Very liking Stephanie's #18 poem up today. Link to left please (too lazy to href)...

Of course I agree that the existential reductio-ad-absurdum is great...

Bragging!

Hey people! Today I'm famous! Check this out!

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
"In an exposed position with little chance/ of retreat, the ponies' best defense is nakedness and lightsome lyric," writes Gordon in "Paeonies," a spirited, strident paean to being spirited and strident. With her "balladry/ for the stubbornly liminal" and goof-grinned reaching for high-sounding diction, Gordon's vatic speaker can take in parables (the foreword is titled "The End of Greed, Imperialism, Opportunism and Terrorism"), language salads that urge readers to "rise up and abandon the spurious contrivance," and satirically theorized self-deprecatory incantations: "come here, i want// to alienate you. dyssemia / the volatile prosody i auto-eroticize..." If the existential reductio-ad-absurdum can grate, the sincerity of Gordon's never-quite-named frustrations comes through in her cries of a bodily, even orgiastic, poetry, reading at times like the Beckett of "Whoroscope" on a day trip to the Haight-Ashbury of yore: "Sure, all's dire, / but look! What comes out! Dark as grapes / but sounding, hot-hot-persisting in wanting / to be wanted. Then I get so enlarged-/ with the writing: it is wrong. So but anyway/ the moment is red duress in bad fire." The result is outrageously ludic, like Elizabeth Taylor lurching through a Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf monologue loaded with sheer energy and disappointment. When she's on, this punk priestess travels through a gaudy, impish, vampy, very important hyperreality.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

O man behind the curtain (you know who you are), thank you for this.

Validation-happiness!

Just received an e-mail entitled "Nada Eliminate Ringing and Buzzing in the Ears."

Nota bene: an emotional formalism. A poem may be a body but it is also a machine made of tropes and codes and connotations. As a human body(psyche) is a machine made of tropes and codes and connotations.

A journal of emotional sensation is usually too discursive or denotative to be interesting as a poem, whatever other uses it might serve.

Why all the Victorian phrasings, relative clauses and wordiness, in my long post of today?

I have trouble with prose, or at any rate with my prose-persona, sometimes.

Strange smells.

Also realized that I perceive women with very large heavy hanging breasts to be less naked (I mean, dressed-naked) than women with smaller breasts. It is as if they are clothed by their flesh.

Someone (another blogger, but I won't say who) mentioned to me at a party the other night that he prefers women's bodies to have "content" -- i.e. to be somewhat voluptuous.

I realized that I don't think of fat or curves or shape in terms of content but as form.

Of course, we are both wrong:

and if I am loved

as if with a toothy mace
then let it be as thinking form
think of content as material --
IN a glass not air or water

but glass itself, and my white thighs
smoother pastures of resentment

"Yang and Yin", Foriegnn Bodie

SIC...STET

Why, readers, do you suppose I typed "hummingbird fever" instead of "hummingbird feeder"???

On the Rasa


Up in Woodstock last weekend, murky weather notwithstanding, I wandered into an Indian import store run by a stocky guy named Shiv who aspired, it seemed, to resemble his Hindu namesake, wearing long dreadlocks coiled in a bun atop his head. He carried no trident nor wore no leopard pelt, but he didn't really need to, as he projected so effectively the image of "Western sadhu." I recognized him from having met him last summer at St. Mark's on the occasion of Lee Ann and Tony's wedding party. He was introduced to me by a woman to whom Drew had introduced me, one Louise Landes Levi. As I had expressed curiosity about the Indian concept of rasa, Drew informed me that Louise knew a great deal about the subject, and in fact was at work on a book about it.

It turns out that the book was a translation of Rene Daumal's Rasa, or, Knowledge of the Self, and also that Shiv had some copies of it on hand at the import store, having just published it in Nepal replete with image of Sarasvati riding a swan on the cover, which is made of exquisitely roughly-textured mulberry paper. I bought one, and was thrilled to find within a very intriguing poetics that comes very close to describing my intuitive and constantly underarticulated sense of how poetry works, for me.

