inaniintimate

Tantric object-oriented philosophy.

Is a moment a telescope?

Is reality retroactive?

"For the analytics the great enemies of human thought are fuzziness, non sequiturs, lack of clarity, poetic self-indulgence, and insufficiently precise terminology. I diagree with this threat assessment. In my view these are all relatively minor problems in comparison with shallowness, false dichotomies, lack of imagination, robotic chains of reasoning, and the aggressive self-assurance that typifies analytic philosophers at their worst."

--Graham Harman

Kate Zambreno's fabulous homage to the great Rebecca Loudon.

Susan Tedeschi on the headphones. Her blues reach me consistently.

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A lot of unsifted things roiling in me. Can't say that I'm feeling very positive these days. Still...

Got to see oldest daughter, M., this past week. Always a joy. She was in town from the East coast for a few days to help her sister, C., our youngest, after a surgery. We all took turns with babysitting, etc., for the grandkids, but M. did the lion's share.

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Had a great homemade meal tonight. Crab cakes, couscous, salad. Never underestimate the curative powers of real food.

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Watched a documentary about Godard and Truffaut this afternoon. That relationship has always been instructive for me.

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Reading an enormous amount. Still struggling with writing but seeing some glimmers of hope.

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Virtually all the chapbooks,pamphlets, etc, of my work that I thought were going to be published in the past and present year have fallen through for various reasons. This is not unusual in my experience. Still...a pissedoffness is starting to build in me. Be warned: I'm going to put a manuscript together this year that's getting out one way or another. And I'm going to get out and read somewhere too. I'm feeling the itch. It probably won't be pretty. It definitely won't be pretty. But I'm pretty certain that there will be some big fun. If only in my own mind.

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What is poetry anyway? A series of investigations is the simplest response. I've often spoken of poetry as an epistemological adventure. And that's true enough. Perhaps it's truer to speak of poetry as a series of mediations/interventions. Maybe poetry is a series of translations. Yeah. That.

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Twinkle, Twinkle

Fairies dance
A forbidden dance

One yearns
To learn.

Here and there
The Real constellates.

This hammer
Is exhausted.

Red stop lights
Run one down.

The sum of relations
Is not a math problem.

An assertion shored
Against a tidal wave.

The title of this piece
Is blank.

Beginnings are hard
To parse.

Success amplifies susceptibilities.

Pictures infuse the Subject.

Nets of quickening correspondences
Are falling from the sky.

Outsized antennae contradict
Accumulated conversations.

Translation anchors sensation.

One notices bonelessness.

Penetrations are bifurcated perceptions
(not portraiture).

Presence is the abstraction
Of luxurious reverie.

Representation is diminution.

Anything is particular.

One’s feelings are surrounded
By overweening anomalies.

Resistance is an object.

Bodies are unraveling maps
Of erotic deformation.

2 New Chapbooks by Lynn Behrendt

This is the Story of Things that Happened (Dusie, 2011)

I l-o-v-e this poem of negative and positive assertions. I l-o-v-e that it is comprised of “stories” about and not about the roundabout of contemporary existence. I l-o-v-e the dialectic which is established amidst a seeming welter of things and concepts. Relation is everything. And the sum of relations is not a math problem. It is an ever dissolving picture of one’s totality. As Behrendt writes toward the end of the piece:

This is a story about information
as an extreme sport.
This is a story about the life & death struggle
of a photograph.

This is the Story of Things that Happened is, I believe, a haunting poem of assertions shored up against a tidal wave of depression. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever read.

Acquiescence, (Dusie, 2011)

This little chapbook is a beautiful object: an accordion fold poem slipped inside of a sleeve.

Acquiescence is a dark and searching monologue about drowning and separations, uncertainty and despair. If This is the Story of Things that Happened confronts a tidal wave of depression, Acquiescence rehearses what it might mean to

sink down

into
it

black water
cold slow

water smooth
slimy water

swirl &
soak it

up, choke
on it

breathe it
in deep

cough
breathe more

of it
in

laden
soggy

sink into
nothing

a beautiful
concept

Behrendt's writing is charged with an ache for connection and understanding. She's a searcher. The end of the poem made me weep:

I don’t know
what it is

what anything is
and why everything

is a thing and why
this pains me so

and why it aches
and aches and aches

way way down
way way down

2 new gorgeous books of luminous dark matter from Lynn Behrendt. Poetry doesn’t get any better than this. I am in awe of this work.

Full-Frontal Poetry

Full-frontal ambience

Full-frontal hesitation

Full-frontal shadow play

Full-frontal otherings

Full-frontal rhetorics

Full-frontal laughter

Full-frontal asshole

Full-frontal frustration

Full-frontal fashion statement

Full-frontal monad

Full-frontal clock

Full-frontal blockage

Full-frontal carapace

Full-frontal parenting

Full-frontal stop

Full-frontal opening

Full-frontal question mark

Full-frontal Götterdämmerung

Full-frontal wtf