Guide to The Difficulties Record

Today I've added about 80 words to the new long poem. That's a lot for me. The piece is problematic. Which is keeping me interested. 22 pages into the thing.

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Made a terrific sea food pasta for lunch. I stir fryed shrimp, bay scallops and calamari in olive oil with red pepper flakes. Added a splash of lemon juice and some parsley. Tossed it all with whole grain pasta. Simple and wonderful. One of my favorite kind of cooking. Good ingredients and true depths of flavor. The broth was memorable. It has me wanting to do a fish stew or cioppino.

I sometimes dream of slurping oysters, eating octopus. I'm always hungry.

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Nature scares me.
Human nature most of all.

Parts and Other Pieces is the title of my next book. Mark Young's Otoliths press is slated to publish it in a couple of months. It's an 80 page book made up of 4 long poems. It's getting some interesting prepublication feedback. I'm cautiously optimistic that the thing is going to be read.

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It's a beautiful day in Northeastern Ohio. Something I haven't been able to say too often over the course of the last 6 months. Between April and May we had 13 inches of rain. And don't get me started on how much snow I moved over the course of the winter.

It's good to feel the sun and smell the flowers, hear birds and children playing outside.

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Inside and outside: the theme recurs over and over again in my thought.

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Am reading many things and working on a new long poem. Among the reading:

Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics by Timothy Morton (Harvard, 2007) is a treasure. Morton systematically thinks through the ways in which ideas of nature impede our ability to come to terms with the environment.

Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell (Doubleday, 2011) is a timely and much needed new biography of the man who, in the late part of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries, probably was unique in the degree to which he fought for social justice in these United States. He helped make labor law, he helped the racially oppressed, he created the lawyer advocate, he defended my hero Eugene Debs! Much of his work is being threatened now or being undone. Read this book. Think about this history. Because it is returning with a vengeance. The rich are rising and trampling much of value beneath their feet. Anti-trust laws and union rights are being swept away. The ever reverberating consequences of insatiable greed...


There Is No Year by Blake Butler (Harper Perennial, 2011) is a beautifully realized novel of suffocating surreality wherein a father, mother, son, various doppelgangers, houses, boxes and others evolve toward a telescoping, uhh, resolution.

As to my long poem in progress, I'm as uncertain as ever. Stay tuned.

No thing
Isn’t connected

To some
Other thing,

To some
Unexpected thing.

Separations are
Social constructs.

I've always agreed with Nietzsche's claim that the only way to improve your style is to improve your thoughts, but also believe that the best way to improve your thoughts is to improve your style. There is a tendency to think that philosophy is about explicit propositional content, and that style is merely pretentious ornament plastered on top of explicit propositions. Yet this assumes that correct representational statements about the world are possible, which is precisely what I deny. As I see it, truth is a matter of allusion, not of representational picture-drawing. To improve as a writer means primarily to improve one's allusive and suggestive power. We should not say ‘there is no truth', since this vapid relativism is irresponsibly empty. But we should also not demand a frictionless contact with the real, as many scientistic and absolutist philosophers do. Instead, approaching the truth requires something like insinuation or innuendo. That's precisely what style is: saying something without explicitly saying it. A style is the tacit background condition in which all explicit utterances are made. Philosophical breakthroughs are always rhetorical breakthroughs. And as Aristotle already knew, rhetoric does not mean ‘devious non-rational persuasion', but ‘establishing the tacit background conditions for later explicit statement.'

-- Graham Harman

If philosophy is psychosis
If poetry is a ventriloquist act
If the robot’s notebook pages have been filled out and overwritten

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What surrounds
one’s aporias?

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Keywords

I'm more and more obsessed by the keywords in a poet's work. Those words which recur again and again that obviously have a strong resonance. Creeley had many--particular, occasion. I could go on and on in this vein.

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I have a strong sense memory of being with David Bromige in Northern California. Our conversation turned to Creeley's work. David did a pitch perfect riff on Creeley talking and stressed the word delicious in such a, well, Creeleyesque manner that I knew David thought a lot about keywords too.

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(to be continued?)