I had researched the rasa before, and had even gone so far as to begin a (abandoned ... we got distracted) collaboration with Marianne based on the concept. At my favorite shop in Jackson Heights (run, I think, by Sai Baba devotees), which specializes in books, groovy painted furniture, tchotchkes, incense, and bangles, I'd bought some books on Indian music hoping to find out more about them. The information on rasa in them was interesting, but undeveloped -- mere lists. This Daumal text, in part a translation of a translation (from Sanskrit via French), really illuminates the idea for me, particularly in regard to poetry.

Each rasa, in Levi's translation of Daumal's translation of a Sanskrit text entitled The Essence of Poetry, is a kind of "savor .. an emotion manifest through the means of art and consciously perceived ....They are distinguished as follows: erotic, comic, pathetic, furious, heroic, repugnant, and wondrous, in addition to, in certain authors, familial (maternal or paternal love) and tranquil (religious love)."

Earlier, the same text asks,

What, then, ultimately is poetry?
Poetry is a word whose essence is savor.

We will now explain the meaning of "savor". Savor is "the essence" in terms of the substantial reality. That is to say, savor is the life itself of poetry, without which there is no poetry. "Savor" (rasa)is, etymologically, that which is "savored" (rasayate). The term includes savor-emotions and savor reflections....

The faults are that which veil it (poetry).

The faults, cacophony, superfluous words, are analogous to infirmities, e.g. blindness or lameness, which affect (the person) through (the medium) of his own body: they affect (the poem) through sounds and meanings....

The virtues, ornaments, and allures are called "agents of construction."

(The corporeal analogy, described above, shows the way in which these agents "construct" the savor, and thus the poetry itself.)

Daumal comments on the text above in essay, "To Approach the Hindu Poetic Art":

Savor is not the base emotion, related to personal life; it is a "supernatural" (lokottara representation, a moment of consciousness provoked by the mediums of art and colored with a particular pathos. Dare I say: an objective emotion? To our Occidental mentality, this would seem to be a strange notion, but if we recall the moments of intense aesthetic emotion that we have experienced, a certain "savor" will come to mind: and we will see how and why this gustative image asserts itself. The savor is essentially a cognition, "shining with its own evidence," thus immediate. It is "conscious joy" (anandacinmaya)... even in the representation of painful things, it is not related to the ordinary "world"; it is a recreation of that "world" on another plane. It is animated by "supernatural admiration." It is "the twin sister of the sacred gustation." "He who is capable of perceiving it, savors it not like a separate thing, but in its essence."....it compels an act of communion." It is not an object existing before being perceived.... it exists to the degree that it has been savored. It is not the mechanical "effect" of the artistic means which merely manifest it....

I'm tempted, really, to type in huge quotations from various sections of this book here, but I'm certain that most of my readers will not have even got this far. Perhaps I will ration it out to this blogs, like syrup from a hummingbird fever, if, that is, the hummingbird nature of my own attentiveness allows me to hang out long enough on any one set of concepts.

But truly, this book tastes to me like a kind of nourishing syrup. Why so sweet? In part it is because the gustatory and corporeal analogies make a good deal of sense to me. Poetry is something I am hungry for, that once tasted becomes a part of me. And every poem is a body -- WITH organs.

I appreciate the idea of a formalism of the emotions that highlights the inadequacy of a formalism of devices to explain how a poem, how language, plays upon consciousness.

As much as I am annoyed by taxonomies, I find the list of rasa fascinating, as indeed they are what motivates me to write, with an emphasis perhaps on the first four: "erotic, comic, pathetic, furious" -- with a little bit of the wondrous mixed in now and then as well.

I love that these poetics emanate from one of the oldest, most reflective, and most expressive cultures on the planet, instead of being the latest, and perhaps most reactive, "thing."

I love the enumeration of the faults of poetry, or dosha; this is where a total inversion of the theory becomes necessary and amusing. Cacophony, superfluous words, and overembellishment (discussed elsewhere in the text -- a bit of syrup to be doled out later?) become not only sicknesses in the corporeal body of the poem but also fascinating illustrations of sicknesses in the mind and in words, and of the sickness of the hostile social context the poems must try to survive in. This is a twist, I know this is a twist, but I have never really believed in the purity of anything, particularly not a theory.

The words float in the solar plexus totally unreleased. Wrung shut.

I mean, too busy for this.

Still busy. This thing's a hex or spinning charm.

