Books Arrived Recently

Some recent arrivals which I have been enjoying immensely:


The Book of Questions, Neruda
Copper Canyon Press (1991)

I used to read this in the university library and for some reason never actually picked up a copy of the book.

Great poems to memorize in Spanish, since they are so diminutive.


Haiku in English, The First Hundred Years, eds. Kacian, Rowland, Burns
Norton (2013)

Kacian's "An Overview of Haiku in English" is a locus classicus now. I was surprised to recall I had actually published in one of the haiku magazines he mentions in his catalog of notables (a rather Gendai journal). I noticed that Kacian didn't mention Brautigan at all when he limned the American history of haiku. Not that Brautigan was hardcore. But then Billy Collins mentioned R.B. in his introduction to the volume, so his ghost sneaked in. (I read closing essay and introduction in reverse order.) It seems appropriate, glossing Brautigan, considering the latitude given by the editors as to what constitutes an "ELH" (English language haiku). Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" opens the volume, so...  The anthology was chock-a-block with fabulous poets new to me. One wishes for several lifetimes to read everyone's books.


I Live, I See, Vsevolod Nekrasov
Ugly Duckling Presse (2013)


The Rooster's Wife, Russell Edson
BOA Editions (2005)

I think it's sort of criminal that Edson was excised from the latest volume of the Norton anthology dedicated to surveying postmodern American poetry. But then I think I get it. Bukowski was also chucked and neither of those poets are going to lose any readers anytime soon. One could argue (much easier with Bukowski than Edson) that neither of those poets really reified the postmodern tendencies in American poetry. Really, one wonders by what stretch of the imagination Bukowski could have been seen to fit into the first anthology. He was intransigently vernacular/demotic and pretty much despised the airs taken on by experimental poets of any stripe. One wonders if he was included merely to help move copies, increase sales. That the man can do, dead or alive. Edson certainly worked with many of the prevalent ideas elevated in postmodernism. However, when it comes to facture, perhaps Edson doesn't appear to be "all that postmodern." He is not superficially postmodern. So I think that's the reason he was jettisoned. It's pretty much a structuralist anthology.

In any case, he's a fabulous writer and many of these poems are stellar. It's a dark collection. It's end of life darkness. The humor is rich but in the way that the darkest paintings of German expressionism are rich in humor. He's such an inimitable stylist in the metaphysical vein that some of the poems are almost hopelessly eccentric. He loves turning the language, turning the ideas, turning the poems against themselves. I think the Ouroboros should be on Edson's family escutcheon. But the strongest poems all seem to cry out to be anthologized, shared widely. I wonder if James Tate was a devotee. Because those two poets seem to speak back and forth (unless I hallucinate that).

I say Edson isn't going to lose any readers anytime soon, but you know that might not be exactly true. He might suffer some for a while for having published slightly off the beaten track. I mean those are good presses, but he seems to have been a bit reclusive and not to have worked hard at creating inertia with his career. He seems to have receded in the public sense near the end, even as his work continued to evolve and deepen, even as he decocted finer and finer essences. Maybe the (slightly tempered) nihilism at the center of his poetry told him that was an okay stance to adopt. I think Edson is eminently translatable. That's not true of all that many poets. I do see interest in his work around the world and so I think if he flags in one language, one culture, he might pick up in another and then come around again to a larger appreciation in his native land.

Decent Grief

Decent Grief  is a very small zine (eight pages, I believe) but it looks like fun and some of that design work in there is to-die-for. Google it and you will be transported to the page on Etsy where three issues are available.

Somebody (or several somebodies) are on their way somewhere.

Two bucks and I think postage is miraculously waived if you're in the United States.

Haiku & Holga

I was perusing the Etsy offerings of poetry and art zines and serendipitously found Haiku & Holga.

Haiku and lomography just seem a perfect pairing to me and you can see this is well-executed.

There are numerous issues available on Etsy and the same artist/seller has a book of New York Haiku (the images below showing densely serried haiku with those beautiful weights holding the book open are from that collection).

The polyartist behind these works is Michelle Spadafore.

