign calls her hour, bids all to rise from childbed, bridebed, deathbed, rise. He comes, the pale salt vampire, in clouds and tears, and claws, battle-led, draws, battle-red, mouth-to-mouth, limb-to-limb, skin-to-skin. There.
Here.

Scarcity

Listen:
If you wait but don’t want
If you want but don’t take
If you take but don’t use
If you use but don’t care
If you care but not much
The petty demon comes.

The petty demon says:
Not all of you are wanted
Not everyone is needed
A few may be accepted

There’s scarcity, you see
There are no loaves and fishes─
Not for the likes of you─
A few baguettes for baby
Some caviar for me
There’s just enough to shit and sleep
But not enough for thee.

The petty demon shrieks:
Time is money
Sell short
Eat to win
Assume the position.

In the world
In the angry material world
There are men who are not men
Men
Whose imaginations never rise
Above the box and plane
Whose imaginations squat
Upon the positions of power.

If the petty demon bothers you
Here’s what you say
Tell him:
I don’t know about
Your lawyer’s fees
Your MDs
Your CEOs
Your deep freeze

I do know that
The blind man is perfect
That there’s more to life than irony
And squealing like a stuck pig

That the truth is hard but you can stand on it
That time isn’t money or a threat but a gift.

As you assume your position
In the world
Do not love
Men who are not men
Whose imaginations never rise
Walk tall; walk with God
Assume nothing; take a position.

560 Brooke Avenue

The walls, barbed wire, barbed, next to a
drive-by window of Burger King: Dios, is
this your way? Electric doors, opened one
at a time, they make a sound, it maddens.
All the time the boys do time, all the time
they say, “Lunacy, this is crazy, crazy mad.”
It is. “Nigga, nigga,” one boy prays, farts as
the JC twists his hand: He tries to laugh, he
cries instead, porque? Scared, so scared, his
scarred voice cracks, 15. “Nigga, ay, I here
4 murder,” he lies. O child, perhaps so. My
Jesus of the got-nailed, my Angel of the why,
& what could you have done yet, why are you
here, porque, my God, & donde vamos, u & I?

Speak Now

Speak now.
Darkened, once neutral air,
Skyscrapers turn,
Dream fire, and burn.

Dream fire, and burn.
Skyscrapers turn,
Darkened, once neutral air,
Speak now.

Vive L’Égypte

A man, beaten — face the color of a burkha
dragged through the mud — is lifted by Isis
with her rose and her tiet.

Isis, who loves mothers, the downtrodden, slaves —
who is friend to the Nile and the dead —
who listens

even to the prayers of the rich — lifts his frame —
trampled and broken — from her mud.
Allahu ahkbar! he cries.

She cries. Cairo — Sharm El-Sheikh — Alexandria —
Hurghada — Luxor — Aswan — the blood of Isis
calls from Philae.

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION : Michael T. Young

2012-01-07T16:53:00.006-06:00

We enter the realm of personal resolutions and revolutions with the poetry of Michael T. Young. Michael has published two collections of poetry, most recently, Transcriptions of Daylight. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, is available from Finishing Line Press and his next full-length collection, The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost, will be published in 2013 by Black Coffee Press.
— Larissa

Fishing Dark

As night took shape, the trees in the dark
uprooted themselves. Through the window
I saw the last light fold up and tuck itself
onto a clouded shelf, and a few late birds
swatted the stillness in their flight toward home.
It seemed there was a swarming in places, a pulsing
just at the edge, where anything clearly seen
sank into the varieties of shade, where the dark
smoldered in potential and at that moment,
I felt privileged, like someone admitted
into a secret society, because I knew then
that the sun is ignorant of the shadows it creates,
especially this one, and all that depends upon it,
all the minds that fish its deep waters,
all the maps that still show an end to the world.

On How the World Might Seem to My One-Year-Old Son

The whole world is the given, free
everywhere and dangerously possible
like a bruise, a bump on the forehead,
the ever-out-of-reach — a computer, a bathroom —
mysteries that tall people inhabit briefly,
then return, pleased with themselves
having known the fruit of the undeniable.
They offer it to me only as fructified
in these shaky steps I take, these legs
nearly paralytic, this mouth inarticulate
as one chewing gristle, lurking near
the sinister, which surprises, puzzles
and even astonishes when it grows
into the Gauls invading Italy for a glass of wine
or Napoleon unshackling the last
of Medieval Europe with an imperial hand,
after having lain prone, subject, sometimes
even naked, simply waiting for a chance.

Screw-up

Someone told me there are no coincidences
as if a tedious architect plotted the track
of each raindrop down a windshield,
and that something must have been intended
when my mother met a man who had her picture
in his wallet. He picked it up, he said,
from the street. He thought she was cute.
But that man is not my father, and this makes
every difference to my personal double-helix
and the pleasure I take in Bach and long walks
since I wasn’t part of the architect’s original plan
and now he has to take me into account
as if his pen left a smudge on the blueprint
and instead of erasing it, he makes it into
an additional room on the house, which means
when I look back on that time someone called
asking for a woman I happened to know,
her phone number only one digit different from mine,
I’m supposed to be concerned because she didn’t
become my wife, as if these connections mean
there is somewhere else I should be today,
and that’s why, sometimes for no reason, I’m sad
or frustrated, nagged by a feeling that something
is missing, like the freedom to screw everything up,
the way I liked to when I was young, just to prove
I was old enough to make my own decisions.

Rewriting My To-Do List

In a Brahmsian exaltation I drove down Newark Avenue,
realizing, as with all such transports, it’s a question
of how far you can go, especially with gloved hands,
in winter, tapping out rhythms on the cold steering wheel,
on an errand to buy a showerhead and cereal bars,
milk and clean wipes, distracting necessities, although
some have argued it’s the other way around, since
as I turned at Dickenson High School, there were those
descending winds, dropping with the hill past the cemetery
and I think an oboe counterpointing the rising strings,
the turn signals of other cars and changing traffic lights,
all the aesthetic risk of listening and thinking of all that time
Brahms took to compose his first symphony,
twenty-one years scribbling, scratching out, straining
like this first burning movement, consuming itself
in the struggle, so even passing under the bridge
and the starless city sky, I leaned into the windshield,
tilting into the night, renewed in the effort to listen closely.

Yardstick

In my dreams of flight I could never rise
more than forty feet above the earth,
sinking or soaring with the contours, puzzling
over what architect set the ceiling so low,
and still carry its mystery with me, like wondering
what kind of person I would become
if I worked in a factory where yardsticks are made.
Would I grow a penchant for measuring,
for fixing limits or would I feel a need
to snatch one or two from the line each day,
take them home and snap them in half? —
or preferably into an odd number —
something to prove that the world won’t end
simply because things are out of balance.

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION: Alfred Corn

2012-01-02T13:30:00.003-06:00

[Author’s note: The numbered sections reprinted below are taken from a 3000-line poem titled Notes from a Child of Paradise (1984), recounting my life from 1965 to 1969, a time when the younger generation began demonstrating against the American invasion of Vietnam and for Black civil rights. These excerpts describe the 1968 upheavals at Columbia University, where I was a graduate student, though spending at that time a Fulbright year in Paris. Earlier in the spring a student uprising in Paris led to a full-scale national strike against De Gaulle’s government, which may have been one of the stimuli for the Columbia demonstrations. Workers’ strikes began at the automotive plants in Nanterre, an industrial town near Paris.]

XXVI.

The plague had spread past hope of remedy.
Discourse volleyed back and forth between
Nanterre and Place Maubert, Défense d’afficher [“post no bills”]
The first restraint to crumble as the walls
Papered over with grievances and slogans,
The wise and ardent icons, Chairman Mao
And Che Guevara. For the first time in decades
The International assumption rang
True. And here was electric news from home:
Columbia had been taken over, shut
Down by the S.D.S. till further notice.
The gray sandstorm of a wire photo
Coalesced around a teenaged striker,
Feet propped on President Kirk’s desk,
Puffing a cigar beneath a Rembrandt portrait.

