Casey Anthony

Mother who killed her baby
In the blue light
I am on to you

Every night I watch you on the internet
Blue light of the electrical screen on your face
Blue light of the night on your face

You took your baby to the river
And dunked her head
In the waters of infinity

Even when a mother brings life
To the world
It is not hers to take
Back
It is not hers to take back

Poem I like from The Little Red Hen by Larry Fagin

I am the little red hen
I work my ass off
For all the poets

And what do I get?
A pat on the butt
When the sun goes down

Argument again Religion

There is no such thing as skin. --Bhanu Kapil

In any argument for religion, there is an argument against it
Poo poo magic
Get the way out of my house
Simultaneity, the conscious regard
Of a thousand men
All traipsing through history
And murder
With its infinite forms
That rolls the skulls of time to my feet
I will argue against religion, not God
I will argue against magic, but not God
Not God, God is pragmatic, is practical
God is practical worth, a sacred act
A sacred act of sex that we engage in
A wet and various act of sex
In songs against it
Against the coming of the dawn, which
Will blind us out, white light
To bind us out of ourselves
Still even in ourselves
We do not know the thing we make
Still even in this poem, I do not know the thing I make
Still even in my heart, love, I do not know the thing I make
Against religion, against the mystical
Against the mystical crazy world
That has got me nothing, I rise
Write numbers in my rising
Make numbers every little thing they can be
Still, hear hear
This poem is about numbers
This poem is numbers
These words are numbers
Your spirit is numbers
My spit is numbers, my blood is numbers
My bones are numbers
My breath is numbers, my death is numbers
My skin is numbers
I slough it off, it is numbers that I slough off
Into the sky
And they go floating by
Forgetting me
Oh that they forget me
I find them so glorious
To forget me
Even as it was I
Who once gave them so much care

Rose Vallord

For the dreamers in my Gaming and Literacy meeting, 12/11/08

Rose Vallord
Remembered the artwork
Of a million Jews
Which had been stolen
Thom says to write about her
The red sun rises everyday
The blue moon
The children rise everyday
One day I will adopt a
Hundred children who have no mother
Still, narrative, no, is only, not only
A primary act of mind
The skeleton of need
Of every child in the universe
The children that rise
Into the morning in the universe
Have not been killed
By the indifference of a million men
But by the difference
Of a million men
To stretch into the sun
And become
A lifelong thing
Building an infinite of future
Of need, no, not need
But our need
To know what they know
And for them to know
What we have yet to know
And to know what we don’t need
Now
But need in the future
What the world will need
Infinite need into an infinite spectrum
Saving the artwork of a million
Infinite Jews to make
The infinite artwork of an
Infinite universe
To breed infinity
Upon ourselves, a thousand loaves
From one loaf
A million bodies from
One body
An infinite sun
From one sun
An infinite moon
From one moon

I am adding Matt Walker's POTATO to my collection of favorite poems

Poet Matt Walker has a really delightful blog that I like to frequent. Yesterday I was browsing around and came across this poem:

POTATO

Sitting in the dark
With a potato
Or without a potato
Is scary

If you are afraid
Of the dark
Or potatoes
Or sitting

Nevertheless
I enjoy it
As do my relatives
As do my confidants

Once I mistook a
Potato for a bullet
A large bullet
Where'd this bullet

Come from I wondered
I was so glad
And relieved when
The Tooth Fairy

Emerged from her van
And entered my face
And ate the potato
I wish I could say

That all is well
I've lost my potato
The room is scary
More is coming


I love this poem. Walker wins me over when he goes from the line "As do my relatives" to "As do my confidants." That's the twist that separates a poem from just another thing. Because then the potato can become a large bullet. Because then the poem can do anything.

I do not have any better way to explain this separation other than a twist. Or to see it when it happens. I know when poems or other pieces of art do not have this necessary twist. All beautiful things have it. It is when the beauty is so great that it has entered the sublime realm and is likewise capable of hurting you. When something is capable of hurting you, it has twisted.

James Tate has a poem in his Selected which describes this twist perfectly, but unfortunately I can't find that book right now. It would be a shame for me to describe it, so I will just save it for another time and post it when I find the book.

(If you have his Selected, I think the poem is on page 43?)

I wanted also to take this opportunity to mention that Tate's Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee is a great new book. You should buy it when you get a chance.

Also, here is the story of a particular instance of carrot corruption: Aaron's Carrots: Disintegration is Told Best in Images

SOFA gallery

This is really super: Katie Geha's SOFA gallery

ON: Contemporary Practice

Finding literary journals that rise above the same old schtick is pretty hard these days, but I am happy to tell you about an amazing new journal called ON: Contemporary Practice (edited by Michael Cross, Thom Donovan, and Kyle Schlesinger). It features the work of contemporary poets writing about each other's poetics through original means. The editors define the project as such:

ON Contemporary Practice gathers writing about the practices or poetics of one’s contemporaries. While these writings may be highly anti-categorical or “hybrid,” they are ultimately for the cultivation and extension of critical discourse.

Looking at the first issue of ON, I have been delighted to see my contemporaries engaged in actual discourse (as opposed to the fluffy/vicious ways we usually talk about each other). It is quite an amazing endeavor these editors have undertaken and I am excited to devour this first issue and all other issues thereafter.

The first issue of ON features work by:

Taylor Brady, Brandon Brown, CAConrad, Jason Christie, Michael Cross, Thom Donovan, Eli Drabman, Rob Halpern, Jen Hofer, Alan Gilbert, Brenda Iijima, Andrew Levy, Edric Mesmer, Sawako Nakayasu, Tenney Nathanson, Richard Owens, Tim Peterson, Andrew Rippeon, Kyle Schlesinger, Jonathan Skinner, Dale Smith, Suzanne Stein, Ali Warren, Katie Yeats

Writing on:

Arakawa/Gins, Taylor Brady, CAConrad, Michael Cross, Beverly Dahlen, Michael deBeyer, Mark Dickinson, kari edwards, DJ/Rupture, Thom Donovan, Belle Gironda, Brenda Iijima, CJ Martin, Emily McVarish, Yedda Morrison, Hoa Nguyen, Sawako Nakayasu, Julie Patton, Lauren Shufran, Suzanne Stein, Dana Ward, Ali Warren

To buy the first issue on SPD, please follow this link: ON on SPD

You can also purchase ON through Cuneiform Press through the following means:

Cuneiform Press
214 N. Henry Street
Brooklyn, NY 11222
www.cuneiformpress.com

Copies are available for $12.00. Free shipping in the US for all orders placed through the publisher. Send checks to Kyle Schlesinger at the address above.

You can find out more information about ON (such as submission guidelines for their next issue) on their website.