Outsider Artists

Here is a list of outsider artists, many of them lesser-known for now, whose work wowed me recently when I began researching this subject.  Many of these are working artists. Several have passed away within the past few years.

Annette Labedzki (see previous post)

Andrew Mass

Chuckie Johnson

E 9

Edward Goss

Harold Plople

Hazel Kinney

Jean-Louis Moray (sells on EBAY)

Jeff Hughart (sells on EBAY)

John Goo-Goo Binn

Jon Strattan

Joyce Cairo

Justin Aerni

Karen Terry

Lee Van Gelder (Wally)

Mary Proctor

Melissa Monroe

Noel Hatfield

Patrick O'Brien

Purvis Young (pretty well-known)

Rick Borg

Steve Martinez

Steven Chandler (who feels like the rebirth of another, dead outsider artist! you'll probably recognize..bit spooky)

Steven Chesley

T-Marie Noland

William Washburn

Zebedee B. Armstrong

Obviously, this is just a cursory list of artists who happened to take my fancy. These are the artists whose work really impacted me on first encounter.

(little painting by Annette Labedzki)

Here is a little painting by Canadian artist Annette Labedzki.

I bought this because it felt like a magic little talisman (could use an apotropaic talisman right now) and because it was so affordable. Also, I wanted it because it is buoyant and beautiful to me.

The artist sells her work on EBAY and I recommend you check her out. You could own an original painting or mixed media work for a price that is sure to surprise you. The artist is very prolific and there is a really wide range of styles from which to choose.

I first discovered her work on a site dedicated to surveying American outsider art. Labedzki actually resides in Canada, so maybe the site is Pan-American in focus despite its stated intention.  I was surprised how many of the artists on that site regularly sell their work on EBAY. Most of these artists seem to be very prolific, which I suppose is in keeping with the archetype of the outsider artist.

This piece is in a style I think of as "shoegaze abstraction." (I love painting in that modality.) The work by which she was represented on the outsider art site was more art brut magical realism with a figurative base. The figures themselves are not always strictly human. Other creatures abound and the therianthropic is a recurring motif in this artist's work. The artist seems to favor creating a very energetic field. The works often feel jazzy, almost intoxicated.

This piece feels much more zen to me. But this is that "shoegaze abstraction." I'm guessing this style might be her yin to balance out her yang. We all need a good yang balancer.

(grain grain grain)

Haiku

lifting my left arm
to soap it, a difference:
mother dying


        *

I comb my hair
in fogged mirror
imagining the lines

        *

fingerprints on art,
a glass over it:
it's only the frame

        *

you're not dying
you're just going
into the alphabet

(haiku)

wondering if Pearl Harbor

was actually revenge

for haiku like this

Shop Talk

the clock
read
BROTHER

     *

the sewing machine
read
BROTHER

      *

the word processor
read
BROTHER

      *

everywhere I looked
I was among
dutiful friends

string

over the hill
and under
its way

        *

rake dead
set against
the moon

        *

an asterisk
that's alive
stuck to his jacket

        *

the difference
between signal
and meaning

        *

or look at the ocean
of grass blows
it walks atop

         *

door set in the field
not even leaning:
no house to harm

string

the shapes
algae makes
on aluminum siding

      *

of a house
the writing
asemic squiggles

    *

from the asemic
factory you come
at evening

      *

nobody home
and gesticulating
wildly

Wet

leaf print
blot
of street
mono-
lingual

conversation,
no, mono-
logue,
mono-

print

"It ennobles by revealing you to be a shithead
for having dwelled overmuch on your aloneness,
your schism with the world."

The Anesthesiologist

The anesthesiologist is perhaps the seminal problem of our time. Are we able to note the presence of the anesthesiologist? The answer, obviously, is no. Because the anesthesiologist has been among us for so long now, an era. It is the Era of the Anesthesiologist. Many of you are holding the anesthesiologist's hand, counting backwards from ten, not making it very far at all. The anesthesiologist is an expert at self-erasure. It's like seeing a lens flare and thinking it is the fingerprint of light. For a millisecond you remember that you are a lens. And then you are only the flare of the lens, a fingerprint of light, and you are out. Gone, here. Language must be something made in the anesthesiologist's image. The anesthesiologist enters the room and there is no longer a room.