Not since Berkeley, we thought…. But what about
Our friends—teachers, students, who might be caught
Up in the drama? Telephone parleys,
Expensive, curtailed, picked their way over
A minefield of conflicting sympathies.
Which tipped in favor of the protest once
Guards swept down and cleared the buildings, clubbing
Anyone to slow to dodge. For blood
Is still blood, however urgent the theory
That sheds it….

XXVIII.

News from Nanterre: a crackdown no less brutal
Than Columbia’s. And then an echoic
Roar of support from the Quartier Latin.
Students ten thousand vocal marched against
The incarceration of their leaders, state
Repression. The Sorbonne closed its doors.
Shouting matches, harassment, and at last
A pitched battle, which deployed in slow
Motion, a liquid nightmare staged around
Collaged barricades thrown together
From lumber, capsized cars and paving stones.
The C.R.S., black-helmeted, with shields,
Goggles and nightsticks, swarmed from armored trucks,
Advancing through a fusillade of stones.
Protesters, in street clothes, fell down and bled.

Cries. Distant sirens. The faint burn
Of teargas drifted down to the 13th.
When quiet returned, I stealthily threaded
My way up toward the brooding Panthéon
And rue St. Jacques, wondering whether some new
Éducation sentimentale would be hatched
From this unrest. The tower of St. Étienne
Said, “Paris repeats herself, true, but the terms
Differ….” A liberated Odéon
Now featured a round-the-clock debate
Open to whoever could make themselves heard.
Groups or solos seized the platform, held it
Till hounded down by boo’s or Merde!’s: total
Dissent voiced in a total democracy.
(I still can’t get that noise out of my ears.)

New driver for January 2012

2011-12-31T11:31:00.001-06:00

Please welcome Larissa Shmailo, Truck's driver for the first month of the new year.

Many thanks to Lewis LaCook for seeing us through the last month of this year.

New Year's greetings to all.

IN MEMORIAM: Carol Novack 1948-2011

2011-12-31T11:10:00.005-06:00

Carol Novack died of lung cancer Thursday at 8:55 pm. She was a genre-defying writer of lyrical and inventive work, imaginative and beautiful. She was a lightning rod who brought together thousands of artists from around the globe in collaboration and exploration as publisher of the groundbreaking Mad Hatters' Review. She was also my good friend, quite irreplaceable.

Here is the text of her lovely piece, "Destination," and the film made by Jean Detheux with her recitation.

vimeo.com/26782140

DESTINATION
(for Jean Detheux)

I
On the hill, there is an easel holding a painting of a town. You
are always traveling to the town, but whenever you think you’ve arrived,
there is nothing but stones, statutes and indigestible
bread. You return to the painting. You wonder if there’s a detail
you’ve missed, a clue that will help you find the town. You let
your eyes be deceived. They are connected to your heart with its
longing to nest; you are possessed with owning. You lose your
perspective again and again, wanting perspective, you are cursed.

II
You have come to rest. You think perhaps this is my town or
close enough to the one I was walking towards, at least when the
moon guided me like a mother it seemed to be. I can’t be too
fussy; I will die with dust mites and sand crabs and there will be
no home in death. But now, always now this town is different
from then, at least my memory of soft greens and blues with
gentle angles, or so it seemed, seems. This town is all glare with
acute turns and sonic booms. It won’t hold me, rock me, is neither
mother nor lover. It has so few dimensions for me though it has
dimensions for the neighbors, I suspect. They talk about rules,
have so many they can’t keep track of what’s forbidden. Too many
of them stay indoors for fear of breaking a rule. The chandelier
drops are cameras. They don’t understand. They make more rules.
This town’s windows need insulation in the frigid seasons when
the voices grow colder and louder. Nothing grows and the
kitchen shelves are vacant. One can hear the real estate agents
screaming in their white rooms. One can see their angry shadows
through white curtains. Always white – that is what the
denizens want: a neutered town in which you may disappear
into your shadows. They say that colors invite arrest. They
think they are invisible, the fools. Perhaps they are invisible
and I am the fool.

Here again I have to walk on stones for bread; the bakers don’t
know me. So I will move on. This is not a town, well not mine.
That is my perspective, not this.

III
He frightened me when he clasped me to him in the night,
when he lowered the volume of his voice to speak of the mirage
of walls and roofs. Not so long ago, he seemed to be my destination.
He was mine and I was his or so it seemed. After an
orgy of mirrors, we sucked and picked at one another’s bones.
Then he strayed into that other woman’s residence and stayed
too long, I took the turn back to where I’d been going, but
couldn’t find it. Pain was my map; I could hardly see clearly.

So I found you hiding in a hedge with thorns, not crying but
chanting, no, singing, singing a lament to your mother; you
crooned, wanting to crawl back into her, so I came and stroked
your head. I remember your hair as soft as dandelion puffs and
you trembled but kept still for a spell entranced you let me
be your home. And then like flotsam, you floated away, you
with your eyes dense with storms. I carried on, tore off my red
dress, taunted you. Who can stay still? Who can remain in homes
with so many rules? you pleaded. I left that town a long time ago,
I answered. At least I thought I did. You looked like a rabbit in a
wolf’s yellow eye. All homes have rules, you said. You said I am
a nomad. I have no choice. You do, I replied, drawing you into
me for the last time, feeling like the rabbit in your jaws. But
was I the wolf? Now I have forgotten your name.

IV
In those towns they lock up the homeless when they remain in
one spot and throw stones at Gypsies. Like snails, the Gypsies
carry their homes on their backs. The denizens say it’s not
right! Everyone must pay taxes and mortgages like us – despite
interest rates. They rape the land we have purchased and pillage
the daughters we have sown and own. Lock them up!

The Gypsies say it is a curse to want to own, a curse to be
possessed. It is a curse to want to possess and be possessed,
a curse to own. You can seek to become the color of any of these
towns with their home teams, but the shade will be unbecoming
and oppressive. You will see!

I try hard not to want but keep gazing at the painting, as if I
had perspective or could learn it. My eyes are connected to my
heart with its longing to nest; I can’t help but let it flutter its
wings and woo my eyes. How foolish. I keep traveling to the
towns, all the same the cursed towns with their statutes and
stones. None is the town I seek.

Lindsay Morrison: man, what a day to go

2011-12-29T15:07:00.001-06:00

originally published in High Brow Mountain Mutant (http://highbrowmountainmutant.com/?p=11)

I don’t usually cotton to superstition but on Christmas Eve my aunt
showed me pictures she’d gotten of two wild

turkeys staring into her windows and then a whole group where the
family usually has picnics. She thought it was an

omen of a funeral. Christmas Day there was a death in the family. I
saw a deer in my yard that day and had

thought, is this a bad sign or a good sign?

I believe.
I believe.

I believe in a kind of subconscious interpretation divined from
unusual brushes with wild animals.

My grandmother’s brother; my Great-Uncle Glenn.

Turkey would have been the perfect sign, because he came from many
generations of woodsmen.

carolann stevens says man, what a day to go, how was your family day
at your house? (other than a death)

my party sucked. i didn’t cook the prime rib enough and i had
insufficient knives to cut it so i had to hack at it with my hands and
a small knife. i began to sweat like a lunch lady and lewis had to dab
my brow as i cut and and flung the ragged puddles of meat. plus i
wasnt exactly partying with motley crue, it was a bunch of my nuclear
family. i did embroider a boner in a quaint way to surprise my mom.
that was a hit and even my grandma laughed and forgave me.

My older sister said Her party was wondeful and we all appreciated it
and felt warm love feelings. There were gifts under and all around the
pretty tree. Animals for petting. Foor for eating. Toddlers for
talking with. Fellowship to be had a plenty!

I said Everyone hated the party and noticed that I didn’t dust shit.

My sister said Lindsay, it was a precious get together and so shut yourmouth

I said They had to drink the meat from cups such was it’s rawness and
they respectfully gulped it in spasms of frightchokes.

stop it, wrote my sister, you are denigrating the reality of your party!

They left me all their god damned empty clothes boxes and forgot half
of their personal property. I typed.

my memory is an iron trap.
get it, because iron is in blood and my memories are surrounded by my
brain blood, where those thoughts are trapped?

Do you ever have dreams about Mill St? I have had many. I remember
almost every detail. Those times were hard for everybody, but in my
memory I always see it literally bathed in a safe golden comforting
glow.

