Thomas Fink and I are proceeding apace with the series of collaborative sestinas. We just settled on the end-words for #6.

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Check out Lars Palm's blog for Alex Gildzen's fun new e-book of photos--my non-photogenic self is included. As are Geof Huth, Kevin Killian, Richard Lopez, Thomas Meyer, Mark Young and others. The Mark Young photo is my favorite of the lot. Though, I have to say, Mr. Lopez is looking particularly dapper in a photo with his young son.

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Single digit temperatures here. At least today the wind's not blowing yet.

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A Taste for the Secret is a book of interviews with Derrida which was originally published in Italian as Il Gusto del Segreto. It's a very good book of interviews. I may want to write something about it later as I continue to attempt to figure out what interviews have meant to me. What I want to note now is how much more I like the Italian title than the English. Something about the expulsion of breath that it takes to say "gusto", I guess, conveys a more physical pleasure.

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I've been craving sea food lately. For lunch today had a couple dozen mussels. Mussels always remind me of my brother John. A day before he ran in the Boston Marathon for the first time we ate a mad number of mussels and calamari in a Massachusetts restaurant in the company of extended family.

I'm reminded too of eating excellent grilled octopus in a humble Greek diner with Geof, Nancy, Douglas and Barb this past Summer in Buffalo. That was a memorable meal of the first order.


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One of the hardest things to learn and re-learn about the practice of writing is patience.

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SNOW

Haven’t finished
Vanishing yet.

Forgot what
Was to be written next.

It’s a game
Of relentless whatevers.

Anything good on?

If I haven't communicated with you in the last few months or haven't communicated with you very well, it has nothing to do with you or my affection for you. It has to do with my mental state and with needing to somehow clear a space for thought and feeling.

The year I spent working on Interpenetrations of Views,the exchange with Geof Huth which fills 680 manuscript pages, is only one of the things that derailed me. But it was a major one. Let me be clear, it was also one of the great experiences of my life, getting to know Geof better and becoming friends. But it threw me off my game.

We produced a manuscript which should probably be edited down to a quarter of its size to make a thing of value to others. But this is not about that.

In the past I've used blogs in an attempt to psych myself up to where I could overcome what is at times a debilitating self-consciousness. I'm unsure how much sense that last sentence will make to you, dear reader. Let's just say that I've never been at home in my own skin and that blog posts, poems, and etc are how I try to intervene in my reality.

Am I making any sense at all? I've always, almost always to be more accurate, felt that all experience is provisional but absolute at the same time. It's what one has and it can be fucked up so easily.

Public apology to JBR for a private exchange some time ago. Utmost respect for what you do. You're an artist. I like you. That's sincere. But I get creeped out, a little, when you sample my work without altering it. It feels a little like a violation.

Writing doesn't come easily to me. I fail more often than I succeed. I struggle with limits I am overly conscious of. I have no facility, as such.

It is for me, in the end, about what can be distilled from a mess. I don't want to gas on.

On the bike this morning finished reading Henry James' "The Beast in the Jungle."

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Listening now to a live recording of Jeff Beck playing "Cause We've Ended As Lovers" with the extraordinary Tal Wilkenfeld on bass.

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In the midst, too, of reading and thinking about The Body: An Essay by Jenny Boully, a text comprised of footnotes, which is jamming kind of interestingly with thoughts about Derrida on Jean-Luc Nancy. The body which is not one.

The Boully book was published by Essay Press. I've read 2 other books from this press recently( Adorno's Noise by Carla Harryman and I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time by Kristen Prevallet). I admire its project.

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About a month ago I sent EXPOSURES to a publisher I don't know to see if it would get a reaction. Not even a response to acknowledge receipt. I'm not surprised.

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James' "The Beast in the Jungle" has to be read slowly. James' prose style demands that. Not unlike Derrida or late Joyce. It's "about" waiting and recognition,deferral and consequences (James' prose style and the story as well).

