underwaternerving

Someone says Hebrides, which reminds me of Hesperides and of that golden apple and of gusts, and I wonder if I’ll see it when I’m gone.

I wonder at lots of things. Whether the words are less important than the objects they persuade into being, whether
intense unhappiness requires intense happiness,

whether if left alone long enough air turns on itself, turns out        coming up to meet a new register –
maintenance, perhaps – an underwaternerving.

Whether one day I, too, will be like the wind.

Eager to hear

Often I am permitted to return to ἀκουσματικός

eager to hear the rhythmic gifts of our ancestors,
diminution, augmentation.

That axial note, our harmonies splintered
like 5ths, make that 3rds,
now besotted, hung
by the bedside a communion of the finest explorations, apparatuses. Speaking

briefly is an achievement. Regaining a little
of your lost enthusiasm, months spent in utility
shadowed in the corner,
a spiritual awakening. A
fattening.

Go hot into the clearing. Go tanglement, go interruption. And beneath
the pluralistic surface you may inspire
again.

Banff Centre poet-jazz collaborations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFZWNGDW5zA

May 2014

"Stratum"

Wanda O'Connor, poet/voice

PJ Andersson, trombone

Kai Basanta, drums

Kristin Fung, piano

Luan Phung, guitar

Antonin Tri Hoang, saxophone/clarinet

Jordon Morton, bass

Oh the character (of being perpetual)

"Wink!"
"I cannot."
"Surface, sketch, betray!"
"I cannot. I cannot. I cannot and will not strike against this dull flint. A dole flaunt. A dell meet; met. Refrain me and I will exit. Frame me and I will loot."
"Suddenly unabundant."
"Perhaps it is extinct. I mean to say instinct."

I suppose this means I am not your darling.


(Exeunt.)

New travel articles

Canadian Traveller Magazine on the Dominican Republic: http://www.canadiantraveller.net/Dominican_Passage_-_A_First-Timer_Drinks_In_The_Wonders_Of_The_DR

Taste&Travel Magazine on Moncton, N.B. in the 2014 Spring issue:

Bury me with a hero, ghost walk me on the river

My incredible friend, love of my life cat Bissy (Abyss) succumbed to a long illness this week. Forever changed, forever impacted by her gracious, spirited life. I will miss you my beauty, my button my heart. You made it to 18 and increased the value of my own 18 years with you. Miss you forever.

The whole world is set on fire.

The Last of the Mohicans

So much change in the wild. Sometimes we must hold vigil.

From Rachel Blau Duplessis, her excellent book "Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis"

Draft 52 : Midrash

1.

Poetry/ Auschwitz/ barbaric.

Oblique triangle.

Also

human litter

has not ceased/ to be/ created.

2.

and face What Is, that it is, that this
happened. As such. The finger points--
     troubling toll through sediment--
     at unspeakable untellable yod,
     wood, leather, fabric, organic char, ash of ash, then
     also       there is the tiredness
of pursuing    anything
like this.

Exuma

The Bahamas. Luxurious. Ocean waves.

All consolation in cellophane waters.

Where one can swim with pigs, sequester away on a private isle of 300 sq ft for a day, all in the 365 cays of the Exumas. It's quiet so quiet. The birthplace of 'lapping'.

Robin Blaser. The territory, the body, the cosmology.

I'm pleased to contribute to a Robin Blaser poetry talk for the The Living and The Dead reading series, with Meredith Quartermain discussing Robin and his masterful work tonight in New Westminster, B.C. My contribution throws around a few ideas of how Robin has influenced my poetry, having written about him for my MA thesis.

Robin Blaser. The territory, the body, the cosmology.

I discuss territory, the body and cosmology in addition to luminous passage in his poetry and poetics.

encounters, perhaps luminous

inurgent matters.

Sous le ciel

Juliette Greco.

Fondly thinking of Paris last March. Fondly wishing for it again, soon. Soon.

Everything happens under a Parisian sky.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XybsC829dsM

Human, All-Too-Human

these early shadows still afflicting.
>>>la pose prétendre à cette catégorie<<<


The Shadow: Since I haven't heard your voice in so long, I would like to give you an opportunity to speak.

The Wanderer: Someone said something — where? And who? It almost seems as if I myself were speaking, though in an even weaker voice than mine.

...