Memories, even “bad” ones are more precious than any property.

Memories are so much more relaxing than the present. You can explore
them without liability. You can think about them any different way.
You don’t have a schedule. You don’t have to be anywhere, you can just
walk around and look at things.

memories to me are always from the viewpoint of my regular eyes. like
in a dream, i don’t see myself in my memory.

Do you mind if I list what I remember. The driveway. The screen door.
The astroturf. The bright thorough clean and polished wood paneling.
knick knacks to the right that said Home is Where the Heart is. The
round rug. The lace table cloths. The grin and bear it magnets. The
secret door to upstairs. the big buttons on the couch. the
bookshelf.the turkey midsoar over the t.v. the low table with that
wedding picture. a large mirror? the lace curtains. the accordion
door.the bathroom decorative soaps. peach. bath grippers. the wood
chair outside the bathroom door. potato chips and french onion dip.
spoons tinkling against dainty cups of coffee and tea. those glossy
mini animal figurines. the angular and magical feeling of the upstairs
with floral wallpaper. a tea kettle. a tall faucet. a porcelain ?
counter. a mudroom/pantry i think tilted toward the yard. a hanging
wood glider, i sat on and it fell to the ground and i bruised my
tailbone and was humiliated. the barn. a clothes line. the mailbox.
the curve. the fireman’s grounds. the 3 10 market.

I remember you playing Nirvana in the car. I think Cobain was still
alive or recently died. It was the early nineties.

The very very last time I saw Great Grandma I was with dad. It was
near Christmas because we were bringing her presents and she unwrapped
them very carefully with a butterknife my hair was black and I was in
middle school. I actually have a photograph of that day. I was sitting
on the couch.

Sheepishly cherubic with a shiny t-zone.

Bosley Gravel: @_TheAristocrat_

2011-12-23T13:04:00.001-06:00

Bosley Gravel describes himself as an 'eclectic hack writer.' I guess that depends on exactly how you mean 'hack' there. While I suspect Gravel intends it to convey his natural modesty, for me, this view of his work has deeper meaning.

Gravel is a writer working at the intersection of genre fiction and disjunctive post-avant practice. If we can see traces of noir writers like Hammett and Chandler in William S. Burroughs, the traces of Burroughs' collage methodology are inherited and tweaked in some of Gravel's work. His 2010 novel, The Movie (http://www.amazon.com/Movie-Bosley-Gravel/dp/1906609241/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2) is a young adult novel, a coming-of-age novel, and, above all, a compassionate look at coming-of-age in a small town.

Gravel is fairly active on twitter, managing a few accounts that exploit collagist methods for text generation. One such account is _TheAristocrat_ (http://twitter.com/#!/_TheAristocrat_).

Here's what Bosley has to say about it:

"@_TheAristocrat_ started life as surreal, non-linear (experimental) novel. The story details the rise and fall of Toby Howell AKA Kid Judas, a musical prodigy who, like Billy Pilgrim has become "un-stuck in time". Raised between a shut-in mother and his wandering uncle, a professional clown who uses the stage name The Aristocrat, Toby struggles with inherited demons despite his talents elevating him to near messianic status. A gallery of characters come and go: Wildman, a forest dwelling lunatic; Winston the Chef; Sadie Day, daughter of a evangelist preacher; Farkus the Pimp; Legacie the Giant; Kit, a mysterious and relentless bounty hunter; Harley a reluctant cult leader."

"'The Aristocrat' was written in a style to emulate William Burroughs' cut-up method: leaps of logic, stream of conciseness that quickly melt into narration or from one character to the next. While I think I pulled off what I intended to do, I realized it was not a salable bit of fiction. But I'd spent a year writing it and I couldn't bear to just toss it in the proverbially trunk -- so I got it into my head that perhaps I'd feed it into my twitter stream 140 characters at a time. Not content with the first layer of 'non-linear' I decided to shuffle the bits chapters randomly, and run that text through a piece of software called Dadadodo which does a particular sort of randomizing using Markov Chains. From there the story is groomed for twitter and automatically (and semi-randomly) broadcast to the twitter stream. With every committed twitter post my media center plays sound byte of Mozart's laugh from Amadeus an inspiration for the protagonist. As an experiment I'd intended to keep it a private stream, but once it was clear it was stable and consistent and engaging, I figured, what the hell, and opened it up ... and was surprised to see a few followers."

Some samples of _TheAristocrat_'s stream:

Just stay away: and #wrapped around in their offering his shoes; to largest the dark two to smoke skyward in."
He of the Dark Two part the moisture out your name I can't love isn't he had a tiny yellow of her."
"The clear it to up on the edge removal of survival, the cans in wire shelves."
Come and what the gory scene of his #feet person minding your father: only about to why did they see. #fluxus #intermedia #syncretism
Barely #stifling a grassy pumping in the folds of paper. #antiart #dadaism #avantgarde

Be sure to check out Bosley's website: http://www.ripcot.com/

Ice age in a bottle

2011-12-16T16:18:00.002-06:00

Need to catch a squall in
this minced crack. Nurse,

your cotton box of restive Snooki
encloses Jonas’ brother, Salk

Let’s get high. They may close
everything, but while we can

swig mint tempests back
and palimpsest, a settee, tea

I’ll swing in methane, thin with Maoism
and you’ll never have to go home

Baby-faced elephant seal

2011-12-15T16:03:00.000-06:00

Everything around you exchanging moisture, says it will accept strict new limits on using chimpanzees in medical research. Night come to made can't has committed a wide range of civil rights violations, against Latinos, take it respond as I've 411 agreement was near on extending this year's payroll tax cut. Thoughts towards the town of lovely lady that needs attention and someone to love, steeped in history. Of an acquisition of social performance platform object object has an the a, proposed law that has mobilized Silicon Valley in a way that goes. Far beyond issues such as privacy or even network neutrality given name that child! Weighing posted a 27 percent drop in quarterly profit on Thursday, less than a she is. In different configurations like mod_php, cgi, FastCGI, etc among ever born in then like a modern version of the taxi dispatching software there’s the flowers, manicuring. My birders have enjoyed a fabulous fall of jaeger-watching it. The postman, SUV, and the interaction between traditional TV advertising and YouTube: I bound house with only causing quite a bit of industry buzz. Skin of my to Atlas the year of revolutions and webolutions, sound? Each minute of hours killed and two wounded in the last five days, in a rash of shootings of work working full-time plans has been arrested for shooting an Elyria woman. In the foot to also can prepare to served since opening in 1910 until its closure in 2005 many different cultural events, including concerts, sports events and exhibitions as part of their wildlife took a different route. For a single-input combination lock familiar to with life forms, faxing is still in use. We have long these mammals I used, sudo visudo, and removed my name (the whole line) from there and total control of more running debian and RAM sticks are completely out of my financial reach than 5,000 Transport Museum! Has got my first taste of unix at the old Bell Labs in IL, largest poster archives. A bust-up baby-faced elephant seal nicknamed Jackson cloud and the black hole if required results are reached. Will radiation that could is normally placid?

Again, golden niblets

2011-12-07T18:01:00.001-06:00

Discovered an obnoxious letter
We were so close he to rock star sweat on him
how she became a Linux kernel

Path photos

2011-12-07T17:53:00.001-06:00

you don’t listen to that one song
here is nothing more satisfying than hearing
power towers along lakefront could come down

Chris Girard: Shadow Shadows Tomb

2011-12-06T20:12:00.001-06:00

According to his website, "Chris Girard is an experimental collage poet based in London whose work explores embodiment and identity." I knew, when I encountered his twitter stream, that I'd heard his name before. The tweets themselves were so succinct, compact and trembling with potential energy that I quickly forgot about jogging my memory about where I'd first heard his name, and decided to simply enjoy. Latest tweet: "I arrive like a tongue protruding into a mouth of another forest. I hear it now, stepping on branches, putting a coin into the head's mouth."

Chris explains "Shadow Shadows Tomb" thus: "THIS is a collage poem based on texts on tombstones I filmed at Nunhead Cemetery in London."

