There is no discourse without reservation. The reservation
of Wade Campbell, fired from Colorado U. The Colorado calling.
White of river, rice, stiletto thinking,
harm and whiteness,
charm and lightness,
tornado in the tomato,
excellence.
Excellent observations.
Chasmatic divides of Colorado,
I am not sure of anything shaking,
sure shaking sugar.
she lacks fluency
she is being careful rigid
she is being beside herself
she is soul shallow
she has a spoon to stir herself
she has a spring to mail herself
she does not have a skirt or shorts
ping point paing
ha ha
bird, don’t think I won’t fuck you up*
pushing past flowers
pushing up daisies
premature form
projects – projective – projectivist
is it the breath or the typewriter
out in the open field
asshole email
I’m doing it again – indenting lines off the left margin for no reason – oh yeah, because they are new paragraphs
high-pitched hello
this is a worthwhile occupation
even though I don’t have shoes
and looking trail
Not only do I expect my self to be a self. I expect every human’s self to be a self. Impermanence, anatta, dukkha. How easy to get off track.
The coffee is terrible. Watery for an espresso.
It’s no good being critical of the animals. It’s no good estimating what is blogworthy. It’s no good trying to find the time. My norms are different.
swimming about without a project
there is nothing I can do
no means no ends no optimistic no despair
and here a series of no’s
that anyone would call bad poetry
and in my hand, the summa critical
of everyone who thinks
or writes or speaks
just wanting nurture
happiness
There is a subtlety in all this writing, subtle refusal to let go. Subtle refusal of the whimsical the circumspect the lack the luck. Subtle refusal to charge off in all directions. Subtle refusal to mentor the young self into immersion. Subtle refusal to merge with the white whale
I write to dissolve, to learn how to dissolve.
I am off the bat. The boat. Boating an activity of many while they are still the middle class
I am expecting. She is expecting in a voice so juicy with disgust or secrets I hated the way the syllable “pect” came out of the mouth oozing with gossipy fruit juice The word is ruined forever as is duds as is a lot of words like revery. Need the poets to reteach me.
We’re not sure we’re wanted on this planet.
I am out of synch, off kilter.
There is some compression of the spine.
There are a lack of general principles
and analytical reach. There are.
My precious treasure.
I know I am halting. I know I am making it invisible.
I know I am policy, relying on the policy.
Almost done.
No, not quite.
No facility in the hand this morning.
Imperialist. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Global Entity Master Database. Master File Project. We insist on a Master File. A Rosetta Stone. The damage is not apparent. Evolution denied. Invalid principles. A style of agreement. A style of nodding. A politeness. A reputation for irritability. A command of your tongue. Here is the cycle. I will approach you. I will sign the deal. I will get organized. We will go into production. We publish libraries. We teach. We are flabbergasted. We flout, we fail. We make Powerpoints. We are adept. We are an accounting standards board. We are widespread. We are afraid of the floors. We deny the floors. We deny the presence. We ignore the presence. We are masked. We are leftover.
We do not cotton to that.
We exude mystery.
We frighten with your quiet.
We are a Buddhist.
A flicker in my toe. The obnoxiousness of writing the seethrough sheer. The obnoxiousness of writing, the impulsiveness. The retardedness. Someone has to be you and you are IT. Someone has to name the fashionable names. Someone has to translate. Someone has to have the skills. Someone has to be unresponsive. Someone has to serve the lunch, someone has to struggle in the office with a flicker in their left third toe and a stabbing pricker in their pinky and that one is me.
Let us diagnose it. But there is no diagnosis. Off my high horse.
Let the wind blow me off my high horse
let the derogatory blow me into yesterditch
let the white appalling bloom in my backyard
let the Geshe undertake me
let the mercury be done and married
let the soon be sooner and the heart be hearty
hartfelt heart fool fool hearty—
where did I see that?
This is the long form. This is the long relax. This is the long white whine. Where is the invention? What is the distinction in the roots of literature?
I am sick.
Feel made sick by these studies.
