Distribution Automatique

Friday, February 13

Bemsha Swing (Jonathan Mayhew) {click here} makes the point that
"an obscure novel by Warsh or
Fanny Howe or Michael Brownstein"
might be every bit as good as any
mainstream novelist and I agree.
Now that I'm packing to move one
of the books I let go of was
"Self-Reliance" by Michael Brownstein.
In its ability to evoke the 70's, the
New York literary scene in particular,
I can think of no better source. Along
with "The Ice Storm" by Rick Moody, this
book is an excellent primer for 70's
time travel.
Grolier Books Issues Alert {click here}

via ...Something Slant {click here}
Notebook: 5/16/88

[scribbled on a mimeographed agency memo
"Training Reaction Form" dated May 16, 1988;
i.e., "The purpose of the training was clear-
strongly agree, agree, don't know, disagree,
strongly disagree, etc]

Story with *bureaucratic* atmosphere.

Bells, loudspeaker announcements,
*all the accoutrements*-

Wonderful example: *loudspeaker going
while speaker is speaker*

*all such* "contradictions"

qualities which press me
*against* bureaucracy

Rooms w/chipped paint-
odd colors- pink

Collage (old peeling off wall)
plastic couches
graffitti on walls

filthy bathrooms
sounds of a toilet running & running

phone ringing & ringing

Thursday, February 12

notebook: 10/28/86

Refrain

Listen
When the words
Won't


**

History


warrior
worrier

Wednesday, February 11

notebook: 8/1/86


As long as you live
You can wait for your chance
The unwritten poem exists
Like an imagined dance

**

notebook: 10/3/83

in the event of solitude
after a time of waiting
purer tones will follow

the precise hour
is vague
the time of collection
varied
after a pure stop
vanish
listen

place things back
put them in order
collect your thoughts
organize your time

disrupt the interval
bend time to follow
circle facts
with varied tones

in the surest interval
repetition is foregrounded
mostly by memory
this is precisely matched
to bring the shrill tones
to a halt

freedom
is not a
counter-command
the release
is more than
the subtotal

characteristic in cities
is the primary concentration of value
what remains is more than
the simple dictation of virtues

to release what is there
it is insufficient to let go
or the secondary resonance
will occur out of phase


::fait accompl:: opened a year ago today with this posting.

   Tuesday, February 11 ::

I take it as a given that the past, present and future are one. One big bang, hey? This is not meant to imply some kind of fatalism. I can remember, hear, observe and predict: source of what admittedly sketchy presentiments. previews, protections I might obtain. It is a vantage point, a perch, a post to watch out from. "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (F.Scott Fitzgerald).
Special thanks to Ron Silliman and Gary Sullivan. Welcome, all: readers, surfers, bloggers, friends.

:: Nick Piombino 7:38 PM [+] ::
. . . . . .

Tuesday, February 10

Notebook: 11/2/87

If one hates systems enough, one
is in danger of accepting no system
at all. This choice quickly leads to
anarchy and stasis. And stasis, no
matter how monumental, is passed by.

Otherwise,how could one have
seen so much moving by so quick?...
In the past we had truths, now we
have quotes. The aura once attached to
words is now eroding, and with these
auras all the past beliefs.

The past romanticisms, attachments, all
eroding. One holds belief passionately
long enough and the shape one's reality
will conform to it. In this transition many
familiar things will disappear. Didn't
Walter Benjamin look for the pores of
revolution in the changing
values of substantives, as revealed
in the auras around an object?

11/4/87

The religions of the future
will perhaps concern themselves
with the art of sharing.

11/7/87

Deciding is always the hardest
part of any action.

11/11/87

The world the way we seem to
remember it. Then I conceived this
as a narrative- someone comes here
from a world in which chance plays
very little part- a much more
relaxed world. Coming here and observing
the life of a poet is his assignment-
but meanwhile the idea that someone
can die out of mismanaging their own
actuality as bodies is incredible
to this person.

11/12

Numbers, like words, offer incomplete meanings.
There is a residue of mistrust
That gathers around our most faithful estimates.
Quantity confuses maybe because
It is inexchangeable with quality.
In the long run quality and quantity cannot connect.
They separate, like water and oil.
Numbers tell is nothing about what is good.
They speak mainly of what is left.
Notebook: 12/11/87

Key Grip (Poem)

All elements come forth to play
their role in the existence of the
poem.This is the essential state of'
equivalence which underlies the
poem's actuality and it is from this
state of reduced specificity
that such a diversity of meanings and
uses can interact and can continue to
cohabit the same bounded system.

