TEN POST-OCCUPATIONS 11/15/09

1) The difference between making a poem and writing one...

2) "the fishes of the sea speak Breton" and "as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words" -- Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

3) Every lining has its silver cloud./This be the old materials/(plural) swagger.

4) Smelling like campfire, I try to be as quiet as an inner tube.

5) "I have habituated myself to simple hallucination; I have clearly seen a mosque in the place of a gas-works" -- Arthur Rimbaud

6) "It seems to me, the characteristic of new art from a social viewpoint consists of dividing the public into two classes of men: those who understand it and those who do not" --Ortega y Gasset
Skirting the issue of "two classes of men" (no pun intended), perhaps "understanding" isn't/wasn't the point of a lot of new art. Maybe the two classes are actually (at least) three: those who understand it, those who think they understand it, and those (the vast majority) for whom "new art" is entirely irrelevant... Somehow, this is a massive problem for me as an artist, because most people's sense of contemporary art is "new art."

7) Everyone in the world speaks English AND their own thing. Americans speak nothing or else.

8) I lectured for hours and the perfume was deadly, the eyes in their sockets so raggedy and wrong.

9) Tonight: Mary Anne's roasted Brussel sprouts w/ pasta, olive oil, garlic and parmesan

10) from A Note on Rejection: As both a poet and editor, I've made huge mistakes over the years--sending work to the wrong places, sending the wrong work to the right places, accepting things I shouldn't have, passing up things that are brilliant... And speaking of brilliance--having talent--even (maybe especially) genius (yeah, the word's a problem, so what?)--is no guarantee that anyone else will be able to recognize it. Sadly, for lots of amazing artists, the stars never align, but we don't start or continue to be artists because of the alignment. We start and continue to be artists because of the stars.

InDigest 12

Brand new InDigest w/ new poems from yours truly: http://www.indigestmag.com/ .

Please enjoy.

Matt

H_NGM_N #9

Friends,

See a link to the new issue of the fabulous online journal H_NGM_N, wherein I have some collaborative poems writ with Dobby Gibson.

Here's the official note from H_NGM_N's editor Nate Pritts:

Citizens of the world!

H_NGM_N #9 is locked & loaded & ready to be dropped from a low flying plane on some unsuspecting country whose regime is in need of being toppled.

& if that country is CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE you can start to see how my metaphor is apt:

http://www.h-ngm-n.com/cur_ent-i_sue

Please note that we are currently open to submissions until November 30th & be sure to check out the updated info on H_NGM_N Books:

http://www.h-ngm-n.com/h_ngm_n-books/

Matt

COLERIDGE ON SPINOZA, etc.

"Each thing has a life of it's own, and we are all one life."

[By the by, I recommend highly Adam Sisman's The Friendship: Wordsworth & Coleridge for anyone interested in these two poets, the Lyrical Ballads, and the underpinnings of Romanticism in general.]

ALEXIS ORGERA'S ILLUMINATRIX REVIEWED BY MARK ROCKSWOLD ON THE TARPAULIN SKY BLOG

Congrats Alexis!

Here's the link: http://tsky-reviews.blogspot.com/search/label/Mark%20Rockswold

THIS IS MY LAND ESCAPING

1) Poems register a particular way of paying attention. They point to/remind us of a certain kind of aesthetic interest, a way of using and engaging with language (to make a kind of sense), which is both heightened and degraded from the ordinary.

2) Form is the evidence of the parameters used to shape a poem (whether they're explicit, implicit, or considered only after the fact).

3) The highlight of the moment is my broken foot. Seriously, my broken foot. Throbbing.

4) This morning Agnes said: "Water comes out of my face, it just happens."

5) Someone else said, maybe me I can't remember, though I did write it down: In art the opposite of meaningfulness is not meaninglessness, but indifference and pointlessness.

6) How to write a poem: What would happen if...?

7) In the Udine region of Italy this summer, I actually woke up to the sound of a rooster. Then church bells clanged in the distance. Recently, reading Ann Lauterbach's Or to Begin Again, I thought of that rooster. Italy. Uncomfortably hot sun on my face.

8) "The question is no longer about what the artist is saying--in fact there is no question any longer--but only a sense of the object as a site where one's awareness is centered."--Crispin Sartwell on the Wabi-Sabi in Wolfgang Laib's "Mountains" of pollen.

9) I would like to make poems which are crash sites and/or building sites where one's (my) consciousness/awareness is centered.

10) I would like to...

STILL LIFE WITH LANDSCAPE

1) Trying to find a way to write poems that say a thing (or many things) clearly in the midst of their falling apart (or after which they fall apart)--with music both subtle and bombastic, tripped up and sicke [sic]--like an orchestra going over the side of a cliff into the sea, still playing. Like Rebecca Horn's exploding piano piece. Like Sonic Youth playing George Maciunas' Piano Piece #13 (Carpenter's Piece). Like a Greg Ginn guitar solo. To make/compose this sort of racket I've been writing ten or twenty or thirty-seven lines, etc., then continuing by breaking off bits of the initial stuff and weaving them together with new things as they come. The difficult part is in the idea of "saying a thing (or many things) clearly," (rather than merely demonstrating something) since what I want to say is never pre-determined. I never know what the poem says (or doesn't) until it says it, or says nothing. The method is exploratory, and allows me to peal off the layers of the initial stuff to see what (if anything) is there...

2) BLACK AND WHITE CAMOUFLAGE FLIGHT SUIT

3) The new Yo La Tengo, Popular Songs, has some epic barn burners on it, e.g. "The Fireside" and "The Glitter Is Gone"--these are by turns lovely and subtle, ecstatic and messy. Note: I first typed "bran burners," rather than "barn burners" above. Bran burning is another name for running. Is this an endorsement of both Yo La Tengo and Raisin Bran? Yes, it is. I even dig the former's cover of James Taylor's "You've Got a Friend"

4) And yet, I'm not interested these days in making poems which are only collages. I love collage, but I love lyric profusion/effusion and even narrative just as much. Of course, I have nothing to narrate, and what I do have to narrate I either don't recognize or can't manage. I love details that float. Events that talk like birds on a wire out to lunch in the Vast (or the Void--I musn't forget the void).

5) Need new shirts...

6) STILL LIFE WITH LANDSCAPE IN EARLY MIDDLE AGE

7) Students' art reviews...