Lonely Poems/Black Life

Love

"Stop telling me what U want me 2 hear
Stop telling me what U want me 2 fear
Stop trippin' on something U overheard
Love is winning without a word
Stop giving me Ur "wish list"
Love is free from all this

Like a bird flyin' over the hilltops
Love is like the sky, U know it never stops
From the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks
Love is whatever... whatever... U want it 2 b

Love is not a game U can play on the floor
U gotta stop keepin' score
If U wanna, If U want 2 play me like U did b4
U better stop and walk out the door
U can skate around the issue if U like
But who's gonna get U high in the middle of the night?

Like a bird flyin' over the hilltops
Love is like the sky, U know it never stops
From the abudance of the heart the mouth speaks
Love is whatever... whatever... U want it 2 b

I c U standing with Ur back on the wall
U better, better get Ur hands up and clap if that's all
and uh, if U don't wanna get Urs, then let me get mine
See, ain't gonna b no drama 'cause we have a good time

What's the point of giving me ultimatums?
Smiling at my friends when U really hate 'em
Trying 2 convince me that eye should 2...
what's the point?

Stop worryin' about what people say
When it ain't gonna stop them anyway
Love can do anything if U try
Come on... Spread Ur wings... Let's fly, fly so high

flyin' over the hilltops
Love is like the sky, U know it never stops
From the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks
Love is whatever... whatever... whatever...

Like a bird flyin' over the hilltops
Love is like the sky, U know it never stops
From the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks
Love is whatever... whatever... U want it 2 b

Whatever U want it 2 B
alright
let's skate

I c U standing with Ur back on the wall
Better get Ur hands up and clap if that's all
If U don't wanna get Urs, then let me get mine
See, ain't gonna b no drama 'cause we have a good time

Bounce
aww, shake that thing, c'mon
ahh, bounce it baby
aww, shake that thing c'mon
good god"

--"Love," Prince



Good-bye sweet chair!

Some new poems

I have some new poems in some super journals:

DL's poems in Womb Poetry

DL's poem in Absent Magazine

Check them out.

"We are a see through love
Seeing through sun and haze
I see through to the totally clear end

If you appear within the seconds of
the word imagination
If you appear the word allows a man to
see to those appearance
If you appear what's airy
sends a friend to my imagination
The kind of town where it's a sin
to be inside and outside for them
Around the side of the house where
the side that you can get up on it
When every inter-call decides awell
that's up to go off

We are a see through love
Seeing through sun and haze
I see through to the totally clear end

It's well to know that since it gives a name
you get to grow up with him
I finish all supposed where it's a good time
floating where so much up
The Kind of love that I can only find in my imagination
The Kind of heart that I can only have in my imagination

We are see through love
Seeing through sun and haze"

-Arthur Russell, "See Through Love"

Arts and Education Issue of the Urban Ed Journal

Please submit to the upcoming arts and education issue of the wonderful Urban Ed journal.

Their announcement is as follows:

Volume 6, Issue 2 - Arts and Education

The Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education Journal is now accepting submissions for the upcoming issue, which will focus on the topic of arts in education. Whether included in the classroom curriculum, supplied by visiting artists, or incorporated into afterschool and community-based programming, integrated and discipline-based arts education is widely perceived by both researchers and practitioners to be a public and private good. In this issue, the journal seeks to elaborate the discussion of arts in education in urban areas. How is the relationship between arts and education understood and practiced in urban areas? On the one hand, educators understand how arts serve as a platform to engage students and foster growth; on the other hand, issues of funding, time management, and local and national school mandates often limit the integration and implementation of arts. How do educators, students, and parents negotiate these factors as they bring arts into learning environments?

This is a broad topic, with both "arts" and "education" understood as including but not limited to visual, performing, creative, and expressive arts in K-12, college, university, and community contexts. We encourage researchers, graduate students, practitioners, policy makers, and youth to publish studies in progress, as well as findings from completed research and reflections on practice. We welcome submissions that present content in creative ways through multimedia formats. Submissions must follow the style outlined in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2001, 5th edition). Please complete the submission form found on our website and e-mail it along with your submission to journal@gse.upenn.edu.

Submission due date: February 15, 2009

Visit Urban Ed Journal for more information.

The Entertainer, You're Only Human, You're My Home (Selections from Billy Joel)

Don't worry, the moon will rise wherever you go.
--Mary Jo Bang, "How to Leave a Prairie"


I.

"I am the entertainer

I come to do my show

You've heard my latest record

It's been on the radio

Ah, it took me years to write it

They were the best years of my life

It was a beautiful song

But it ran too long

If you're gonna have a hit

You gotta make it fit

So they cut it down to 3:05"


II.

"It's not always easy to be living in this world of pain

You're gonna be crashing into stone walls again and again

It's alright

It's alright

Though you feel your heart break

You're only human

You're gonna have to deal with heartache"


III.

"When you look into my eyes
And you see the crazy gypsy in my soul
It always comes as a surprise
When I feel my withered roots begin to grow
Well
I never had a place that I could call my very own
But that's alright
my love
'cause you're my home
When you touch my weary head
And you tell me ev'rything will be alright
You say
Use my body for your bed
And my love will keep you warm throughout the night
Well I'll never be a stranger and I'll never be alone
Wherever we're together
That's my home
Home can be the Pennsylvania Turnpike
Indiana's early morning dew
High up in the hills of California
Home is just another word for you
If I travel all my life
And I never get to stop and settle down
Long as I have you by my side
There's a roof above and good walls all around
You're my castle
You're my cabin and my instant pleasure dome
I need you in my house 'cause you're my home"

I am not lame for liking Coldplay

People are always wanting more of something. I have been reading all these articles about creativity lately and the consensus is that more of it would be good in our schools. Still, what does more mean? People often want more money, but then they are often unsure of what to do with it. I think this is how hoarding develops. The allotment of things is what is important with resources. For example, the times in my life when I have wanted more love endlessly were the times when the wrong kind of love was available.

In other words, I have decided that the people I know who think I am lame for liking Coldplay are the same people I know who nothing meaningful about art. I make my own decisions about what kind of art I like because I know a lot about what kind of art is important to our time.

I do not think Coldplay is particularly important to our time, but I do think it is nice to listen to on the train when you need a gentle Pisces voice to counteract the harsh world.

I read with Tao Lin a few weeks ago in a poetry reading. He’s obviously a genius. Every writer and poet alive today should worship the ground he walks on. But I guess most people already know to do so.

I hope he doesn’t mind me putting him so close to Coldplay.