The Wanderer: Only now do I notice how impolite I am, my beloved shadow: I have not said a word about how pleased I am to see you as well as hear you. You should know that I love the shadow as much as I cherish the light. For facial beauty, clarity of speech, quality and firmness of character, shadow is as necessary as light. They are not opponents: they are rather affectionate, holding hands—and if the light disappears, the shadow slips away after it.

The Shadow: And I hate the same thing you hate: the night; I love human beings, because they are devotees of light and I’m pleased when their eyes shine as they discern and discover knowledge — untiring knowers and discoverers that they are. That shadow, which all things cast, if the sunshine of perception falls upon them — that shadow am I as well.

I want all the things

Listen

in the dark, with the heaviness of arm over the bridge of nose. Listen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjENMiafz34

Santo Domingo

I drank a café con leche in Santo Domingo today. I consider it quite an accomplishment.

My limited wardrobe is soaking up the humidity. I will wear all clothing on the return flight (extra humidity charge, I've been told. No, the locals aren't pulling my pants).

Ok, more of La República Dominicana (with more to come):

Santo Domingo has the pleasure of holding up the stoney entablatures of the home of Diego Columbus (yes, that Columbus; son of who moved to the DR to take up residence and more or less to run the place while old dad was imprisoned in Portugal, and subsequently died thereabouts. So much for "founding-rights'll get you an out-of-jail-free card".)

View from the Cafe across from Columbus square (some great local fruit), and a really old church. The oldest one in the Americas. Gothic architecture inside. The only one in the Americas. Otherwise quite boring, really. Lots of talk of popes and saints; Catholic churches... I did manage to decipher some Latin on-site and that was a little fun. The Latin's a little rusty, but not as rusty as the nails I saw 4-day old meat hanging from along the side roads somewhere between the towns of La Romana and San Pedro de Marcoris. The locals say they salt it. But not right away. Odd that not a single fly seemed to be passing by. They have a solution for this older, grayish meat. Something to do about a sour orange marinade that kills and restores.

Santo Domingo's old city is Caribbean-colourful. Lots of things falling apart, too.

Dominican taxis. Not kidding.

I bought some chocolate cigars. I have no idea how to smoke them, but the scent overpowered the sense.

República Dominicana

Come

come with me into the museum and stare at the painting until it becomes another painting
(I'm thinking of Mondrian's Composition, 1916--the fractures and the bold claims in territory; maneuvers; Berio's Sinfonia, 3rd movement)

be still and listen as I read from the journals of Kierkegaard; his elegant lethary and way of writing error into things (how he labels those with a cursed mendacity)

we'll extract seven new renderings of the dawn of new Helen, whispering findings of emerging minutia in the city back and forth (what little romances).

once again I will tell you I love you and you will turn away, some book framing a familiar exit

Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.

Nietzsche

how to enter a dress *

stop dying.
yes, it is like falling.
no, it is not togetherness.
hung, rather, in convex systems (condensing above a human barrier, what expectation looks like).
more nimble, sure.
it is like this: a hand, and then another. no need for an interpreter. these things we know, how to dress.
how to enter.
perhaps the door can open by itself and let in everyone who have currents to lend to the increasing chorus,
warning, transitive.
and the almost a river.
which may or may not have been exposed to constraint, which may or may not have been numbered, detailed, felt, watched, talked to, prescribed.

promise me an old city
with some carriage, pulling into mist,
our projects
and measurements
delighted.

promise me the Indian boy with braids on the school bus.
promise me forever beautiful knees.
the whole of our lives.



*draft

Bonjour, encore bonjour amour (mélancolie)

bonjour, tristesse. Enfin, non encore. Plusiers des lettres, se noyer les mots. mais vous ne savez pas comment vous préparer. vous n'aviez pas les leçons, l'amour. manque. lui en courant. plus enfin.

bonjour, bonheur (plénitude), et
Rue de Seine
quand je trouve un autre, alors

vague à l'âme

the stage, the backs

It is nearing summer and the auditioning work begins. The odd call for commercials, the odd extra work for film, for series. If lucky, a speaking part.

Being on a live set is fantastical. The really dreamy part begins in the backs of the theatre/the off-camera area. Once in the lights, once passing over the threshold of that tape mark on the floor, you are expected to--no, paid to--slip into a new presence, a performance in thirteen acts. The sky is yours, the task of the translator manageable within the space of the small room (we live in the sentence), the stage offering plenty of exits through heavy dark curtains that seem like secret passages, that you covet and recall under heavy blankets while you sleep.

