The sign reads
"On Site Alterations."

I want
To stop
And ask
If anything
Can be done
With me.

Arranging myself,
I wander
About attributes,

The nearness
Of thirst
And thrust.

You ask
If I said
Enemy or
Enter me.

Entropy is
A given.

My Theory of
The Subject is
A translucent curtain.

Deeply saddened to hear that Leslie Scalapino has died. I feel fortunate to have spent time with her on a couple different occasions--in San Francisco and here in Ohio. I've some things I want to write down about what Leslie's work has meant to me, but later when I don't feel like crying.

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Am listening to the new Keith Jarrett/Charlie Haden collab, Jasmine.

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Geof Huth's new blog 365 Ltrs offers up a poem a day in the form of a letter to a different addressee. I was the soft target of poem #2 and received a signed hardcopy version in today's mail. It was one of the most thoughtful gifts I've ever received. Again, I feel a little weepy.

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I've been on something of a tear reading work by and about Ralph Waldo Emerson (who, by the way, shares a birthday with Geof Huth). Just finished On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson by Branka Arsic (Harvard, 2010). I really like this passage:

"Rather, as Hegel claims in complete agreement with Emerson, philosophical thinking is about affirming something by exposing the subject to the 'predicate'."

Which reminds me, I need to decide what to do with my "unpublishable" manuscript Exposures.

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Connections and disconnections. That Emerson was not systematic in his thought, that his thinking was relational--performative--has a lot to do with what attracts me to him. Just as Leslie Scalapino's work always seemed to me a kind of phenomenology of the present, unfolding like a moment of really experienced conscious time.

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I'm groping. With no sense of destination, no place to go.

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Earlier today I had a ranging conversation with a local bookstore owner. I told him that I thought that where one locates oneself on the ideological continuum really depends on little more than the amount of empathy one feels toward others. If you can't put yourself in another's shoes, then whole worlds of possibility are closed off. If everything is ego-oriented, if everything is about oneself, then there's going to be trouble. No one can be all things to all people; but aren't we defined as much by what we do as what we don't do, by what it doesn't even occur to us to try to do?



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One of the books I bought today from my friend: Blasphemy: Art that Offends by S Brent Plate

(Black Dog Publishing, 2006).



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This past Christmas I received a digital voice recorder which I've only just now, months later, taken out of its plastic wrap. I decided I wasn't going to open it up until I had a project to use it for. Now I have the idea about what to use it for, I just don't know how to use the recorder. It looks somewhat complicated for such a tiny little thing.



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Last Summer we bought our first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share. We're doing it again this year. Every week we receive a box of fresh, locally grown produce. Today we got our first one of the season: radishes, leaf lettuce, green onions, strawberries, and brown eggs.



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Anthony Braxton and company batting away on the stereo.



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Rainy, humid day.



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What is a picture? What is an image?



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There's a passage in Emerson's journals that I find interesting: "Never can love make consciousness and ascription equal in force. There will always be the same gulf between me & thee as between original and picture."



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In Vollmann's Kissing the Mask there's a recurring riff about relations between a man and woman being about the pleasure of crossing an abyss.



*



The fascinations of the mask.



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There's so much I don't know. And I, myself, am so unknown (even by myself).



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Sexual desire. Wanting to touch and be touched. Wanting to be open to surprise. Wanting to be surprised.



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Where does one find oneself in terms of thinking about the role of waiting in one's life?



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After a hiatus I'm again trying to win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. It's one of my few ambitions. Hi Karri!



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New & Highly Recommended

It's pure serendipity that the 49th book to bear the Otoliths imprint just happens to have the title that it does.....



7 x 7

Crag Hill

56 pages,

Page size 8½" x 8½"

Cover image by Nico Vassilakis

Otoliths 2010

ISBN: 978-0-9806025-7-9

$13.45 + p&h

URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/7-x-7/10899413



Implicitly comparing a book to a deck of cards, and that deck of cards in turn to the world of social violence we’re dealt, Crag Hill stakes his ante on the power of poetry to witness and document the multiply-layered, self-inflicted insanity of US daily life in the Bush years. As readers we become participants and are thus empowered to say no to the game of death. —Maria Damon



One of the most important things I look for in poetry is something I can believe—something without posturing or postmodern cynicism or post-anything for that matter: something that stands outside of facile labels, something (disorientingly/ seemingly) simple that makes me see and hear and feel—and more importantly, makes me believe—in the world, in poetry, in the process of poesis. Crag Hill’s poems make me believe and listen—and more importantly—make me want to listen. And best of all, they are far from simple and believe in a chance-laden process. They make our world. These are poems fiercely engaged with/in our current and tragic socio/ political/ecological moment and I am deeply grateful for them, because gratitude is the beginning of understanding. These poems remind me that rage and discontent is the genesis of change, that "death is death"—such a necessary reminder in times of such alienation from it. Let us now go make and change, listening to this poet’s example. —Christopher Arigo



"Scattered parts/now lie about what happened." 7 X 7 parses the dizzying bomb crater sized duplicities of the thoroughly mediated, mediatized and militarized zeitgeist which we have collectively dealt ourselves into. Crag Hill is looking to see where the proverbial chips are falling. And he's playing with a full deck. —Tom Beckett

An Onto-epistemological Question

Why do I always have to be the man?

I'm happy for Rae Armantrout's success, acclaim, etc. It's deserved. I am dismayed, though, by reviewers' tendency to use her success as an occasion to dismiss--or place under erasure-- other L=writing practitioners. I'm not surprised though.

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Am reading a lot: Zizek's new one, Living in the End Times, Vollmann's Kissing the Mask, Foucault's lecture Manet and the Object of Painting, Schuyler's Uncollected Poems, Bernstein's Selected, and a bunch of Emerson stuff, etc.

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Submitted a performance proposal for the Avant Writing Symposium at Ohio State in August. Am trying not to invest too much hope in any sort of idea of acceptance.

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Last night I watched EXAMINED LIFE, a film by Astra Taylor. The film spends time with Cornel West, Avital Ronnell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor. It is a gem.

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All sorts of tightly braided desires beginning to fray. I can never think about erosion without thinking that it is mostly eros (to employ for the umpteenth time one of my favorite Bromige devices).

*

Listening to Anais Mitchell's Hadestown. It's making me want to go back and watch some of those old Cocteau movies.

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Recently spent a few days in Connecticut visiting family. My parents, three siblings, some but not all spouses, and various nieces and nephews gathered to celebrate my brother John's 50th birthday. A family tradition, in recent years, has been to assemble scrapbooks celebrating significant events like 50th birthdays. I assembled and edited one for John. It included anecdotes, photos, news clippings, collages, letters and stories from numerous parties. During his party at a restaurant many of these items were read aloud and passed about, often by the people that created them. It was a memorable and emotionally rich occasion. Especially since I don't very often see my extended family.

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Families are petri dishes.

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The idea of the examined life as the precondition of serious thought, for philosophy, goes back to Plato. To love wisdom, one must take oneself apart.

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Is safety
an accident?

You had me
at "epistemological
paradigm."