This is a poem I wrote for George Bush:

The Liar

Worse than The Fool
The Liar is always coming at me
With his various masks
He is a man I will never marry
Carrying black pails against the sea
The seawind betrays him
For his guilt and sameness
And haunting, he always haunts
The Liar is a false fool, I watch his lips
And they are fruit-like, but bitten
And I watch them and they are ugly
Like the day from which I came
And they are nothing
Magic lips I see
And there is no one on this earth worth living for
The Liar is bent towards the sun
I have no faith in him and who does
Have faith in a man
Who is no more than an alien

I actually don’t think all Republicans are evil. That’s because I am humanist and I have known some Republicans in my time who actually wanted to help people. My dad was one of those people.

Nevertheless, McCain/Bush is no humanist. Mostly in part because he is too old to understand humanism. Old age and youth (not always mind you) can cloud humanism because there are other needs when you are on either side of death. Humanism is for us adults, in the prime, ready to take action.

And just like this, as Obama said recently, we need adults in the White House, not children.

Hillary Clinton is a Republican Humanist. I still love her.

It is no matter. I’d take a slightly corrupt Democrat-Republican-Humanist over a Bush-McCain Republican anyday.

We need to fight Sarah Palin/John McCain. They are not what this world needs. We need to fight, as adults, for the world.

We need to forget about George Bush/John McCain Republicans that are betting that we have the TV on with the sound down.

I care about sound. So do you, I think.

We are a country where charisma matters a lot. George Bush and Sarah Palin look awfully good on TV with the sound down. They are good-looking. Don’t deny it. That’s the problem, looking good, deadpan-style, with no sound. The American deadpan is only important when you have the sound on—that’s when you see our depth. But unfortunately that’s the way a lot of Americans watch TV, with the sound down, while doing something. This soundlessness undercuts everything this country is good for. Still, there is an inherent tension between what looks good and the sound of it that happens when we watch TV in this country with the sound off. Which is what a lot of Americans do, cause we are a busy and lonely people and we need company—a soundless company that doesn’t make a fuss. And I don’t think that’s good per se, but I do think it is a practice that elucidates an implicitly American relationship to charisma that does not involve sound. If want to win this election, we need to understand this soundless relationship immediately.

The other week I saw one of my old students and when I did, I thought of a class I had a few years back. It was a class in poetry by women (don’t get me started on why I don’t agree with sequestering women poets like that, but it is a necessary practice if we want our poems read). One of the girls in the class was mad at me about something. I think I was critiquing her poem and she was fuming at me. And then she exclaimed: “Oh Dottie, you don’t know anything about the real experimental poetry that is going on these days.” I remember being a little pissed off, but also in love with her spunk.

And the truth is, I probably didn’t. I don’t think I am an experimental poet.

I used to be one, I think I have intentionally tried not to be so in the last five years of my life. I am not sure what got me on the path of trying, but I do know that a lot of what is considered experimentalism in poetry today bores me. I just don’t see the risk in it. Of course, too, a lot of so-called non-experimental poetry being written today bores me, too. I believe in experimental poetry, but not as a dogmatic definition of being brave in a poem. I think a lot of poets are brave and I love the poets who are writing these days who are intensely fearless. I would like to get back to being brave.

I think being brave is a lot about being forced to be so.

One time a supervisor of mine in an arts studio where I worked told me plainly, as I was planning a public art project, “what you give them is important.” That was probably the most important thing a person has ever said to me regarding curriculum.

What circumstances you give a person is of the utmost importance to their experience. In education, this is not only the objects or ideas you give them to manipulate, it is also the world you give them to manipulate the objects and ideas in.

It is certainly not a new idea to think that social justice is married to providing people with proper education. What is proper is certainly up for debate. What is not proper is another four years of George Bush-style policies, another four years of the purposeless, soundless allotment of more. Or bravery for the sake of it. Or of a soundless beauty that masks death.

First and foremost, we don’t need people like Sarah Palin dictating educational policy. Just because you like children or can have them doesn’t mean you know one “goddamn” thing about the way people learn. It doesn’t even ensure that you care.

The weird sounds in Jeff Mangum’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea sound like a train slowing down, as its wheels caress and rub the tracks. It is a sad sound. The pain I feel when I listen to that CD is like the pain I feel when I press on a fresh bruise. Over and over again it is the same dull ache.

I will never get over that album. Soft silly music is meaningful, magical.

I was thinking about Hillary Clinton the other day and I wrote her this poem:

Hillary Clinton

Daughter of Chicago
Businessmen and teachers
She was born
She was smart
She grew up
With dreams
In Midwestern scenery
She met Bill Clinton
O Bill Clinton
This poem isn’t about you
I am a feminist
Like every other woman
Of my generation
Even though you
Can’t tell, much has
Been already done
For example, some men
Have a range of
Emotions you can count on
Abby Walton too
Once played me a song
Called Old Old Fashioned
Hillary Clinton speaks
And it sounds like the soft
Soft static in that song
Laura if we were one thing
It might look something
Like a blue-green dragon
You might disagree with me
About the color
In the morning the sky is grey
It is grey a grey grey sky
I can’t count on the sky
Mother, mother, mother
Mother, mother
I like the way you were
Once round and full
And healthy
And the black night
Wasn’t seeping in our dreams
Hillary Clinton
I know when I see you
I am seeing a little girl
Who knew
She could be president


In other news, I think Danity Kane is my new favorite band:



“When the red light comes on, I transform”

Do they mean burning by that? No, I don’t think so. These women have too much glorious flat affect to let you see them burn.

Here’s another one:



A rule that is not hard to learn is that when Puffy starts talking at the beginning of something, it’s going to be good.

I think someday we poets should get him to grace a reading for us.

I love him:



“You know what time it is? Report to the dance floor.”

“You are the only one I want to talk to. But I don’t want to rush.”

“She diggin my style, my swag, my suede, my swerve
My way with words, the Boy’s absurd for sure
You can't fall til my aura called
I make miracles like I walked on water
What you want mama order, it's on my tab
I'm so bad with that cash, I dropped the whole bag
Where you at girl?”

Order books

Order Jordan Stempleman's book.

Order Poker if you don't already have it.

It would be hilarious if the world's future wasn't at stake

McCain doesn't want Barbie to speak cause they have to order a new microchip for her.

Tell me the poo is not genius

Read this and you will be happy finally with your mortal coil:

Genius drawing by Camilla Schofield

Darkness Everywhere

"Caution: to prevent electric shock do not remove cover
No user-serviceable parts insde Refer servicing to qualified
service personnel"
Let this be the epitaph for my heart Cupid put too much poison in the dart
This is the epitaph for my heart because it's gone, gone gone
and life goes on and on anon and death goes on, world without end
and you're not my friend Who will mourn the passing of my heart
Will its little droppings climb the pop chart Who'll take its ashes and,
singing, fling them from the top of the Brill Building And life goes on,
and dawn, and dawn and death goes on, world without end and you're
not my friend"

-"Epitaph for my Heart," Magnetic Fields

Feelings are a new form of nothingness

Poetry Dance this weekend

I have been working with Kathryn TeBordo and her Workshop for Potential Movement for a few months now to make a dance out of my poems. This weekend this dance will occur for all to see.

