serif of nottingblog

BLACK HOLE

2012-01-30T14:31:00.001-05:00

BLACK HOLE

My neighbortakes out bags of garbage. My neighbor walks the dog. She washes the car,sweeps the walkway, shovels the snow, carries groceries home. My neighbor hasremarkable legs and can leap tall fences. My neighbor has a birthmark whichcovers most of her face. It’s not the shape of Jesus, her birthmark not theshape of Mother Theresa. It’s not the shape of the Great Rift Valley, nor ofthis story. Her birthmark is a black hole, vast and mysterious, unknowable andterrifying and we cannot look, cannot look away.

Leaves drop fromtrees and land on the sidewalk.

A hundred yearspass. It is autumn again. The same leaves fall.

“Why do youobsess about our neighbor’s face,” my son says. He is now 107 and has childrenof his own. “There are other things to think about. For example, her remarkablelegs, her ability to leap tall fences. She was my Grade 2 teacher and as suchprovided me important guidance regarding my proclivity toward pulling girls’hair and the appropriate legerdemain with which to form the letter F.“

“Lookat her birthmark.” I say. “Look with both naked eyes or with one through atelescope which you have coyly hidden behind the almost closed curtains of ourliving room. Gaze into her birthmark and you will see time and spacecollapsing. Light disappearing. The glint of the sideview mirror, new quartersflipped into the bright morning air, a sudden shine from the policeman’s badge.Your poor red heart turns to some kind of ground beef and gets sucked in,sucked into her face. Along with streetsigns, seniors hobbling before our frontwindow, horses, the planets, spiral nebulae, great gas giants, and the memoriesof entire civilizations, the Mezozoic, skipping games, philosophical paradoxes,and the sadness when youth is over. I’m sure you feel that, son, its dull metaltaste, its acrid, static melodies. But,remember, you have your children, their consolations, rewards, and materialsupport. And so, in the dim fossil glow when time has just about called it aday, your progeny orbiting bedside, splittle dribbling from your weak and judderinglips, your sallow lungs wheeze, and you whisper:

“Hank,Bob, and Sheila,” you say. “Janice andJulie; Neptune, Gloria, Saturn and Pluto,” you say. “George, Henry, Earth,Venus, and Gwendolyn; Mars, Jeremiah, River, and Dwarf-Star,” you say. “I havesomething to tell you.”

“Wait,”my son interupts. “Hold that thought. This just in. Look across the street. Ourneighbour,” he says. My son’s eyes rollback in his head. I worry, at his age, if this might be some kind of seizure,some kind of arrest. Something medical. Life ending. But he stands steady, hisarm pointing certainly toward our neighbour, shopping bags surrounding her onthe front lawn like mute and overstuffed acolytes or drunken circle-time children.

“Her antlersreach into the withdrawing almost infinite sky,” my son says. “Eachvelvet-covered tine is a branch rising as if to blossom in a star. The muscles in her tawny and spectacularhaunches shudder, her eyes are obsidian headlights filled with the shadows ofdeep space. Her pert teeth are constellations which tell their own mythologicaltales. Who are we? What is our place in all this changeable uncertainty? Ifcommunication is dark matter, what are our mouths, our wild breathing likesolar flares seeking night?”

With this Delphicstupor, my son tries to upstage me again. I am the great blue earth, andbeneath the whorl of its clouds, its plains are filled with blond lions andvelvet-nubbed giraffes, pods of great singing whales ranging beneath itschuffing seas. I am the centre of everything yet he insists on maintaining hisheliocentric legend like some recalcitrant Galileo before the otherworldly andacademically accurate lute-playing of his father, Vincenzo Galilei.

“The Baroqueperiod with its concentration on monody and its rigorous harmonic hierarchy isinevitable,” I tell him. “Legends propped up by empirical data and quotidianand reproducible experiments lack the gravitas and mythopoeic reality of theactual. The black hole is ravenous. It is expanding. Soon it will cover ourneighbour’s entire body, a predatory shadow, an endless mine-shaft through timeand space. Then it will engulf her side of the street. Then the world. Whatsparkles at its core? What does it pull toward its alchemical treasures?”

My son, theforetold spittle now running in delicate rivulets down his upturned pink chin,raises both arms, and calls out some intelligible equation, rotten withcoefficients and imaginary trigonometric pig-Latin. Then he runs blindly acrossthe street. We can be thankful that here, in the cul-de-sac of our lives, thereis little traffic. No SUV charges toward its End-of Days assignation with daycare,no delivery truck plows forward, laden with time-sensitive communication and Internet-orderedfolderol. The well-kept blades of our neighbour’s lawn part before the quickglossolalia of his sneakers, a Exodus-enabling sea of grass flinching beforehis mad and unintelligible dance. He dives toward his former Grade 2 teachersearching for who knows what further instruction on the calligraphic mysteriesof the letter F and the hieracticprotocol surrounding the grasping of pigtails and the ringing of little girls’hair. For a moment his body with its sadwhite sneakers is parallel to the slight curve of the earth and is beautiful.

My sondisappears into the infinite shadow that is our neighbour’s birthmark.

Once again, he hasstolen the scene and is gone.

I weep.

Songs of the Uncanny Valley:

2012-01-26T10:11:00.001-05:00

Songs notice.
Songs do not notice.

SONGS OF THE UNCANNY VALLEY

Readers of this blog will note that the last few posts of pieces are based on the synthesized voices native to MS Word. What's up?

These pieces are my explorations of synthesized text "reading" -- the interface of the fictional persona (the computer 'character') and the human meaning of the text (language, we are trained to assume by default is 'human', has a source in cognition or expression. My texts themselves are supposed to be problematizing this issue, particularly in light of the robotic voice with shares some properties with the human and the expressive voice. Also, the relationship between speaking, song, melody, and inflection. The pieces are supposed to be chant-like and hypnotic and disconcerting in some kind of uncanny valley between human and not, between music and not, between chant and something else. This effect, to me is most present in the whispered text (Old Mother) with its allusion to broken old men voices or ghost-like whispers.

PUNCTUATION: THE MUSICAL

The short piece, above, is a setting of the punctuation of the first twenty sonnets of Shakespeare. This is taken from my book The Servants of Dust (published by derek beaulieu's mighty No Press). Punctuation. What kind of lyrics are those? Is this expressive? Of what? There's music and play in the reading of the punctuation. I find it disconcerting but yet fun. I'd like to do a set of the entire punctuation of the sonnets. Boring, but in a transcendent, non-developmental way. Like reading the punctuation of the Bible and leaving out the words. (Yes! I have to try that. An adaptation of the Bible, but only the punctuation. )

I kept this setting very very simple and highly repetitive in order to make it more trippy and minimalist. I like the strange rhythms created and the pseudo-meditative effect with sudden accelerations. Also the 'drama' of the minimal and how this highly self-similar piece has its own micro-dramas and nano-suspenses.

So how do you respond to these recordings? Are they unsettling? Boring? Do they exist in an uncanny aesthetic valley? In a canyon of failure or loss? A fissure of imagination or boredom? What's the relationship between the setting and the text? I'm interested in how these play in people's heads.

you did not expect me to live... I have said it. I will live.

2012-01-24T15:12:00.002-05:00

Old Mother by Gary Barwin by himself@garybarwin.com

This is another chant created using MS Word voice synthesis.

This one uses a few near-whispered voices -- shaky, old men's voices, spirit voices. The text is a poem that I wrote nearly 30 years ago while studying ethnomusicology at York University and having listened to some very moving Native chants that were intensively metaphysical and spiritual in their intent and effect. Here's a link to the text.

This recording that I've made on this half raining, half snowing dark afternoon is also strangely moving to me. Preternatural and haunting in its basic assertion. "Old mother...you did not expect me to live... I have said it. I will live.

Future Moon: MS Word Sings Again

2012-01-23T23:55:00.001-05:00

Future moons by Gary Barwin by himself@garybarwin.com

A song, quite pretty, actually, with a melody created by the synthesized voice native to MS Word and that I processed in Ableton Live.

The Drag(Hair)net(Cut)

2012-01-20T23:02:00.000-05:00

Issue 4 of Dragnet Magazine is just out and it contains my story "The Haircut" on pages 46-47. Above is the first page. You have to go to the magazine to see the next page and the exciting conclusion, not to mention the illustration by Illya Klymkiw

Double Tiger Barcode: the musical

2012-01-17T15:21:00.000-05:00

DOUBLE TIGER BARCODE by Gary Barwin by himself@garybarwin.com

I discovered that MS Word could translate a text into voice while revising this poem. There are a number of voice options but "Bad News" created this lovely mellifluous chant which I accompanied with music and added some vocal 'harmony.'

Sometimes You Don't

2012-01-16T10:48:00.001-05:00

a leaf blew through an open window

driving fast

the colour of skin

I was on my way

my children’s bones

covered in skin

there were sirens

ambulances & police

the trees like fathers

shushing

bending

trying not to personify

SOMETIMES YOU DON'T

think about how

it makes me feel

a broken-headedsquirrel

stuffed

down my pants

a music stand

in one ear then out

the next

a papercut

discussed in an email

chimp kisses

with a snow-blower

[Looking through old computer files, compiling a MS. What to do with THESE?}

Milkwing

2012-01-14T00:59:00.000-05:00

Ampersands: a two dimensional concept in three dimensional space

2012-01-12T17:05:00.002-05:00

handpersand

2012-01-11T09:55:00.002-05:00

Ampersutterfly

2012-01-10T15:03:00.001-05:00

On Reviews, the Unread Book and the Landless Giraffes

2012-01-07T13:56:00.000-05:00

"How was the show? Oh, the audient loved it."

Perhaps I am because my little dog knows me, and sometimes the writer feels that a book is because a reader knows it and, even more so, a book is because a reviewer reviews it and it becomes part of the discourse. Of course, the reception of a book, its traction, whether momentary or long-lasting is part of the meaning of a book, is, ultimately, part of the discourse itself. Language exists apart from use. Apart from words, sentences, speech and books, but it also is made of these things. A giraffe without land or air may be a beautiful thing, but it isn't a giraffe in the usual sense.

I still believe in the unread book. Its mystery. Its potential. What might be behind its hidden doors. Or the secret book, the book known to few. And in truth, some books have an ideal audience which is small, or specialized. If its only her dog, if it's only this single one dog that truly knows Gertrude Stein--and Gertrude Stein knows how it knows her-- it knows her in a way that no others do and Stein has a unique dog-derived self-knowledge as a result of this. Though Stein is also known by many. And she herself knew how she was known by many. But that's another kind of knowing.

All of this by way talking about reviews. I'm always very grateful for reviews. Of course, I'd like more people to encounter my books, to enter into a dog/Stein relationship of their own with them quite independent of me and my own authorStein/dogreader relationship. And reviews facilitate this, they facilitate more readers finding out about the book, and begin a dialogue between them and the book. Or a trialogue. Between the book, the reviewer, and the potential reader(s).

And reviews and their writers often reflect new ways for me to see the book, or at least, to see how others might approach the book. What they notice, what they think about, how it fits into their notion of reading, books, literature, the world. Sometimes the reviews tell me more about how a specific reader has read the book. Of course, I don't always agree, but then again, I don't always agree with my dog.

Should I write here here about how, though I've published, over the last sixteen years, 10 books plus another 4 for kids, and appeared in hundreds of journals and magazines, that I've never had a review in either of the national newspapers nor in the Writer and Porcupine-specific journal? Do I care? Should they? Am I happy with the howling pack of those who know me or learn about my writing through other (less national)(under)dogs?

I am happy with them. I've had good dogs.

I do, though, have a sense of wanting to be part of that other conversation, too. I guess some part of me thinks that it might introduce more readers to my work, which I would like. Some will get something from this exposure, some won't. I do have misgivings about 'the marketplace' sensibility, but outside of the very satisfying networks, the temporary autonomous zones of specialized readers and webs of those who know such work as mine, it still is the primary way readers find books.

There is also, I have to be honest, though I dislike this in myself, a sense of there being a party that I'm not invited to. A sense of validation. Really, it feels all Cinderella-not-being-invited-to-the-ball and I don't like that. Really its only the insecure part of me that wishes for this, not, I don't believe, my core. And I'm certainly not willing to magic myself into some ball gown and coach that isn't mine. I'm good staying in the Coach House with the other mice.

