Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

Worried (Draft of text for performance)

w w or died
Finally definitively defiantly you can make up your mind and/or
w o or died
he/she takes back his/her body finally definitively defiantly wood resisting water
w or r died
Whitman’s yawp, this yawp— [arms up, open, catharsis]
word died
I can’t believe it

w w or died
and/or and/or and/or and/or land/or/sea or
Walt roar [arms up, open, catharsis]
row row row row row row row row row row
w o or died
spoor sperm permanent or
w or r died
who youwho youwho youwho you
word died
I can’t believe it

w w or died
they reached the Pacific returned but Lewis didn’t go much further, oar awry, awwwww…………………………………………………………….
w o or died
office without direction, officer without a pad, a paddle
w or r died
Irishmen and women crashed, bed rash, dream slashed
word died
I can’t believe it

w w or died
stuttering utters sings otters rings others authors
w o or died
the death in the current, word cure of death, no cure
w or r died
rapids rapid rap ra ra ra ra ra ra ra
word died
I can’t believe it

Worried

wwordied

woordied

worrdied

worddied

No Wonder You Rise in the Night

The
neighbor’s dog
will not stop

barking
before stepping
on the first

wave
its weight
over my shoulder

blades
There are
easier ways of

making
sense, yelling
across rising water

etched
on the
heads of pins

But
the boy
who always has

his
hand up
ties the poem

to
a chair
with a rope

Imagine
him surprising
his new invention

Genre Bender: Susan Smith Nash's I Never Did Tell You Did I?

Is Susan Smith Nash’s I Never Did Tell You Did I? an epistolary novel? Some of these letters may be fiction laced with truths, or truth spiked with fiction. Covering about nine months, from late November to the following August, they follow the trajectory of a conventional novel, i.e. introduction of character/s and conflicts (intra- and inter-personal), rise in “action,” which in this case is the series of intertwined career and social/personal dilemmas, the climax, which perhaps fittingly occurs at “home,” in Norman, OK, and “resolution” between Susan and Marshall and Susan and D.

Is this an epistolary memoir? All truth, no fiction? Constructed memory, structured life when our lives have no such structure? The facts without all the accompanying flux? If you read the brief bio at the Avec website, Susan Smith Nash like the Susan signing the letters of this book has traveled to South America, to the former Soviet Union, to and from Oklahoma, but who is the real Susan? She never did tell us, did she?

Is this book an epistolary monologue? None of the letters were sent, or so the subtitle claims. None of the letters receive answers; none of the subsequent letters refer to letters the letter writer has received in response. Through the guise of letters to her sister, Tek, to Rialdi, Todd, D. (the recipient of roughly half the letters, to whom Susan is impressively frank, wide open about sexuality, past mis-steps, doubts about the present and future), to Aygun, Marshall, her teenaged son, and Jeffords, is Susan writing letters to Susan?

An epistolary dialogue? So personal are the letters readers can’t help talking back to her as they read (even if they can’t send what they say).

Ultimately the book tells us Susan, intrepid traveler, tells us Susan tentative parent, tells us Susan Renaissance entrepreneur, tells us Susan erotomanic mid-lifer, tells us Susan a person whose skills – geologist, computer educator, teacher, economic advisor – make her more employable than anyone I know insecure in every job, every new business venture she enters.

The book tells us Susan impulsive, honest, compulsive, compelling, tells us Susan a living worth telling, tells us Susan now sent.

More Compass Points 2

Compass

Though the window allows transmission, it also cuts it off. What is the grain of the braindrain? An aisle, a current, a potential impasse. Behind him, his present whenever he wants it.

Compass

American flag bandana wrapped on his head, swastika shooting flames tattooed on his right arm. Flag’s limp, but what does it stand for? The lake curves, dumping sand, families of swimmers. When the sun sets I know where I am.

Compass

Bank of clouds, rain spent a couple hours ago. An unlikely place for a battleship anchor, hundreds of miles from a military port. She went into the bathroom followed by his fantasy. Symphony of crows, clicks of grasshopper, silent traffic on the distant highway.