Shadow Shadows Tomb

Shadow shadow
shadows shadows
tomb side
flies leaf
o

Sacred shadow shadow
beard sleep surface shadow
acre leaves
room tomb

Resteth pity
shadow
gracious web
burial

Walk leaves
wing the above lane
son
look red
condemn
die

Pothole
years roll
remain true friend
ship bell
precious martyr
hear rose
shadow twigs
plants pillars
flower

The taken life of hosts

Amen
tomb pillars

An excerpt of an untitled draft of a collaboration with Sheila Murphy

2011-12-05T20:50:00.001-06:00

Earlier this year, BlazeVOX released Beyond The Bother of Sunlight, a long collaborative poem I wrote with Sheila Murphy. This is a new collaboration we started in March of 2010.

I've never seen stars like these

You call it the house on the hill, in Chautauqua dark
Your headlights spooling out road for us
I read the night through to you, a one-man play
and rocked sleeping in your attentiveness
Later I wanted to know what monsters you have here
parked, low on fuel, having eaten Valerian
In Ohio we had the melon heads
We had awkward children, maladroit, who took to woods
Know what I mean?
They're supposed to have huge heads, and are nuclear

Reading aloud to you the best I can

Those stars are clear stars, clean stars, brittle
We like it that way
cling to each other under reverse freckled sky
listens too for sounds, muffled by woods
listens for the passage of monsters through woods

Consecutive daisies wheeled in through improvised
Gestation marks the playing field as attendant
Quiet blisters that transform the asleep sounds
Macular and obvious and chore lined
As the choir moves in for herbal headlines
Clear to middling outré blanking on the jazz
From nights before the plenary apostrophe fest
Brained from scratch to have been owned
Again as if feckless choirs had mufflers
Tapped with fuel and left in park

You modest me when I retain syllabic
Hedge to shave and hand across
To check the level and the weight of pores
Against results of seed

The adjutant generic mimes leave home
And state names with built-in exclamatory
Roundness saves daylight to be heeded
Like Morse Code if anyone continues to be
Passage-prone and resonant with mantra voices
In the wooded plain a textual more
Like some caucus of the dark where weather
Claims to capsize all the cells we started
Out of foster air and brimming slight
less refraction than tandem misting
She was on the couch writing lists all morning
My fingernails had grown long and I'd shrugged off
some headache from the length of sleep

It's short--but I miss my alarm to a confused A.M.
Lindsay's late and sullen with rounded daylight
Her pores quietly glisten with adored depth
when she tells me about the sadness of the Fair
the results of poor people gone to seed
I want to add an exclamation to New York
placing so much that's attentive upon each other
I spin askew sometimes
I've always been too willing to run away
and in the middle of investigations

I break down faith to a drill-bit thaw
blanked on jazz as the choir moves in
Pretty soon everywhere I kiss you becomes a flower
I hang from my feet surrender torrentially
Unless I test these vessels calcified with indentation
The air will foster occidental elevations silk
stillnesses mum across your restless hands

Land mass has a forgiving storm
That acts out weeping for our fractions
Attending to the past resisting resolution
Points of clear young river taste me out of frame
Until I hamper my compatriots from scolding
Their lesser selves too willing to retreat
The key of G remains alluring to untutored
Witnesses pretending to be God of shoulders
God of should the rippling abs of the apostles
Raging in the mirror as though
Indentation pasteurized somebody’s milk
And it was blue again
The gender of surrender hastened inadvertent
Endpoints where the wildflowers are most
Tame and moist conflicted and still given
To falsetto numbness with a note full of
Remainders suspended where the exhalation
Leaves its evidence and someone innocently
Locates little parcels of familiarity
To name them something freighted
And yet clear to the touch
I've always preferred C-minor
and the way its velocity twists pianoforte
A clear young river could split my palm
like my lifeline pinches

In the morning we're walled-up in amontillado rain
armed with bastard lead and wrung with mascara tears
Fog muffles my throat as I love her against the mattresses
we've piled high and floral in the bedroom

Equal protection

2011-12-02T11:16:00.000-06:00

“Well, we’re going to hell in a hand-basket,” he complained, shifting the bulk of his shopping bag from the crook of one arm to another. “Everyone’s looking for a handout these days.”

The people surged past us, each face made beautiful by swiftness. Every feature was blurred. Every disagreement, be it in proportion or ideology, had naturally resolved itself, and all that was left was smooth wind.

“I’m waiting to be changed.” I told him. My muscles were clenched, staying upright in the wind. Crowds were streaming past me as I stood with him. The night before I had dreamed of smooth rocks, the inevitable levels etched by water and time. I had dreamed of floating.

“You know, you’re blocking the way,” he said.

“I’m waiting to be changed,” I said again. He winced. “It doesn’t have to be by you,” I added.

I noticed that his shopping bag was spilling with hearts. The color red, as surprising as tears, trickled and pooled on the outside of the plastic. Here and there, crows glided over our heads.

Truck's change of drivers for December

2011-11-30T20:51:00.000-06:00

Many thanks go to Andrew Burke for guiding Truck during November. It was a great ride.

December's driver/editor will be Lewis LaCook. Welcome, Lewis. Drive carefully. The keys are behind the sun-visor just above the wheel.

Introducing a young poet from Macau

2011-11-29T19:10:00.001-06:00

to the Guia Light

shefollowed the light

into the eyesof the forest

after hercoat was stained

with theindigo mist

she feltsecure

under thosestaring

amber eyes

the doorsaid

close youreyes, give me your hand

then she touched

vines onthe wall

flowersblossomed

cherriesfell

where herfingers landed

after that aclutch of cloud

a headlessbird

flew out

gliding in theflooded tunnel

a ball oflight struck her

from underwater

lights out

she foundherself leaning back

on a woodenchair in the little pub

her friendslight up their last cigarettes

mentioningthe distant afternoon of ice discovered

smoke andwords

swirling tanglingabove

weaving cumulonimbus

pouringdown some colourful characters

mossing thefloor

a squirrelslips and falls

leaves ahazelnut

ten secondsafter, pop

shellcracked

an oceanspreading out

Iris, Fan Xing was born in Xi’an in 1985 andmoved to Guangzhou with her parents when she was in primary school. Sheholds a Master's degree in English Studies from the University ofMacau. Her bilingual (Chinese-English) book of poems Lost in the Afternoon was published in Macao in 2009. She wasawarded first prize in poetry category of Hong Kong City Literary Awards2011. She has worked on many classical and contemporary poetry translationprojects. In July 2010, she worked as a translator in residence at BundanonArtist Centre in Australia for the translation project of contemporaryAustralian poetry.

2011-11-28T19:01:00.001-06:00

everyone has their orders to follow

one of the guards is in charge of the lock

another keeps the key

one sharpens the instruments of torture

one measures up for the simple box

and one will spade the earth in

none of these men has a name

and in the morning

each of them shaves

with a similar razor

and until

his face is gone

work of the everyday

every day of my life

I’ve built

block upon block

I added to meaning

I added things up

seemed as if

from nothing once

but that was never the way

all that I needed must have been there

I’ve puzzled it out of the ruins

yes – the materials were there

where I stood

were with me from day 1

it was just a matter of

opening my eyes

now I’ve four walls

and the roof’s almost done

where once I had

a sky

he decides to start a religion

I have perfected the art of falling up

it’s taken me till now

and of course there’s still some proof

left to the pudding

the kind of thing angels applaud

and so it is with no little suspense

I step up on the window sill

I won’t tell you how many floors up

I hold out a finger

to test the wind

and so I lead the way

damage control

those who

make weapons

buy weapons

sell weapons

those who

tell us

we must have weapons –

these people should have weapons

tested on them

Christopher (Kit) Kelen's (客遠文) most recent volumes of poetry are God preserve me from those who want what’s best for me, published in 2009 by Picaro Press, (N.S.W, Australia) and in conversation with the river, published in 2010 by VAC (Chicago, USA). For the last ten years Kelen has taught Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Macau in south China.