My absolute core belief as a writer is that I must write the books that I must write whether there are dogs around or not, whether the book is unread or not. The book itself is dog enough for me.

But I delight in an exchange of ideas, of discussions about the book, in a careful consideration of the work. And so, I'm most grateful for this nice little review by Michael Roberson in Canadian Literature of The Porcupinity of the Stars among other books (as well as those by Don Kerr, Tammy Armstrong, and Jon Paul Fiorentino.)

So, thanks Michael. I appreciate your thoughtful engagement with the book. And thanks to other readers and/or reviewers of the book in the past. I'd also like to thank those who bought the book but didn't read it, but would rather just imagine --with fear, trepidation, wonder, and disgust--what might be behind its deer-coloured sports-sock-infused front gate. And finally, I like to thank those who have never heard of the book--all these on this planet and all those lifeforms extant in other places of the present, past, and all possible universes. You help make my book mysterious, unknown, a sanctum for initiates and cognoscenti. You make special dogs of those who have dog-eared The Porcupinity of the Stars.

Time for a Vispo: anamevispoem

2012-01-07T00:26:00.000-05:00

for Amanda Earl

Brain banjos and moon smoke

2012-01-05T16:33:00.000-05:00

I ran a project-based blog called "Heine Site" where I invited writers to write a new poem/piece of writing based on some materials that I created derived from a poem by Heinrich Heine.

There were many great contributions from a diverse array of writers -- from Erin Moure and rob maclennan to Satu Kaikkonen and Steve Venright.

A couple of days ago, Bruce MacDonald sent me a poem that he'd written based on the Heine material on what he assumed was my defunct blog. This defunked the blog. I'd like to restart the project. So check out the blog -- the information about how to contribute is on the first blog post -- and then send me a text.

I'm fascinated by how the same material can be developed differently and evolve into completely different kinds of work. This is not only variations on a theme, but not an object lesson, but a process lesson. A way of seeing new kinds of proceedings, of thinkings, of imaginings.

THE GREAT EXPLORER

2012-01-03T14:37:00.001-05:00

THE GREAT EXPLORER

The great explorer leaves the palace. Even without his splendid hat of feathers, he has to crouch to get through the gates.

“Those who stand at the gates are the brothers of explorers,” he says to the gatekeeper. “In the distance, we see first what others see only later.”

“Sometimes I see those who return with an arrow stuck through them,” the gatekeeper says, “Though mostly I sleep in this chair with my hat pulled over my eyes.”

The explorer mounts his horse and trots out into the fields. He smells the delicate scent of rolled hay, gazes at the familiar archipelagos of stars above him.

Now he is at the shore and climbs aboard his ship. He sails. He will find a new land. Those on the shore watch him sail. He sails all day. They watch him get smaller. He is the size of a small child. Soon he is no bigger than a pebble. Then he is nothing but a speck, a pinprick, a molecule.

He sails across the sea. He arrives at a new land. He throws down his anchor then rows to shore. An island chief appears on the sand. He is surrounded by many people dancing and bearing great platters of fruit.

The island chief looks around the shore. He looks at the sea. He looks up, then down. Then he sees the explorer.

“These platters of fruit are for you,” the chief says.

“Thanks,” the explorer says. “They look delicious.”

“Might take a few days to eat them,” the chief says.”What with your size and all.”

“What about my size?” the explorer says.

“My brother, you are very small,” the chief says. “Like a mosquito or an electron. But do not worry. My own son was born small. At first we thought that he was just far away. But eventually he grew. Though he’s still ugly, even from a distance. Monkey-face, we call him.”

“Your people dance well,” the great explorer says.

“You have an impressive hat of feathers,” the chief replies.

“I had hoped to find you,” the explorer says.

“You are a dust mote illuminated by a ray of sun,” the chief says. “Something from another world that was there all along.”

“You shall have my ship,” the explorer answers. “The next ocean is yours.”

Opinity on Porcupinity!

2011-12-22T19:50:00.000-05:00

Review in Prairie Fire of The Porcupinity of the Stars by John Herbert Cunningham.

No matter how thin and flimsy / On Samuel Beckett

2011-12-18T12:43:00.001-05:00

NO MATTER HOW THIN AND FLIMSY

for Jonathan Jones

Sometimes a single phrase or a word, the whorl of a letter, a word grain, an image. A single moment in language, a single moment, the apprehension of something ‘true.’ Real in a rhizomatic way. Like suddenly seeing a single molecule of something. A thing no matter how thin and flimsy. Humans made out of these thin and flimsy things. Human thought.

When something ‘speaks’ to us, it is a fragment. A quick flash of something. A single leaf in a forest of otherwhere. Or everyhere. A consolation. An encouragement. A confirmation.

Imagination, memory, experience, compassion. The human. Rhizomes.

*
BECKETT

between the snowflakes
Samuel Beckett

space for a whole forest
of Becketts

*

Samuel Beckett
falls from above

with an open mouth
fills with sky

*
a Samuel Beckett
that has no face

is filled with sky
a body’s worth

*

a Samuel Beckett
with a thousand fingers

feathers reaching to the sun
begin at the beginning and stay there

*

what does it mean to be Samuel Beckett
when you are a bird

a thousand Samuel Becketts in a swarm
a transforming liquid of solid flight

For Hoarsemen

2011-12-05T22:19:00.001-05:00

. For Hoarsemen by himself@garybarwin.com

Some asemic sound poetry. No uvulas were harmed in the making of this composition, but some pharynxes were taxed while lungs inspired.

Blog Clouds Sheep Breath Jack Frost

2011-11-30T14:05:00.001-05:00

I had a dream last night where I replaced every blog post on this blog with a cloud. Each blog cloud slowly moved across the black sky of the page, out of focus, sheep-soft. They each floated off the screen and over my wife and I sleeping in our bed. As they passed over us, cirrus wisps, the sighs of thoughts, our white dog, sleeping beside the bed, and always alert to the slightest sound, heard their small rain-like susurrations, their hazy pixel-small exhalations. Blog posts floating over to the window, balefully looking outside. A Jack Frost of breaths which never freeze.

At some point, I also dreamed that I should add a large disclaimer to the blog to the effect that most of the posted poems or fictions are posted as drafts and I eventually either discard them or work 'em over good and radically revise them. It's ironic to me that often the potential for the largest and most enduring audience for these pieces is here, on the internet, and not in the books and journals where the finished pieces often eventually appear, much improved. Still, I don't want to replace them. There's something about cracking open someone's braincover and looking in at the thoughts as they form, before they are polished into words. Or --hopefully -- looking into this blog and seeing the words before they are polished into more polished words.

Andrew Faulkner, he of Emergency Response Unit press (a chapbook press that does fantastic work) and a very talented writer has a begun a blog collecting sky images. I read a few and sent him one of mine. Then I ended up working on a poem using images of sky. Here it is. Unless it has, cloud-like, floated out of vision toward some blog horizon over which we may expect to arise a blog new day.

ABOVEDLESSNESSLESSNESS
for Andrew Faulkner

sky is ape
heaven is monkey
I lie on my back and look at banks
they are clouds.

*

I am thrown from an airplane
grass is sky
commuter headtops: clouds
clouds I love your balding, your tinting.

*

between earth and space
sky sandwich
O jam of night
star seed my looking teeth

*

prehensile sky in sorrowful eyes
grip the brain like a water balloon
throw it far
thinking an explosive gag shower
the mouth open to visible throat
small bugs and surprise

*

bank bank bank star
bank bank bank cloud
bank financial instrument bank bank
seahorse bank bank bank
sky

*

the sky is wheat futures
is legal tender
is an ape with a mortgage
is the limit
is pure speculation
a foreign market
a reasonable return
outsourcing heaven to the sparrows

Questionless Book Interview

2011-11-28T16:51:00.001-05:00

Unquestionably, I have a lot to answer for in my questionable answers to the unanswerable as I answer George Murray. I seem to have dogs on (in) the brain!

Ukulele

2011-11-24T14:55:00.001-05:00

I played ukulele
as if there were turnips everywhere
and the neighbours
came to eat and remember
we were invisible

Ouroborosemia

2011-11-22T13:23:00.001-05:00

infra-asemic writing: the ligature inside the letter: the connection of something to itself: ouroborosemia: asemic infra-writing. and when what is infra, inter too?

Playtime Clothes for Wittgenstein's Children

2011-11-16T10:37:00.001-05:00

Gun Wolf, Gun Sheep and Gunless A

2011-11-15T21:20:00.000-05:00

Clothes for A

2011-11-15T11:41:00.001-05:00

Franz Santa or Mickey Kafka?

2011-11-13T18:55:00.001-05:00

"…the deeper alchemy bywhich Kafka's comedy is always also tragedy, and this tragedy always also animmense and reverent joy… the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrificstruggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity isinseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossiblejourney toward home is in fact our home."

-from DavidFoster Wallace's brilliant speech on Kafka’s humour

THE METRIC SEASON

2011-11-09T16:10:00.002-05:00

The Metric Season

My daughter and I were walking in the forest in early November. Hamilton, Ontario, just below the Niagara Escarpment. Light was filtered amber through the yellow leaves. The way it reflects bright off snow, it reflected from the leaves fallen on the forest floor. We were walking through a woods suffused by golden light, a continuous late afternoon honeying, as if walking through a leaf itself, some kind of Magic School Bus science trip.

If I believed in heaven, I said, it wouldn’t be the bright green technicolour spring of the Christian right. it wouldn’t be Webern’s boundless, directionless, infinite twelve-tone heaven. It would be this fall. The end of an age. Elves leaving. The mortal forest. The peat smell. No gaudy bursting of flower buds or impetuous birds. This lager-coloured light in a shuffling forest.

I don’t understand those who don’t like all the seasons, my daughter said.

Then we wondered about borders. Where are the borders of colours, when does red become orange, and when does grey darken into blue?

Other places, there are only two seasons. Rainy and dry. And why four? What about the metric system. Maybe there should be five.

We could invent another season, try to find its source in our memory, associations, hopes.

What would we call it? When would it be?

A before-fall, an after-spring. A season of in-between days.

Perhaps it is there already like a silent letter, inexpressible and unspoken. A subtext between father and daughter. The dry season between drops of rain.

Book launches for FRANZLATIONS, my NEW BOOK!

2011-11-09T12:45:00.000-05:00

Three F Comics

2011-11-02T12:03:00.000-04:00

I'm in love with a single pixel of you

2011-10-28T13:10:00.000-04:00

Today, I've a poem in a snazzy online magazine. Branch Magazine. It's interesting, mixing fashion, design, and poetry. And Fred Wah, who is the featured writer. My poem is about a single, criminal pixel. That I'm in love with.

In the last month, my writing has found itself in a variety of different contexts. The International Festival of Authors (Toronto), the International Poetry Festival (Iceland), chickaDEE magazine, Taddle Creek Magazine. I've an image on the cover of M.D. Dunn's new book, Fancy Clapping, a blurb on the back of that and of Carey Toane's new The Crystal Palace. An image of mine appeared on the poster and the program for the International Poetry Festival in Iceland and the Reykjavik Grapeline printed a full page reproduction of a visual poem of mine. As we speak, my son is writing a country song based on my country zombie lyrics. And I'm reading at the Pivot Reading series on November 2nd. Think I'm going to do some Origami for Terrorists, a sound poem about breathing, and maybe play some flute.

So: How is meaning made? Oh I remember. From ducks. Different ducks. Or is it by comparing different ducks? I can't remember. These ideas run like water off my back and I only know that I have a back by walking forward and seeing what follows from that.

Hey friends, you've got my what? Please give it back. How can I lie down and look up at the clouds? Some of them look like words. My friends that is.

I went last night to the Westdale Cinema and watched Herzog's film about paleolithic caves, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. A beautiful, moving, slow-burning juniper-fuse of a film. I got myself hopped up on Twizzlers and watched the shadows move across the ancient undulating horses and rhinocirrocumulus cave-wall skies, cave-bear scratches like vapor trials across the breathing images.