I have no nude photos of myself to send to Jim. If I scan my breasts will I get some kind of radiation? Actually, forget it, that would be very awkward (physically).

Having to censor myself here. I don't like that.

I adore the word "dogged", though of course I am a cat.

To my great surprise, I'm getting to be a slightly better bellydancer. Maybe there is something to this "dogged continuance" stuff.

I always get a strange feeling when the digital clock on my computer reads 9:11. Don't you?

As soon as my head clears, I'll make a plan, I always think. In the meantime, I buy fake flowers.

Thinking about how everyone's blog (like, I suppose, everyone's personality) is too something. Surely you've thought this too.

Five more days of rain slated. Mercury still retrograde through June 5.

Anxious.

What do Kasey's categories mean?

Here's something I wrote to Jordan on "psychological" "criticism" (sorry JD, I know you don't like scare quotes, but I dig them. You might even say I "dig" them.) (Indeed, "commentary" or "reading" are far preferable terms.):

It's CONTEXTUAL criticism, situational, only the context is inside and between people. How can "the social" NOT be considered to be what is inside and between people as much as whatever "external" forces and strictures we deem it to be? All these fucking false binaries make me want to... sigh, I guess. I wish I had time and space and half the brain to be more critically concise about tearing them down; that takes some serious philosophizing tho. I guess I only can do that poetically right now, brick by intransigent brick.

Like just about everything else I say, this smacks of a kind of femme-y essentializing. That is, the men have always known how to talk rather well about what they perceive to be outside. Outsideness (Camille Paglia mentions the arc of male urine, etc., shooting out into the world). They have a harder time with what they see as "insideness" -- what Gary called last night, "processing." Marianne and I can talk for hours, for example, without the slightest sign of fatigue, about the nuances of relationships and perceptions. I asked Gary, would it be easier to talk about your emotions if you thought about them as something outside you, something rare and obscure perhaps, that you could collect?

This is the fundamental difference in approach between an "Elsewhere" -- analysis mainly of Things Outside -- and a "Ululation" -- Internal Roilings escaping bodily through vocalization.

Two headed pure love monster! Maybe, yes, but with very different sorts of heads. Hee hee. Jim, I love it.

I have to work focusedly on developing a class I am teaching at Pratt today and not allow myself to be seduced by bloglandia.

But I do want to say a word about what Nick has been doing at Fait Accompli -- these early notebooks of his are making my jaw drop, as did the piece about poetry he posted a few days ago. Nick, sometimes I just want to lift you up out of the crowds and hold you high for everyone to see!

The difficulty of just getting on/by/through/over can not be overestimated.

Does psychology come out of structure or does structure come out of psychology?

I was just asking Gary the other day when people were going to get over the injunction against psychologically-oriented lit-crit. Then Jordan mentioned it today.

When you actually KNOW the poet it's hard *not* to bring psychologically motivated readings to their work.* And it seems... like I know... a lot... of poets.

*We do this, for example, in bars and cafes and after-reading events all the time. Just not on paper.

A separate poem blog because it's like making a book of poems. I used the integrated style for a while but found myself writing more anecdotes and "koans" than poems.

A poem blog based on this principle: "Build it and they will come."

Creating a space to fill up. Doesn't that seem fairly obvious?

A Dedicated Follower of Fashion


My friends, I have done it, the copykitty thing... I have started a poem blog: prrrowess.

I fully intend to prettify the template. For now, it's excruciatingly simple.

OK, gotta get ready for work!

Since I put a site meter on this blog, I noticed that lots of people come to look but don't hang out here. There is one person, however, with an aol.com server who spends a long time here -- like up to 45 minutes. Who are you?

I would like to make my audience happy. What sorts of things would induce you to stay here longer than a minute, aside from any sort of fresh posts?

I used to have a fantasy of performing as a sort of human jukebox, with a corrugated carton for a costume and a giant song list. I like the idea of accommodating to people's specific desires. That's kind of sexy, right? I suppose it would also be a way of showing off my musical prowess.

PROWESS! I love it. Don't anyone steal that name for the poem blog I will soon set up in imitation of Kasey imitating Jordan.

Noticing that I love to say, "...but it's more complex than that," ... if only to feel the web of intricacies branch out, intertwine, thicken.