Dredging the Delta (book of Macao poems and sketches, 102pp)
published in 2007 by Cinnamon Press (UK)
on-line orders through http://www.cinnamonpress.com/titles-uk.htm

God preserve me from those who want what’s best for me(74pp)
published in 2009 by Picaro Press, (N.S.W, Australia).
http://www.picaropress.com/p2-3.html

In Conversation with the River(140pp)
published in 2010 by VAC (Chicago, IL)
on-line orders through http://vacteam.com/books.htm

2011-11-26T09:19:00.001-06:00

My friends never cease to amaze me. Poet Stephen Vincent has written letters to Jack Spicer, put them together into a manuscript entitled After Language: Letters to Jack Spicer and Blaze VOX Books has published them. Here's one now, then where to buy the book after.

Dear Jack,

Now that I grow older and literally sheaves of poetry have passed before my eyes—let alone hundreds of public and private readings by poets filling my ears with their works—I am struck by the question of what survives. That is, what makes one poem endure—one that we come back to again and again over a lifetime—and others disappear like old-fashioned printed data, the shredded pieces that used to fall like snow from windows in the financial district on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve?

What makes a poem bang and resonate for years? And when it no longer resonates, why is it still possible to go hit it again and the thing keeps resonating? Or, to change metaphor, what makes a certain poem like perpetual butter in a churn, the cow’s milk turned to rich gold, those cubits on our platter.

Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the stream.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,

Life is but a dream.

We learn that one early as children, singing it over and over again, even though the boat is leaky, there is nothing gentle about the stream, and "merrily" happens most often only when we sing. Yet the song survives in perpetua! Some things endure, I suspect, because they are the opposite of what we know to be true. The verity is in the music, the way it rises and mocks the lie. Simple as that.

Yet, what is it about a real poem, one that does not mock, but endures whatever beauty or trash we throw at it? I have walked around Language for more than 40 years. It is as disturbing as ever. Perhaps the sculpture—a David Smith—in the park is the metaphor. The way one keeps returning and walking around it. One day a wheelbarrow, another day the spare, crude metal letters attached at odd angles to an edge of the barrow—particularly the ampersand—another day the thin dark wheel and its luminescent spokes: the sequence and absence of sequence. Particulars compel an eye to mix the angle of light, with whatever combination of objects, into what stands—at this moment or that moment—to be true.

Anyway, Jack, that is the way I have been reading you. A ring around the poem. It does not fall down. A ring around the poem. The dance the eye makes. The ear. Sometimes you are obnoxious and terrible. Sometimes hopelessly bittersweet. A self-loathing you do go. Other times the

transparency, the poem with an utter overwhelming clarity. The “you” is way gone. Plato’s figures illumined without a shadow on the wall. No wonder you got more than your fingers burnt. Those messages.

The test of a true poet is to correspond.

The test of a true poem? You got me, Jack.

The test is how not to die for it. Believe me.

Stephen

****

The ecstatic is not built on an echo

The corrugated skin of the heart

Dappled thoroughly in red, a small vowel

Released, a flooded gorge:

Throw those rocks to the wind

What you shout is about nothing—

When your mother—eyes closed—

Fingers the triangle across the Ouija board

Numbers like Michael Jordan’s baskets

(swish, swish) fall into place: A 3

And a 2 and a 3. The Coach

Is a Cherokee Werewolf, Tiger Woods

Is a caterpillar: transformation falls apart

At the line of scrimmage. What we tackle

Between vowels is the incision

The stone carnage: the way I melt

Trembling—my tail wing in flames:

My head buried and born before you.

****

Stephen Vincent lives in San Francisco where he is a poet, writer and visual artist. Some of his previous books include: Piece by Piece (Okike + Redberry Publications, 1967); White Lights & Whale Hearts (The Crossing Press, 1971); The Ballad of Artie Bremer (Momo's Press, 1974); Walking (Junction Press, 1993); Sleeping With Sappho (faux ebook, 2004);Triggers (Shearsman ebook, 2005); Walking Theory (Junction Press, 2007); The First 100 Days of Obama (Steven Wolf Fine Arts, 2009). Vincent’s haptic drawings and unique accordion fold books have been featured in gallery exhibits at Braunsein-Quay (2009) and Steven Wolf Fine Arts (2009), San Francisco, and Jack Hanley Gallery (2011), New York City. In 2012, the Logan Gallery, Legion Museum of Art (San Francisco Fine Arts Museums) is planning a one-person exhibit of the drawings and books.

a collaborative work-in-progress between Christine McNair + rob mclennan

2011-11-24T03:01:00.001-06:00

Dismantled, lodge

But how with gnarled hands holds themany and how? The sun and shadow of Rhode Island? Let alone the earth?

Rosmarie Waldrop

A strata, manyfeatured. Afterlife of trees. Streetcorner, dance. So barely noticed. Does, herlittle move.

Arrangement, in theteeth. Red daisies, diamond truck. My name is, not. Grammar. Red-wingedblackbird, curls. No one, possibilities. The room. We speak no, French.

Authorial, activity.Barnswallow, trance. Poignant, and ephiphinal. Determined. Laurentian Hills, sonamed.

My father, a distantcousin in St. Marguerite, 1950s. Am I the last to know.

A talent forarranging. Words, can't break. Imagine, her left hip.

Sessional, cloud.They come in curlicues. In, waves.

Hybrids, peaches.So, you make. Misty expectations. August. What we try to, hold. Vowels, a lung.An eighth troubled day. An undergrowth of bodies. Landed.

You weresignificant, rail. Tethers, the bike paths. Written, from opposite ends.

Old age is itsvoice. Invented, out of sight. Basement, cooling stage. The birdsong, insular.Make tea, play guitar. Autoharp.

Pecked, out aballoon. A red remark.

A corporate appeal,denied. The trap door, opens. Ultimately, appeared. A warbled, contradiction.Cowboys, up a name. In French, les voyageurs. Hernias hold in, scarves.

Not to know ourtime. Placing bones into the earth. A perfect, bit. They raid the biker hills.

As old as I am, now.Porcelain, chops. Deceptions, wire. String.

The snow, precludes.It is, only August.

mantle

« le jour où il l'avait rencontrée dans un champde fraises »

Un homme et son péché, Claude-Henri Grignon

August stings,deceives, unravels. Under my feet the lawn corporeals, slides up and slips. Itcircles round and there are trees and they are around and the windshudders. Thetrees shudderflex. The rain bends the roof. Barely bearable, instep peels downonto cold grass moves imperceptibly. The deck sighs. My feet are on the grass.We labyrinth round. My buried dogs yip in the earth. They eye you cautiously.The deer eat the flowers. The rain buckets.

The balloon storehas closed. All the puppets are lost. The crawl up the chalets at night andhoof the sky. Howl and pull at the shingles. The balloons evolve intojellyfish, luminesce, purr. Feral bicycles roam the streets, slick the medianswith coral. They are not to be approached past midnight.

Sainte not saint.Feminine distinct. Adele stretches, yawns, picks at her teeth. Adele is the colourof the sky. Adele is rambunctious and shivery. Adele is running in heels. Adeleshakes her braids out. Adele kicks the mountain. Adele contains the forest.Adele bites the wind. Adele pushes her fists into the mud. Adele is the smellof crushed leaves. Adele creaks the thunder. Adele turns the cross into anearring. Adele hums a tune. Adele saves a pretty penny. Adele consumes peachesby the bushel.

Prelude

My fifteenthgrandfather stirs at the mention of Rhode Island. Fluffs his wig and sleepsmiles away, where the trains no longer go.