A scientist spoke of the permeability and fluidity of ancient thinking. A man can become a bull, or a horse can become a river. Identity is fluid. But reality is also permeable. There's not an impermafrost: the metaphysical shares its imaginary spirit-world neutrinos with the tangible anti-Platonic protonouns of the physical world.

What is one pixel? A thing, an idea? A faster-than-light non-neutralino in the/a world without light but filled with shadows? Is light the shadow of a shadow?

Which is not to say that what is not the shadow of the duck is necessarily a duck. Rain also has a shadow.

WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS

2011-10-04T13:41:00.000-04:00

a reply to Geof Huth's discussion of Against Expression.

1.

Poetry is everything that is the case.

2.

My emotion is your emotion.

But I’m just not feeling it.

I mean, where’s the love?

It’s poetry in emotion, but I’m feeling very notional.

Though these days, I’m feeling for all of us.

Words cannot express…

Just saying.

3.

Expression is a literary device. Like metaphor or…apophenia. It is also a human experience. Or so we say and think. How we conceptualize expression, emotion, the human, or the self may change, and is subject to (changes in) language, technology, culture, epistemology, ontology, psychology, and Facebook.

How emotion or the self (or selves) – the lyric, the semi-lyric, or the illyric, the lyrictus – appears in writing varies. Is TBA. The N/A may be. Or not.

Self-expression may be shelf-expression. Shelf-centred. Shellfish centred. Self-centaured. Selves-expression. Ex-expression. Oxpression (boustrophedalia). Santa and the selves. Crowed sourced. The cloud reveals its soul in the fog. The shadow in the absence of dog. We don’t necessarily express our selves in our expression.

They said my work was emotionally one-dimensional.

It hurt my feeling.

4.

The self and its effluvia – emotion – need not be present in writing. Possible but not necessary. The effluvia of some writing is the self, the way the broken mirror or the empty window are effulgentia of light. There may be emotion without the self. Or vice versa. (I know about this. I once had a girlfriend…)

One can always write ‘a sonnet’ about the reading experience.

Is there reading without the self? The feeling brain behind the reading face. Or fingers (if only four, in a white glove, big round ears like satellite dishes to the animated made-of-frames mind.)

Who turned out delight?

In what way is the conceptual expressive? Is the expressive conceptual?

Poetry still has a use to articulate, conceptualize, theorize, frame, and create paradigms for feeling and human experience. Non-human, neo-human, near-human. The not-the-author. I is an author. Readers are a book’s aphorisms. They see a self in the book.

We need to continually reinvent the wheel. The commonweal of expression. The dictionary of semaphore for flagless hermits. Braille for the inside of the body.

“Expression” has just become a more complex complex.

Here’s the formula (why was it so hard for you, Einstein?):

h=iΔe

where i=emotion, concept, the conceptualization of self, language, time, ducks, meaning,
writer, the concept of ‘writer’

e=time, culture, context, language, conceptual framework, quantity of tacos consumed, structure, use of Wellerisms, reader, the concept of ‘reader’

h=expression

And what about the ‘=’ sign? It is two letters seen from above. We do not know what they are.

The results can be calculated with extreme precision or an extreme lack of precision depending on whether one is on a train, in the 20th century, moving forwards or backwards against the motion of the text (boustrophedon is possible) or how one defines ‘one.’

Words can’t express how much I can’t express.

5.
Poetry is the case (a fact), the existence of states of affairs.

A poem is a thought.

A poem is a proposition with sense.

A poem is a truth-function of elementary propositions.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must pass over in silence.

Except for this next thing.

Trailer for my new book: Franzlations

2011-10-02T15:59:00.000-04:00

Franzlations: the imaginary Kafka translations by Gary Barwin, Craig Conley, and Hugh Thomas takes the parables and aphorisms of Kafka as a starting point, and steps a few places to the left in order to reinvent them. Sometimes this means walking off a cliff and into the empty air. (Don't look down!) Sometimes this means keeping the cage and replacing the bird. For of course, Kafka's writing is a rich source of ideas, play, structure, and wit. It looks like the real world, but in the way the bootstrap that one pulls oneself up with looks like a real bootstrap.

3 Words: New chapbook by NF Huth

2011-09-30T22:13:00.001-04:00

3 Words by NF Huth!

now available from serif of nottingham!

a new chapbook featuring 9 brand new poems!

your choice of three colours!

only $5 Cdn!

contact me and it can be yours!

here's a poem from the book

When If And

She throws out the dishwater that is still hot.
She throws out the dishwater that is still hot enough to use.
She uses cold instead.
She washes the dishes in cold water.

She rests on a chair that is not cloth.
She rests on a chair that is not cloth but that is wiped easily.
She sits on a vinyl chair.
She wiggles on a vinyl chair that is easy to clean.

She questions the sound from the hall.
She questions the sound from the hall that is rain but not.
She wonders if it’s wet.
She hears the wet rain that is a cough from the door.

Most words begin with B.
Words that flesh out thoughts begin with bees.
Bees are not inside with us.
Words that used to swarm land on the armchair.

Her eyes follow the swarm heavy with rain.
When silence swarms she fills the space between.
Silence is never filled.
Rain heavies the bees. They swell and drop from her mouth.

The clock signals some ends with sound.
A final sound is a puddle of bees ticking on the floor.
Her meter is bursts of three.
Her meter makes constant ends.

Railroad Song: I've been working just past where I know

2011-09-30T15:45:00.001-04:00

WORK SONG

I’ve been working on the yellow road
Trying to live long all day.

I’ve been working on the green road
And time just passes away.

I’ve been hauling on the blood red road
Don’t you hear our bones rattling?

I’ve been working on the bruise blue road
Rise up & begin earning in the morning.

I’ve been assembling on the pale white road
Don’t you hear the shouting of ‘heroes’?

I’ve been working the coal-black road
Someone came to the diner I know.

I’ve been struggling on the burnt purple road
Living large all day.

I’ve been working the orange red road
Just past where I know.

I’ve been gasping on the grey road
And I’d be happy to give it away.

I’ve been working the dusty pink road
Wish Charlie Parker would blow his horn.

I’ve been watching the wide whale road
Someone’s likely in the kitchen shucking corn.

I’ve been carrying on the lost yellow road
Invisible way before dawn

I’ve been working on the dirty brown road
And time passes where once were locomotives.

‘Cause I've been working
All day.

I've been working
In time.

Don't you hear the whistle?
Don't you hear the captain?

For I’ve been working
All day.

__________________________

from a bumpHEAD multimedia performance. The video played behind our performance which consisted of spoken text, saxophone, bass, and guitar.

Parenthesis (

2011-09-26T12:05:00.001-04:00

1.

(the parenthesis is your
needs answered
it is your field which you sow
with love and reap with thanksgiving
the parenthesis is your board
and your fireside
for you come to a parenthesis
with your hunger, and you
seek it for peace)

2.

(the parenthesis is your
belief in manifestations of
needs answered
the spirits of the dead
it is your field which you sow
solitary essences that haunt
with love and reap with thanksgiving
particular locations, objects, and people
the parenthesis is your board
with which it was associated with in life
and your fireside though stories of
phantom armies, ghost trains, phantom ships
for you come to a parenthesis
and even ghost animals
with your hunger and you
have also been recounted
seek it for peace)

3.

(the parenthesis is your
roadside, a marker that commemorates
a belief in manifestations of
a site where a person died
suddenly and unexpectedly
needs answered
away from home
the spirits of the dead
unlike a grave site headstone
it is your field which you sow
which marks where a body is laid
solitary essences that haunt
the memorial marks
the last place on earth
with love and reap with thanksgiving
where a person was alive
particular locations, objects, people
the parenthesis is your board
travelers often buried where they fell
by family members or friends
of the person who died
and by your fireside stories of
a bunch of flowers, real or plastic
phantom armies, ghost trains, phantom ships
taped to street furniture or a tree trunk
for you come to a parenthesis
a handwritten message, a personal memento
which may be included
and even ghost animals
a more sophisticated memorial
may be your hunger and you
have also been recounted
a cross or a plaque
seek it for peace
wreaths)

4.

(the parenthesis is your
can you get over here
do you need the police or fire or ambulance or
roadside a marker that commemorates
a belief in manifestations of
it’s important
what do you need the police or ambulance
a site where a person died
uh, somebody’s going to die
do you need the police or ambulance
suddenly and unexpectedly
needs answered
just fuckin’ get over here
what’s going on?
away from home
the spirits of the dead
an ambulance
do you need an ambulance or fire
unlike a grave site headstone
it is your field which you sow
send someone
do you need an ambulance there
which marks where a body is laid
solitary essences that haunt
yeah where are you
(address omitted) and the phone number you’re calling from?
the memorial marks
the last place on earth
I don’t know get over here please
what’s going on
with love and reap with thanksgiving
where a person was alive
get over here
tell me what’s going on
particular locations, objects, people
the parenthesis is your board
someone’s holding me hostage
holding you hostage
travelers often buried where they fell
by family members or friends
yeah get over here
are you injured
of the person who died
and by your fireside stories of
he’s injured
injured what happened
a bunch of flowers, real or plastic
phantom armies, ghost trains, phantom ships
I had to stab him
how old is he
taped to street furniture or a tree trunk
for you come to a parenthesis
don’t know, get over here he’s gonna die
yes a handwritten message, a personal memento
which may be included
hello even ghost animals
do you have any information
a more sophisticated memorial
that’s all I have
maybe your hunger and you
but we’ll send somebody
okay have also been recounted
a cross or a plaque
okay seek it for peace
wreaths
are you there?)

What Once Was K

2011-09-25T23:59:00.002-04:00

Metaphysics

2011-09-25T23:45:00.002-04:00

Shroud

2011-09-25T23:37:00.001-04:00

Parenthesis after de Chirico (for Márton Koppány)

2011-09-25T23:33:00.002-04:00

We Emersongency Celebrate

2011-09-20T14:39:00.002-04:00

Exploring interleaving source texts and translation software. I particularly like 'we emergency celebrate the good with you' and 'I'm still proud of them who respect us.'

I find my writing life busy with writing a novel, writing poems using 'old school' techniques -- extracting them like a magician's coloured hankerchief from my fingertips, writing poems using various exploratory (at least for me) processes such as the example below, and creating short stories, both with and without any forethought. A variety of ways of editing the previous types of writing, including the radical edit: deleting the whole thing and forgetting about it. Some engagement with posting the work here on this blog. Perhaps linking with Facebook. Occasionally reading one of these explorations publicly. Aiming for a multiplicity of ways of creating, continuing, remaining energized, following through on hunches, plans, and suspicions.

POPLAR

we have a lot
but do not blame

the child is good
but nothing to talk about

who is the boss
who advocated all this

his body swaying like the wind
now snow

his second home
the entire human family

in the narrow part of the universal
with immersed parts of love

how many people face the snow?
I’m still proud of them who respect us

this snow reads

wandering eye beams

we see a lot of outside
we emergency celebrate the good with you

Some of my upcoming events

2011-09-16T15:34:00.000-04:00

Saturday, September 17, 8pm
Somewhere There, Toronto
Gary Barwin (reeds & text) with Arthur Bull, guitar, Nicole Rampersaud: trumpet Tena Palmer: voice Bob Vespaziani, percussion, David Lee: double bass.
227 Sterling Road,
Unit 112,
Toronto

October 6-9
Nyhil International Poetry Festival,
Reykjavik, Iceland

Friday, Oct 21, 8pm
Harbourfront International Festival of Authors
Gary Barwin reading with Jennifer Haigh, Colson Whitehead, and Sarah Winman. Becky Toyne hosts.
Lakeside Terrace,
Harbourfront
Toronto.

Sunday, Oct 23, 2 pm
Harbourfront International Festival of Authors
Authors Gary Barwin, Joe Dunthorne, Souvankham Thammavongsa,and Alexi Zentner. Kyle Buckley hosts.
Studio Theatre, Harbourfront,
Toronto

Wednesday, Nov 2 , 8pm
Pivot in Toronto
Gary Barwin with Aisha Sasha John and Gregory Betts
The Press Club,
850 Dundas W.
Toronto

Thursday, Nov 10 8pm
Toronto Franzlations book launch
Gary Barwin & Hugh Thomas
The Ossington
61 Ossington Ave
Toronto

Sunday, Nov 13, 2pm
Hamilton Franzlations book launch
Gary Barwin and Hugh Thomas
Bryan Prince Bookseller
1060 King St .W.
Toronto

Forgive me...