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In my day job I interact with a lot of people. Outside of my job, I really don't. I'm pretty good with people on a one-to-one basis, not so good with groups. I've grown to hate public speaking. Which is funny since I loved it when I was a kid. I did plays in high school and a stint of debate club in college. I once considered going into Law/politics. (My BA is in Political Science.) Somewhere along the way self-consciousness in public situations became almost crippling.

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I write poetry, I suppose,because-- oh, let me more accurately say that I've been trying to learn how to write poetry for a very long time now--because I've come to believe that experience is a cocoon of threads which can only be unraveled and parsed through the kind of epistemology that poetry is. That poetry is philosophy that can carry a tune, philosophy that shakes its ass.

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When Derrida famously said in the documentary film that he would want to know about the sex lives of great philosophers(because it is something they didn't write about) but would not want to reveal the details of his own...Now that was interesting.

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I've lost the habit of daily blogging but keep flirting with the practice of blogging to see what place it can have at this point. Hard to know. No longer very sure whom I'm writing for, speaking to.

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Last night went to bed very early. Was extremely depressed and had a pinched nerve in my neck. Dreamt I had a personal conversation, across a table, with Charles Bernstein.(We haven't spoken in years.) It was an extremely vivid and relaxed dream. Strangely, this morning I discovered Charles had recently linked on his blog to my poem "PARTS (30 Things for Geof Huth)" which can be found below.

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Drinking Sicilian wine. Still listening to Jeff Beck.

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PARTS

(30 Things for Geof Huth)


Thread that
doesn’t belong
to it.

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Waiting,
separate.

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Undeterminable
emphases.

*

Effects of
affective reiterations.

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Something
(nothing)
happens.

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Shadow
of a gesture
on a wall.

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Pronoun:
envelope
or knife?

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Detached thread,
car tread,
frays, fades.

*


Separations,
exchange values,
soluble senses.

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Non-

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Body parts
weighing experience.

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Exceeded by secession.

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Another
(again).

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Unconcluding

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Beginning between
less than
full stops.

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Autobiography of
a paren.

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Opaque elsewhere,
everywhere.

*

Loss leaders.

*




No tell retail.

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Bent footnotes.

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Demi-hemi-hesitations, interruptions, slips.

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Voices,
holes.

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Absent mirror.

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Again and again
(no gain).

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Windows,
floors,
doors,
tears.

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Eyes are.

*

One (always already).

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Break
(brake).

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Faux patter.

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Reattachmeant.

I've been working hard and thinking hard but hardly writing. In addition to working for a living and whatnot I've been moving snow around every day for the last week and a half or so. We've probably about 20 inches of snow compacted onto the ground and some scary ice and temperatures. Last night coming back from an out of town public health training session had a true white knuckle driving experience on the glassy roads.

Am thinking a lot about Derrida and speech act theory;thinking a lot about performatives, about language that does something. Am thinking also about photographs as utterances, as expressions of ideologies/subjective views of the world/experience. There may yet be a long poem to emerge from this meditation. I'm not sure.

Also I'm not sure I can blog any longer in the personal way I once did. I'm not sure where blogging in general figures in the mix these days. I'm struggling to find a form which will accomodate a mess yet to be made.

|Only his
torso, arms
and cock|

fit (in
the mirror).

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Very early this New Year's Day I wrote the above ten words on the stationary (or since I write on it so often, perhaps it should be called the stationery) bike.

Hours later, after re-watching Derek Jarman's short film Wittgenstein, I remembered once reading that a possible derivation of my last name is "maker of brackets." I wondered: is that what I am as a poet? A maker of brackets?

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It's 11:35 AM as I write this post. The poetry fragment which I began with was written about 6 hours ago. I've been obsessing over it during that span of time. On the one hand, it's purely descriptive of the image I would want on the cover of EXPOSURES, if that work ever sees the light of day. On the other hand, it represents the beginning of a raw clarity I'm struggling toward.