Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

emergent

part
out of
forth : rising into

waves
suddenly appearing
for prompt action

hemophiliac
or outcome
involving the appearance

Poetics/Politics of the Word/World

Dedicated
reader asks
each chosen word

if
it aches
for all words

the
poet or
poem didn't choose

Quotations from Recent Reading

Human understanding is a savage construction
of dilation and resistance

"The Human Abstract," Elizabeth Willis, The Human Abstract

I hate therefore
The word "prayer"
Since every word is one

"The Passion," Fanny Howe, Gone

Awakening in fever I will
protect the dreaming impulse
when the mind becomes sick
and surprise is incapable

"The Song That I Believe Can Be Sung," Pam Rehm, To Give It Up

What lasts in thinking is not
So much the way
As its horizon, the plum side
Not facing us but richer
In contingency

"Face," Forrest Gander, Science & Steepleflower

108

What is so

Cool about

Shadows.

Dog is

Scrambled

Walking out

Of a

Mirage.

Jim McCrary, from "Hotter Than and Now," appearing in Black Spring, Winter 2004

Work in Progress: Biblio of Ekphrastic Writing

Alexander, Charles. Near or Random Acts, Singing Horse, 2004
From Charles:

In its second part, several pages of work written while looking at Chagall's painting "I and the Village." I was projecting the work for students, who were writing, and I began writing, too. There is also, in that book, one part that extracts lines from what the students wrote in response to the painting.

Here's a link to a piece I made in response to work by visual artist Cynthia Miller, to whom I am married. The particular work was an outdoor public installation. Later my piece with an illustration by Cynthia was published in a "screen fold" series by Light & Dust. The web site explains more. Just the text of the piece appears in my book, Hopeful Buildings. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/alexander/aviary.html

Ashbery, John. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

Auden, W. H. “Musee des Beaux Arts.”
From Michael Snider.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Kiki Smith's “Endocrinology”
From Bruna Mori

Carper, Thomas. “Paint, Her Portrait.”
From Michael Snider.

Davis, Dick. “Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son, On a Painting by Guardi, On an Etching by J. S. Cotman”
From Michael Snider

Dolin, Sharon. Serious Pink.
From Burt Kimmelman.
Review by Eillen Tabios: http://www.jacketmagazine.com/23/tabi-dolin.html

Hernandez, Jose in collaboration with Luis Bunuel, in the 10th issue of 3rd Bed.
Andrea Baker, Poetry Editor, 3rd Bed, http://www.3rdbed.com

Justice, Donald. “On a Picture by Burchfield, On a Painting by Patient B of the Independence State Hospital for the Insane.”
From Michael Snider

Kimmelman, Burt, a collaboration with the painter Fred Caruso, "The Pond at Cape May Point."

Mezey, Robert. “To a Likeness of a Captain in Cromwell's Army.”
From Michael Snider

Nemerov, Howard. “Breughel: The Triumph of Time”
From Michael Snider

Perlman, John. Self Portrait. Elizabeth Press, 1978.
From John: Yes, [William Carlos Williams’] example is initiatory : everything / is a picture // to the employing eye / that feeds restlessly to / find peace.

Schnackenberg, Gjertrud: “The Self-Portrait of Ivan Generalic”
From Michael Snider

Stallings, A. E. “On Viewing an Exhibition of Paintings--The Treasures of Venice”

Tabios, Eileen. Behind the Blue Canvas

Tabios, Eileen. My Romance

Tabios, Eileen. Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole

Wald, Diane. Improvisations on Titles of Works by Jean Dubuffet, Mudlark online
http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/mudlark10/contents.html
From the author: The “chapbook” was written over two days about five years ago, but I wrote for hours each day taking breaks in between sessions. It was a funny time. My husband and I were more or less trapped in small cottage in Rhode Island during two insanely rainy/stormy days. There was so much water we’d have to wade out to the car and the inlet outside the cottage came up almost to its door. There were also some really large, really pissed-off swans in the yard----so, all in all, it seemed a great time to stay inside and write. I had a laptop and two huge Dubuffet books (I’d seen an exhibit in DC just before and was enchanted with his work) with me from the library, so, yes, I did look at the paintings too, although the consistently wild nature of the titles was what first inspired me. It was terrific fun to write.”

Wheeler, Susan. “The Debtor in the Convex Mirror,” a response to John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and a painting by Quentin Massys, c. 1514.
http://bostonreview.net/BR28.5/wheeler.html

Wilbur, Richard. “Wyeth's Milk Cans, Museum Piece.”
From Michael Snider.

Notes to Self

11:56 p.m.
Just enjoy the game. Just enjoy the playing, even when he shanks a throw or howls as a ball he half-heartedly tries to catch bounces off his chest.

11:58 p.m.
I've always lived within my means, a lifestyle even my hyper-critical mother-in-law once acknowledged. That goes for the magazines I've published.

12:04 p.m.
My love is a long-lost rock in a weary land.

Why Compass?