2011-09-15T11:12:00.000-04:00

I'm reposting this from about five years ago as I was thinking about it for a scene in my novel where my 14-year old protagonist in Medieval Spain considers the Jewish 'Day of Atonement.'

Tomorrow night begins the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement. It's a time to 'atone' for one's trangressions. It would be like an all-day once-a-year Catholic confession, except that you don't confess to anyone, but acknowledge within yourself the deeds that you wish to atone for. I really like the opening service (Kol Nidrei) mostly for its seriousness and the solemn beauty of the music/chanting. I don't resonate with the idea of asking for forgiveness before God, but acknowledge that it is a healthy thing to take stock of one's deeds of the past year and consider them in a reflective light.

In the last couple of days, a book appeared in our downstairs bathroom. I guess my eldest son put it there. I recognized it as one of the books that I stole when I was about 14 from people whose kids I was babysitting. There are four books I remember stealing when I was a young teenager. To wit:

1. The Existential Imagination. A great anthology of short stories, including work by Kafka and Beckett.
2. Psychoanalysis and the Existential Imagination.
3. & 4. The Collection Works of Shakespeare (two volume edition). This I especially liked because of the etching of a pastoral English scene on the front, all those puffy clouds, stone buildings, and rivers running through millwheels.

From almost thirty years after the event, its fascinating my choice to steal these books. Firstly, it reveals that I was a strangely precocious, nerdy, and serious 14-year old. I also remember buying Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite on cassette using a handful of silver dollars. Secondly, the idea of stealing two books on existentialism is mesmerizingly ironic. It begs the question of how I conceived of my personal moral code. I do remember thinking of all those books in these houses as a beguiling array of worlds of thought and fiction for me to discover. As far as I recall, I didn't steal anything else from any other houses. Once I did try a drink of "mead" from a bottle. Again, that was because it seemed so redolent an entry into another world, mead recalling to me probably the same time in England that the Shakespeare illustrations did.If a kid stole a book from my shelves, would I be upset?

ABSOLVO MIHI

tree forgive me
shoehorn forgive me
five forgive me
blue sky forgive me

forgive noun
forgive verb
forgive tonsillectomy of sky

replace my bones with words
& walk

replace sounds with sky

moon
fungi
mouth

raingear when the rain
has stopped falling
the lawns of barbershops
choirs of hidden deer
the war of the day
an amnesty of quiet

After Aristotle and Nietzsche on 9/11

2011-09-11T22:04:00.001-04:00

I've been working on a suite/collection of poems circling around the expression of/exhortation to compassion, empathy, and kindness & how it is both simple and extremely problematic to express such concepts and how even the concept itself is both simple and complex and can be difficult to meaningful frame. I thought that this small text might be appropriate to post today as many people approach 9/11 and what it might mean to them and the culture.

CANTO

O enemy my enemies there is no
is no friend O my friends there
O my enemy enemies there is no
no friend O my friends there is
O my enemies there enemy is no
friend O my friends there is no
O my enemies there is enemy no
O my friends there is no

friend my O friends there is no
is no enemy O my enemies there
O my friend friends there is no
no enemy O my enemies there is
O my friends there friend is no
enemy O my enemies there is no
O my friends there is friend no
O my enemies there is no

Ungendered third person singular pronoun / The Shimmy of Shadrack

2011-09-07T11:13:00.000-04:00

When will the English language adapt? When will it adapt and create an ungendered third person singular pronoun? I lie awake nights thinking. He lies awake night thinking. Someone was in my bed. They couldn't sleep. He/she tossed and turned. Her mouth longed for an ungendered third person singular pronoun. Someone slept until he was refreshed. We changed the language and then had breakfast, each of us with her preferred choice of grapefruit.

THE SHIMMY OF SHADRACK

1.

man was in my office crying
didn’t understand irony
I worried

about mucus
I told myself
keep typing

eventually I gave him a tissue
thank you, he said
keep typing

the shimmy of Shadrack is
the shelf of my broiling gate squeezer
he said

but he wept with such fury
I might not have understood
one day all this will be over

an appropriate metaphor will sail
as we all wish it to sail
and even this man will be joyful

2.

each man is a great tweezer
broiling on a shelf

Shadrack you shimmy
when others are girt with grief

I look at a squirrel
it looks back at me

are we really so different?
he with cute nose

me with nostrils
worn with flair

do animals cry?
Internet says

animals do not cry
as humans do

but produce tears
necessary for

healthy eyes
(follow the link)

the salt creates
osmotic balance

why don’t you cry, animals?
what is the metaphor?

Preview of my latest book: Franzlations.

2011-09-02T13:39:00.000-04:00

My latest book is due out from New Star next month. The above is an almost finished draft of the cover, designed by Craig Conley who also did the images. The book has his brilliant images on every page. He also designed the book. My other collaborator on this was Hugh Thomas, who is one of my absolute favourite poets. I'm thrilled to have been able to collaborate with them on this. I know my good friend, Franz, was too,

Here's something about the book.

Franzlations takes the parables and aphorisms of Kafka as a starting point, and steps a few places to the left in order to reinvent them. Sometimes this means walking off a cliff and into the empty air. (Don't look down!) Sometimes this means keeping the cage and replacing the bird. For of course, Kafka's writing is a rich source of ideas, play, structure, and wit. It looks like the real world, but in the way the bootstrap that one pulls oneself up with looks like a real bootstrap.

It is said that if Kafka had not existed, Kafka would have had to invent him. But since he did exist, Franzlations has invented an imaginary Kafka so that he could help create the Kafka that was already there. Perhaps it was that. Kafka who helped create these imaginary parables.
This, itself, is a parable.

Fine Tooth

2011-08-29T16:10:00.003-04:00

FINE TOOTH
‎
"When people say, "I don't read poetry because I don't understand it," I think, "Do you understand your sandwich? Do you understand combing your hair?"--W.S. Merwin

FINE TOOTH

we must be kind because
almost everyone we meet

my hair is amazing
I understand my sandwich

we must be kind because
I understand my sandwich

almost everyone we meet
my hair is amazing

I understand my sandwich
my hair is amazing

almost everyone we meet
we must be kind

_____________________________________________

Lines from M.S. Merwin, Chris Piuma, Rabbi Bernard Baskin, and Nikki Reimer & thanks to Melanie Drane

C=O=U=N=T=R=Y=S=O=N=G

2011-08-25T14:08:00.001-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I spent about 8 days with my wife and eldest son, Ryan, in Nashville. As Ryan is a country musician, we went to a lot of shows of country music, bluegrass, and points in between. Ryan and I spoke of collaborating on writing some country songs and so I wrote some lyrics which go with the melodies which are still just Hanklets in the Williams of his eye. Those songs are still in development. You'll know that we've been successful when I surround the ten gallon space that looms above my brainbox with a big white hat.

In the meantime, I've been working on some poems influenced by those lyrics. C=O=U=N=T=R=Y S=O=N=Gs, you could say.

LONESOME SONG

1.

the intense conviction of
I hope you don’t think
the existence of
I’m backward
the self apart from culture is
if I look forward to looking back
as culture well knows
on looking forward to you
its noblest and most generous achievement

2.

for every kind of beasts, and of birds
we want brains and Hank Williams
and of serpents, and of things
we want what’s inside your head
the sea is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind
oh we’re country zombies
but the tongue can no man tame
you never feel more unalive
it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison
than when you’re undead

3.

O that I were
words fail me, he said
where I would be
let me just say
then would I be
there are no words to say
where I am not
what I don’t know how to say
but where I am
what might better be left unsaid
there must I be
nothing I can say
and where I would be
can express what there are
I can not
no words to describe

4.

forget trains and trainsmoke
who whet their tongues like swords
valleys and the lonesome road
who aim bitter words like arrows
forget mountains and old songs
shooting from ambush at the blameless
until times get hard
shooting suddenly and without fear
forget the moon and dogs howling
they hold fast to their evil purpose
about playing the steel guitar
they talk of laying snares secretly
forget the words of those old songs
thinking, “who can see them?”
when times get hard

5.

the intense conviction of
I hope you don’t think
the existence of
I’m backward
the self apart from culture is
if I look forward to looking back
as culture well knows
on looking forward to you

Necker Book Cubed

2011-08-21T13:26:00.003-04:00

ORIGINAL SKIN

2011-08-09T19:03:00.001-04:00

ORIGINAL SKIN

     Nine thirty.

     This is like sperm, the Rabbi thought, looking at rain hitting the window at high speed and rushing down the windshield. Most drops were quickly swept away by the wipers, but every so often, one made it down to the hood, the translucent drops round at the top, a zig-zag tail wiggling behind.

     And he remembered an image on a T-shirt he’d seen on a guy running past his house. One sperm had broken away, the clear leader of a pack of sperm, approaching a large egg at the top of the shirt, near the neck. Only the strong survive, the caption read.

    Look, Tanya, his wife said, nodding at a sign. 100 miles to Nashville.
    That’s good, he said. I’m tired. A little supper and then let’s get right into bed.

    An hour earlier, Tanya had taken over driving. He hadn’t slept well the night before and had got up early. This was a rare trip without their five hundred children. Another child was growing inside his wife. One of the strong ones. It’d be three more months before the child would swim—or be pushed—toward the light. He’d let Tanya sleep late this morning while he took care of the kids and prepared things for his mother-in-law to stay over for the weekend.

    It had been raining for days.

    The Arahat Mountain Boys. His band. He played with an old high school friend, now a biology teacher in a Catholic school. Mandolin and sometimes banjo. Once – a Jew and a Catholic – they were The Original Skin Band, but that was years ago. They had a gig tomorrow night. The first in a while.

    Ten o’clock. As they drove, his wife began to recount her strange morning dream.

    A man in had been chasing her on a long train. He was disguised as her husband and knew secret words for sex. For everything. The man had been sharing a lemon meringue pie with the Catholic school teacher and began to kiss her, getting meringue all over her face. Then she ran. The other passengers were dolphins with human faces and they all had library cards. Jewish library cards. The train had come from between her legs. Inside the club car, her 500 children threw food at each other and now a sheep was trying to kiss her while she played the banjo. The man disguised as her husband smashed through the little window of the club car door. She was terrified. His face, his voice, his body were identical to her husband’s. He began to sing prayers but he sounded like he was underwater and far away.

    So, Rabbi, she asked her husband, what do you think it means?

    We should make love tonight? he asked.

    Ten thirty. The road was dark and the rain continued against the windshield. The oncoming cars and trucks came out of nowhere, shooting up water, and frightening her with their speed as they flashed past.

    I packed some sandwiches, she said.

    Corned beef, I hope.

    Look, she said. He leaned forward and opened up the bag.

    Ah. Corned beef.

    Yeah, and some of the kugel that Franny brought over the other night.

    A dream dinner, he said.

   Eleven o’clock. They drove in silence. They didn’t see the minvan swerve into their lane until it was right in front of them. Tanya swerved left. The side of their van crumpled as the minivan smashed into the Rabbi. Corned beef , he said as he lost consciousness.

      He woke to find the two wrecked vans joined together. Quiet except for the whimpering of a small child. The rabbi tried to move. His legs didn’t work. He could see the little girl through the fractured glass of the other van. A vague opalescence. Only two years old. She was dying.
He reached through the window and pulled the girl close to him.

    With the knife meant for the kugel, he cut his chest open and pushed her inside. His broken body would become her second skin and a two year old girl would become the father of 500, soon to be five hundred and one, and the husband of his beautiful wife. He would watch from somewhere, from nowhere, from outside, as she woke in his paralysed body, as the people in the emergency vehicles pulled up on the road beside the trees and began working to save anyone they could. And then, like the rain, he’d be gone.