An e-mail from someone telling me this is one of the few blogs he reads. Funny! This blog lately so fragmentary and un- (if not exactly anti-) intellectual I can't imagine why anyone would read it.

Less and less interest in talking about poetry and poetics lately; more in talking about "other essentials of life."

Sometimes Jordan's posts are so adeptly mannered I want to... I don't know... shake him or something. The thing about the peppercorns... made me almost palpably... jealous. And that Oharan thing next to it about chance encounters with other poets, too.

I think someone should do an anthology of poems & other writings about poets' chance encounters with other poets. Doesn't the genre well pre-date Ohara? Surely there must be something like that in Baudelaire's prose. Coleridge wrote about encounters if not chance encounters. And Hazlitt! how could I forget Hazlitt? I seem to remember something in Rodefer's first book ... something about the grid of the city being like lines of energy that lead us to each other. Am I making this up? Will look it up later. But not actually sure I have the book!

For the utmost in utter lack of RIGOR and METHODOLOGY, try ULULATIONS!

What do other people do with their violence?

Question: why do emotions locate themselves in specific parts of the body? in particular, the nervous and respiratory systems?

No, now that i think of it, they are in the digestive and muscular systems too.

So...where are emotions in relation to the skeleton?

So many questions... like... why is theory necessary if we are going to die?

Can you theorize pain? Certainly. Why might it (not)be useful to do so?

TREES absolutely heavy with blossoms today.

Is the feminine fondness for anything pink and ruffled really a labial analogue?

or is it more complicated than that.

Are we bonobos? Or Mandarin ducks. Is the question.

Poet? or a character in a bodice-ripper? Jack asked.

Both, I replied.

Drew's post on Matisse/Picasso totally kicks the podium.

Questions:

What's the difference between a 'dramaturg' and a 'drama queen'?

Is our 'hard wiring' just wrong?

How to hold death in mind at all times non-morbidly?

I never had someone terribly close to me commit suicide. I knew and liked both Ramez and Dan, but we were not really intimate. And though their choices saddened me, I could somehow understand their torments and their motivations.

My only really sad and uncanny close-friend death experience is this:

When I was twelve, I had a best friend, Caitlin, whose mother was a junkie. Caitlin and I were in the same alternative school. She was willowy and Welsh-looking, with beautiful totally golden wavy hair. I think she was one of my first loves. We would walk around holding hands, we took LSD together, we would sit on each other's beds drinking lapsang souchong and earl grey all day reading and talking about what we had read. We both read and wrote poetry. Men were wild for her. She had this incredible nymphy body with long limbs and perfectly round not big not small breasts. She gave off the aura of being highly experienced. I think in fact she was. We became punks together. Later she abandoned me quite suddenly when she met a man, a hardline Marxist, who eventually became her husband. I never understood that abandonment, particularly the suddenness of it (as I suppose I never understand *any* abandonments).

In our alternative school was another knockout nymphet, Leila, who had long red hair and am oddly pointy nose. She, at fourteen, had a body like Ava Gardner -- totally 40s pinup (she even wore a vintage a-line leopard-print "car coat"). And she *sucked her thumb*; you can imagine what this did to the 30ish Marin County men who pursued, and often got, her. Leila and I had actually known each other for many years. Our mothers were friends, and we all used to go Sufi dancing together at the Sausalito art center where my mother took metal sculpture classes.

The two gorgeous girls were rivals, on and off, for the attentions of a variety of men. It was a neverending soap opera; existing as I did, between them, I was privy to both of their lamentations and rages over their respective nemeses.

I lost touch with both of them.

Sometime in the early 80s, Caitlin had a brain aneurysm that put her in a coma for some time. She came out of it, but her speech was slurred, her vision was impaired, and she had to walk with a cane. I tried to contact her a couple of times but she never returned my attempts at communication.

I had lost touch with Leila around the same time, but I heard, after I had been in Japan for several years, that Leila had died of a brain tumor.

Then, after a Google search I did last winter, I learned that Caitlin had died of complications resulting from her aneurysm, perhaps a couple of years ago.

Farewell to all that youth, that loveliness, that sex, those passions and convictions.