The before is almost as sweet as the duration. All black boxes and white lettering and metal poles and roped knots, bold lines taped in X's and L's to mark place and to mark light. Where every outfit is a costume simply by putting it on. And everyone understands that you are playing a part. And nothing else matters but the minutes spent upstage or down, standing in the place assigned to you, improvising as is your nature in that costume you're wearing, in the back of something waiting to be someone else. Embracing that part of yourself that you can't explain to anyone how/why it exists and so you simply must show them. Show, don't tell.

Sometimes life is like this.

Ma'at Hornefrure'

Jeter tout reste. and here I am pouring wine into the soup bowl and soup into the alley. I do not know where I am. the sea gives rest. is given.

Ma'at Hornefrure', la deuxième place, abscons. Even with your frailness, even when loving without delicacy, even when enclosing oneself in the cult of second place: répétiteur d'amour replaces what water coveted or converted.

Replaces the need for the fan dancer's resting place.

        gestures the need for body.

Simone

Duende is silent, nearby, a pregnant, and overwhelming power... It is death, life and fate... the consummation of risk and knowledge. Made visible it is huge, potent, patient, but less tolerant than anything the human will can grasp. Duende is a sweet bliss that will infiltrate the bloodstream like toxin.

bpNichol

Thus that it is having tried to fix time it is myself I am the one destroyed.

Sontag

My library is an archive of longings.

Afterwords*

In part, damascene road passaggio is, in cinematic effort, refractions of the camera obscura, a sequence of asides and sides that take as their companions letters addressed to no one which are, to be expected, never read nor ever returned. This project takes up Kafka’s intercourse with ghosts, where he writes, "People have hardly ever deceived me, but letters always have... writing letters is like an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one's own ghost... writing letters is a means of exposing oneself to the ghosts, who are greedily waiting precisely for that. Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way.”

Like an Ovidean romance, having been cast aside and situated at the edge of the inhospitable sea, this passaggio represents at once tristia in vogue, exposing a vulnerability at the heart of absenteeism, and the likely automatism that ensues, attributing atonal/semi-tonal relationships between corresponding mutedness and subsequent apparitions to a deficient or a decelerating tempo.

Disenchantment provokes a split, in part sacrificing Lacanian consciousness, where the “unconscious is the discourse of the other” and where any utterance is learned by imitation instilled by the ghosts who fingered through the enchantment in the first place, techniquing holes, holes. The artifice dissolves to be replaced by another Wasteland artifice, with small curtsies to Surrealism, where redress is in continual residue.

Here, acts of enlightenment and superstition battle it out, but with no notion of where the stage is at and only some idea of the staging. Where a step forward, perhaps lightly, upon the Deluzian surface (where “nothing is more fragile”) and into perpetual night recovers an interest in what guidelines we use for shaping. Hesitation is everywhere: in myofascia transparency, in rest, in the anatomy of containment. Where the snake meets faceted night.


*this subtext/pretext follows my latest chapbook work, the poem damascene road passaggio, in an attempt to sift or to garden the gaze from the pricey Parterre; a way past poverty, then, and into particularities in the field. From here you might see the tenor open his mouth and howl, but are safe from the drippings of the first row.

dreams of Vladimir Putin (he's shorter in real life); we speak French, my Russian is too risqué in its infancy (must not insult Putin), and French is like un mer sublime dans une verre d'eau. I am awarded a Visa for life, once I proved that I am with Russian, pulling a sheet of music from my bag where I am transcribing words. This is Mozart's doing--as Midge says to Johnny in Vertigo, "Johnny, Mozart's the boy for you."

The new chapbook can be ordered now:
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/03/new-from-aboveground-press-damascene.html



The poet resists wrenching comparisons ousting Homeric hymns from heart. But, alas.

Where one realizes that spy fantasies are grounded in real-life experience of running-as-fast-as-you-can, having identity bestowed upon you; retreating, retreating. A change of haircolour goes a long way, baby. Boxes, life is in boxes.

Where one realizes that this is but a battle of Enlightenment and Superstition
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlhbFk2GbcY

Where one grows larger within the box, the box unsuitable but a better catalog than streets (all streets are the same).