Book Recommendation

    Nigel Nicolson's unflinching examination of his parents' marriage is probably sui generis. It's hard for me to imagine another son writing with as much candor, maturity and objectivity about the most intimate details of the lives of his parents, especially when the amours of those parents were so complicated. You see, Nigel's parents were Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. It would be a slight to call theirs a "marriage of convenience," but it was certainly an unorthodox marriage. If you want to see how an open marriage between bisexual partners could be negotiated in the last century, then here is your case study. And yet there was a little something more here, a different sort of love. There was an abiding between these two spirits even as they traveled so far from one another. They were rather like John Donne's compass. If you want to see very deeply into the Bloomsbury Group and its convoluted psychology, this is your book. Romantic life among the Bloomsburians almost invariably conformed to the old Facebook bromide: "It's complicated."  There's ample first person narration in the form of correspondence and other more diaristic documentation throughout this book. Portrait of a Marriage was first published in 1973, but the edition I have was brought out by Atheneum in 1980.

A Pretty Fabulous French Photographer and Author of Books on Outsider Art

A pretty fabulous French photographer and author of books on outsider art acquired six of my recent productions today.

I don't know the artist.

His work is so delicious.

(Happy.)

soap in the pupal phase
I picked up and held
in the strange house
     strange base
a few pubic hairs

yours,


         *

soap melting
                from the branch
                        oh likely
            you beguile
                       as the walker
          left out
                         in the rain

                   
                      what kind

                          of walker

      the trees
                destroy
      densely
                     each other

                   so   slowly
 
              wetly




                it's almost
                               erotic

                really,
 
                      how
                         wetness
             
                      brings
       everything
                     
                               down

     fabric   lilac  tulips
        purple   tulips   fabric
           plasticky   KY    stems
   green  fabric
                  spear leaves
         lit by nightdrop
                          small
                                   corsairs

Amulet

   Conscious living
      in a wave
         Put your hand here
      I don't know how
         to cut out
     around this shape

                but no worries
             I do not believe

                  it is your true shape

Little Statuettes of the Night

The shadow of a paper airplane

      at 2 a.m.

         its lost pilot

  

  I am so freaking tired

     of street minstrels

           at 3 a.m.

  The cats and the deer

      and the moon

         stare at each other

             round 4 a.m.

      Comes traipsing

          toward the first 

                  cold bus

                at 5 a.m.

          a diva

              telemarketer

       

        sad as a rain divinity

    

Are

Are the abstractions that surround death friendly abstractions?

The Poetics

The Poetics of Surveillance vs. The Poetics of Immanence.

Ancient Greece

In ancient Greece, they threw imperfectly-formed tanning machines off cliffs into the sea. This is why their men in marble, their few women in the febrile stone, are so pale. They had such very high standards.

Okay

It is okay to be the night. It is okay to be a shopping cart stolen and ridden by teenagers miles from its strip mall of residence. Left in a small rural tunnel cars drive through one at a time. It's always cooler under there and there's a dripping from the highway above that grows algae on the walls. A lovely, pale Matisse green. It smells like the wet of ancient mosaic. Algae skin that gets so little light, you are pretty. Wall, I like that sound you make with your mouth. Little shopping cart, come with me. I will take you to your mother. She is probably frantic.