I don't think that I have truly "processed" the fact of their deaths. They remain to me now as "figures in the narrative."

Anyway.

Anyone who has V. Imp. may have noticed that it is dedicated to Leila and Caitlin.

so... gather... ye rosebuds... while... ye may...

Not sure why Ann, Gary's ex, thought Dan was "dangerous" for coming on to her. I hope she didn't think she was special. Dan came on to everyone -- me, my beautiful friends Claire and Stacey. His approach was -- and in this my testimony differs from Gary's -- to be quite abject. He was the kind of man who seemed like he wanted to put his head in your lap and gaze up at you lugubriously. (This creeped me out. I didn't learn to love abjection in a man until I met Gary.) And he liked innuendos. I remember he came by one day when I was working at David Highsmith's bookstore and for some reason we were tallking about children -- maybe even little girls. He looked at me meaningfully and said "they're so wet." Now, how was I supposed to construe that?

It's quite true that I reviewed Monologue x 3 for Poetry Flash. I'm sure I have a copy somewhere. What Gary doesn't mention is the dramatic irony of this -- what if it had been Monologue x 4 and Gary had had the role he wanted in it? How would *this* story be now? What, for example, if I had given him a bad review? The mind boggles, stumbles, reels, freaks out. Do you believe in fate?

I remember arguing with Dan a couple of times. He could be very persistently argumentative.

First thing to remember is that Mercury is retrograde. Communication will be haywire until the end of May, 'tis said.

We can look at Mercury retrograde as an opportunity for introspection and reflection-before-speaking, also as a catalyst for outbursts of truthtelling. We can also allow it to play havoc with our lives. Just remember, back up your data, and be ready to deal with the fallout of countless misunderstandings.

Now, to Nick's comment that women bloggers write more about sex than poetry or poetics. I'm not bristling at this comment, but I think it's funny, sort of that old "animalization" of women vs. the "cerebralization" of men. I don't always have a problem with this kind of essentialism ; sometimes it suits my arguments -- but in the case of womyn bloggers, I simply don't think it's accurate. If I think back on the topics I have posted on, I can think of very few instances where I explicitly wrote about sex. I posted one funny fake sex fantasy. I wrote about my memories of a hippie girlhood and specula. I may have sexualized my cats a little in a poem about them, i.e. "One of my first sexual experiences was with a kitten." But in the main, although I have written on "feminized" topics like adornment, ornament, long hair, etc., I think I have written more about war, pain, and despair, and the tiny lovely absurd or hilarious experiences that permit me to move through war, pain, and despair. I have also written about poetry and poetics, though not as much as when I first started, mainly because I have no time. I have about eleven minutes to write this before I must leave the house to go to Hunter to find out the almost certainly negative results of a tuberculosis test I was compelled by the Dept. of Health to take because one of my students had TB.

Of course I think that language oozes sex no matter what the topic, but that's perhaps my own bias, as in a bias-cut satin gown that barely hides the pubic mound of a cabaret singer...

I certainly have no problem writing about sex, a fact to which Swoon, not to mention all of my other books, attests. You'd think, actually, that 'd be writing about sex much more on this blog than I actually do.

So... sex... you want it? You KNOW you want it...

mmmmmmmm

The mussels and their lips, the greeny membranes,
the flat apricot clams.

Moistly fluttering up to the explosion of oh!!! feathers falling in twitchy heavings on my purple stockings, sweet with crotch musk aching in blossoms.

His lips that licking my folded claspings send up through the nerves puffs of melody from my painted mouth.

Oily nipple, thrill of entry. Contacting tongues to activate the hearts, dual dumbeks (sp?) in the craving room.

etc. etc. I mean I could go on and on like this. But I'm getting turned on and I have to go to work. (work vs. eros. Quel drag!)

p.s. James said something about "mere mental masturbation", not in reference to Swoon exactly, but agreeing with something Gary had written there. You know, what's the big issue with masturbation? Thinking back to Jism Jim. Don't understand.

Anyway, whenever I hear the word "mere" I reach for my vibrator. How I do love the trivial!

And whenever I hear yet another convolution of "whenever I hear the word .... I reach for my ...." I want to screaaaaaaaammmm!

"Under clothes/ the vaginal cave/ as if that's some sort of/ big deal..."