Compass

One piece is lifting its way out of the puzzle, nudging another along. Town’s lights in the print, so thin along the tops of the hills, push back at the night sky pressing down. No power, nothing to receive. A window’s deceiving.

Compass

Clear again, at least in the sky. Fake grain, fake flames, fake nipple. The people in his peripheral vision are androgynous. Unoccupied cubicles, but can you say that about the minds?

Love the Concrete Poems

Found at Concretismo !, a site Jay Thomas' blog Bad with Titles led me to (which he graciously said Geoff Huth's site led him to). Thanks Jay and Geoff!

Dear Editors

no log of length
no lag
no soft lake of pinch
no perfect salt
no dimmed pewter
no doubt
no job
no nomination
no taxing foothold
no displacement
no exactly factual
no pretensions
no planes up, porch lit
no living room
no brown envelope
no upcoming car
no grudge, battery
no bureaucrats
no cultural affront
no other, only
no reciprocity
no painful vanish
no printer creatures
no mind is large
no largess
no lawyer
no member of unions
no number of opinions

More Compass Points

Compass

From this angle the piles of dirt could be chugging down the train tracks. The health of the maple, robust, branches rich with leaves, contrasts with the elm, sick, limp leaves on thinning limbs. The ball bounces up off the rim higher than the dribble leading up to the shot. His vision’s soothed, well-kept grass, and dozens of straight tree trunks.

Compass

“Our framework, then, is dependent upon a rich theoretical network. Network constructs particular moment-to-moment learning. Extend beyond the individual. Draw both perspectives, contexts, implications stress.”

Compass

Stop in all directions, then go, mostly straight. He passes, nodded, then his reflection, distorted, cut off at the knees. Uphill a row of trees, a dozen varieties of maple, throw shade at a slant. It’s astounding, it’s confounding, how often he looks up at an impenetrable wall.

Compass

For luck or just the look: two painted horseshoes propped against the basement window. The stairs start to spell out a url – www – but run out of space. He’s flung in the opposite direction, picture glass reflecting the outside, bright, neighbor’s green car parked. When she climbs the shelf, which is often, she knocks off Singer, Stein collapsing onto Stegner.

Compass

She suggested we hang two pictures of butts next to the pictures of rocks, granite boulders worn smooth and round. More paint and rubber stamp ink than tablecloth. This refrigerator pees, or at least it sounds like it, late at night. He can’t quit the smell, baking soda, cat litter clumped with piss and poop.

Compass

Navigation. Rise. Peak. Fall.

Compass

One sunflower sprouts six heads, can you imagine what that would be like? Textures of juniper, aspen bark, curling leaves, against the textureless sky. Breeze carries air colled by the sprinkler. One red rose, but the second produced by its bush, almost gaudy in its loneliness.

Compass

The last four years legions of Americans long for Canada, if they could only get jobs. Heading up the Missouri, two hundred years ago, into the current. Two rivers meet, become one; two nations met, diverged. Not so astounding, no one left standing.

Any Takers for Tom Cruise?

Tom Cruise is Ready to Love

"He
claims him
a man who

loves
relationships and
will never be

down
with love
despite some disappointments"

Hmm,
not me
I don't think

he'd
be caught
dead in a

squirrel
thong, my
criterion for love

Go to "The Text Festival"

Here's something worth watching develop in 2005: The Text Festival. Wish I could get their in March for the Bob Cobbing exhibit.

I like the site's "about the festival" statement:

From advertising to road signs, from to logos to global branding to digital communications, text forms the visual and linguistic background to everyone’s existence. Once poets were seen as developers of language and ideas, the creators of new ways of thinking and expressing, but now they are seen as irrelevant. Faced with a modern world where the written word or sign consumes and clutters virtually every environment, how can poets and text artists work with language? What are the innovations and devices that can progress the tradition of poetic innovation?

Those are two questions I lose sleep over.