Hello goddess, hello Godfrey. Here’s a secret: Karen Finley telling me the writing seemed like psychotic ranting, I should cut it back to one page. I felt like she had requested that I violate the “Form.”
I am—APPALLED. Are you walking? Are you walking on the trail? Audaciously? The words of men. The Buddha gotra means the buddha lineage, the Buddha garva means the buddha womb. Are you cranking? Are you listening to the music? Or are you playing it?
This is not ecological.
Interplay. Fabric. The writing is a crazy fabric. No regular warp and woof to hold the thing together.
Ecology. Well, our remove from it.
I know my row of herbs in the upper yard—rosemary, sage, lady’s mantle, bergamot. Some lavender. Oh well, okay, bored.
The journal “form.” Ha!
I forgot I was a poet
with this sun thing I embraced
there is an eager energy there
sun energy—she lets it play
she delights in the sun
a form of ecstasy
but dangerous
What Fran did not remark upon—the line breaks, the line breaks are wicked and insidious in that “poem” and point to fractures—consciousness not flexible but fractured cracking as I struggle to shift and separate, adapt
I’m ready to go home
brief thoughts of sex—need for writing about sex—some struggle in the bedroom and some insight—my mother unable to find comfort unable to take refuge—what is my refuge? yes the moment’s smell and that sensation walking on this trail this step-by-step, yes, your shoulder and pow—the odors of your hair sensation pressing mouth into your shoulder upper arm, sensation from other parts of body sensation pleasure from the use of muscles in my limbs with a calibrated abandon—leading okay—leading out of mind—it is a kind of practice—the flexibility to change your frame of reference—to let the body lead (no breath awareness) but—this is something I have learned
Adorable. He’s adorable, the way he curls his toes in, snuggles. The poetic journal, contentment of those “I’s” that misarticulation. I posted indirection on my website. Someone said “I don’t know what this poem means to me.” Wouldn’t that be me?
There are too many things, too many words, too many songs, and too much sugar.
Too much news, too much nonsense approaching the big topics, too much story leis around our necks.
Particles, particulate. I sound funny at work. Disturbing. At all disturbing.
I wish this could be warmer. Or more expressive somehow. I wish I wasn’t tempted by shit, and tales, and mentally ill. I wish I wasn’t haunted. And am I haunted after all? I feel like yes. I feel some burdens, but you know what—it’s no longer all that interesting.
I’m interested in the magical indigenous under the sound of rain.
Some sound of rain remains. Tremendous rain, hard going. No crickets yet. Peepers faint. Sky sound with plane. Birds are more fascinating than dogs.
And yesterday or last week I heard about a service, body washing. Washing the body. I want my body tenderly washed by my faith community. Nothing more beautiful than that. And here I chatted about inconsequences with co-workers and Margaret’s family, while her mother lay in state. I thought—at least there should be silence. We are so bereft. And Poland—what happens when you lose 3 million Jews?
The memoir giving a consistent shape. The desire to be anti-memoir. The desire to be anti-craft. The desire to be antimacassar.
Don’t raise kids with big heads. Make sure they know their place. No touching, thank God.
The desks of childhood, the pencils. The awesomeness of three-year-olds.
Tiresome. Tiresome culturally. Advice is grating sandpaper. Would rather taunt the shy mink. Or is that tempt? Would rather tempt the shy mink into my clutches, offering morsels. Would rather miss my family, friends, than see them. Illusions. Going to move.
It still seems too high-falutin’, don’t it? There’s an etymology for you. Look it up when you get home.
If you get home. Too many layers. Can you layer in the ujjayi breath, she asks? She massages my feet lightly delicately at the end of class. What a slow reception.
Many Americans are beautiful and they have nice clothes but they are in the majority not enlightened.
It’s transparent, colorless, isn’t it.
It’s styleless. It’s a mess. It’s a loss.
I am interested in Artist’s Books. I really don’t want to publish an ugly standard book. I designed an ugly standard book and had it produced by Thomson Shore. That’s good. I learned a lot. I made some mistakes. It was good though. No way to teach you how to do this. I don’t want to be generous, don’t trust myself. I am not that generous. Not sure you have aptitude. I do not want to work with people without aptitude.