Here are some showtimes.

Here is a great write-up about the project on the Live Arts Festival blog.

Here is some more information about the show.

In the show, the sublime is something called Eagle. But the poems do not go into the sublime, they go into the dance. I go into nothing because I am simply a physical medium to the words.

diode poems

I have some new poems in diode magazine and here they are: DL's poems in diode.

I say new poems, but at least one of those poems is over a year old. I don't know if that is new or not.

Also, recently I saw a movie by Esra Ersen called "Growing Old (Dis)gracefully" (I may have messed that title up) at the Bard College Art Museum. I could not stop watching it and fell in love with the main character, Helen, who was so full of life. Check it out or this artist's other work (which I am not familiar with) if you can.

Here are two pictures of a real, dead dragonfly:





Here is a picture that Eric Baus took because he always captures the moments in life that are blissfully sad:

A good voice

This group is so good:



Diddy's voice is like a glorious midnight in their song.

Any song that voice graces is going to be good.

Don't forget this great song from 1996:



You know when he says "Let's go"? Yeah, that's what you have to say when the whole thing starts. That's why I'm his loyal fan. Cause he knows what to say and how to say it right.

Laura Solomon's Blue and Red Things

Laura Solomon's Blue and Red Things is featured on Silliman's Blog today. Read about it here.

I like how Silliman talks about the power and seriousness in her poems. Both are everpresent. I also like how Phillip Metres calls her work "post-apocalyptic pastoral" in the comments. That's a great description of what is important in Solomon's poems, I think, if she wouldn't mind me saying so.

One time Laura Solomon read me a poem and in my mind I saw a forest of translucent, light grey trees. It is an image I have never forgotten and which I consistently associate with her poems, particularly this collection, Blue and Red Things. The image in my mind is kind of the image on the cover of her book, but different. The image in my mind is more jelly-like, more tactile. It is very hard to explain. Anyway, nonetheless, the image I might call a group of post-apocalyptic trees.

(For more Solomon, check out her reading in the bathroom leg of The Tiny Tour. Hers is the 3rd video down.)

Open galleries

I think open galleries on the internet are really cool, like this one: Museum of Computer Art Virtual Gallery It is good to give people a space to show their work when the site has space to. The internet should be an infinite collective, I think.

It just occurred to me that I could never end a string of things I would like to show on an open thing like a blog. The world is infinite with beautiful things. At some point though we all have to stop showing. I never get sick of it though. I could never get sick of collecting the things that humans make. Is that a kind of humanist hoarding? So be it.

I went to the Bard College Art Museum this weekend and saw this great movie installation by Johanna Billing called Magical World and thought it was beautiful. It was so sad, too.

I think the best contemporary poetry today is the kind that gets its formal structure from hip hop. That is what I try to emulate, at least.

I shouldn't talk in absolutes. But it is our time, a time of American absolutism. We will get over it soon. I hope.

Still, I really mean what I say about hip hop. This song by B.I.G. has been embedded in my brain for the last 10 years:



Also, like hip hop, the poet Nick Moudry, who I went to school with many years ago, has taught me more than I could ever articulate about formal structure in poetry. He was featured on the Omnidawn Blog in June. Here's his poem: "Still-life."
Here's another poem of his called "Imitations of Life."

I have a poem by him called "New ode" that is covered in green acetate for safe-keeping hanging on my wall. Last night, my brother, it being his last night in town, and Conrad and I ate coconut sorbet and I read Nick's poem to them. It had been a long time since I had read it out loud. It is still one of the best poems I have ever read.

The other day I sprained my neck but I kept a stick-to-your-skin heating pad on my neck for 8 hours or more and now my sprain is all but gone. How does that work?

I have decided that I think blogs are really really odd. This is a really weird time we are in, you know.

This is a video of a favorite song of mine:


I like how that guy screams in the beginning of the video.

Are you jealous of my pictures: Pics of people in The Yellow Marshmallow


?

?

You shouldn't be so jealous.

Jealousy destroys tolerance, and the destruction of tolerance is the destruction of all love.

Here's a song about love sung by a true performer:

Compost tea

My brother is in town. After he made some compost tea:


(Yes, that is the tea.)


He showed me this video by Jens Lekman:



which I really liked. The snow erases everything. It is the physical sublime.

The other day I wrote an essay about how being late is not a moral issue. I still feel that way today. Sometimes people try to put things that are not in the moral realm into it in order to make them feel like they have strengths. Being late is not a strength, it is a choice based on a series of conditions, some present, some past, a few future. Like Kierkegaard, I think we should watch what traits of others we ascribe to the moral realm. Doing so too hastily breeds intolerance, which is the death of all love.

Here's a better picture of the compost tea:



The song in the video is called "Black Cab."

He also took weird pictures of some the stuff around my apartment:





I want those to be gigantic posters in my room. I think EB is a photographic genius. He can literally make a dead bird look beautiful: EB's birds

Even though the time is gone, I still remember the time I spent on the beach a few weeks ago. I felt right there and am sad not to be there. Here's a video I took of the seaweed:



Also, I like reading this: Interview with Juliana Spahr from 2005. I love Juliana Spahr. One time I wrote her this poem:

Death of (no Life of) the Human

for Juliana Spahr

We are all here together
Insecure or not
It is our party
To play in
They are our hearts to mention
The world would not exist without us, o us!
I feel connected to everyone (everything) with lungs
The green springs of the air we breathe in
Are spongy and delightful
And I am not a racist
Nor am I not a fascist
I am not anything as much as I am nothing
Floating so floatily in the mid-Spring air
The white wind touching my wrists and ankles
And everything loving me, o that I exist
And breathe in this air
There would be no air to breathe
Without us to breathe it

I like her because she's a humanist. Oh but who isn't these days. Oh but she's a real one.

I wrote her another poem once about being in a dark park, but I never finished it in the right way. Sometimes you write a poem and you just lose it before it is done. Usually it's because someone calls you to annoy you before you can get the poem out. I wish those people who always ruin my poems would wait to call when I am lonely, which is a lot of the time. I am more the person people want me to be when I am lonely, but I am never lonely when I am writing a poem. There are always too many people around. I wonder if everyone who is a poet feels that way. I wonder if everyone who is an artist feels that way.