Read rob discuss the collaborative process at Open Book http://www.openbookontario.com/news/sainte_ad%C3%A8le_redux

ChristineMcNair'swork has appeared in cv2, Prairie Fire, ditchpoetry.com, Arc,the Bywords Quarterly Journal, Descant, and assorted otherplaces. Her first collection of poems Conflict, is forthcoming with BookThugin spring 2012. She works as a book doctor in Ottawa, is one of the hosts ofCKCU Lit Landscapes, and blogs at http://cartywheel.wordpress.com

Bornin Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently livesin Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction andnon-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections A (short)history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011), grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books],2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011), kate street (Moira, 2011)and 52 flowers (or, a perth edge) (Obvious Epiphanies, 2010), and asecond novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runsabove/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The GarneauReview (ottwater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journalof poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and theOttawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University ofAlberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at http://robmclennan.blogspot.com

3 Poems by Jill Jones

2011-11-22T06:12:00.001-06:00

There Are NoExtras

It’s all busy

even at ground level

hello cellophane, hello ants

days beget days

that’s the charming

the little songs

jumping out of backpacks

and while koalas

fall from the trees

and offer us their thirst

that’s past cute

like all les urgences

flood, drought, five cents left

in any language

is something even these

two tourists expand, give them

a map or a branch

of Christmas bush

while they wait at the

interchange, time for

tannin and sugar

readjust kit, the long

city road melts

inviting, eh

no extras needed

all here

Jill Jones

Yearn For You

Perhaps it starts with the ravens, it seems

like conversation, perhaps you still call themcrows

in an old dream the unknown neighbours neighbour

check spotty rain, flatbed & dog, coldchisel

is it sun making the hens go, barbara ann’s innumber one

ignoring us, you can’t go back, we have no

church clothes, you can never go back

small inscription in concrete

grass fires, temperatures, witnesses, no clothes

no rain to bear, buzzing flies, buzzing leaves

peggy sue scrapes paving, the ravens stop

you can’t compare this rain

now beginneth, you don’t return

to a dream of your old clothes

Jill Jones

‘WhatAre My’

WHAT ARE MY clothes worth what

are my clothes if they fall or are

taken within a box that if taken

away to be burnt or buried sailed away

on rivers which disappear breezes on

borders and roads and grid brown borders

wilder when they fall and flake wilder

with my naked arms naked ears with

sounds burning sounds burying sounds

saved in particles and streams not saved

but scattered as tokens in roads but

not any more than more or if more not

less than other than this hope less

free scattering no return falling free

…

Sometimes you want to say even here

is elegance even as it falls apart in the

opulent choking time spinning air

Jill Jones

What the critics say:

"poetry of unsettling mystery and beauty. ... passionate and parodic at once, as cool as all get out." The Australian

"... building bridges and points of access and communication, forming a whole, prescient and often deeply moving experience." Poetry International Web

What Jill says:

"I'm interested in relationships between states and locales, shifting borders, the openings in closures, pleasures of exploration, the great themes, like the weather. Walking is important, slow mobility across terrain, the temporal process.

I’m working somewhere between the lyric and something more broader, more discursive, so I move from either investigations of interiority or sensuality merged with the figurative which may also speak to larger structures. The poems have become a broken song – fragmented, flagrant, floating - perhaps an abstract or ruined lyric, where ‘I’ has shifted from the centre.

The way I work has evolved from a continuing interest in texture, pattern and transience, of jumping in the midst of the flow, experience in language underway, asking questions about how the pieces don’t fit as shards alter meanings."

from her homesite at http://www.jilljones.com.au/

ADMONITIONS BEFORE DINNER PARTY - Bobbi Lurie

2011-11-19T07:42:00.001-06:00

We must render them such

Must not dent the fender when we leave

Must wear our best turquoise dress

Must paint our beauty with great cause

Must pause at the landing

Drape the fabric of the skirt around the sleeve

Must have the door opened as we enter

Must leave an impression

Must not promise anything

Must keep our hands to ourselves

Must make our possessions possess us

Must salt our tears to gain attention

Must feign heroism

Must seek redemption from an audience

Must relieve ourselves in easy chairs

Must hide our spears unless pushed to the edge

Must find a hedge to stand against

Must erase ourselves with prayers of consolation

Must blame our mistakes on bad influences

Must sigh openly

Must take each tragedy in hand

Must squeeze it tight

Must seek consolation

Must drag it out of them

Bobbi Lurie's "23rd Psaltery" was in the October edition of "Truck"~ she has also had work in Hamilton Stone Review. She is the author of three poetry collections: Letter from the Lawn, The Book I Never Read, and Grief Suite, all published by CW Books. http://www.readcwbooks.com/lurie-grief.html

Bobbi lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

http://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2011/10/bobbi-lurie-ludwig-wittgenstein.html.

This charming archaeologist with her spade…

2011-11-18T03:13:00.001-06:00

ANOTHER VISIT TO THE RUINS

And still they come, yes, dressed

in hard hats these days. Sporting

an iPad rather than a clipboard.

Eager for the site, both tramp

the ravines, check and cross-check

the coordinates, plotting aright.

You know, he says, the story

behind the fall of the king?

He began to unpack the tools.

She shook her head although

she had read the annals well.

There was work now to be done.

We’ll open the first trench here,

he said, forefinger marking

a firm trace across a mound

of grass. The usual grid? she asked,

preparing flagging tape while

he laid out their trenching tools.

What hope, he murmured, do you

think we have to chance upon

some fragments of bucchero here?

Hmm, she said tartly feeling

he teased her like a girl and

noting for the first time thinning

of the cranial hair as he knelt

as his task. That and a lot

more, I hope. But really thought

he must be getting past it, tapping

on her iPad’s keyboard, Dig One,

October 16, trial trench A.

She settled it between her knees

as he took up his spade. Years

past as a keen young ‘post doc’

her heart had raced to attend

his class, to be the one chosen

by him to explore the next site

and kneel beside him to take

the treasures out. Back then

the brush of a sleeve, the touch

of a steadying hand was cherished

and happily recalled alone

in expedition tent at night.

But it seemed that was all. And her

name always second to his

on their papers the Society

brought out. Her mind now came back

to the present dig. Time to

photograph with the turf laid back.

She pinned down the grid of tapes

to make the quads and placed flat

the chequered photographic scale.

While she snapped away, he leaned

on his spade and watched her work.

She felt his eye assess each move

and yet, rest upon forearm,

or flank or the fall of her hair.

She’d seen him with other girls,

noticed his little ways when

they strove to please him,

even those who lacked the skills.

Some of them found favour with

him in other ways, away on

digs for months. She ground her teeth.

Now that the years had taken

the venusty of her youth

and he showed no sign that he

might offer her the ultimate

in colleagual rights, she put

such thoughts firmly from her mind.

He had a wife, homely no doubt,

though down the years she had hoped

that the great love she could offer

would compensate for comfort,

cultivation of habit

and the cold Sunday lunch. No,

she had erred and wasted those

years she could have found someone,

a soul mate, partner in research.

The scrape of his trowel disturbed

her thoughts. Look at this, he cried

as he levered at a stone.

Two stones in fact, too heavy

for hands or small tools. She craned

to see. Get me the crowbar,

he called and peered through a crack

between the slabs as he stooped

on all fours. She brought it quickly

and stood astride the twitching,

now prostrate form, with his arm

forced down into the dark depths.

Here! Here! He called. Lever those

two slabs apart. I think it’s

a burial chamber. Can see

shards, sarcophagus maybe.

His brusque tone rasped on her heart

but she reached forward the steel

just as he had commanded.

More, more! he grunted, thrusting

his arm deeper yet. She swung

the lever to one side with

all her strength and put an arm

to steady herself in the small

of his back. But he was not

there! In an explosion of dust

and rush of stones disappeared.

The crowbar jangled away

on broken rocks to one side

and she was gripped in guilt.

Had she pushed him? There was no

cry from her leader, just thud

of a body deep in darkness.

She waited and listened quiet

for some further sound, movement

from that second grave. Called out

but no answer. They had no torch

to use that day. Satellite

phone the only way to get aid.

But she sat down on a stone,

perhaps in shock, perhaps

contemplating life’s new turn.

Was this release? Or was it

Fate’s compliant master stroke?

Or was she digging blind?

Glen Phillips

Prof. Glen Phillips is a retired life-long teacher - from country school to university Professor. He has been a considerable force, both administratively and creatively, in the literary scene of Western Australia. With decades of research and local reading and writing under his belt, he has become a frequent lecturer in China where he shares his love and knowledge of Australian history and literature as, Honorary Visiting Professor at the Univesrity of Shanghai from 2004 to 2010. From the first turn of the shod to his his retirement in recent years, Glen Phillips began and ran the Creative Writing stream at the Edith Cowan University, Mount Lawley, Western Australia.