The Indra work tells me—my life has been quite diverse and varied, here, there, and everywhere—it’s a little dizzying to think that this was all one person and one person’s life. It is shocking.
Here are my projects—
I write a series about rivers, it feels really forced, much less interior than I’m used to.
I’m doing book design, an anthology. I feel like curling up in shame for the uneven obstreperous (bluntly) badness of this poetry and get defensive at the awes of horror over awkward typographic dumbnesses in Duncan’s Selected oh yes it is a bad book and—well, mine probably is too.
I’m writing a gigantic Hallmark card to 365 of my closest friends, a project which I never once get brave enough to mention because it’s absolutely a faux pas in circles like this to write about real people in a dumb form like “50 words,” not to mention being 50 which is also a mistake too grave to mention, so I shut up even though I secretly admire myself, if only for the year-long discipline (its roots in stubbornness).
I have a blog. Lisa acknowledges my blog on hers, kind words; we mention it once in person, then this contact sinks again into the pool of anonymity, mutual lurking. I decide I want to put more energy into my blog, I have sort of a grip on it as an aesthetic project so I post something almost every day in November, although this is quite strenuous, and sometimes, it’s only photos/fragments.
Lisa’s interest in plants helps me acknowledge that I have a yard, a garden, even a sort of love for certain specimens. I bring two plants indoors for the winter—parsley, rosemary—and plant cilantro seeds. The sage survives outside. I think of bringing Lisa some sage bundled as a gift, maybe wrapped in some embroidery floss. No thyme at the moment.
Umm…can’t get there from here. Can’t go to Naropa, can’t spend lots of money on classes when I’m 50 and Blair’s in college, can’t generate a poetic community like the Beats or the New York School springing up from the wasted garden void around me, can’t make contact, can’t begin to get excited again about an online journal project, any opportunity to publish or be published, any sights set higher than retirement sooner hopefully rather than later after I finish paying for the college education of my favorite anarchist who would never rub elbows with an institution unless the term was paid for by a foolish parent (yup that’s me).
One of the first sessions, we are asked who writes as the “I” in their poems. No one says Yes but me. Should I defend this practice? Is it passé? Have I stepped in it?
Thenceforward continuously tainted by my I, which shows.
I am spoofing on the Beats today. It’s a shame, but that’s the way it is. I am after all forlorn, my wrist(s) are broken, I have fallen from my ladder. My phone.
I believe I can get home. Go home and—work on my splotch art. Always a tentative on-the-fly effort with permanent, disfigured results.
I fell in love with it. Love is a Practice. A failed practice. A failed letting go. Love is a failure of letting go.
Gallery. The word is elite.
This ebay is great.
My arm’s whine affecting my mind, a slight nausea of thinking—or maybe that’s the holiday?
I read it again and again and I still have no idea what he’s talking about. Just seems sad to me, but is that my idea or his?
Ashbery drives the emotion into metaphoric schemes.
I don’t really want to understand it.
I don’t want the poet’s sympathy.
Wrist issue.
Wrist misery.
Rising above, like a Buddhist, with no solid self.
Emotions rise up out of the unsolid self. Should I accept that living really belongs to my son now?
I am puzzled by the moldiness of man-made surfaces, the genial alignment of everything in the natural world.
I wrote so much no one would want to pick up one of my notebooks and wade into that.
Writing—sort of below par—under the surface. Aimless.
Writing without the mountains.
What a mess.
I find it all a hateful mess.
Part of me is just super fucking suspicious about this goddawful meaningless poetry. I can’t write anything like that! I think about the hermits pushing against the bounds of possible experience.
I think of the poets pushing, pushing out of bounds the wheelbarrows full of language. Clods, clots, clothoppers. Hamemers.