In order to continue to remain
actual, any particular thing must repeat
itself or be repeated indefinitely. This is not
true of a more general system which may be
maintained by its presence through
the entire structure. Very
likely the
overall continuity between substantiality
and experience resides in the intermixture
of fluctuating states that
confounds the entrance of new
types of conglomorations of
interacting forces at the boundary zone
of the object.

Later:

It is the year 2142. A letter is
being written to the International Society
of Psycho-Cybernetic Counselors.
Glen Linang is the the Senior
Dean of the International
Society. For the past two years he
has been studying the writing of a
small group of writers in the late 20th
Century. He had discovered the writings
by accidentally coming across a piece of antique
"software" whilch contained the key to
a record keeping system which lay
unused for decades in the City College
of New York library.

12/1

The pathos of life lies in the disparity
between the actuality of a specific thing
we are focussed on at any given moment
and the fact of life itself.

Then again, this observation when
depended on to justify too much can
dampen the sense of reality.

The other is a melody
which exists most of all in its own right.

Monday, February 9

Only twenty minutes left of Monday but it is still
Marianne Shaneen's {click here}
birthday. Happy Birthday, Marianne!
"*Praise of Aphorisms*-A good aphorism is too hard for the
tooth of time and is not consumed by all millenia, although it
serves every time for nourishment: thus it is the great paradox
of literature, the intransitory and the changing, the food that
always remains esteemed, like salt, and never loses its savor,
as even that does."

Friedrich Nietzsche

Notebook: 12/15/87

Teaching and movement are instincts.
Light and dark are contained
in their images.

Light is a constant thing that
comes and goes. Dark is
in a hurry and is (always) inevitable.

On account of light we are not
necessarily watchful. With dark
advancing we are forced to advance.

12/26/87

One of and one. (Poem)
The Age of Hoots (Poem)

12/27/87

Sitting in the most relaxed position
I can find, I go into my
professional poet's revery.This
revery acts as a direction-
finder, in it I become a sail
placed in the winds of my mind
and hopefully by the end I've found
the starting point of some writing.

These notes are markers depicting
those starting points.

Conduits are being constructed
between voices. You can listen to
them at the margins. Placed into
type, these wooded constructions
become mannikins you are
willing to spend real time with...
and then, willy-nilly we can talk
about it. Oh, Carlos! I am tracing
the connections between the back-beat and
the image on the screen. Didn't you
have the same hunch I did, that this
is all a screen-test for something
else? The garden fits the image
of eternity. Children are happily playing on
the grass while the earth below conceals
the dead with cosmic sympathy.
(Ponge,*Le Pre*)

Also, do not be afraid of your informers.
Poetics found at the line between
what can be known and what can
be touched. An inscription at the
boundary between what can be
seen and what can be held. An
area is encircled where a small
bit of time is placed on a slide.
Later or much later we look at
it. Again- it is a *terrain* that is
depicted. Some of us stay there, while
others move on, while still others
come and go. I repeat: if your
source of information frightens you,
something is being misconstrued. There it
is again; how many times I have used
this word this month. Earth,
air, water and fire considered
as freedoms. What are the freedoms
of a particlle, a specific unit
of charge in the physical universe?

"Look at the clock which becomes language."
says Tristan Tzara. (*Mr. Saturn*)

An adroit fusion of the obvious
and the repressed, a willing
juxtaposition of the precious and
the oppressed. The revolutionary
as an empowering person rather
than a self-indulgent,
self-destructive person.

12/28

Poetry: nice work if you can get
it.

12/29

Poetry: A "foreign" language I
read and write but I don't live in its
native land.

I thought of titling this "Sotto voce"
or "Native Land."

At all events, writing is an
elliptical condensation of time.

Sunday, February 8

An interview with Gill Ott from
Banjo: Poets Talking (CA Conrad) {click here}
via transdada (kari edwards)

Note: kari edwards reads tomorrow
details on the sidebar
I found this fraying poster today among some
notes I hadn't looked at for a long time. It was
pinned to my day job office bulletin board for many years.
I've seen versions of the quote many times since,
but I like this translation
more than any other I've seen.

"Until one is committed there is hesitancy,
the chance to drawback, always ineffectiveness,
concerning all acts of initiative (and creation),
there is one elementary truth the ignorance of
which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:
that the moment one definitely commits oneself,
then Providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would
never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of
events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour
all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and
material assistance, which no man could
have dreamed would have come his way.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Begin It Now."