Human Thing

Love

Apologize, Timbaland Featuring One Republic

I'm holding on a rope
Got me 10 feet off the ground
I'm hearin' what you say but I just can't make a sound
You tell me that you need me then you go and cut me down
But wait
You tell me that you're sorry didn't think I'd turn around and say:

That it's too late to apologize
It's too late
I said it's too late to apologize
It's too late

I'd take another chance, take a fall, take a shot for you
I need you like a heart needs a beat, it's nothing new
Yeah, yea
I loved you with a fire red now it's turning blue
And you say
Sorry, like the angel heaven let me think was you
But I'm afraid

It's too late to apologize
It's too late
I said it's too late to apologize
It's too late

It's too late to apologize
It's too late
I said it's too late to apologize
It's too late

I'm holding on a rope
Got me 10 feet off the ground

A favorite poem for what is a rainy day

It is rainy where I am. Here is one of my favorite poems in honor of a rainy day. This poem is not about rain. It about the day after the day that it rains.

I know the truth - give up all other truths!

I know the truth - give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look - it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.

-Marina Tsvetaeva

Trying to be all cool and organized

My reading page is sort of updated for the fall: List of readings I will be in this fall. I don't have all the details for all the readings, but I thought I would put some of them up in case anybody is going to be the areas I will be in. Thanks for considering coming to a reading of mine in advance.

Speaking of things that are organized well, here is one of my top ten favorite websites of the last 5 years: We Love Colors

I am reading in NYC on 8/23, so come see me if you are free

Here's a reading I am going to be in with John Beer and Macgregor Card on 8/23:

Poetry Time reading

Come to the reading if you are in the NYC area!

Yesterday I went to the beach

Yesterday I went to the beach:



I am living life in a way I never have before. I am sick of the old ways I used to live life. I want to believe in the picture above again. I don't think I have ever been alive and truly believed in the picture above.

When I was in college, I worked in the library with this wonderful woman named Mona. She told me that the world was full of people who would suck your joy out if you let them. It sounds like she was talking about vampires, but no I don't think she meant that. Joy is not blood. She said to protect your joy at all costs. I think we all should do that: protect joy. It needs protecting. It is not a very strong thing, very flimsy and serious and watery. It is not blood, so it doesn't go on forever, bringing life. But when it is around, I will surround it in my meaty hands (but not touch it, you should never touch it) and not let the darkness seep into it anymore. It is worth saving, like chance. Chance is worth saving, too.

Sometimes I look at blogs and I find things I like

I drank almost an entire bottle of Diet Mountain Dew today in order to finish an academic task I have been working incessantly on for the past week (and let's just say I haven't finished yet). Anyway, sometimes drinking lots of Dew makes me find blogs with poems that I like. I really like this poem by Kendra Grant Malone: "is it narcissistic that im attracted to you even though we look similar?"

It is a great thing when ass is the last word of a poem. This is not a rule, but a general observation.

It is kind of a rule that I am glad that geniuses like Bernadette Mayer wrote poems like this, so that we can all write poems that end in ass as much as we want to.

I will continue to look at blogs more to find more poems I like. People writing poems and posting them to blogs--I like that! The world wide web. Who would have thought.

Terrible Love

Here is the best news ever I could tell you: Ish Klein's first book is due out Feb. 9, 2009. It is called Union! and will be published by Canarium Books. Ish Klein is a genius. People say that sort of thing a lot about people, but I really mean it when I talk about Ish Klein. It is a true blessing to know her. Alice B. Toklas wrote (or we will say she did for the sake of argument) that there were three times in her life that she met a genius and each time she heard a bell. And she said, when she first met Gertrude Stein she heard a bell.

I first saw Ish Klein read when I had only lived in Philadelphia for two months, as she read for the Philadelphia leg of the Poetry Bus Tour. I didn't hear a bell that night cause that's not my thing, that's Alice B. Toklas' thing. Still, bell or no bell, she was so good, she scared me. For about 8 months after that, I would see her around town, but I was so scared of her genius that I would lose all ability to say anything and end up running away. One night, last summer, after having known who she was for 8 months, I went up to her at a party and introduced myself. She was very nice and I like her very much to this day.

I really like Alice B. Toklas.

I first read Gertrude Stein's Three Lives when I was 15. I was in San Diego visiting my Aunt Ardis. The day I read the book, I was swimming by myself in my aunt's pool, with a bunch of orange trees all around. That was a very important day for me.

The other day I went to a reading Molly's Bookstore in Philly's Italian Market. Molly Russakoff is a brilliant poet who ran the bookstore, but is now closing it in order to open up Project 360, an amazing educational venture for teens who feel like they don't have a place in the traditional school system (I will hopefully write more about Project 360 in a future post, as I think it is wonderful and people should donate money to it). Because the bookstore is closing, there was a closing reading. Books from the bookstore were very cheap at the reading and I bought a book called Staying on Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas. It seems like a really good book so far. At the reading, Ish Klein read the poem below. It knocked me so far off my feet that I can't stop thinking about it. In fact the poem below this post called "The Body" is written to Ish after hearing this poem by her. Here's Ish's phenomenal poem:

Act I: Against Death

Since we are ghosts,
since we are barely here but for pain and song and sad lights from our memories
making it out,

since we are brightest before death-
Wait ghost!
Wait friendly ghost! I’m running after which means I thought of running:

I watched myself do it
I had regret
I put it all on you.

You- the mobile ghost
You- the better ghost
You with your magic and who am I?

I am an angry friendly ghost. A ghost who wants to lose weight,
one who picks at skin and pulls out hair.
One who doesn’t haunt others but who haunts herself.

Ghost among ghosts!
You who are a weary ghost- who is hung over and scribbling out the fear-
The old buildings that we move through as we dodge machines.

Come here and be faithful to blood
to the fact that it pours constantly-
The collective blood that pays our way and says almost nothing.

I am haunting these people.
I think they are my friends.
Not well

am I doing this.
I am going to be forgotten.
I do hope that happens.

Maybe then I can change
maybe I can say,
You go here, do this do that:

first A, then B, then C
and I will be reliable
as for endeavor.

But always it is:
C! B?
fuck you A. I never needed A.

A is destroying my mind-
A is the devil and the devil wants to fuck and crawl out of me again;
to make me responsible for the end of it all.

A- the thing to do-
Avoid the devil
do the laundry.

Avoid the devil’s cameras.
Hi! I say. I smile.
behind the loudness, my evasion, the hangover, I am planning,

planning to get better.
I am figuring somewhere else.
I have been working on it.

I’ve been imagining the woods- not the city.
The woods and within the clearing
two castles.

They will dig me out from a whole.
I was sleeping inside a tree.
You see I killed myself before for love. I could not be found.

Others needed me and I did not care.
I needed me but I did not know it as I was essentially leaking
everything and the love and the pain it mixed

sand to glass inside- it broke and my glass with wine
broken- this is how I drank it.
This is what shocked my voice

this is the further tear along the front.
The front filling up with blood- ballooning with it.
It fears the air a bit.