Dear Reader

2011-08-05T11:57:00.000-04:00

for Craig Conley

Infinite Book

2011-08-05T11:28:00.001-04:00

the proscenium
of the sky
or page
or of speech
a meniscus
the constellation of words
separated by
millions of miles
millions of years
appear together
one constellation
a sentence
a phrase
a meaning

__________________________________________

for derek beaulieu and kevin mcpherson eckhoff

ATTACHMENT

2011-08-04T13:49:00.000-04:00

ATTACHMENT

today the car
yesterday the road

today the mailbox
yesterday the mailman

shoulders falling like snow
shh

if you look closely
I have a powerful and significant body

a centaur or a mermaid
six of one, half a dozen of the other

the horizon scalloped like crazy
out there beyond the boats

yesterday the horse
today the fish

they are home in their beds
at home in their beds

it’s about the join
the point where the human torso joins the fish
the horse attaches to the human

_______________________________________________

Another poem written, forgotten, discovered, the process obscure.

The Hand

2011-08-03T12:24:00.002-04:00

THE HAND

(I suppose I should dedicate this to the Addams Family's Thing and Franz Kafka.)

I do not expect the hand. At first, I think it is a root or some other growing thing searching out food. I brush against it. It is cool though warmer than the air, warmer than the soil. I rest my head against its soft palm.

It cradles my head for hours, then it strokes my face. Perhaps it has a cramp and must move. I breathe, sleep, wake. The hand is gone. I sleep again.

When it returns, I touch my fingers to its fingers and they respond, curling. We remain fingertip to fingertip. I do not know how long. My watch is gone. Nothing changes.

I sleep and when I wake, the hand has disappeared, my fingers are empty. I feel for the hole in the earth where the hand has returned. There are several small crevices and I reach in. Nothing but dirt or vacancy. Somewhere in this country, they think of shoes, stationary, a plate of meat, the floor of a change room.

Then I feel the hand against my side. I hold it. We are parent and child, sisters, lovers walking together, watching the moon, anticipating the boat which will take us across the river. We whisper our stories. We are silent.

The hand is the moon, clouds. A sigh. I begin to wait for it. To expect. It is a television. A friend. What does it hope for, reaching, holding, sharing its quiet?

Fields of daisies, butterflies, explosives. There is no remembering. A cubicle. The Canadian Shield, its stunted trees and shine of mica. Burritos, librarians, snakes, and nightstands. Documents passed from hand to hand in secret.

The hand carries nothing. Heat. A body. Happiness. I feel little except when I hold the hand. It could not have been looking for me, could not have anticipated finding me. A human hand among thousands: its own shadow, cold, sightless, underground; its mother, master, child, slave. Its twin.

I outline letters on its palm, but it does not understand. Its fingers move. Maybe it writes, but were it Arabic or English, I feel only caresses and swirls. An intimate and inscrutable grammar.

We lock our fingers together. We sleep. Wake. Are happy.

After a few days, the hand does not appear, I think I have lost my own hand. Later, I realize, the hand is gone. Hand. Gust of wind. The wide earth. Death. Someone brings me food.
I open and close my own hand. I open and close it. I pass the memory of the hand between each of my own hands. What can be held in a hand, what has flown away? I remember nothing.

Birds: the dreams and prattling of those born from an egg

2011-07-29T14:55:00.000-04:00

Nightingales' notes (as Bechstein has beautifully recorded them) seem to me like the Mexican language, and to express variety of sentiments of adoration and love. The parrot, magpie, jackdaw, jay, starling, and bullfinch, are prattlers; and the exquisite little canary, the pupil of my friend Mrs. H------, the pet, indeed, not only of its mistress, but of statesmen and learned physiologists, warbled its words in purest melody. From Sir William Temple we learn the faculty of the wonderful parrot of Prince Maurice of Nassau, at the Hague, that responsed almost rationally to promiscuous questions. Granting, then, this faculty of memory, it is clear that the bird may dream; and I may add a quotation from the "Domestic Habits of Birds," in proof of this.

' "We have, however, heard some of these night-songs which were manifestly uttered while the bird was asleep, in the same way as we sometimes talk in our sleep, a circumstance remarked by Dryden, who says -

'The little birds in dreams their songs repeat.' We have often observed this in a wild bird. On the night of the 6th April, 1811, about ten o'clock, a dunnock (Accentor nodularis) was heard in the garden to go through its usual song more than a dozen times very faintly, but distinctly enough for the species to be recognised." The night was cold and frosty, but might it not be that the little musician was dreaming of summer and sunshine? Aristotle, indeed, proposes the question - whether animals hatched from eggs ever dream? Macgrave, in reply, expressly says that his "parrot, Laura, often rose in the night, and prattled while half asleep."' - Philosophy of Mystery.

____________________________________________________________
from the book "The Literature And Curiosities Of Dreams", by Frank Seafield

SPRING (after Mary Ruefle's The Hand)

2011-07-27T13:59:00.000-04:00

SPRING

after Mary Ruefle

the teacher asks a question
your hand is not correct

she asks again
tree branches, feathers
air-conditioning
robin hung
hung by the neck

you look out the window
the answers you ask yourself and your life

your littlest finger
the little beauty
drama and light without fire

*

after Mary Ruefle's "The Hand" and with thanks to Translation Telephone

Protection Song

2011-07-26T17:03:00.000-04:00

PROTECTION SONG

for my father

O birth of many babies
clarinet playing
and the blackfaced river
how I love you

the trees are Jews
birth
leaves
in autumn under water

the sky in the river
in the river under water
beside clouds that flow in the river
under the pine or beside the oak

a crowd of friends marvelling at ships
a fear of death
a fear of death beside you
parents, wife, children, friends

those whom you wish had no death
that they sail on the river
on the sky sailing in the river
those that sail endlessly and without fear

O endless clarinet-faced death
sky-faced ligature of water
O blackfaced Jew and Jewfaced black
black, Jewish, and under water

O 19th 20ieth O all centuries
the music of Al Jolson will protect you
the birds swimming
the banjos soft and low

Treadmills, priests, dogs, dusk, sleep, and fathers: an update

2011-07-21T12:48:00.000-04:00

Hot summer noontime and it seems all bloggers' thoughts turn to updates about why the intermittent blogging, the veer from the dogged posting, the endearing indolent laze through the hot daze of the dog days. And here, it is this way, too.

I'm a likely a third of the way through my novel (Yiddish for Pirates)-- 33,000 words. Five hundred words a day seems all I can manage, what with the nautical terms, the Yiddish-speaking parrot, and such novel intricacies as plot. I've been writing on a treadmill. Literally. Writer friends of mine write this way -- words measured in distance traversed. Imaginary distance walked through. Which makes sense for writing. I wake in the morning, my legs aching, thinking only that I managed to get my character into the Cathedral, and forgetting that I walked nowhere for hours.

A historical novel, it's hard to know how much history belongs in it. How much a character is aware of the history that s/he walks the imaginary distance through. Of course, I'm taking the characters on a guided tour, but it's not a lecture tour. It is, like most lives, flaneury, and we turn a corner into a historical alleyway or are hit or manage to dodge events hurtling at us along the thoroughfare. I'm resisting the urge -- even if my characters don't always -- to explicate, to present grand themes in grand expository language. I'm not, however, resisting bad jokes. Not all of history's one-liners have to do with exclusive succession of power.

At the moment, I'm in the Inquisition. It's the 1480s and my protagonist is 14 and is something of a freedom fighter. Most people at the time, I'd imagine were pragmatic, phlegmatic, 'nu?'-matic, or as I said, were flaneurs through the unpredicted and unmapped paths of their own lives. And they were frogs in a pot of gradually heating water, adjusting to the temperature until it was too late and they became soup.

I'm pleased with how exciting and compelling the events of my novel have become. There's heroic and amazing deeds, but I'm becoming increasingly concerned that -- though I modelled it after 17th century adventure/exploration/pirate novels -- eg. Defoe, Exquemelin, etc.-- like Borges' great story of Pierre Menard writing Don Quixote in the 20th century, it means something vastly different now. Of course, maybe my narrator (a parrot, after all) is lying. Or can only understand the world through received stories, But still.

That is, however, what makes this an interesting enterprise. For me. Hopefully for my readers.

Recently, Pearl Pirie posting a link to "Translation Telephone", an online application which runs a text through 20 random languages in Google translator. I often do this manually: take a text and translate it back and forth into and out of English to generate interesting variations and new directions for editing and revising a text. It's fascinating how particular languages (at least as rendered by Google) steer the language to particular sensibilities.

Here's a poem that I wrote exploring Translation Telephone.

CREPUSCULAR

1.
the horizon
it is red, bad hair

2.
it is not a good place for the night

3.
dog told me baby
watch the sunset
it needs it
or sleeping dogs

4.
shepherd of the night
I live in another part of the plan

*

Here's another kind of translation. I've been reading Mark Abley's fantastic Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages and in the chapter on Yiddish, he writes about some very powerful Yiddish songs which were written during WWII. One was a lullaby to a stranger's child, because the mother had disappeared. I can't quite remember the particulars; there were some other striking quotations. Thinking about this, as well as some disturbing events my son & his girlfriend, currently living in Nicaragua for the summer, reported, I wrote this villanelle. It is a 'memory translation' and an imaginary reconstruction of a text which I've never seen.

LULLABY TO A STRANGER'S CHILD

mother where is the mother sleep
by the window child
father under song

though the old
sing and unsettled ask
mother where is the mother

sleep something broken
in the forest words
father under song

sleep the river father
mother understand
sleep where is the mother

sleep father sleep
carried in pieces
father under song

born, be born, hide
remember together a voice
where is the mother sleep
father under song

OK. Time for the treadmill and a priest to pretend that he is a ghost. Soon there will be a murder. Be well. Be cool. Drink whatever liquids are necessary.

WALK TALL, CANNONBALL

2011-07-15T15:39:00.003-04:00

Nat and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley

I recently published a story in a chapbook entitled "The Saxophonists' Book of the Dead." (serif of nottingham, 2011.) Nicholas Papaxanthos read the story and asked me yesterday 'where was Cannonball Adderley?' since I'd left him out of the story in my pantheon of legendary saxophonists. I was thinking about this and felt that I needed to remedy this. Who could leave out Cannonball?

And so, today, I have written this story about Cannonball (and his brother Nat.) It also included chess, because chess is a kind of two dimensional jazz.

By the way, Nick's premiere poetry chapbook, Teeth, Untucked (Proper Tales Press) is great -- check out the title poem, it's especially.excellent. You can get it by contacting Stuart Ross at Proper Tales.

And now, thanks to Nick, the story.