The Difference

Now I watch my bipolar traits from a safe distance. I observe their strangeness. I keep the vagaries and velleities immured.  Strange to write, "from a safe distance" when I am inside that bipolar brain. But there is a distance of reflection now.  So much of this is the four years of solid recovery. I have such incredibly good periods. I look to the future. And yet I am a guard. I am my own guard. Constantly. I have stellar periods when I need to police myself so much less. And then I still have periods when I mandate hypervigilance for myself. But the important thing is, it works. Nobody knows this process but me. I really don't need to put anyone on notice but myself. That's real progress. But it's there. Always. Because through no fault of my own, I was born to this. I have the cognitive dysfunction which is sometimes downplayed in descriptions of bipolar disorder. I think ultimately this is the real culprit when it comes to emotional distortion and dysfunction, and what always ended up causing the social dysfunction in the past. I really try to be as careful of others' feelings as I am with my own. Sometimes I think I'm even more careful with their feelings than my own.  Because I am generally okay. But what lurks beneath must be acknowledged and greeted each day with a tiny dose of healthy terror.It's not self-pity or puling or even moroseness to say I understand with complete empathy V. Woolf's stones in the pockets. I understand the words she wrote, understand them in a visceral sense: "I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times." I think now and then, too, of Philip Seymour Hoffman's death, and how quickly it followed upon a single relapse after years of sobriety. I have much gratitude, but I have even more wariness. A house divided can indeed stand. And virtually all houses are divided up into rooms. Some of the bipolar rooms are just a little more haunted than those you find in more "ordinary" houses.

(little joke for dyspeptics)

Q: How do you know if your acid-blocker is working?
A: If you forgot to take it, it's working. Because you now have dementia.

Every Rational Person

Every rational person has approximately twelve irrational people living inside his or her skin, sharing organs with him or her.

For example, today I met "Robert" downtown for lunch in the food court at Strawberry Square.

I say the "food court," but we sat at one of those small tables set in the elevated walkway which connects this downtown mall to a decent hotel. We sat about twenty feet above a city street and enjoyed the traffic whizzing under our sneakers, watching it through the bowed glass of this tunnel so like a Habitrail tube for hamsters.

It wasn't long until the twelve inside Robert began to emerge.

We were having a normal conversation, but I sensed the twelve pushing at Robert's face and innards, like Freddy Krueger with his nightmarish plasticity.

Who were these people inside Robert? I named them arbitrarily as I sensed them.

Mariah wanted to dance with me. I believe a tango she had learned in her college days and had never again gotten a chance to show off.

Jude, I am fairly certain, wanted to slay me very slowly with a rusty can opener.

Robert drank his diet soda and prattled on about perfectly ordinary and depressing things in the news and in the art world.

He smiled nicely, a smile like a well-made sandwich.

Sam, I am fairly certain, wanted to sleep with me.

Or did he merely want to seduce me? Yes. It was horrible Julietta who wanted to sleep with me. She was in her nightgown. In a food court. She was always that way. He hair had her children's lollipops stuck throughout.

Rani was feeding the imaginary sparrows which flocked the food court. A true nature spirit. Barefoot at all times, even when she married.

Poor Gus was mentally challenged but a delight to behold should we decide to play the game "What Does That Cloud Resemble?"

Odile and Odette only had eyes for each other. They wanted to weight Robert down with stones and just throw him in the river. I sensed him watching them at their caustic flirtation even as he talked. They don't think of themselves as lesbians. They think of themselves as swans.

Rod was doing things with a protractor and French curve and his mustache that he hoped would win the attention of the attractive young woman passing us just then. It didn't.

Salvia was contemplating what song should be playing during her suicide, which is all she ever does.

Alice, despite the name, is a boy and a spiteful one in a dress.

Albert, despite the name, is a girl and a spiteful one in no dress.

I enjoyed my visit with Robert but I couldn't help scribbling down notes to some of his various resident personages and I even penned poems to two of them.

Of course, I was too afraid to show these to Robert or his "inner friends," so I just surreptitiously slipped these notes into a trash can as we exited the food court, hoping Robert's bodily cellmates would not notice.

Westron

Winter winds go forcibly through a landscape. The palette changes as you watch. Going through a field of this and the forest at the edge. Do you only imagine this lavendar light? It is like a dry washing machine, a washing machine of air. And you are in the middle of its violence, like a garment trying to escape but following the rhythms of the machine. Trying to think less while walking in heavy winds won't work. Winds, especially these winter winds, have mastered reverse psychology. They know you will try to retreat to silence. They are like the pressers of old. They put the stones of winds on your mind and force all your silence out.

It may be their unfairness you come to love.

Drawing

The distance is in the wings. We say, no, the wings are in the distance. But we know we have reversed it. The way we have with ink. It is the same stubborn idea, the same stubborn wing.