It needs to keep moving.
Wary blood, how can I blame you.
I am dead.

I did kill myself. I must forgive everyone in pain.
I must give them everything to correct my mistake.
It isn’t easy . Sorry.

Well, the furies
You know- the furies who can cure them.?
They have many arms all weaponed, all holding edges and points to tear.

You can’t hug them from behind.
They roll with spikes out.
Who’s in there? What blood is in there? How can it be freed?

I am part of you furies.
I am a radiant of you too.
Let me take you in and care, let me sit you by my fire.

My sister in her car.
We will die now, I thought.
We’re together- it fits

I guess I’m ready
If this is love
it isn’t trusting.

Love you are allowed to be you.
You with frightened blood and plagued by cameras from beyond and dancing sort of.
You with no magic that has become a new magic of ticks and clicks. Hit it with a stick

Metal, it is now,
a moment! I have stopped
aware of my complete apparent lack of comfort.

Numbers. Points in the dark.
Heaven. Old time.
Shame. Shame the stupid soiled person, the actor.

You out there, there is a way.
A way to break out!
You mate with flames

You forgot-

you forget

You must have been

You must be:

A. Devil

B. Angel

C. Motion

D. Dog

E. Electric

F. Made by Men

C. Computer, broken circuits cutting other circuits


inside and around

outside holding you in.

Inside screaming


Your friends are keeping you here

They need someone too, Love.

LOVE TERRIBLE LOVE


LOVE TERRIBLE LOVE


STAY WITH ME

The Body

for Ish Klein

Eric says all my dreams are in my body
All my bad dreams
About betrayal
I don’t want to be in this body anymore
That holds all the betrayal of the universe
Its tissues bluing all day into blue-black
Blood balloon
One day all that blood will be dark and grey
I want to be an unearthly body instead of this one
I want to be a body that is free of dreams
The imagination
I never wanted the imagination within my legs and arms anyway
Blacking within it like forgotten light
Umbrella limbs full of potential light
I never wanted to be the person who tells you
That I believe in you
So that you never had to listen to anyone else
I never wanted
You to forget about me
Freeze me into arctic lust
Until I am never the body
That is amber in the sun
The people, I never wanted the people
To touch my body like they owned it
In dreams
On earth
In real life
I wanted people to believe in my body for once
Not my dreams
That you can walk through in wonderment
Because they are so beautiful
The whole world, the people
They never believed in my body
They only ever believed in their own bodies
Walking and talking
Through the world
Mimetic knights
The people
They only ever believed in their own similar bodies
Flattened pieces of videotape
Matted pictures, red and black
And twinned
The twinned heads and feet
The pickled noses, the twins
The people
Lost and adorned
They only ever believed in the things that were similar
They only ever believed in the cold

english bulldog puppies

These dogs make me want to live forever.

Talking fish

After reading this article, I don't want to eat fish anymore. And this after I just started eating fish again after two years of fishlessness.

Check it out:

Article about the sounds of fish

Joni Mitchell - Both Sides Now (Live, 1970)

"But now its just another show
You leave em laughing when you go
And if you care, don't let them know
Don't give yourself away"

Suicide - Ghost Rider

Nelly Furtado Say it Right

This song is so sad.

Pinkberry Song

i wonder should i get it plain or green tea, doesn't matter to me
don't care how long i have to wait,
i like it in the rain, or in the winter time
like a burst of sunshine, good for my body, good for my mouth,
good for my mind, good with the family, good with the friend, with the lover, or alone
it's an obsession, pure and delightful, simple and heavenly
and guilt-free, yummy! pinkberry

iChat Screenshots-possible picture pool?

Hey, does anybody out there want to start an iChat screenshots picture pool on Flickr?

Here's what I have so far: iChat photos

Maybe there is one already. I can't imagine there wouldn't be. It would be cool to have a poetry one.

Deadpan poems in Glitterpony Magazine

Check out some more of my Deadpan collaboration with Thom Donovan in the latest issue of Glitterpony. Glitterpony is the brainchild of the fabulous Natalie Lyalin and the fabulous Jon Link, both Sagittariuses. I gotta stop. Sometime soon, I promise I'll stop. Soon.

Here are the poems: Deadpan poems in Glitterpony.

Cat Power: The Moon

"the moon is not only beautiful
it is so far away
the moon is not only ice cold
it is here to stay"

Very Small Movies

Yesterday, I communicated via puppets with some friends on ichat way into the night:



But before that I went to a party with my work friends and I had to walk for what seemed like a very long time by myself on a woodsy street. I made this movie because I wanted to remember the feeling of walking by myself on the street:



And then after I made the movie, I started thinking about other very short movies I have randomly made within the last year. Here are a few below:



That one I made when Laura and I were in Ithaca, NY and this nice woman was driving us to the train station. Below is one from the same trip when we were on the bus:



Here are some dogs in NY:



And then here are some water ripples in a pond:



I have some more, but I'll spare you the overload. Still, looking at them has made me consider how much the lack of a regular performative element in them might have something to do with their being tied to the natural world in some way (animals, trees). Anyway, very small movies really interest me lately. Making very small movies seems to be some way to capture the memory moments of a life that are actually important and don't have much to do with performance, except the performance of the everyday. Still, the everyday has a style and very small movies show this style, this joy of living. I don't think there is anything I could say about them that wouldn't seem extremely naive and simplistic to anyone with any expertise in film, but I have noticed that video sites like youtube and vimeo have more than likely bred an explosion of many short movies (under 30 seconds). When visiting the youtube channels of my poetry peers for instance, I have noticed that many of them seem interested in capturing moments in very short movies that have no obvious narrative, are wholly quotidian in their beauty. As well, there are probably millions of very small movies on sites like youtube, such as the millions of movies of cute moments between people and their dogs (I have looked at all of these, I think). Still, why is capturing and archiving these small moments so important to us as a culture? I don't know why, but the possible answers seem fascinating.

This interests me too because I've been working on an ethnography this past Spring of an after-school science program and very often in an attempt to capture unperformative moments of the children's learning, I have taken very short movies of their interactions. In capturing the social aspects of a learning event, it seems that a culmination of very short movies might show more about their learning than weeding through a continuous record. The performance is in the off and on switch, but the players, often unaware of the small moments being captured, are more true to the real life I want to better understand to aid learning in the future within these short movies.

What matters in a human life is not always the very dramatic moments that are infused with high meaning. We know this. What makes life good is being content through an accumulation of very small moments. Gorky knew this always. We have always known this all along. Still, the materials of this, in very short moving pictures, haunt me in a way that my memories haunt me. Because the past goes into a hole in the universe we can never fully capture, even as the past is the very thing that gives any existence at all any meaning.