WALK TALL, CANNONBALL

We were playing Internet chess.
“I like jazz,” he said. Rook takes Knight. Check.
Knight takes Rook.
“But I didn’t like it when I lost my legs.” Queen takes pawn. Check.
I didn’t know this guy, but I took the bait. “What happened?” King takes Queen.
“It was the late fifties. A time of great warships. Of colonial powers sawing the world into pieces. Galleons seized the wind in their enormous sails and smashed the sea.”
Bishop to Bishop 5. Double check.
“Powder monkeys ran up from the orlop deck, loaded powder and the gunners shot brilliant saxophonists back and forth at each other, sometimes broadside, sometimes stoving in the galley and toppling the mizzen.” King to King 1. “It was another time, another world. A world where Cannonball Adderley was a weapon. A time of great
adventure.”
“And you lost your legs?”
“Early June. A battle over the coast of Hispaniola. Cannonball Adderley smashed across the foredeck and took me down with his blues-inflected post-bop. I woke up a week later in a hospital without legs. I didn’t know what had happened. The morning sun bright, the light breeze rippling through the white curtains. The green scent of trees. The nurse ran a damp cloth across my forehead. She was singing quietly. “Summertime,” she sang. “And the living is easy.”
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Shh.” she sang. “Fish are jumping.” She pulled the blankets around me. “The cotton is high.” She walked quietly from the room.
I slept then, waking for small moments throughout the day, and then as the day faded into night.
Darkness. Someone beside me began coughing, then asked, “Anyone there?”
I wasn’t certain of much, but I knew that.
“Yeah,” I said. “At least some of me. The part that’s left. Don’t know where my legs are. In the ocean, maybe.”
“Where are we?”
“Some kind of hospital.”
“My name’s Julian. They call me Cannonball.”
“Cannonball? Cannonball Adderley?”
“Yeah. Cannonball Adderley. Used to eat a lot as a kid. ‘Cannibal’ my friends called me. Over time, it turned into ‘Cannonball.’ So did I. Quite round, in fact.”
I didn’t know then that he was the one who took off my legs. Anyway, it wasn’t his choice: who would choose to be fired from a cannon? Besides, there were many Cannonballs in that war. Many Cannonball Adderleys. Seas full of dazzling jazz saxophonists, spent and sinking to the sea floor.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Not good,” he said. “Dizzy. Nauseous. Like I’m going to die. Or just did. And I don’t know where my brother is. Nat. Nat Adderley. You know him?”
“Of course,” I said. “The soulful brass salve to the incisive rippling edge of your alto.”
“Yeah, that’s him,” he said. “But I’m worried. I haven’t seen him since we were brought below deck. They lit him on fire, you know. He burned well. Hot and quick. Me, I was for smashing things. I destroyed rigging, stove in the sides of ships. I crashed through decks of men. And then, I would dance a nimble harmonic filigree, a razor-sharp hummingbird path around the changes of a jazz standard.
“All our lives, we looked after each other, though he was the younger brother. Spent all our time together ever since we were kids in Tampa. Playing ball on the sidewalk. Riding bikes to the beach. Piano lessons. Sword fighting. Nat and me, buying candy. Chess on the porch with grandpa, cake with grandma. Corner store bullies. Maybe bullying some ourselves. Pouring gasoline on the creek and lighting it on fire down in the ravine. But music. Always music. Four handed piano. School pep band. Jazz. Women. The church.
“When I was first fired out the side of a ship, I looked up and there was Nat above the gunwale. Did you know that gunwales are sometimes called saxboards? I should make that the name of a song. So, there I was about to splinter the side of a ship, and I saw my little brother, Nat, watching out for me. Just like when I went to record with Miles. ‘Cannonball,’ he said. ‘Go get ‘em, Cannonball.’ And I did.
“But where is my little brother, now? Where are all those Nats, those other Cannonballs, peppering the sides of ships and crumpled amidst the broken bodies of the enemy?”
The night nurse came in then to change the dressing where my legs once connected to my body. “Nurse, nurse,” Cannonball called. “Nurse.”
“Cannonball,” she said. “Don’t excite yourself. You need some rest.”
“But, Nat—where’s Nat?” he said. “I need my brother, the corporeal plushness of his cornet, the deep soulful vitality of his songs. I need to know where Nat is?”
In my life, both before and after I lost my legs, I have done many things that I have not been proud of. I have done good things, yes, but I did something then that I often think about, often think about when I listen to the Cannonball Adderley Quintet, or the Miles Davis’s classic Kind of Blue album, the one where Coltrane and Adderley are the perfect healing ballast to Miles’s hurting hipster reticence and introverted only half-aware pain.
“I am Nat,” I said. “Don’t you recognize me, brother?” I said, “Julian, it’s me. Nat.”
Bishop to Queen 7. Check. “And what did he do then?” I asked. “Did he believe you?”
He never said another word. He lay back and died.
King to Bishop 1.
“Yes,” he said. “When the nurse left, I reached over and took his wallet from the night table. I only found out then that he was the one who had taken off my legs.
“But I have been able to live a good life.”
“Because of what you did?”
“Because of his legs. I took his legs and I used them. I stuck them on myself and I walked through the cities and I walked through the towns. I walked right into a lawyers’ office in New York City, and I got his royalties. And I walked out to the water and sat down on the pier. And I looked up at the stars and I looked up at the moon. And I knew that because of Cannonball, everything would be all right.”
Bishop takes Knight. Checkmate.

MY NOBEL PRIZE SPEECH

2011-07-10T22:54:00.004-04:00

I get the Nobel Prize stuck into me. The pin goes through my heart. Don’t worry: it’s made of a new material that I just invented. It is both wave and participle. Royal jelly and particle board. It is shadow and light rolled into one like chocolate, riot gear or the end of the world.

I recently invented myself. I am entirely new. A new cloud, a new ant. Hook me up to the flat screen IV and let the 3D beam through my veins like weather. Change my channel. I sleep.

I said, the mind is a lawnmower, chewing up lawn. There was a dog in that yard. That’s why my heart got pinned with this prize. My mind-blades ran over something no one else noticed, but I don’t throw away the bags. I am all new.

Newsflash: Nobel Prize pin insertion causes end of world. The end is very small. You would need giant microrganisms or death-defying binoculars. They thought we would all die. A tiny thickness travels upwards and blocks it. There are clouds over my tongue.

An enormous quail or a bean from the edge of the universe, a universe that still doesn’t have a name. I forgot my newness because I invented it so fast I finished before I began. I said, You can’t kill me because only one of us is going to die.

Yes, you should thank me for receiving this prize with my only heart. My words are shadows in my hands. Now I open them and let the dove that was never there become ssmall and far away. In conclusion, Mr. and Mrs. Committee, I’d like to begin by inventing something else. All this new gets lonely.

Phil Campbell was his Town (for Phil Campbell, Alabama)

2011-06-20T14:06:00.002-04:00

PHIL CAMPBELL WAS HIS TOWN

for the real Phil Campbell

There’s a guy called Phil Campbell who lives in a town in Alabama called Phil Campbell. It was exhausting: the questions, the confusion, the wise cracks:

“So you’re Phil Campbell and you live in Phil Campbell…?”

Phil Campbell thought about moving, thought about changing his name, but he never did. Phil Campbell was his home. It was his name. He was Phil Campbell and Phil Campbell was his town.

But Phil Campbell wasn’t named after Phil Campbell, the town. He was named after his father, Phil Campbell. And this Phil Campbell had been named after his own father, Phil Campbell, who had been named after his father, a stocky and redoubtable man named Phil Campbell But that’s as far as it went for that Phil Campbell was the progeny of George Campbell, a migrant who had moved to Phil Campbell from somewhere up north, no one was sure where. On the other hand, Phil Campbell, the town, was named in the 1880s after a railroad man named Phil Campbell who came from England and set up a work camp. The town was incorporated in 1911 and remains the only place in Alabama to have both a first and a last name.

“Hey, Phil Campbell, you come from Phil Campbell?”

“That’s Mr. Campbell to you.”

It was a good life in Phil Campbell. Safe streets, good jobs, a good digestion and a smooth complexion. A happy life.

But something bad happened this past April.

A tornado ripped through Phil Campbell and messed things up. Here’s what happened.

Bricks, windows, record collections, lungs, felt cut-outs from the day care, intestines, burgers, fridges, bank deposits, Phil Campbells’ pants, cows: all tossed into the air and then scattered about the hot Alabama ground. A toupée was blown, forlorn and alone down Main street, a baleful tumbleweed, inventory spat from the twisting chaos of the air. There were tears flying horizontally like rain. There was worry. There were small bursts of hope, but there was little to hope for.

Phil Campbell would never be the same.

He’d been working in his basement for days and hadn’t got the tornado warnings. He’d come up into the kitchen to get himself a glass of orange juice when he heard strange sounds outside and so he opened the door to see what was going on. The tornado burst right through the door. And when Phil Campbell opened his mouth to say, “Hey, what do you think you’re…?” the tornado jumped in and dived down his throat. Phil Campbell’s insides became as messed up as the streets of the town, and he fell down and lay on the clammy linoleum beside the stove and passed out.

That’s where the other Phil Campbells enter the story. One thousand one hundred and fifty Phil Campbells. Phil Campbells from all around the world.

These Phil Campbells found each other on Facebook, through Twitter, and through regular email. They gathered in the town of Phil Campbell. They came to see what they could do.

They came to help.

Philanthropy.

It was mostly guys named Philip and a few Phyllises, though there were Phillipas and Filipes, too. They all wore name tags. Identical nametags, photocopied by Phil Campbell of Phil Campbell Real Estate (Boston, Mass.)

“Phil Campbell,” the nametags said, both with irony and without.

It was a serious thing, this meeting of Phil Campbells, but it was delightful pandemonium when they registered at the hotels.

“I’ve a reservation under the name Phil Campbell,” a Phil Campbell would say at the Phil Campbell Motor Inn and the other Phil Campbells in the line behind him laughed good-naturedly at the confusion of the girl at the desk.

And there were the many Phil jokes.

“Hey Phil,” a Phil would call into the whole group of Phils just to see who would turn around.

Or the ever popular, “Philately will get you nowhere.”

“I’ve had my Phil,” a Phil Campbell father would quip about his son, another Phil Campbell.

And there were murmurs of assent as a Phil Campbell patted his handsome round Campbell-belly and ordered a Philly Cheese Steak sandwich at the Phil Campbell Steakhouse with the words, “I need a Phil-up, please.”

But no matter how you looked at it—joyfully, wryly, bizarrely, wonderfully—there were a lot of Phils.

“Hey Phil, where are you from?” one Phil would ask another.

“Brooklyn. Where you from?”

“Toronto, Canada,” the first Phil would reply.

Groups of Phil Campbells sat together and talked. There wasn’t anything special about being Phil Campbell if you lived outside of Phil Campbell, for instance, in Seattle or Liverpool or Prague. There weren’t special Phil Campbell stories, the way someone who shared a name with a famous celebrity had stories.

“You’re Tom Green?”

“Not that Tom Green.”

“Oh, but please, have a seat in First Class and may I have your autograph? For my kids.”

But being Phil Campbell became remarkable when you were in a group of over a thousand other Phil Campbells.

“One can of beans isn’t special, but if you see a thousand cans of beans lined up in a row, then that’s something,” a Phil Campbell from Hoboken, New Jersey explained to a Phil Campbell from Tucson, Arizona.

And being with one thousand one hundred and forty-nine other Phil Campbells in the Phil Campbell Catering and Banquet Center in Phil Campbell, Alabama was not just unusual enough to make a good story. It was sublime.

An alignment of electrons. A ringing harmony, a magnetic charge.

What was the same? What was different? What’s it like where you come from? How did you hear about the town of Phil Campbell?

But then the Phil Campbells turned to the more serious matter at hand. “How can all of us Phil Campbells help the people of Phil Campbell?” The tornado had been bad. People had been killed. Many were missing. Phil Campbell was filled with debris. There were emergency rescue crews, but they were overwhelmed.

The Phil Campbells made plans. They would tend to the sick and traumatized, search for the missing. They would clean up, help rebuild, and assist people in finding new homes. Each Phil Campbell according to his or her own skills, profession, and nature, and resources. There were Officer Phils, Nurse Phils, Construction-worker Phils, and, of course, several Dr. Phils.

They set to work.

With spades and wheelbarrows, pick-up trucks and bandages.

With kindness, determination, and goofy grins.

Army cots were set up in the high school gym. Enormous pots of soup were set to boil in the kitchens of churches. An infirmary ran out of the flagship Phil Campbell Pizza Emporium. A team of Phils began going door-to-door—or property-to-property when the doors or the houses had been knocked down—searching for those in need. Old men and women were helped outside, blinking in the bright light, as if emerging from a cave, and then driven to the gym. Mothers and their small children were lifted off their broken porches and taken for food at Phil Campbell Baptist Church.

“How you doing, Phil Campbell?” one Phil would ask another.

“Doing fine, thank-you, Phil Campbell,” the other would reply and they’d both smile. Two Phil Campbells out in the world, doing good.

“OK,” one of them said into the crackling walkie-talkie. “Just going to check one more street before heading back for more supplies.”

Phil Campbell’s street hadn’t been hit hard. Really it looked almost untouched. The lawns, neatly manicured, the shingles in place on the roofs, only garbage pails and flowerpots tossed about the sidewalks. Still, the team of Phil Campbells went up and down the street, checking each house just to make sure.

Phil Campbell’s door was open.

“Hello, anyone here?” they called.

No answer.

Phil Campbell was still unconscious on the floor, a pool of almost evaporated orange juice sticky between the shards of broken glass scattered over the linoleum. The Phil Campbells moved quickly. One checked for a pulse. The other brushed the glass out of the way to make a clear workspace and then prepared the medical kit and held up the walkie-talkie, ready to call for outside help.