Where one's society exists corporeally, for this is the place: better to fit the orchard and the park, the birds diving into trees, subterranean stems.

Louvre, inside the pyramid

The poet obsesses over shards


One moment they shall wake, and dance

March 14, 1:20 a.m., Paris. Paris, je t'aime.

Some notes on my neighbourhood, some discoveries I've made by walking (a lot): Souvenir shops line both sides of the boulevard de Clichy and boulevard de Rochechouart, steps from the Moulin Rouge and near metros Blanche, Pigalle, Anvers. Montmartre hides the glory (and grime) of old, of certain Belle Époque decadence--a wrought iron elaborate work here, a detailed visage of stone there... the buildings built to 5 stories or less; unstable grounds, it is said. And a certain malaise is still present in the brisk air of early March. Young Parisians do not seem to notice, but what have the young but time (the notice arrives later, with postage past due). Within a two-block radius from my rented apartment at 45 rue de Douai, surrealist writer (one of my influences) Andre Breton took residence for many years at 42 rue Fontaine--interestingly surviving as a part-time art dealer, acquiring Picasso's incredible demoiselles d'avignon (simple washer-women who worked at/near his small art studio on Montmartre), and a slew of artists and writers would use his apartment as stomping grounds. Cafe Cyrano, steps from my place and facing the circular Place de Clichy, was a local haunt of Breton's, as was Au Petit Poucet and Brasserie Wepler for Henry Miller, who wrote of taking naps in order to filter the surrealist dreams he had into Tropic of Cancer. You can also see some of this in his book Black Spring (excellent little book, as well as his thoughts on Clichy, Quiet Days in Clichy). Au Petit Poucet is only a facade, as I discovered the windows whited-out and painted over with graffiti now. Miller used to write letters to Anaïs Nin there. But the Wepler is still intact. I've walked by it several times, but it seems so manicured now, the Miller scrubbed out of it, and they sell oysters on the corner, too, under a fancy red awning. You can even get a hot waffle. Bizet’s house is also around my corner. We share the same colour of front door. The cafés were where writers used to live, their apartments often too cold to be in—I have this very sensation, now, as my own Paris apartment has but one heater and with these recent cold days I’m not content to stay for long (today I bought a sweater for 6 euros, a man-sized sweater, from a shop between two souvenir stores and a sex costumery. Henry Miller would give good conversation in exchange for good eats. Could writers these days say the same? I fear more and more writers are either frightened of various anxieties or fixated on success (which can come at a cost of authenticity, or, as I notice more and more, a snobbery that infiltrates and spoils the writing of the otherwise talented ones). So much chicanery, I witnessed it here with the very few English writers I met. Their eyes were reticent, or they were filmed by fatigue, or they were suspicious. Sometimes they would peer into me, an obligatory scan, and soon boredom would ensue when I did not choose to entertain. Perhaps I was scanning, too. I am cold in Paris. I am listening to Werther, Massenet’s masterpiece. This is my final night in a city I’ve dreamed for years, a presence with me in chambers, in hallways, in open-air skies, and in these dreams I became and became. Even the faces on museum walls reach toward and gaze inward and whisper: we have known this city; it is hard, it is soft, you will have to be tough enough, but if you are, it will reward you more than you have ever known. This is where the spirit returns in order to know itself—not more fully, no; it is where the spirit began and you have come home.

beret(te)

the poet selects a beret. handmade, 100 % real head covering. now with more grey.

O, paris

Dear,

I am going to Paris. In three days. For the first time. And it will be raining. And I will shout in that rain, probably on a bridge. And I will walk alot, trying not to get wet. And I will pronounce French words, some of them I will whisper. And I will order a cafe, fully expecting an espresso.

I may even buy a hat. I will most certainly buy a scarf.

Also

I started a Montreal reading series: http://www.residualreadingseries.tumblr.com/ Have a new or newish or old book you want to rejuvenate? Let's talk.