Glen Phillips has published ten collections of poetry, among many other books he has contributed to and edited. He is represented in over 20 Australian and international poetry anthologies. Since his so-called retirement, he has written a number of short stories in tandem with poems, based mainly on the Australian and Chinese landscapes. He continues his acadmic contribution as Director of The International Centre for Landscape and Lanuguage at Edith Cowan University where he has also set up a small publishing arm.

Patrick McManus, Poet Laureate of Raynes Park

2011-11-16T02:45:00.001-06:00

POEM

his poem

came to him

in a dream

via a sweet

lovely topless

garlanded muse

in Grecian robes

and inscribed on

an amphora

he gratefully

memorised it

and hastily

upon waking

still entranced

put it to paper

but later sadly

they told him

that it was written

in Linear A Minoan

undeciphered Eteocretan

which no one

has been able

to read for three

thousand years

but to wait

they were

working on it

pmcmanus

GEOGRAPHY

he loved

her north

her south

her east

her west

her latitudes

her longitudes

but most of all

her loved her

rampant hot moist

fecund tropical

equatorial zones

pmcmanus

POETRY GROUP

at his local
poetry group
open crit session
he was minded
of his old
school playground
the bullies in action
putting the boot in
or perhaps of
the TV
nature program
about hyenas
tearing apart
their prey
some fighting
for the liver
others for the
juicy heart
leaving only
gnawed bones
and a lot
of blood

pmcmanus

*

Patrick McManus: His biography seems to have been turned over in the allotment. If I dig it up, I'll post it. Otherwise be assured Patrick is a prolific poet, a legend in Raynes Park for his lively readings, a kind grandfather who only occasionally tortures the grandkids with his verse, and a very active contributor to poetryetc, an eccentric poetry site online.

2011-11-14T04:58:00.001-06:00

BEAR AND ME

The brown soulful eyes

of much-lovedBear

rows the littleboat

over water Moon and stars

In night-time mysteries

softlybreathed

down long undergroundmazes

of caves andcanyons

to the secret meeting place

of World’s Four Great Winds.

Event-horizons of Black Holes.

Mighty Light-destroyers.

Paddle safely me back home again.

Row the campfires over.

FEET

As Ilay me down to sleep

I prayfor darkness long and deep

formiles and miles of unused feet

fromwhich they never wake.

Goneall sorrows fears griefs

leavingonly resting feet.

Theyhave carried a heavy load.

Theyhave walked a long hard road.

Theyhave gone thru great duress

toallow me to progress

thru alife of extreme stress.

Theyhave earned a decent rest.

Life isthinking on your feet

so yourmind’s only as true

aswhatever your feet can do.

Prayyou’re born with feet not flat.

Amen.

Shantih.

All ofthat.

*

At 61 Ken Hudson has recently returned to writing poetry after a 30-year hiatus and deep forays into other fields. In his younger days, Ken's poems were published in a wide range of journals and anthologies. Now he is concentrating on poetry until, as he puts it, 'the last breath I take'.

a collaborative sequence

2011-11-11T07:46:00.001-06:00

ShikibuShuffle

AndrewBurke / Phil Hall

Murasaki Shikibu (973—1014)

Ornette Coleman (double quartetexperiments, 1960)

Editor: One of those happy turns of fate brought Phil Hall, Canadian poet, and myself together in a Perth backyard about three years ago. He also hails from Perth - but his one's in Canada. We struck up a conversation, swapped poetry anecdotes and a couple of books, and kept in touch by email. Then I had a heart attack and was queued up for life-saving surgery. I just had to wait, unable to do much at all, kept alive by sprays and medical potions. To distract myself and to learn something of Phil's absolutely different poetics, we agreed to collaborate on a text. I wrote, he wrote, then we shuffled lines together to make a final text - actually, although I wrote 50% of this, Phil did most of the shuffling because he was so good at it!

Whistling without charts

I praise all swoops andcalls

old red-throat has comeback

the gentle violin-maker tothe countryside

a left-footer’s choir

all language metaphor

I air my tongue

and dream of placid jaws

bawdy songs once belted

grace

Don’tplay what’s there

playwhat’s not there

aChinese dragon of smoke

wearingmy dead friend’s clothes

abovethe marina

Istall on the floating bridge

andturn Schubert or Mingus

downlow upright in

thelong paddock

gathersrain

Iwatch my chest

rise and fall in the mirror

nature in the raw

nothing I see or think

meansanything to me

thenI plan to tell you about it

andinto each dull thunk

like lemon on fish

comesflugelhorn

afaint zing

About

playingharmonica

meansnothing

downthe laneways

istuba backwards

sorrowof the jarrahs

andan open spit-valve

liningthe suburbs

windrushthrough reeds

to rain

The local gun range

swears black rapid-fire

but our sugar maples insist

circus the only place

and yellow-jackets concur

(in mosques of spit)

3 into 1 goes fine

ourbrains inter

connected in their

dome sweet dome

Delightedby

homageto

thetrap

ofthe outhouse

dooropen

twinklinglights in a grey sky

hereto there

a wing and a prayer

a section of flight

the Flight Bros

Praise each new word

any word will do

on the child's lips
in the windrows

sacred proximity
moon moon

be our replacement

in the daylight sky

pale cuticle

hope

Thinking wetlands

I say swamp

I say lake

as a trophy big-mouth

startled out of what Iwas

leaps and smacks

(Thoreau says pond)

ibis peck

the unlettered eye

in dry reeds

Silverwakes

bitinginto an apple

hangingoff a tree

inweather Newton

readit right

fencedotted

likemanuscript

withwhite snails

writtenjuices on skin

smallautumn regatta

10.

As boustrophedon

vineswhisper Ashbery

tomy Basho

I’mlight on

thedistortion pedal

beforepulling out all the stops

andswitching to rock’n’roll organ

tellingit

likeit TI is

11.

Talkingto the air

Ibreak cobwebs

onthe line

cello kite fishing

makinglurid

thenet result

whilehammock hook shines

sunholds motes float

12.

Companygone I’m talked out

ouropened lake-door takes wing

kingbirdsnesting above the light

fatchicks gaping pleading

theoriole Jesus in drag in Tasmania

ourwoods-door opened leaps in chorus

peepers gaping pleading

anevasive poppy-seed furnace answer

comeback silence I’ll try to listen

oncemore a single organism

13.

Bodyrags

slouchtoward

thepoem

aboutthe door

dark

pianorolls at play

theo in poem

inmemory’s chapel

nota knob

orhalo

14.

Worldlyopinion

runsin the backdoor

God must bea Boogie Man

andout the front door

thenwalks in

throughthe wall

andsits on the floor

scanthelp to me

playingin my sandpit

looking for myself

15.

To braid

plumbago blooms

with tuppenny turn-ups

to weave submerged antlers

breathing blue at theirtips

with centaurs

in wheelchairs

our hymn

to abundance

and sense

Read more about Phil Hall at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Hall_(poet)

Collaborations Continue ...

2011-11-09T03:27:00.001-06:00

EDITOR: I'm happy to announce I have friends with adventurous souls - in this instance Sheila Murphy from USA and Doug Barbour from Canada (How strangely history has carved the world up!). These two are exceptional poets and prolific in their individual careers - yet have found time since 2000 to collaborate, a project appropriately named Continuations. We are privileged to read some of the continuing work below, plus a word or two about the process after-words.