“He’s alive,” the first Phil Campbell said. He took a small flashlight from his pocket, pulled up Phil Campbell’s eyelid, and shone the light at his pupil. “Responsive,” he said.

“Sir?” he called to Phil Campbell. “Can you hear me?” He leaned in close to listen to Phil Campbell’s breathing. “Help me,” he said to the other Phil Campbell. “Let’s sit him up.” With an one arm around his neck and by holding him under the arms, they pulled Phil Campbell up and rested him against the cabinet doors below the sink.

Phil Campbell began to breath heavily and his eyes fluttered.

“What your name, sir?” the second Phil Campbell asked. “Do you know your name?”

“Ph…Ph…Phil Campbell,” Phil Campbell said weakly.

“That’s my name,” the Phil Campbell who had an arm around his neck said. “It’s all of our names.”

“Phil Campbell,” Phil Campbell repeated. “I am Phil Campbell.”

“Yes, sir, “ Phil Campbell said. “Your name is Phil Campbell. It’s our name, too.”

Phil Campbell opened his mouth to say something more, but he could not contain the tornado any longer and it turned violently inside him and shot from the cave of his throat. It knocked both Phil Campbells down as it twisted about the kitchen and then burst out of the house with an ear-splitting howl.

It beat against the houses and trees of Phil Campbell’s street, this time, smashing and scattering everything in its seemingly erratic path toward the centre of town.. It destroyed the elementary school and knocked down the library. It raged along the side streets and ripped through the mall.

One of the Phil Campbells, rolled over on his belly and reached for the walkie-talkie. He must alert the other Phil Campbells.

Later that afternoon, there were one thousand one hundred and fifty one Phil Campbells gathered together on Main St.. They stood in a line on the other side of the street from the tornado.

Phil Campbell, the only Phil Campbell from Phil Campbell, Alabama walked forward.

“My name is Phil Campbell and this is my town, “ he said to the tornado. “You are powerful and you have ravaged my insides and you have ravaged my town. You have killed many of our people, but I am not afraid. I stand here with all of these other Phil Campbells. Phil Campbells who have come here from all over the world. We Phil Campbells are not afraid.”

The tornado turned and twisted and darkened the sky but did not move.

Phil Campbell bent down and picked up the lost toupée from the middle of the street. Though it was dusty and misshapen, he put it on his bald head.

“Leave this town,” he said to the tornado, “Leave this town and I will come with you.”

The last time, anyone saw Phil Campbell of Phil Campbell, Alabama, he was high in the air, holding onto the toupée and waving back at them.

If the people of Phil Campbell could have named their town after Phil Campbell, they would have, but more than a hundred years before, they already had.

NOTE:

There is a real town in Alabama called Phil Campbell and there was a tragic tornado which ravaged their town. Likewise, there is a group of Phil Campbells who travelled there to help. Here's a link to an article about these great people

MARINATOR

2011-06-16T18:03:00.002-04:00


MARINATOR
 
sunshine coming in low 
and steady over the mail box
 
the radical gloss of toes 
made wet by dog’s tongue
 
my daughter is coming home by bus tonight
laminar and turbulent  
 
Newtonian and non-Newtonian 
we’ve texted
 
cooking on the BBQ
flows in arbitrary geometries with both fixed and moving boundaries   
 
my son marinates with glee
a crushing thrill or else weariness of living
 
capabilities for the prediction of combustion 
a girlfriend’s rattle of car keys
 
particle transport, propagation and flows in porous elements
there’s supper to be made
 
a fly buzzing behind photographs
the universe is not only centerless but edgeless
 
a surface roughness or general body force 
an image of snow, blue sky, the spine of a cactus, a comic book
 
terms regarding gravitational and electromagnetic forces can be defined
the wavy green and red lines of the word processor
 
an ontological no parking zone
the signs say not until the fifteenth of the month except before June

Talking about John Wieners's Poems on PoemTalk.

2011-06-13T20:00:00.000-04:00

Allen Ginsberg with John Wieners in 1972

This past fall, I was delighted to travel to the Kelly Writers House at UPenn to participate in Al Filreis's fantastic podcast series PoemTalk. I joined Al and Ammiel Alcalay and Danny Snelson to discuss John Wieners's poem "Acts of Youth" in a performance recorded in 1990.

Here is a discussion of our discussion with links.

If you're so impatient that you want to jump right to the episode, then here is a direct link. Go now! There's not a moment to lose.

If you don't know it, PoemTalk is great series of discussions of specific poems from the ever expanding PennSound collection of modern and contemporary poetry and poetry-related recordings. The project is directed byAl Filreis and Charles Bernstein at UPenn.

Thug Launch performance from new book "The Obvious Flap" with Gregory Betts and Jaap Blonk

2011-06-03T12:02:00.000-04:00

Video of Three Spam Emails Sonnet

2011-05-27T14:14:00.000-04:00

A video rendition of a sonnet inadvertently created for me by three email spammers and published in Vallum 8:1.

Five Four Faces

2011-05-22T12:44:00.000-04:00

The Obvious Flap Book launch in St Catharines!

2011-05-20T17:12:00.002-04:00

Innnnnumerable

2011-05-11T12:20:00.000-04:00

POEM

too

little

to

be

a

MUSIC FOR WRITERS 3: The Music of Spitch

2011-05-09T15:03:00.001-04:00

The third installment in my guest post series MUSIC FOR WRITERS for LemonHound. This one explores the relationship between spoken words and music.

I write about Steve Reich, Paul Lansky, Sarah Palin, Rene Lussier, Monteverdi, Arnold Schoenberg, John Somebody, Leonard Cohen, and a duck.

Here is is.

I THINK OF NO ONE

2011-05-09T14:59:00.002-04:00

I THINK OF NO ONE

then someone running
or not running

the water carries the streets
the wind takes the sky

a blue bruise
everything able to rise and perish

rises and perishes
there are no graves

Origami for Terrorists

2011-05-05T11:59:00.000-04:00

The Birds

2011-05-04T10:30:00.001-04:00

THE BIRDS

after Todd Rose

no pair of birds

should ever

be seen

as being just

or necessary

and no result

of a pair of birds

should ever

be seen as

victory

or success

every pair of birds

should be understood

as a tragic

failure

of catastrophic

proportions

a failure of birds

to act

with intelligence

creativity generosity

kindness faith

and respect

in the end

we will remember

not the birds

of our enemies

but the silence

International Pwoermd Writing Month and the New International New Alphabet Writing Month

2011-05-02T11:14:00.003-04:00

gh₂oti

As followers of this blog will know, I have just finished participating in Geof Huth's International Pwoermd Writing Month (InterNaPwoWriMo) a month where almost as many international writers as letters in the alphabet wrote one word poems each day of the month. It is a minimalist analogue to the National Poem Writing Month, and the source of much fun, creativity, and in(ter)vention. You can read the various one word poems (pwoermds) on the blogs and Twitter feeds linked through the http://napwowrimo.blogspot.com/ site. There were some beautiful, beguiling, ridiculous, and surprising creations.

The springuscule and summeruscule version of a new letter

Next year, I want to go even more minimalist. I want to initiate a project where each participant creates a new letter of the alphabet each day of the month. What will we call it? International New Alphabet (Pleotmter?) Writing Month? InterNaAlphWriMo? InterNaPleoWriMo? Or maybe it will just be Regional. Or indeed confined to my desktop. A flash mob of one.

But if each participant created a single new letter each day for a month, at the end, they'd have an alphabet. Perhaps the letters could be mixed-and-matched with others. An ecumenalphabet. A letteriot. A trium(gly)phant alphaGlyphony. Or the letters could go rogue. Remain hermit and unattached. Singularities. Minuscule miniscule bangs at the beginning of new alphabetic universes. Who's in?

murmurmur

2011-05-02T10:36:00.000-04:00

InterNaPwoWriMore 30: six: sic(sic)

2011-05-01T00:06:00.001-04:00

filllllllled

aintological

hiiiiiivemiiiiiind

loudsaucing

allowedsourcing

NaClty

pondh₂o

r(h₂)aindr(o)p

doremi(sic)cal

emu(sic)al

fayuhllduh

spellinng

abracadaver

karmachamelon

bl nd

exc!amat!on

exlambation

bitterswept

weepink

extrafinery

o)newords

meremur / murmere

murmurmur

sublinimal

whispker

wispdom

ESCAPE IS TEETH

2011-04-29T14:28:00.000-04:00

there are hundreds here
more will arrive soon, they say

I can see the horizon
and I’m looking up

now there are thousands
watermelon watermelon, they say

my stomach is a small country
looking for immigrants.

some day I will take history out back
one of us gonna learn something

smile, they say
let’s pretend there’s a camera

barbwire is dental floss only
if escape is teeth

I dig in the ground
all I find is more ground

when I give up
I find the hole

I begin by learning their names
only one is actually called ‘Watermelon’

*

How does a poem begin? What vague sense of a somethingness ends up in the desire to form something out of words? I was listening to a remarkable interview on the CBC show "Ideas" about Timothy Snyder's book Bloodlands about the inconceivable horror of the mass killings of Stalin and Hitler in the 30s and 40s. The 'Bloodlands" is Eastern Europe. Something about the specificity of numbers struck me. Snyder talked about millions but how he tried to be exact and not round off each number. A two or a three. Those two after all those millions could be your grandfather and grandmother, or your neighbours.

I wasn't exactly thinking about encompassing the entire horror in a poem. There was something which caused me to think about my five hundred mothers reaching back into history. Five hundred mothers reaching forward into the future. I wrote down this line. It was the sense of connection, of, I guess, compassion. How we all find ourselves swimming in history, in some kind of fate. And it isn't six degrees of separation. The six degrees collapse into the single fact of our humanity, of the happenstance of history.

So I wrote some more lines. There's always the embarrassed attempt to encompass something large emotionally and conceptually in a little poem. As if I could sit down one morning and neatly complete it. And then, how to write and encompass such a thing in a 'readable' poem. It shouldn't be readable. Or, should I write another poem, about something readable within this unreadable horror? I don't agree with Adorno that after the Holocaust that there can be no more art. But, writing about such a horror, simple artifices and techniques can seem awfully coy and simplistic. Maybe one needs a larger, complex web of text, one, perhaps, without obvious textual strategies. One which examines the issue and the language and its framing. But perhaps, at least for this poem, my initial goal is off. I'm just not aiming for the right result. I should think through what I am trying to accomplish.

As I was writing, I was also thinking of some of Jim Smith's politically charged poems in his Back Off, Assassin. Jim is able to pull of some powerful poems, filled with anger, perspective, and a kind of political wisdom. There are some poems in Matthew Rohrer's recent and brilliant Preserver and Destroyer (see "Casualties" in this review) which somehow place different issues into a powerful yet domestic context, far from the horror.

I was thinking of relatives of mine who were hidden in hole by a farmer in Germany during the Holocaust.

The poem that I have posted above is very provisional. I have pulled away from the initial issues, broken off only a tiny molecule of a vast history and experience. There were specifics in an earlier draft. I've excised these. The initial poem was in numbered sections. I've elided the sections and cut much out. I offer this poem as an object lesson, as a small foothold in a vast cliff face which hopefully serves to illustrate something of a process, something of an ambition.

InterNaPwoWriMo 28: Borklefemur Hamsterfrizz: some spwoken pwoermds

2011-04-28T18:02:00.003-04:00

Pwoermds for InterNaPwoWriMo 4

Pwoermd for InterNaPwoWriMo 4

Death Be Not Proud2

John Donne's Death Be Not Proud with spaces removed and recited by Text to Voice Synthesizer with some multitracking/processing and a train.