Also

I have a new chapbook out, damascene road passaggio (selections). You can order it here: http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/

Love,

poem composed of scraps from documents named "extra"

I was hoping to extract the algorithm of your language, and this in the middle of purporting and defeating jingly musak (also, there is musk, of which scent I, as lady friend, absent in affection of late, am inclined to devour)(also we’ve been in this room for two days or was that 22 days
so when does language

stop

for a breather anyway

you’ll never read all those books not really read them I mean but
still
they remain prizes in the shadowy cave (yes, I mean Plato) weighing down your shoulders and scraping at the muteness of your desire, transformation, so that finally the books are nothing but dead
influence
and what is sacred really I mean really sacred do you recall
those nights
(were they nights
a more sonorous succession of night
faceted night?
                perhaps we are translators now, what explicit task
                what I mean is that you put your hand
                here
                and night will pass quicker more quickly in any
                case we’ll pass “signs” back and forth and it’ll be fun.

Then they spoke the most perfect utterances to each other and he cauterizes the ends of his fingers so that their conversation can
stop
or is that start
but unfortunately he uses up all of the paper to cover the mitigation

But it never would have worked out not really I mean I always had a thing for Liza Minelli and I never would have
admitted
it.

warmed islands
anarchic
or filled with
blood
in agony
agonizing
field
goals, articulating
field
goals
chi chi chi
chicanery chicanery
like a
bird
although not
a
bird
stranded
on the
little
island
the little
moods
companion
patriots
life can be so disappointing

Ava Gardner, The Barefoot Contessa

-Where are you Maria?

-Half in the dirt and half out.

...

-She moved among all these crazy people, through the casinos, and beaches, and ballrooms, from Marseilles to Monaco, as if she were loaded with novocaine. She showed no pain, no pleasure, no interest, no nothing...

Lorca, excerpt Fable and Round of the Three Friends

I had killed the fifth moon
and the fans and the handclapping drank at the fountains.
The milk of the newly delivered, still tepid and sealed,
troubled the roses with its long white grief.
Enrique,
Emilio,
Lorenzo.
Diana is hard,
but sometimes her bosom goes cloudy.
Even the white stone may pulse in the blood of a stag
and the stag have its dream in the eyes of a stallion.

When the pure forms collapsed
in the cri-cri of daisies,
it came to me that they had murdered me.

excerpt, damascene road passaggio

If a passaggio is indefinite extent
If a passaggio is a continuous part of a surface

There is a spot where these landscapes meet
or brush

along a juncture of sea
wall

except for the condition
ing
that is off

West broadway, hotel poems

Kakfa, on letter writing as an intercourse with ghosts

"People have hardly ever deceived me, but letters always have... writing letters is like an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one's own ghost... how did people ever get the idea they could communicate with one another by letter!... writing letters is a means of exposing oneself to the ghosts, who are greedily waiting precisely for that. Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way."

forthcoming from "damascene road passaggio"

We’re swift to accord LOVE,

         deserving of special treatment          entrenchment

         some lightness upon the cuff


                           wrists exposed
                                    written on


mapping a temperament or
a viscous humour

                 (something to stick to


                  strumming the portico, hoping for Arousal or something like it

                  but it was too late

                       he having already left for the beach. the browned skin, the neck
                  exposed, the sun the sun the jealousy of the sun

girl in hotel contemplates holding

Nietzsche, the honorary name 'love'

We slowly grow tired of the old, of what we safely possess, and we stretch out our hands again; even the most beautiful landscape is no longer sure of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some more distant coast excites our greed; possession usually diminishes the possession.

...

Here and there on earth there is probably a kind of continuation of love in which this greedy desire of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and greed, a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its true name is friendship.

The Gay Science, 14

Rilke

The Zeitgeist creates huge silos of power
that are as shapeless
as the straining urge
he acquires from everything else.
He has forgotten the temples.
We are the ones
who try surreptitiously
to save such squanderings
of the heart.

Duino Elegies

Nietzsche, music

Writing about and composing notes for a performance on silence. Nietzsche is inspiring.

http://www.nietzschecircle.com/agonist.html

Featuring Nietzsche and his relationship to music

Also: http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/music/music.htm

And, listen to the master create light in other various ways: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH3rcIHn6FA

Keeping watch over Vesta’s ever-wrung flame
arsenals of pathways
that light elegy or
folios, recuperating

how we have not bothered with hands

ἄτη ἄτη ἄτη

ruined by ideas, she leaps heedlessly into more.
it's the lines, the lines that have gotten in.

Sontag, on writing, Paris Review

I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It’s a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I’m too interested in many other things.

mesmerize me.