No, that is not entirely true. I mean the future gives meaning, too.

When I was talking about this with EB this morning, he told me about the Early Edison films and how they captured very small moments as people experimented with the medium of film. Here is a snippet of them:



That kiss is amazing. Still, it is not these moments that I am thinking of now exactly, although they are related and beautiful. I am thinking of the moments up until the limit that make the limit +1. These are the moments that important to the poetry of our time.

Rock Star - N.E.R.D.

"You think the way you lives okay
You think posing
Will save the day
You think we don't see
That you're running
Better call your boys
'Cause I'm coming"

"I guess
You ain't heard that we swallow guys
It's too damn late to apologize
Will you see the mantle or will you see the skies

It's almost over now
It's almost over now"

Bauhaus - Bela Lugosi's Dead

James Taylor - Something In the Way She Moves - Live Concert

"Every now and then the things I lean on lose their meaning,
And I find myself careening
Into places where I should not let me go.
-- she has the power to go where no one else can find me,
Yes, and to silently remind me
Of the happiness and good times that I know, you know."

Grease - You Are The One That I Want

"If you're filled
with affection
you're too shy to convey,
meditate in my direction.
Feel your way."

Bob Dylan - Simple Twist of Fate (1975)

"They walked along by the old canal
A little confused, I remember well
And stopped into a strange hotel with a neon burnin' bright.
He felt the heat of the night hit him like a freight train
Moving with a simple twist of fate."

Bob Dylan - Love Minus Zero/No Limit

"My love she speaks like silence,
Without ideals or violence,
She doesn't have to say she's faithful,
Yet she's true, like ice, like fire.
People carry roses,
Make promises by the hours,
My love she laughs like the flowers,
Valentines can't buy her."

Two great things I saw yesterday

I saw Giant #3 by Zhang Huan in a gallery yesterday (I wish I remembered the name of the gallery). Here are some pictures of it. If you click on those images, you can see them better.

I was not expecting it to be so big. It must be at least 100 feet if you stretched the thing from end to end. The whole giant is made out of animal hides, tacked together, hooves and all. I think art should punch you in the face from time to time. That thing really knocked me out.

In the exhibit, there was some text by Huan about how conceptual art does not serve him and how social realism always serves what his body wants to say. I am completely misquoting him and probably misrepresenting him, too. But whatever he said, I loved.

Also, in another gallery, I saw this painting "You Can't Stop and Smell the Roses with Amphetamine Psychosis" by Larry Johnson.


I think the painting is actually called "Untitled (Courtney Love)." I have always liked her. Anyway, I detest drugs, but something about those woods in the painting gives me the creeps in the best possible way. I have always been a sucker for art about psychological dysfunction. I think because this is the stuff that is the fucking truth.

I have no idea what Johnson's painting has to do with this Livejournal entry. I still don't understand what Livejournal is. Do people still really use that? I think I missed this part of the internet.

I have noticed that Livejournal seems to give license to people acting inordinately goofy or sad and wonder why that is.

Just wanted to share some beauty with you. Hope you'll check these artists and their work out more today.

Renting Babies

Dear EB,

You can rent babies!

Look: Renting Babies

DL

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort

UPDATE!! on Savage Grace, the movie

So, I finally saw Savage Grace. And while fellow natural redhead Julianne Moore, the greatest and most beautiful actress alive today, can do no real wrong in my eyes, I found the movie so profoundly disturbing in the worst possible ways that it has given me horrific dreams for days. Listen, I thought the movie was going to be about bakelite. I love bakelite. This movie is more about insanity than bakelite. The combination sounds cool, but I have had my fill of insanity for a lifetime. And it wasn't a combination really. Where was the bakelite? I wanted to see at least a couple of people wearing bakelite and I didn't. So, I can't really recommend this movie, although it is not bad per se. And if you are into movies about insanity, I suggest seeing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest instead. If you are into bakelite, I suggest finding the people who are still selling it for cheap at yard sales because they don't yet understand its magical/economic worth.

Also, in other entertainment news, I would like to take this opportunity to say "In Your Face!" to the doubters and haters in England who didn't want Jay-Z to be in the Glastonbury festival cause they thought hip-hop is not rock. Hip-hop is everything. Just look at these sales: In Your Face Sales for Jay-Z in England.

And then, take a listen to the master: Amazing Jay-Z song.

You are not dead

I would love you if you were dead
But you are not dead you are alive
You body ringing in me, ringing true
Ringing true, not like a blue nerve net
Encased in glass
Not a red rubber heart encased in glass
Not a burned out body encased in glass
But a real thing, a soft thing
A soft and wild thing
I am so glad I left the world
And found the wildness beyond in you
I am so glad I was brave enough
To leave the place in me that was not wild
To go into the cave of life that is not dead

Style is Joy: Listen to this today

Listen to Bhanu Kapil today.

Style is Joy, cont.

Style is Joy. As it says:

"One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form."

"Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work."

Both of these gems are by The God of All Writing--Flaubert. All hail fellow fire sign, Gustave Flaubert, The God of All Writing.

More Style is Joy to come. Oh, more to come.

New reviews of AWE, famous coupling, and CA Conrad's Somatic Poetry Exercises

Check out a new review of my book AWE in InDigest Magazine.

Thanks so much InDigest Magazine and Jess Grover!!

Also, the wonderful Katie Fowley reviewed AWE in the recent Rain Taxi. Thanks Katie!!

Also, yeah, while you're at it, check out this site of famous astrological couples. I did!


(Can you believe that a Pisces woman and an Aquarius man could be happy forever AND make salad dressing--Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward? I could not.)

(I could believe that Hall and Oates are Libra/Aries though (you have to scroll down a bit.) That picture looks just like my buddy Laura and me--Libra/Aries.)

Also, you'd be remiss not to check out CA Conrad's latest Somatic Poetry Exercise (dedicated to genius Ish Klein) and follow it to the letter to write some beautiful poems. Write some garbage poems! Stop talking to people and write poems!! That's what I tell myself a lot. So, I guess that's what I'll tell you. But really I am telling that to myself. All day long.

Poems in The American Poetry Review

I have poems in the July/August 2008 issue of the The American Poetry Review, as part of a special Philadelphia poets section. Please check them out when you can. I think it is cool that this section came out at the same time as the awesome FANZINE Phillysound feature. Philadelphia is such an amazing place for a poet to live.

Phillysound on FANZINE

There is a Phillysound feature on FANZINE out. It is curated by CA Conrad and hosted by Thom Donovan. I think FANZINE is a really super site and Conrad and Thom have done an amazing job on the feature.

Here are my poems in the section. The first poem can be found in my chapbook, Tourmaline, put out recently by the great Transmission Press.