-Goethe-
from *The King of Time*
Velimir Khlebnikov
translated b Paul Schmidt
Harvard UP, 1985

"To The Artists of the World
A Written Language for Planet Earth
A Common System of Hieroglyphs
for the People of Our Planet

We have long been searching for a program that would act
something like a lens, capable of focusing the combined rays of
the work of the artist and the work of the thinker toward a
single point where they might join in a common task and been able
to ignite even the cold essence of ice and turn it to a blazing
bonfire. Such a program, the lens capable of directing together
your fiery courage and the cold intellect of the thinker, has now
been discovered.

The goal is to create a common language shared by
all the peoples of this third satellite of the Sun, to invent written
symbols that can be understood and accepted by our entire star,
populated as it is with human beings and lost here in the universe.
You can see that such a task is worthy of the time we live in.
Painting has always used a language accessible to everyone. And the
Chinese and Japanese peoples speak hundreds of different languages,
but they read and write in one single language. Languages have
betrayed their glorious beginnings. There was once a time when words
served to dispel enmity and make the future transparent and peaceful,
and when languages, proceeding in stages, united the people of
(1) the cave, (2) a settlement, (3), a tribe or kinship group, (4), a state,
into a single rational world, a union of those who shared one
single auditory instrument for the exchange of values and ideas. One
savage caveman understood another and laid his blind weapons aside.
Nowadays sounds have abandoned their past functions and serve
the purposes of hostility; they have become differentiated auditory
instruments for the exchange of rational wares; they have divided
multilingual mankind into different camps involved in tariff wars, into
a series of verbal marketplaces beyond whose confines any given
language loses currency. Every system of auditory currency claims
supremacy, and so languages as such serve to disunite mankind
and wage spectral wars. Let us hope that one single written language
may henceforth accompany the longterm destinies of mankind and
prove to be the new vortex that unites us, the new integrator
of the human race. Mute graphic marks will reconcile the cacaphony
of languages.

To the artist who work with ideas falls the task of creating
an alphabet of concepts, a system of basic units of thought
from which words may be constructed.

The task of artists who work with paint is to provide graphic
symbols for the basic units of our mental processes.

We have now accomplished that part of that labor which
was the thinkers' task, we stand now on the first landing
of the staircase of thinkers, and we find there the artists
of China and Japan, who were already ahead of us, and our
greetings to them!..."
from *Public Domain*
Gill Ott
Potes and Poets Press
1989

"Language is no one's. Never was. The true site of all language
is the pairing, writer to reader, speaker to listener. The
poem is a public event, host to a multitude of private entries,
a defined anarchy. Understood and practiced in this way, it is
powerful.

The regimentation of meaning is criminal, even in the least
increment. Language is at once ambiguous and persuasive
enough to offer itself as a tool to advantage and oppression,
and seen as a medium, neutral. Complicity in this crime, as
auditor/actors as much as speakers, contributes heartily to our
public experience and behavior, as consumers, workers,
citizens."
from *Fits of Dawn*
Joseph Ceravolo
C Press, 1965
published by Ted Berrigan

"Coyote! Swivel! innocent
java texas upside survival pawn
of gazelles Let preamble!
July easily darkness serious fussing have
'Oh raffle of drunkenness woven
released adirondack whatever succint
l'ete with cello Guilty supreme
of shoulders, tattoo doze and yet sky Yes!'
taboo algonquin remedial
orgone obtruse poppily reefs
Grateful ranch! Wallop ranch of
fin!"
Politicians Sounding Like A Broken Record?
Read These Blogs!

A midnight menagerie on
Moonshine Highways (Amy Bernier} {click here}

**
"A case for hallucinogens: writing poetry."
Right now on Process Documents (Ryan Fitzpatrick) {click here}

**
Score 19 is Out {click here}
edited by Crag Hill.

**
"that stressy nutty feeling of fingernails running down your psyche."
Nada Gordon (ululations) {click here}
riffs on her own reading, and that of two others, at Bluestockings

**
An important small press conference in Ithaca, New York
discussed in detail by Josh Corey (Cahiers de Corey){click here}

**
"The apartheid might have legally ended, but for
as many as 90% of the women of Afghanistan,
these "reforms" — such as the setting up of a
women's ministry in Kabul — are little more than a technicality."
Looking for true political sensitivity? Check out
Froth (Marianne Shaneen {click here}