InterNapWoWriMoth 28: foetless

2011-04-27T22:50:00.005-04:00

shouldthering

thereal

etcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcera

Titanicked

ubiquit

pwoerm

pwoemb

fetusk

literarely

iconiconiconiconic

unicon

nauseahorse

see(sic)k

winternapwowrimoon

withhering

doggged

widom

deskimo

ununsung

]b]r[e]a[t]h[e[

}b{a}r{o}q{u}e{

[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[i]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]

unununique

lovelornithology

earthography

typographid

After Escher

2011-04-27T11:25:00.000-04:00

Speech Balloons (for derek beaulieu)

2011-04-27T11:16:00.001-04:00

MORON LIGHT

2011-04-27T00:00:00.013-04:00

MORON LIGHT

a moron is a message to future moons

a moon understands the world by being a moron

the moron is really two moons—or many

it is useful to be a moron, if you are a moon

a moon is one way of explaining things

a moron is the moon's way

future morons are the written language of moons

the new moon has the absence of teeth in the old moron’s mouth

shadow exists in the moron dictionary

when it is moonlight, shadow is a moron

InterNaPwoWriMore 27: hark(si)chord

2011-04-27T00:00:00.011-04:00

saxorphan

singlish

harm{sic[sic(sic)]}chord

pain’t

skulkture

errorapture

skillseen

thight

mosquieto

mountaint

etymolecule

leaeaeaf

kerspelunk

biolunarescent

no’on

circumincision

i(on(ion(ion(ion)ion)ion)i)on

antidisestablishmentorastafariorgasm

Belief Case

2011-04-26T11:43:00.000-04:00

BELIEF CASE

1.

the world is everything that is the briefcase

the hinge

shadow and ground
held together

papers inside
a tree

2.

a briefcase
has two faces:

an inside that becomes
an outside

the origami of darkness
manifold
a handle on a cave
an origami of time as well as space

the face of the briefcase
the planet’s laconic smile

3.

a ring of briefcases
a henge

something new
may be sacrificed

the eye casts no shadow
but is where shadows cast

4.

a lung’s worth of air
an archive of sighs

a lake without water
a lake’s worth of water
looking for a bed

the cattle are lowing
the briefcase awaits

5.

evolution expected the briefcase
but was surprised by water

wave
the briefcaseless hand
clap
the clasps of the hands

hands swim through
infinite wisps of paper
the impossible air

6.

what is the difference between
a typewriter and a lion
a sheep and a briefcase

driving past the fields:
-I see the sheep are shorn
-at least on the side we see
-ah yes. the outside.

7.

briefcases on the mountain
and the sky split by thunder

dark follows the hand into the briefcase
doesn’t know what the moonlight says

night holds the earth by its black handle
walks

InterNaPwoWriMoon 26: Wingdin

2011-04-25T22:17:00.000-04:00

eveningtually

nightfail

twiglight

treemph

tumultiphant

con’seq’you’all

dawnting

furthermorning

dozen¹²t

docen’t

{hi[d(d)]en}

kinkink

queene’en

reigndope

ghotifinger

pwoemwad

mothful

mnm

2011-04-24T22:30:00.001-04:00

Study: & Y's for Geof Huth

2011-04-24T18:42:00.001-04:00

InterNaPwoWriMo 25: SPR!NG

2011-04-24T13:38:00.000-04:00

spriing

sprring

sppring

sprinng

springg

ssspring

Nor'easters:

Islamb

3ewish

Infersand Ampinity

2011-04-24T13:18:00.001-04:00

InterNaPwoWriMo 24: four yyyyou

2011-04-24T00:00:00.001-04:00

InterNaPwoWriMom 23: abecedeefgeeaitchayejayarian

2011-04-23T12:26:00.000-04:00

abceedy

abcious

abcdefght

abcdefghious

abcdefy

abcdefghijkly

abcdefghily

abcdefghijklmny

abcdefghijklmnious

abcdefghilently

abcdefghoti

abcdefinition

abcdefinity

abcdefiance

abcdefarious

abcdefghiance

abcience

abidance

abcdance

abcdwxy

zyghost

zyghoti

tm[ ]esis

tmecyst[ ]

t[ ]m[ ]e[ ]s[ ]i[ ]s

]tmesis[

camouflag

i and j

2011-04-23T12:00:00.003-04:00

InterNaPwoWriMo 23: whater

2011-04-23T00:00:00.001-04:00

SOFT-FACED

2011-04-22T15:11:00.000-04:00

SOFT-FACED

We decided to have a son, the wholegoddamn pack of us, standing outside the pool hall, all of us between seventeenand twenty, quite young ourselves. It’s late night and there’s a big moon inthe sky. We didn’t exactly say it out loud, but a consensus over the having ason thing was reached, decided as these usually are though the mutualrecognition of stirrings deep inside us all, passed around without comment by somesort of silent network.

And how does a group of us have ason? Sure there are methods like gang rape. We’ve thought about it. Or kidnap. But tonight, maybe it was the moon,or the combination of shooters and what was up our nose, but we stood outsidethe pool hall waiting, smoking, knowing something would happen. We didn’t haveto do anything. It would come to us.

A soft-faced boy walks out of theside door with a girl. He looked like us, except for the soft face. He wasn’thiding it. “Hey, fuckface,” we say. “We heard what you said to her. She’s ourfriend.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You sure as fuck did. You asked herfor a hand-job, you fuck.”

“I fucking did not. I was justasking about her baby.“

“You fucking asked for a hand-job,dickhead.”

“Did fucking not. We were in Grade8 together. I was asking how she was.”

“Fucking liar.”

“Screw off, you dickwads. Fuckyourselves. I fucking said nothing.”

And then we pulled his jacket overhis head and began punching him in the head until he fell down. We kicked himwith our twelve right feet, with a few left kicks mixed in for variety. He madea bunch of sounds that weren’t really words then rolled over to face theground. We kicked his head. End of round one.

Then he got up. He wasn’t big butit I could tell he worked out.

“Fucking assholes.”

He punched me right in the nose.Then again in the jaw. It was like a strike of lightning in the face.Everything dark except for the bright bolt where he hit him. I got him in theside then connected with his jaw. My knee went into his gut and his fistslammed the side of my head. We both fell to the ground. My ear and then mynose again. He had me by the hair and pulled my head up and then hard downagainst the pavement. Kaleidoscopes out both my eyes and then all of my boysbegan kicking him hard in the head, the legs, the gut. A hundred hoofs into hisbody. His nose bleeds, his teeth are broken. The moon is over the parking lot but it’s behind clouds, thefucking chicken. End of round two.

“OK, asshole. Round three.” He hasstaggered to his feet again. We’re in a circle now.

“Ready to fight some more, you fuck?”There are big welts over his forehead. One of his eyes is swollen. Some bloodout the corner of his lip. He spits stuff from his mouth.

“Fucking round three. You too much ofa pussy? Need your mommy and her big tits?”

He walks away down the sidewalk.

“Pussy,” we call after him.“Chickenshit.”

So now we have a son. The wholegoddamn pack of us. We’re fathers.

That’s how it’s done.

InterNaPwoWriMo 22: wwe

2011-04-22T00:00:00.001-04:00

InterNaPwoWriMo 22: ttwwiilliigghhtt

2011-04-21T11:37:00.000-04:00

IntNaPwoWriMo 21: twwilight

2011-04-21T00:08:00.001-04:00

paragrasps

ighgh

m_te

twiilight

Poem for the Poets: National Poetry Month

2011-04-20T10:02:00.000-04:00

for five hundred years
the poets lean on my right shoulder
and cry

poets, be quiet
I’m trying to think

for five hundred years
the poets lean on my left shoulder
and keep crying

be quiet, poets
I am trying to think

the poets return to my right shoulder
for five hundred more years
and cry even louder

poets, you are too loud
I am going somewhere else to think

InterNaPwoWriMo 20: &pology

2011-04-20T00:00:00.046-04:00

fo’sh’r’n’d

&ustry

alithe

circlestance

squore

dithyrhombus

&bivalend

+pers+

ampersonator

*

InterNaPwoWriMo 19: b!am!

2011-04-19T00:23:00.005-04:00

"I'd say the Roman alphabet, being dominant is the alphaalphabet."

helfabet

&idisestablishm&ari&ism

heartsuccored

mhwuhahuuwhusihhkuh

&erlust

So Much Depends on Half a Red Wheelbarrow

2011-04-18T13:38:00.000-04:00

The Magic Mustache, vermiphilery, and Henny Youngman reads Mother Goose

2011-04-18T10:50:00.001-04:00

One of the great things about writing children's books is how the books engage with their audience -- an audience of children, yes of course, but also with their parents, and the whole family. The books often have a way of entering into the family's own culture, sometimes connecting to their language (phrases from the book become part of their own particular familiese) or with activities or interests. I've had many reports that my The Racing Worm Brothers has been an accompaniment to families' worm-related activities and obsessions (as indeed it was inspired by my sons' vermiphilery.) And there is a special place for story and for books in families. Bedtime stories are a particularly intense and intimate moment of shared imagination, shared immersion in story and mood. My book, The Magic Mustache originated in a bedtime story that I improvised for my son Aaron.

Altogether, it's been a delight how these books find a place with their audience and continue to do so, years after their publication. People take these books out of the library and continue to read them. I find it very gratifying.

Today, my trusty Google vanity search henchbots found this discussion of my children's picturebook, The Magic Mustache at the blog, My Mama's Goodnight. In the sidenotes to the blog, the author notes how the elder of her two sons reads Captain Underpants to his younger brother in the voice of Mick Jagger. Now I'm thinking about which famous voices I could match with which stories. Tom Waits reads Anne of Green Gables? Marlon Brando reads Goodnight Moon? Jean Chretien reads Now We Are Six.

serif of nottingblog

BLACK HOLE

BLACK HOLE

Songs of the Uncanny Valley:

you did not expect me to live... I have said it. I will live.

Future Moon: MS Word Sings Again

The Drag(Hair)net(Cut)

Double Tiger Barcode: the musical

Sometimes You Don't

SOMETIMES YOU DON'T

Milkwing

Ampersands: a two dimensional concept in three dimensional space

handpersand

Ampersutterfly

On Reviews, the Unread Book and the Landless Giraffes

Time for a Vispo: anamevispoem

Brain banjos and moon smoke

THE GREAT EXPLORER

Opinity on Porcupinity!

No matter how thin and flimsy / On Samuel Beckett

For Hoarsemen

Blog Clouds Sheep Breath Jack Frost

Questionless Book Interview

Ukulele

Ouroborosemia

Playtime Clothes for Wittgenstein's Children

Gun Wolf, Gun Sheep and Gunless A

Clothes for A

Franz Santa or Mickey Kafka?

THE METRIC SEASON

Book launches for FRANZLATIONS, my NEW BOOK!

Three F Comics

I'm in love with a single pixel of you

WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS

Trailer for my new book: Franzlations

3 Words: New chapbook by NF Huth

Railroad Song: I've been working just past where I know

Parenthesis (

What Once Was K

Metaphysics

Shroud

Parenthesis after de Chirico (for Márton Koppány)

We Emersongency Celebrate

Some of my upcoming events

Forgive me...

After Aristotle and Nietzsche on 9/11

Ungendered third person singular pronoun / The Shimmy of Shadrack

Preview of my latest book: Franzlations.

Fine Tooth

C=O=U=N=T=R=Y=S=O=N=G

Necker Book Cubed

ORIGINAL SKIN

Dear Reader

Infinite Book

ATTACHMENT

The Hand

Birds: the dreams and prattling of those born from an egg

SPRING (after Mary Ruefle's The Hand)

Protection Song

Treadmills, priests, dogs, dusk, sleep, and fathers: an update

WALK TALL, CANNONBALL

MY NOBEL PRIZE SPEECH

Phil Campbell was his Town (for Phil Campbell, Alabama)

PHIL CAMPBELL WAS HIS TOWN

MARINATOR

Talking about John Wieners's Poems on PoemTalk.

Thug Launch performance from new book "The Obvious Flap" with Gregory Betts and Jaap Blonk

Video of Three Spam Emails Sonnet

Five Four Faces

The Obvious Flap Book launch in St Catharines!

Innnnnumerable

MUSIC FOR WRITERS 3: The Music of Spitch

I THINK OF NO ONE

Origami for Terrorists

The Birds

International Pwoermd Writing Month and the *New* International New Alphabet Writing Month

murmurmur

InterNaPwoWriMore 30: six: sic(sic)

ESCAPE IS TEETH

InterNaPwoWriMo 28: Borklefemur Hamsterfrizz: some spwoken pwoermds

International Pwoermd Writing Month and the New International New Alphabet Writing Month