Tourmalines are very important to me. Sometimes I think about and look endlessly at pictures of watermelon tourmalines online. I have a necklace of them too, but I never wear it. I don't know why, but it is something about it being too powerful. Because tourmalines can come in so many colors, there is no way to ever get one clear, singular view of a piece of one and thus, in its raw forms, it is forever an image of simultaneity, in some ways too duality. To me, God and the world, the self and the world, are always in a state of togetherness and simultaneity. Even nothingness is always in state of oneness with somethingness, which is why people who believe in complete nothingness are wrong. The world is futile always just as it is meaningful, and so forth--spirit and object consistently and constantly circling one being (see quotations and poem below, and also the grey cat video). Of all the magical rocks in the universe, tourmalines might be my favorite.

Anyway, I digress, but I do hope you will check out the great Phillysound poems up on FANZINE today. I don't think any of them have to do with tourmalines.

Duality, outside and in

"Word's a sentence before it's a word."
--Ron Silliman

"What in this world
Keep us from tearing apart
No matter where I go I hear
The beating of your heart
I think about you
When the night is cold and dark
No one can move me
The way that you do
Nothing erases the feeling between me and you"
--Cyndi Lauper

"“Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them”
--L.S. Vygotsky

“He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of aristocrats, or he who, like Dostoievsky, gets nearest the moon of our non-being.”
--D.H. Lawrence

Song of a Man Who Has Come Through

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them

--D.H. Lawrence

Duslo falls asleep

Skin

"THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SKIN!"
--Bhanu Kapil

"And there was a booming above you
That night, black airplanes flew over the sea
And they were lowing and shifting like
Beached whales
Shelled snails
As you strained and you squinted to see
The retreat of their hairless and blind cavalry

You froze in your sand shoal
Prayed for your poor soul
Sky was a bread roll, soaking in a milk-bowl
And when the bread broke, fell in bricks of wet smoke
My sleeping heart woke, and my waking heart spoke

Then there was a silence you took to mean something:
Mean, run, sing
For alive you will evermore be
And the plague of the greasy black engines a-skulkin'
Has gone east
While you're left to explain them to me
Released from their hairless and blind cavalry

With your hands in your pockets, stubbily running
To where I'm unfresh, undressed and yawning
Well, what is this craziness? This crazy talking?
You caught some small death when you were sleepwalking

It was a dark dream, darlin', it's over
The firebreather is beneath the clover
Beneath his breathing there is cold clay, forever
A toothless hound-dog choking on a feather

But I took my fishingpole (fearing your fever)
Down to the swimminghole, where there grows bitter herb
That blooms but one day a year by the riverside - I'd bring it here:
Apply it gently
To the love you've lent me

While the river was twisting and braiding, the bait bobbed
And the string sobbed, as it cut through the hustling breeze
And I watched how the water was kneading so neatly
Gone treacly
Nearly slowed to a stop in this heat
- frenzy coiling flush along the muscles beneath

Press on me: we are restless things
Webs of seaweed are swaddling
You call upon the dusk
Of the musk of a squid
Shot full of ink, until you sink into your crib

Rowing along, among the reeds, among the rushes
I heard your song, before my heart had time to hush it!
Smell of a stone fruit being cut and being opened
Smell of a low and of a lazy cinder smoking

And when the fire moves away
Fire moves away, son
Why would you say
I was the last one?

Scrape your knee; it is only skin
Makes the sound of violins
When you cut my hair, and leave the birds the trimmings
I am the happiest woman among all women"

--Joanna Newsom, "Only Skin"

$10 student rate to adopt an endangered sloth!

The evercaring Jason Z. just told me about an agency that rescues endangered sloths. For just $10 (a student rate) you can adopt a sloth! Here is the information: Save a Sloth

So, for $10, this is what you get in addition to saving a sloth:

"Package includes:
* 8X10 color photo of the sloth you will be adopting.
* Color information card about the type, and a personal history of your sloth.
* 8X111/2 Sloth Adoption Certificate.
* Annual issue of the 'Buttercup Newsletter'.
* individual wallet size photo cards of adoptive sloth with student's name."

Sloths are pretty fucking awesome in my view. If you don't believe me, then watch this video:

Cool baby sloth

Isn't it great how they put their arms over and under like that?

And then look at this video: Another cool baby sloth video

I love the sloth named Taz in that one.

This video made me sad when I watched it, especially for the first 40 seconds: Swimming sloth video

I don't think that sloth meant to be swimming. I think he was lost. He looked like me when I haven't eaten all day and am wandering around H&M. Anyway, it is nice when they save the sloth and bring him to a tree. (Sorry to give it away if you haven't watched the whole thing yet.)

Anyway, everyone should adopt a sloth.

Look What I Can Do Animals

This is my favorite toy artist of all time: Look What I Can Do

This is her Etsy shop: Browse and buy beautiful animals

And this is her great blog

I found out about her through looking at the pics from one of my favorite blogs ever: Bits and Bobbins

Oh, I am so glad I found out about her.

I am going to go look at her creatures now and dream of a room filled with them. Now that would be a great room for a poetry reading.

None of it matters

None of it matters, lost one
In the world
None of it matters
I went from water to waterfall
Green world to red world
I went from a world full of deer
To a world full of bears
The tissued world
To a world that was off set
I set the curtains
They said, Set the curtains
So I set the curtains
I spent August in bed
In the same clothes
I kept on the same clothes
For ten weeks
I changed my outfits
Five times a day
And no one listened
I got lost, I got found again
I was always lost
I will always be lost
I will never win at this game
I will never
Be the speaking thing they made me to be
I am not pronouns
Nor am I all of them
I am no I
I wander
And it doesn’t matter
I stay the course
I am a star-filled night
Among the unforgivable
I live within a grey world
Within a pretty one
Within one they made for me
I help you find your books
I made the books
I made them, world I held within me
It was no help
I looked at the world with dark eyes
In front of a grey house
I was always lost
In that house
I was always lost, a zero
Am I lost for good?
Shoot I don’t know
Mathematical laundress
Of the forgotten egret
I am
Glue me to ten sheets of paper
So that my skin sticks upon them
Write six blue letters upon my skin
I am all object
Throw me around the sky
And I will glisten, a red ball
Floating over buildings and boats
And the sun itself
Hang me on the moon
I am funny-shaped so far away
Stick me where the bunnies go
Let me lay there with them
And those awful ears upon me
Who knows within them
The secrets I will tell

Fight the Smears site

This is a great site: Obama's Fight the Smears site.

Check it out and spread the word.

I love these pandas

I love this story

This is so beautiful: picture of a long love
Another picture of them

Article on Poets on Painters

There is a great new article on Travis Nichols and Katie Geha's Poets on Painters project out today.

Click here to read the article.