A Piece of Paper

A piece of paper blows through an empty park. And you stand there, this is what you watch. Is it transparent, translucent, is it opaque? It skips the air like a child's knees. Though it is tiny, though it is nothing. You realize the word empty is loaded. The way you stand and wait for an "all clear" from yourself. The tree branches bend down to the earth in heavy wind then. You know then what it is like. It is like dolls with diamonds in their wooden knees.

String Ten

the wasp's nest
of value
plagues an artist

        *

winter pipes sometimes
just start hammering
when you turn the tap

        *

if you could
be an art
and not an artist

        *

stars converse
in that window:
there's no sum

        *

you could learn
you lie
to the wasp's nest

       *

it just builds up
in the old pipes:
the indignant air

A Cat With a Concussion

The cat with a concussion runs through the Snipers Market, formerly the Flower Market. She can no longer do the things she loved to do. She cannot toy with a dictator's laptop mouse, mischievously. This cat with pure white fur, who has been blinded and deafened by a bomb falling through the roof of a room where she had been pleasantly sunning by a window, dashes madly now into walls and the legs of running children fleeing other explosions. The bullet that enters her brain had a prayer scratched on its shell by a young man who died Tuesday. The child soldier who shoots the cat is severely reprimanded for wasting a bullet. This stern rebuke comes from another child soldier who had been one school grade above him a few months ago.

I Have Work in the Latest Issue of Zeitzoo (Vienna, AU)

And I'm happy to be in the company of friends and fellow creatives like Grzegorz Kielawski and Michael Lippmann.

It's times like this I rue my lack of proficiency in German.

There's a link over at the right to the magazine and its other cultural manifestations, which are many and varied.

That

That there is motion at all in the world, which is a kind of haunting.

Sweater

The child's sweater left in the park. Taken off like protection, forgotten. A color that glows at twilight. You imagine the color. An antique mother sitting in a thrift store window.

A Piece of Paper

The piece of paper with a child's crayon drawing on it goes blowing down a winter street. It cannot decide whether its drawing, the child's world, is on it or in it. The landscape with periwinkle wraps and rouge people. American Indians doing their laundry in the sky. Some such. Oh, and chimney smoke. Always that. Blue grey squiggles of autumn rising over the simple house. This landscape with lightweight people wraps around your ankle a moment, not long enough to bend down and take it, not long enough to have it, and then it continues skipping the air down the street. Strange that the trees you see lining this long street at such correct intervals are all anonymous but not random. The branches of these trees are the secret home of this drawing.

The Returns

A man walked into a sterilized room and noticed it was filled with a bunch of returned suicides. They had been arranged in a rough circle (which primitive superstition asserts is the opposite, talismanic shape to suicide's unbounded anti-circle). They were all sitting on fold-out metal chairs. All the chairs were one-size-fits-all. That is how suicide is, thought the man. The chairs looked as provisional as life felt to the returned suicides. The returns were all ages, all sizes, all colors and creeds. They had all tried to buy the farm, but their eternal mortgage had fallen through. They were here to explain but not apologize, a tightrope act. Now it was going to be something like credit counseling. There would be condescension masquerading as love or at least civility. Some would later decide to save themselves or others. They would become bankers of life. Others would bide their time, visualizing isolated tree branches the way some have porn films playing in their heads all day. No sooner had the man entered the room than he announced himself as conductor. He showed the returned suicides a small baton. He smiled at the string section and they all jumped out the nearest window, en masse. 

The Pingers

A father is pinging his daughter because he fears his death. A teenager is pinging the cell tower above her naked body, which shares a wild, untilled field with another naked, pinging body which shares itself with her slightly older lover who is also pinging. Something is pinging on the floor of the Arctic Ocean right now, a mystery ping, and nobody on earth knows what it is. Arctic animals are scattering from this sea zone of pinging mystery. I feel the dead pinging me when I read poems. Phone calls are being thinned out, attenuated to mere texts. Screaming is texting now. The universe is sliding towards less and less human words. There is much less blood in our language. Something is being quietly strangled to death. I want to escape the pinging, so I run out the back door of my house at evening and race towards the dark woods. It may still be legal to scream there. The trees might be protecting screams. They have for thousands of years. On my way there, some contemporary bats fly over my head, scoffing at my retrograde screams, pinging every solid object in their blind sights.

