Thursday, April 29, 2010

(Re)Creation, or a New Mythos

"When I retire I'd like to supplement my income by becoming a poet."

I'm not making this up, folks.
And, can I tell you just how full my banks are from writing poetry?

When I retire I'd like to supplement MY income by becoming a brain surgeon. (suggestion inspired by Margaret Atwood)



I realize I just compared poetry to brain surgery. I'm fine with that.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

My G&M article

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Another set of Amour/Armour


I keep dreaming of spaces. rooms, houses. unknown cities. For days now.

Keep writing of the abstract, the logos, renewal without a clearly divisible path... or a link back to logic. the centre does not hold...
My brain is worn out. I think I seek escape into foreign recesses of my mind.
Or I am trapped in an ontological web of Calvino's Oulipo...

The problem could explicitly be a case of deferment of Being. Solution? make something new. I shall build a home I can live in. Lessen the journey. All I need is a lot of money. maybe I can write a meta-fictional narrative of this nonsense.

Too many doors. Possibilities? Distractions?

While I'm here... does anyone believe in love anymore? Or am I just a silly romantic yet holding out for the real thing? hmm.

Friday, April 23, 2010

Spicer poem for April

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.


(Spicer, Collected Books 217)

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Artie Gold

Wrote a piece on Artie for the Globe and Mail "In Other Words" book-blog. Will be appearing online shortly.




“Where are the lids? The lids to everything?”
Artie Gold, before ROMANTIC WORDS


It is no coincidence to me that Artie Gold, Montreal poet, died on Valentine’s Day, 2007. His poems, written in Montreal where he lived for 30 years, wreak havoc in the heart. Suffering from recurrent lung deficiency, it is no surprise that the physical enclosure of solitude the disease eventually required of him may have, as a point of necessity, afforded him the state of habitual transcendence. To the moon, to the heart—always the traveler. Reading through Artie’s poetry might lead you to believe a number of things about him: that poetry sometimes pays the rent; that the “pure lyric beauty of the wave” breaks the borders of “inside/outside”; that one might believe love is simply met, “I can win you with a coke” or that it is not at all effortless, rather “plies deep… waylaid, it had a habit of suddenly throwing down / its basket of roses and running… too many times love has occurred, reared its beautiful head.” The magnetism of Fort Poetry, as he called it, held him—a field where he could position the external world as fulcrum to his heart, shifting and mellowing glimpses of the “light alone that is foreboding / enough in itself.”

Feeding each instinct off the other, the proof of the inability to ‘get at’ in Gold’s poems is in the living movements, and in the weight of the image, “like a waterfall behind a lightswitch / things wait there just out of reach.” He is well aware of the impermeability and the consciousness of uncertainty in the condition of being human, and depicts with authority these states of change—one moment visible and the next “spilling the illusion,”

reaching for something by which to retaliate         at life
I shoot my foot         I am not sure of the enemy         a whistle blows
and I am dragged off stage to be replaced
by some other idiot. it's cosmic

The poet assures us our loneliness and struggle, “It is war I wage. the falseness within me against the individual,” and yet he at once remains a portico for those of us seeking light and the promise that the mystical process will continue,

                                                       The lights
jarr, as in any analogy there are
elements that must mean something because
they must; but mean nothing
                                                       because they cannot.

Gold’s vision is a collection of the predictable, the underworried, configurations of the city and the body, the chase of idea. He is a philosopher of place, identifying himself through incarnation with the objects themselves, happiest just to enter, “if nothing was to happen in autumn / why would the wind enter the woods.” Gold, alchemist of “love’s passage,” intrudes, slides, returns,

the illegal swimmer

Not realizing the night,
accepting the cold the water’s arrogance

breaking into the water; intruding
in an element with no love
so men are fooled and drowned.

mercury, it will slide,
rush up our bodies;
and we are returned to earth.

my foot feels the water
slide never embracing it
steps aside.

we might sooner cherish silver.



Untitled poems quoted above, and “the illegal swimmer,” appear in before ROMANTIC WORDS and THE BEAUTIFUL CHEMICAL WALTZ. With thanks to Endre Farkas, Ken Norris, and Stephen Morrissey for kind approval in using Artie’s work and photos. Poems will be appearing in the upcoming fall release of THE COLLECTED BOOKS OF ARTIE GOLD, © 2010 Talonbooks.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Update


I'd like to report that my most treasured and beloved 15 year old cat Bissy, although still fighting a terrible disease, has been doing better through the miracle of homeopathy, vitamin supplements, fluid treatments, and much affection. An Apollo sized miracle (thank you, spring, for bringing back the Sun).

To share in her continued health, and to hope it continues as long as her body can manage it, I provide this video.

Love and flowers. So happy to see the sun again.


Keeping clean, staying healthy!

Friday, April 16, 2010

Swami Satchidananda

On giving and expecting and receiving.

"If it comes, let it come. But don't look for it."

Monday, April 12, 2010

Feeling like a fraud in grad school.

Something Nietzsche writes about those who learn on their own or are receptive to pursuing and have the ability to translate read knowledge into unique theories (not unlike an alchemical process) vs. those who simply need to be taught by others in order to achieve a sense of knowledge... perhaps achieve a small "e" enlightenment.

I believe I am sadly of the second type. Slave to the slave mentality: a seriously depressing realization. That I need to be told something--grounded in a way--in order for my creativity and logic to kick in. That I can't parse Plato or such entirely on my own without seeing what everyone else sees. (when I do read the dialogues, I see things not quite as they should be)

I am a fraud to the academic system. I don't think like everyone else. It's a serious failure. I would trade sacred and dear things to me to be able to see clearly, contemplate without interference of emotional quotients... I am far too sensitive to the lights of metaphor, spatiality, romance. Temporal flux.

I cannot figure how to resolve this. It's as if I have no longer any mind to position clearly. Any true sense. Lost in words. A jungle of misinterpretations.

Sink or swim... I know these are not the only options. Silly world.

Sunday, April 04, 2010

Draft Thesis Topic


(drum roll)

After much muching and books overflowing with muchness regarding who, when or why, I have narrowed the topic down considerably. Yes, it may become once again enlarged while thinking and all that.


Robin Blaser (and literary period, and particular stylings) through the lens of the Pre-Socratic philosophy of Heraclitus (and I'll get by with a little help from my friends: Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Oulipo, Spicer, O'Hara, and donkey).

That is all.

Friday, April 02, 2010

Sex at 38

Ingratiating wayward body,
turning
turned,
still

there is some fusion, some arbiter in linking fields

    immanence
        or lack.

But still
        the shoes pile up
        the omniscient voice,
        (instability)

the paradox of Zeno--this stepping ahead
too quick
without a map.

The last exercise was a steady one
hands focused on the incline
knees bent in supposition to the Being
that is Air

so quiet, She
so drunk with the scent of it

slipped into

     a static
as plastic
bag
in the sauntering wind.




*addendum: "sex" is a misnomer. More spiritual lovey-ness.


* contributing to a series of "Sex at" poems published originally by the dear-to-my-heart Artie Gold and super Barry McKinnon, among others. And now, there's a book (of which I just found out I'm in. hmm): http://www.chaudierebooks.com/books/collectedsex.html

Thursday, April 01, 2010



Birthday plans:
walk on the mountain
good books
great conversation
shopping for bday present for myself
sauna? sadly, no time. Must read more Lacan, visit with professor, and attend tonight's Psychoanalysis class.

Chess night at Cafe Pi. Hoping people decide to come.

Love birthdays.
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