Reading late last night, I found this passage, which in part articulates what I have been attempting with the Compass series:

.........................................We say
the streak is an optical artifact or a green-backed firecrown
tonguing nectar from quintral flowers. We say we are somehow rich enough
for multiple, even inconsistent accounts. No one comes prepared
for the meaning of the sentence.
Yet we compass. Sometimes. We see.

from “A Dissonance Leading To A Modulation,” p. 13-14, in Forrest Gander’s Science & Steepleflower

Compass 18-23

Compass 18

Rank and file of plastic bottles: an opened water bottle, mostly full, is swallowed up by the milk bottle behind it, stout gallon jug undiminished by the half inch of milk spoiling at the bottom. They traced their car trip on a map, the departing and returning routes bulging in the middle to converge at their destination and home. The summer’s not caught up with them yet, pansies, petunias, marigolds still thick and bright. She painted a figure on the pot, legs twice as long as arms, slowing down the dance.

Comapss 19

Raising Cain: Loose Watch. Lit stairwell, the light brighter near the top. The basement window frames the juniper, the empty hose rack, the red slats of the railing, daisies in bud waving in the background. The Things They Carried: The River Why.

Compass 20

Red bucket tipped on its side, empty except for the glow of sun. It’s the thinner, taller trees that talk most about wind today. Green foam ball in search of green bucket two feet away? Yellow rose cut back, gathering its energy for a second bloom, dried petals scattered at its base.

Compass 21

He remembered two, three winters ago, a tree snapped in half across the street as he scraped his windshield. Upright piano, cover down to silence the cat and its atonal sonatas. He never noticed before: the body of the lamp suggests a pineapple. This evening the sun slumped below the horizon.

Compass 22

The willows spill over the house. Morning glory and thistle, give ‘em an edge and they want more, creeping over the playground gravel. You have to share the bench – room for but one person – with two kinds of thistle, and even morning glory claims a place. Someone left a bowl, emptied, on the bench, the shadow of the spoon telling the wrong time.

Compass 23

The grain on the aluminum siding lies: shapes and textures gained in one industrial press, not whelped by weather over time. He never noticed the aspen before, skinny, strangled between two tight adjacent properties. Which came first, spider web spun from bench to flower pot or the web of a violet pansy, this as he’s ever seen one? Blinded by that direction, that’s where he goes.

Received Today

I love those mail deliveries that freeze me at the mailbox, scraps of fingers, envelopes, and stamps flying through air. (I love receiving e-mail, too, getting mail all day long rather than just that one much-awaited time signaled by the post-person's steps on the porch, but it will never be as tactile as the post delivered to your front door.)

Today I was twice frozen: copies of the newly published Black Spring (see a related enterprise, Black Spring on-line) edited by that famous golfer Steve Tills (also known as Stephen Stills alterego) and a book from a press to always treasure, The Elizabeth Press, Self Portrait by John Perlman, a poet who has treasured every word he's published.

Here's to good reading!

Johnny Appleseeds: Poems for All of Us

Among the things I joyfully received from Richard Lopez upon my return a couple weeks ago -- The Grapevine, a delightful chapbook now housed on my bookshelves between Dirt by Jim Leftwich and The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca (how's that for bedfellows, Richard?), and a cd of a reading he did recently in Sacramento -- were two one poem mini-booklets, an inch and a half by an inch and a half (which my five year old daughter, Noemi, covetted, pocketing them whenever she finds 'em ((she's progressed to making her own mini-booklets that size, one today with a series of ladybug stamps))). These come from a series of poems-for-all. These poems, now over 350 of them, are

scattered around town — on buses, trains, cabs, in restrooms, bars, left along with the tip; stuffed into a stranger's back pocket. Whatever. Wherever. Small poems in small booklets half the size of a business card. A project of the 24th street irregular press, which cranks them out to be taken by the handful and scattered like seeds by those who want to see poetry grow in a barren cultural landscape.

I've always loved leaving copies of SCORE publications (we did broadsides, SCOREsheets, SCOREviews for such purposes) or extra copies of publications sent to me in public places, conferences, teachers' mailboxes, stuffed in envelopes with bill payments... Most of the time, if I stick around long enough, most people who first find these literary oddities (out of context, e.g. library, bookstore) have moved them aside as if they are dirty tissues, yet I persist in littering poems in the world because I remember the few who have picked them up, read them, faces breaking into quizzical smiles, then pocketed them furtively.

Here's what you could do: send some poems to scatter to Richard Hansen at Poems-for-All, send me poems to scatter (1111 E. Fifth St., Moscow, ID 83843) -- I should be in Portland, Boise, and maybe Seattle (and points between), all fertile scattering points, or scatter poems wherever you go.

Call for Submissions: eratio

eratio postmodern poetry
welcomely invites submissions of such for its fourth issue

details here:
http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com/contact.html

home page here:
http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com

click on a letter to enter a page
click on a diacritic sign to tour the eratio gallery

works that resist context, that stand alone. the unforeseen

deadline for submissions for issue four is july 31, 2004

send your best work (no, seriously)

edited for real by gregory vincent st. thomasino