Story at Eleven

     There was a bridge that crossed nothing.
     A crowd of people arrived at this bridge and were afraid to cross.
     "Why are we afraid to cross this bridge which crosses absolutely nothing?"
one of the terrified assembly asked her terrified traveling companions.
     "Perhaps it is because some idiot called this a bridge," one of the other
petrified travelers ventured.
      And no one was willing to set one goddamned foot on the thing.
     So they remained camped there for years, waiting to see if something
would rise from below and swallow the structure, or whether it would sink
into something below itself, either way proving it truly had been a bridge they had
been facing all along.
      The journey itself was forgotten in favor of the terror of the bridge
(or whatever it was).
   

Sun Drain

Every day, the old man sits high in a dour, tall building. He sits at a window. He watches a train that contains all the loved and loveless dead ones whizz down the oldest railroad tracks in the world. Always there are more and darker commuters. From his side, they look like the ghosts of jazz singers, with their dark hands and faces pressed to the morning-frosted glass of the train. From their side, he is a slight imperfection in the ice.

Five of My Poems Will Be Included in the Anthology The Collected Explosive Magazine

This is cool and I am really grateful to the editor(s).

I remember really loving the magazine and the great design of the issues that often (always?) had these tactile covers.

I remember dealing with Katy Lederer exclusively, but I'm guessing there were other editors. But then maybe I'm wrong. It's been a few years.  I'm not near my copies right now.  Katy is a wonderful writer in the fullest sense of that word, but I know her best as a poet. Her books are never hard to find in this house, because I make sure they stay in the "old reliable" section of my bookshelves for when I want something inspiring to read that I know is always going to do the trick. Lovely. Lyric. Spirit.

Jeff Clark will be designing the anthology, so you know it's going to be a physically beautiful specimen as well as a good read.

This is great because I bet I missed an issue here or there with various changes of domicile and it will just be nice to catch up with everyone and look back at a really interesting magazine that I suspect will hold up very well with the years and all the rest that has come with the years.

Prints of My Work are Now Available through Dan Skjæveland Gallery (Norway)

I'm quite happy to be represented by Dan and I love the company.

Please check out the work of my fellow gallerians Bill Dane, Sotiris Lamprou and Dan Skjæveland.

We are planning an exhibition as well.

I'll add a link at right.

In other news, I have discovered a new printmaking process. Actually, it's a print "unmaking" process, and it's all about dissolving the pigments in photographs to turn those photographs into paintings. I just made a new set and loved the results on a few of them.

I ordered boatloads of antique/vintage photos on Ebay to work with now that I have the chemical process doing what I wanted it to do.

Endre Tót: I´m going nowhere... (Oxford, 1991)

Really, Isn't There Only One Core Economic Question?

When we're talking about the economy, doesn't the difference between Republicans, Democrats and independents really come down to how much the party or individual is willing to re-allocate wealth through the taxation system. I realize there are other "controls," but that's the massive driver of the economy. Always.

It's interesting that many economists say peak social performance can really only be gained if the top marginal tax rate is somewhere between eighty-five and ninety percent.

I'm sure that sounds horrific to the rich.

F.D.R. wanted more. He wanted to cap incomes at 25k (350K or so, adjusted for today).

I remember when Reagan took the top marginal tax rate from 70 percent down to 28 percent. No wonder the one percent idolize that truly horrible man, that abysmally awful "leader" with astrological stars in his eyes and Book of Revelation prophecies determining his foreign policy.

You can find these figures thrown around again and again. I don't think it's always on partisan sites like this article here at Huffpo.

Happy/Flummoxed

When several pieces of your artwork sell at once and you have absolutely no idea where they are in your house. And it's always just the ones that have somehow gone off the radar.

Clarification

bird chatter / at morning / is not song / is need / processing / need / evaluative being / not romanticism

Even Though Daniil

Even though Daniil Kharms died, horribly, in 1942, his favorite book is Cruel Shoes (1977) by Steve Martin.