for the next month, all U.S. dollahz proceeds from sales of Amy De’Ath’s poetry pamphlet CARIBOU will go to Occupy Oakland to support them in their new venture. GO HERE to get yourself some poetry with a side order of SMASH THE STATE. or, uh, non-violent protest. or however you wanna call it.
Marianne Morris.
Poetry. Outrage. Nonsense.
COMMITMENT
BAD PRESS • ASK ME ANYTHING
The Portal of Lost Wanting
Poetry. Outrage. Nonsense.
COMMITMENT
BAD PRESS • ASK ME ANYTHING
The Portal of Lost Wanting
don't fetishise the revolutionary other, just give them your money
when sad administer self to softness / debt of thunder / i am sorry
birdengine asked: why is it that cannot lay an egg?
perhaps problems is to lie? egg lay in lap of crescent moon, hang from hub of moon. perhaps problem is, if not egg, moon.
“Having participated in past protests by the Writers’ Union of Canada on the lawns outside Parliament, Wah is aware of the view that the current government regime has not always been supportive of the arts. Last month, he told the Globe & Mail that he is looking forward to the opportunity to “engage with that paradox of politics and poetry,” given that “all creativity is political.”
— http://thetyee.ca/Books/2012/01/23/Fred-Wah-Poet-Laureate/
Damn, it done changed. Back when our program was so lame, we couldn’t even draw 40 grand for a football game.
yo imma talk some trash for three minutes now about Keston Sutherland’s Hot White Andy (go give it your precious time here because all critique is an order of fascination, right) because it seems as though being Pissed Off is the primary reason for me blogging anything at the moment and well, i’m temporarily Pissed Off now that it has suddenly occurred to me that the section where KS instructs the reader to look up the poem’s references at lion.chadwyck.com is the most pompous and elitist maneuver in the history of pompous elitist maneuvers a) because you can’t access that “lion chadwyck” (?!) sheeit without a membership which you will usually only have if you are the member of a university and not all universities subscribe to this service and b) because it leaves no room for independent critique, it is basically saying that there is only one way to read this poem, that that way is through literary history, that you must yourself go and scramble to find out where these little morsels of text are, as you eat them, yum yum, and then write up a nice essay about it eviscerating the grand soliloquy of pater nostrum colostrum as you go, and be grateful about the bountiful plenitude of things to fill an academy with. SORRY BUT SOMEONE’S GOTTA SAY PEACE OUT Y’ALL look the fuck out for my paper at the POETRY & SOURCE conference in Plymouth in May cuz headz be gone roll
“ICE-COLD BITCHES MELT DOWN WHEN IN THE CLUTCH”
— method man / raekwon / Ice Cream
GENIUS DOESN’T STEAL, ASSHOLE STEALS
i’m totally fed up of discovering sneaky theft in literature of other literature, you always hear that refrain about how geniuses steal but if you ask me its tons and tons of bullshit - geniuses don’t steal, ASSHOLES STEAL. jacques rancière, you ASSHOLE, you nonchalantly chiefed a crucial passage in Plato’s Phaedrus for your stupid pointless tree-wasting masterpiece Politics and Aesthetics or whatever and passed it off as your own, i am so glad i uncovered this BLATANT THIEVERY before using the quotation as an epigraph to my book, more fool me for not having whiffed the now blatant stench of appropriation that shall colour our dealings forthwith.
Rancière is talking about Plato explicitly, but does not use quotation marks to enclose the comment that writing, ‘en s’en allant rouler à droite et à gauche, sans savoir à qui il faut ou il ne faut pas parler, l’écriture détruit toute assise légitime de la circulation de la parole, du rapport entre les effets de la parole et des positions des corps dans l’espace commun.’ What effectively happens is that he makes Plato’s idea way less interesting by occluding it with the typically critical-theoretical nonsense that makes me want to throw books against walls - it isn’t just about writing anymore, but about how the stage ‘disturbs the clear partition of identities, activities, and spaces’. did you ever hear anything less interesting in your entire life?
here is Plato’s originating idea, as God and the Winged Horses and the Painful Buds of the Sprouting Tendons and Muscles of Wings intended it.
PLATO (writing as Socrates in the Phaedrus): Writing, you know, Phaedrus, has this strange quality about it, which makes it really like painting: the painter’s products stand before us quite as though they were alive; but if you question them, they maintain a solemn silence. So, too, with written words: you might think they spoke as though they made sense, but if you ask them anything about what they are saying, if you wish an explanation, they go on telling you the same thing, over and over forever. Once a thing is put in writing, it rolls about all over the place, falling into the hands of those who have no concern with it just as easily as under the notice of those who comprehend; it has no notion of whom to address or whom to avoid. And when it is ill-treated or abused as illegitimate, it always needs its father to help it, being quite unable to protect or help itself.
Maybe that’s what’s going on here with Rancière, he needs his daddy to hold his hand and pet his hair. I AM SICK OF FRENCH MALE THEORISTS! THEY SHOULD GO EAT A STACK OF CHEESE AND COMB THEIR SIDE PARTINGS THE OTHER WAY!
Socrates Describes Your Ex-Boyfriend
The boy is forced to follow with indignant cries to heaven, still not realising the fundamental truth; he should not in the first place have yielded to a lover, to a man necessarily out of his mind; a non-lover, a man perfectly in his senses, is what it should have been. The wrong choice means surrendering oneself to a man who is disloyal, bad-tempered, jealous, offensive, harmful to one’s income, harmful to one’s physical being, most harmful of all to the development of one’s soul; and there neither is nor ever can be anything of more real importance in heaven or earth than the soul. (Plato, PHAEDRUS, 241)
there ought to be no limits in language. which means that Ed Dorn may say what he likes about the gutter but it also means that i may say fuck him as freely as i like. but this extends into other things, other social things other than poems
(which are social things).
free poetry
i just found these recordings of readings from the Poetry Project Marathon at St Mark’s Church in New York City on New Year’s Day 2012 which i had the good fortune to attend, i hesitate to say anything about it at all at least partly because i am still shy of the personal a, and b because there are facets of the personal which are really magnificently uninteresting and horrendous i still don’t know how poetry gets away with them and equally how it could seek to be constituted by anything else, even as i try continually to mash the personal and the general into one crystalline fist / rainbow growth — sucking a sugared lemon — and how do you write poetry without the personal, and how do you understand the world outside of the subject-object thing if you aren’t levitating in a cells-dissolving present moment which prevents even simple things like making stew — okay but CAConrad, Patti Smith and John Giorno were particularly stunning that day, each touching on particular things about poetry-if-you-ask-me that hurt, Conrad (‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? how about don’t kill and say whatever you want’), Smith in gratitude and plenty, and JG’s assertion about poetry resonating in particular as ‘a noble effort, doomed, but the only choice’, oh woe poetry with your broken old breaking old heart, being large and small by turns every other day, last night SO SMALL, the night before EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD. anyway it was good to feel so resolutely immersed in my fellow noble doomed creatures of craft that day, an auspicious start to the year, walking home in the cold dark cupping a small object in my palm imagining it as a concrete metonymy for grace———-you know, when poetry isn’t free it’s cheap, and that’s one of the best things about it, there is no such thing as expensive poetry and if there was it would suck