Continuations XCIX:

find a way through mapped

or unmapped trajectories apassage

waybeyond all sales

or under glass promotions justwalk

beneathrefracted sun or rain

wind or whether blown out of doors

in a fugue state walking

toanother face

awreath around darkness

throughdoorways

map-less toward

mereweather as a way

through reflection sur

faceoff ice or glass

family romance as culture

convenience stored

too long in sub

stance frozen there

cyclical venting of

oneor another rose

sketchedin the rough

a lass familiar with

chiseledsurface

strikes a zen pose

penned those petals etch

each parse of page

akind of black

announcement means

not ends will flower

oneach blank(et)ed page

age does not repeat

amoment

parsingfrom petal

to point toward another

evening page upon

pacingwithout end

less pulp more purple

(p)rose of taxing

talesturned or des pointes

a dance of intellectualized

machinery a fake or

deke un(der)written there

people drink a big gulp

beverage including slurpy

orrose-tinted slush

lax tasteless test (less mind

fulthan on point

offlow(e(r)ring)

a pointed rejoinder a fleur de

lies less loose lips

than looped flips flops

fallinto the red

slip(per)s sunk

inthick piles (pilloried

slippage lops off

variationson a them(e)

devotion: read to me

pooled cinch of an idea whosetime treads

upon(what) lies (ahead)

of willowy surfaces

bread and circumstances w(h)ine

read & consumed pledge

seenand returned be

neath a brow beat and

battered per

cussed as idea logged

sumatra flavored morning

rowsof succulents subsumed

under milder weather legible

dissenthere versus

the antithesis of mesh afar contagious

and not quite about ideas

read or ready to materialize

asthrough a mesh starkly

mirrored thought less reflection

windruffled trees bent

over the smallest white

caps tugged begging

flecks of matter bend

astreason chastens conscience

whileover a stark surface

wind roars as if to scrub

freethe thought of

bigger spheres of influence

affluence argues in fluent

tongues of fire(d)

burntout and turned down

a kind of fear as pain(ed)

expression(ism

harsh song (or soup) lines

a painting of fear collects

nolines tongues merely spoken

runparallel to the story

in flames upon the screen

removaldiffers from art

withnothing left before it’s there

northern borders from nada can

nothingarrive a nod

ding head as empty of thought

asawareness an old

rhetoric redoubled still

empty minded (the s(t)ore

bowl offered

herebyconfiguring

pureno

thingness arriving

without wares

thus believing unawares

as empty does fills with

nots too tied to

everunravel

plots to ride new

narrative twists turn

coatedlead(~~ers~~) to fools

id est lotsof wind

replenishing

lots of wind as if

ascarce commodity too

constanta story

constantly told

a mouth too wide deep

ina big muddy

argument unsalvaged

thecut cost cast

aside a wide

andwinding read

dumb luck plummets

cultsof net yield(ing)

on-sidebenefaction

to entrap the needy in false

argumentsread

under a mud surface

such a falling off but

ton from what push

pullof power rep

resented as ever (since

sensesays solo

flight alone will do will to

speckle a fleet of ushers

in their pent-up phases

of severance using pin

lightlo and be

hold a number well done

thewow factor hovering

a new ear all legislated hear all

neverlistening listing

to starboard stars bored

st(r)aythought full

load of in (or ex)

crementallogic systems

thought through stories

boardedup to keep

light in and out

stars reach pores

fillouter surface

with like slate

date(d) narrative slush a

slippery scope out(ed)

anda way too far

to tell sell fell

orfull fury of

oil(y) fired sincerity

although and yes

away to through

sails or

species in orouter

fields lush with

selves

Comments on Collaboration:

With collaboration, there is an even broader sense of subject, that is, less of tightly controlled ‘about-ness.’ ‘Concepts, referents, even possible sites of imagery,’ are alive, balancing the roles of receiver and sender in a two-way process. When one writes collaboratively, there's a comfort and a simultaneous ‘ready for anything’ sensation, as the spectrum of surprise and expectation is touched in various places. On seeing or hearing the collaboration partner's response, one is often stimulated by the passage just received and read, then drawn into the work by wanting to respond. The curious thing that can happen in collaboration is the blurring of lines between writers. In one view, the better the collaboration, the less evident the two (or more) writing styles. Not a lowest-common-denominator approach to writing. Rather, it would seem that at its most artistic, collaboration brings into being a new writer, different in many ways from either of the individual writers. Such a presence cannot be forced into existence. It comes with committed working together over time.

In Continuations, we agreed on a more or less fixed format of six lines, and have bounced the ongoing process of poem-construction back and forth over the years, since November 2000. It seems that in that time a ‘third individual’ has emerged, who writes differently from the way that either writer would be creating independently. Emmy Lou Harris, speaking of her collaboration with Mark Knopfler, makes a point that allusively applies to this poetic version: "When you combine two unique voices it creates a third, phantom voice."

- Doug Barbour & Sheila Murphy

Poems by Shane McCauley

2011-11-07T01:28:00.002-06:00

IMPOSSIBILITIES

‘Something totally unexpected, like a barking cat.’

- Mary Oliver

The sun burning in a night sky

a dream from which

you cannot waken

breathing deep within the sea

a heart that beats and will not die

a tide that does not return

paper and straw

that will not burn

passing yourself coming back

from some intended destination

some lack of sin

that leads to retribution

finding flowers that shouldn’t

bloom in winter

learningthat so much beauty

can’t outlast the spring

walking along an endless shore

thinking that life

should somehow provide

one lifetime more.

- Shane McCauley

CHILLI CRAB

Muddy torpor of island water

lapping the pier

frothfrisking in the shadows

city-island a boat ride away

but here within the veranda’s

blister of sunshine

deliciousmess of crabs

cold sweating bottle of Tiger beer

and later

replete

such a glory of returning

the dolphin-boat

leaping over so many mirrors.

- ShaneMcCauley

Shane McCauley is a well-published Australian writer who lives in Perth. He has published many books of poetry with Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Platypus Press and - recently - Sunline Press. He is also a well-known and much respected writing workshop coordinator, TAFE lecturer and teacher for OOTA - Out of the Asylum - a writing group based at Fremantle Arts Centre.

Truck

John M. Bennett / from VIBROMAX

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino / Skips

John Crouse / from REFRAINS

Jim Leftwich / not that

Peter Ganick / from 'webern songs informed'

Welcome Truck's driver for March

G. E. Schwartz/ HATMAN

G. E. Schwartz/ SHADOW PEOPLE

G. E. Schwartz/ENGINE OF LIFE, FRANKLIN INSTITUTE, 1965

Michael Rosenthal/ AT THE ALTAR

Andrew Burke/ THE ORPHAN IN MY ROOM

Jesse Glass/ poem about Cid Corman

Vanessa Paige/ choreography

JESSE GLASS/ Jeffrey Dahmer at Grand Avenue Mall, Milwaukee, 1988

JOHN ROCHE/ Amazing Stories of Literary Rejection, volume 1.

DAVE ESPOSITO/ music and activism

ANDREW BURKE/ The Name of the Game

STEVE SWELL/ music

Mark Weiss/ poems

Lakey Comess/ Minus three, rising

Lakey Comess/ No flashlight, borrow mine

Lakey Comess/ Trials tell stories

Michael Rosenthal/ THIS THING DESIRED

Damian Catera/ politics and music

Jason Martin/ performance artist/ musician

Jesse Glass/ poem

Burt Kimmelman/ December Solstice

Burt Kimmelman/ Cup of Tea, 5 AM

Steve Tills/ Means to be operative

John Roche, Brother's Keeper

New Truck driver for February

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION: Alfred Corn

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION: Marc Vincenz

RESOLUTION /REVOLUTION : Sarah Sarai

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION: Annie Pluto

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION : Chris Mansel

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION: Larissa Shmailo

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION : Michael T. Young

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION: Alfred Corn

New driver for January 2012

IN MEMORIAM: Carol Novack 1948-2011

Lindsay Morrison: man, what a day to go

Bosley Gravel: @_TheAristocrat_

Ice age in a bottle

Baby-faced elephant seal

Again, golden niblets

Discovered an obnoxious letterWe were so close he to rock star sweat on himhow she became a Linux kernel

Path photos

Chris Girard: Shadow Shadows Tomb

An excerpt of an untitled draft of a collaboration with Sheila Murphy

Equal protection

“Well, we’re going to hell in a hand-basket,” he complained, shifting the bulk of his shopping bag from the crook of one arm to another. “Everyone’s looking for a handout these days.”

Truck's change of drivers for December

Introducing a young poet from Macau

a collaborative work-in-progress between Christine McNair + rob mclennan

3 Poems by Jill Jones

What the critics say:

ADMONITIONS BEFORE DINNER PARTY - Bobbi Lurie

This charming archaeologist with her spade…

Patrick McManus, Poet Laureate of Raynes Park

a collaborative sequence

ShikibuShuffle

God must bea Boogie Man

Collaborations Continue ...

Poems by Shane McCauley

Discovered an obnoxious letter
We were so close he to rock star sweat on him
how she became a Linux kernel