The foxes coughing in the mountains. The evil fox light. Lost lore of animals lost lore of fears. Our superstitions are gone now, transformed into bombers from the air. Our strange fear of foxes or wolves following, met with turbans and robes. We do not learn much about any of this, we don’t push through it. We just take it as it lays.
I am going to pull out “The Instruction Manual”—”as I sit looking out of a window of the building.” I want to write “The Questionnaire.” All of these ideas are depressing and messy, like litter. Like leaves. The dead brown leaves, everywhere, curled, curled. Every year, done, down, down.
I am resistant in so many ways.
Do I want to pay my parking tickets? Oh no, nothing is that fortunate.
Fortune. Fortune crusting.
This is a bad habit. Repetition.
Vague desire to study philosophy. A search for meaning. Then I remember I don’t believe in meaning. I believe in nouns. I could read a philosophy sprinkled liberally with nouns. And not abstract nouns either. Concrete.
I learned there is a different definition of project. At first,
I thought I had many projects. Now I realize I have only one.
How not to get hit by a car.
Can a sculptor capture such a subtle shading of emotion? No. Maybe a painter can.
Favorable to nouns. I am quite enamored of nouns. I adore their capacity for imagery, for correspondences. They shimmer with energy, living freely in the absence of verbs.
Note the differences: Anne and Sylvia, Remedios and Leonora.
I love the worn out ladies brave in Mexico.
I heard something on the radio yesterday about supermarkets and the vast surplus of food/calories we produce here in the US. The radio voices said—No wonder we are confused—due to the pressure of food marketing. I am immune to food marketing.
I close my eyes to it. I used to get overwhelmed in the supermarket, until I blinded myself. Every year, I buy fewer and fewer packaged goods. No meat. Less and less fish. Ordering herbs and tea in bulk, online. This is a project full of pleasure.
A possible sadness antidote.
I like the sensation of a loose form. Three pages at a sitting. Or thirteen fragments. Or 50 words. I feel safer. Enclosed. I am in a quieter, less hysterical space.
I am also reading the latest BANR (Best American Nonrequired Reading). I read the introductory material. I like it. I am there, on the fringes. Essentially light and non-required. I didn’t grasp that it was high school students. I like their giddy sensibilities.
Food is very important to me. I miss being able to cook, having a broken wrist makes it an ordeal. I like really tasty food. I like fruit smoothies. I love wine. I like vegetarian food—all the variety, none of the danger. I don’t think I could be vegan though. I like eggs and dairy too much.
One of the things that I love about Natalie is her ability to make judgments about people and say them out loud. It’s thrilling to hear her sum up a person, their behavior, their motivations, their unconscious fire, all rolled into one or two quick incisive statements. Initially, I just bought into everything she said. I had never experienced such a wise window opening onto other people. I was hungry for the guidance. Somehow, I had been misled, led to believe that everyone was a Child of God. Christian psychology is very flat and its behavioral modification systems are very dumb. I had no ability to read people, to differentiate between them. I was like a person, a woman, in an arranged marriage with everyone. As far as Natalie’s stories go, later I learned there might also be other points of view.
Some envy. I enjoyed a short story that included a line about envy.
I enjoyed John Ashbery’s line “I write in the afternoon.” It hit
me with a great impact. Why? Because I don’t like afternoons. They are a negligible, hateful time, a chunk of time to get through. I am optimistic in the morning (usually) and pessimistic in the afternoon. There’s a wish that I could heal this. What would a good afternoon look like? Sunshine? Satisfaction? Rest?
I don’t like any hour of the day.
Is there a character in this story? No. Yes. No.
I’m wishing for my own soundtrack. I don’t think I have ever really lived my life. Just stepped through it. Looking backwards, while walking forwards. That’s how I broke my wrist. It was windy at the time.
I walked down the hill, the easement nobody owns. I thought there might be some kids there, drinking, fucking, smoking. There are some white plastic chairs back there, a trio of them, but they were empty. I thought about Al ruining his life, and how Blair rejected his friendship. I liked the stucco look of that garage. It reminds me of Italy, a place where kids hang out and ruin their lives as well, I guess.