Language Sampler

Edited by Charles Bemstein

Introductory Note One of the most frequently mentioned and least understood developments in American poetry in recent years has been the emergence of an ideologically, psychologically and linguistically selfconscious movement, centered largely on the East and West Coasts, which some observers have dubbed Language Poetry. Like most pioneers in new literary directions, the Language Poets, for the most part, deny that they belong to a formally constituted group and eschew the name imposed on them by casual critics. Nevertheless, for better or for worse, a shared tendency or at the least, a common preoccupation with "the resonating of the wordness of language," as Charles Bernstein puts it has been recognized by the outside world, and to some extent by many of these poets themselves. In order to learn more about the outlook and practices of these writers, we asked Bernstein, who is co-editor of the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, to prepare a relevant anthology as a special Paris Review feature. His "Language Sampler, "prefaced by a brief essay discussing the premises and aims of the authors he has selected, follows. J. G. [s.c. Jonathan Galassi]

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Charles Bernstein: Introduction

What we have here is an insistence to communicate. Not, perhaps, where communication is schematized as a two-way wire with the message shuttling back and forth in blissful ignorance of the (its) transom (read: ideology). There are no terminal points (me>you) in a sounding of language from the inside, in which the dwelling is already/always given. Hints, then, of a writing that takes as its medium, or domain of intention, every articulable aspect of language. It's as if a new scanning of consciousness were possible by introduction of the music of its constituting. And by this means to make audible the thinking field: to get access to the lens (the mixed metaphor is again ideology) through which the world's meanings are formed into audibilities. The work collected here can be characterized in the negative as writing that does not privilege any single mode, including the expository logic and speech-derived syntax that dominate contemporary writing practice. Distinctions between essays and lyrics, prose and poetry are often not observed. For instance, some of this hybrid work (I like to think of it as amphibious) engages critical forms of discourse in a prosodic scrupulousness of intention that relies for its coherence more on internal necessities of the poetic process of meaning than on external constraints of rationalistic argument. Issues of poetics, when not explicitly determining the genre of the work, often permeate its mode of address a tendency that can pull the poem out of the realm of purely personal reference and into a consideration of the interaction among the seemingly competing spheres of politics, autobiography, fiction, philosophy, common sense, song, etc., as in Lyn Hejinian's relevantly titled "Province" or Diane Ward's asymptotic construction of simultaneous statements, "Approximately." There is a willingness to use, within the space of a text, a multiplicity of such different modes, which counts more on a recognition of the plastic qualities of traditional genres and styles than on their banishment. At the same time, however (often mixed in with, or the overall compositional product of, this multimodal process), there is a claim being made to a syntax to put it indefensibly of pure music, of absolute attention to the ordering of sound's syllables, for instance in Ken Irby's "Etudes" or Peter Seaton's more densely scaled "Wounds from a Heart Would Do It." Not that this is "lyric" poetry, insofar as that term may assume a musical, or metric, accompaniment to the words: the music rather is built into the sequence of the

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words' tones, totally saturating the text's sound. "Indefensibly," that is, because there really is no pure music any more than there is pure language since any material practice becomes itself a mode. Striking, in this regard, is Alan Davies' sublime diction in "Lies," in which he invokes a Blakean Poetic Truth at the same time that he laments its structural impossibility. These considerations suggest less a common stylistic center to the work collected here (despite the giddy infatuation with rubrics that spurs talk of schools) than a common point of departure in divergence from-questioning-conventional practices in the recognition of the intrinsic "modeness" of any writing. Identifying "conventional practices" is a major preoccupation for many of these writers since such practices exist primarily as blind spots in our thinking field, or as "Blank" in the term of Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Gesturalized divergence, for instance, is as much a conventional practice as uninflected conformity; both can provide inexhaustible material for poetic scrutiny. Such scrutiny will not necessarily dispense with conventional practices when they are identified. Rather the forms being critiqued will often be mimicked, which is to say, cited. Two examples are Bruce Andrews' bracketing of gesturalized divergence in "Confidence Trick" ("Dragooned dork bird" "Embalming fluid fuchsia") and Ron Silliman's bracketing of uninflected conformity in the first sentence of "Blue" (which quotes Valry's wry epitomization of the conventions of the novel: "The Marchioness went out at five o'clock"). Michael Gottlieb's pointedly titled "Social Realism" is nothing but citation, yet the inverse effect of its weaving is an elegantly poignant melody of inner life. The process of identification and critique has no end; no process, including its own, can be exempted from it. This may allow for some value in the otherwise shopworn notion of "the new": for contemporary writing does have the opportunity to deal with the particular material at hand in this time. While the process itself may not be "new," the particular constellation of materials always is. I am sufficiently skeptical of the presumption of "advance" in "avant-garde" to equally distrust formulations that appear to pit "the new" against tradition. What is presented here exemplifies a continuing dialogue with the past(s) surely not, though, just a narrowed line of hallowed English verse! and the future(s). Yet because it is a dialogue, it does not only involve repetition of old forms but also a response to them. My discussion of modal properties and critiques of conventions does not, I hope, obscure the powerful and sometimes pessimistic social comment in much of the work collected here. Indeed, it is my contention that having available all modes for use increases

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the capacity of writing for expression. The tone of anger, for example in Bob Perelman's "Third and Townsand," or of quieter distress, say in Susan Howe's "war / obdurate as oceans," is not, of course, a formal dimension but a reaction, in part, to the events of the current period, including a barbaric U.S. military and social policy. Throughout this collection there is a feeling of investigation as a way for both selfand social discovery, and for music. An opening of the field. . . that is already inhabited. The trouble with the conduit theory of communication (me>you) is that it presupposes individuals to exist as separate entities outside language and to be communicated at by language. "As/ far/ as/ I/ can/ see/ you/ are/ there," as Ted Greenwald has it: the other shares the same language space as I do. Correlatively, I take his "all/ over/ the/ body/ finishing/ touches" to be a literal acknowledgement that it is touch that completes the body, that there is no individual, i.e. untouched, body. It is the touch of others that is the givenness of language. So writing could be such "finishing touches," not telling another what she or he does not know but a resonating (articulating) of the space in which both are enwrapped (enraptured). The resonating of the wordness of language is manifested by the multiplicity of structures and of syntaxes in the small sampling here and in the work of other equally relevant poets. For Tina Darragh the "pun as ambiguous figure" becomes the focal point of inquiry; her text is composed of "fragments of dictionary pages transcribed in form of an Ames Distorted Room a model constructed to seem like a usual rectangular room, but when objects are added they seem oddly sized." I think the measure of these poems, indeed, sizes us up. And soon the oddness of the sizing process gives way to the physical beauty of hearing syllables dance to things heard by being made anew.

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Peter Seaton: Need from a Wound Would Do It

We're strange features, ignoring things. Our hero Separates from a problem in pink, the thought To be able to thing in the world. Hyacinth lips. Where a word prepares to send One to is spoken, by articles In an adventure drawn among to call her Lucidity the course of specimen hopes herself, The hands of her and her affairs by her Standard, she's in some hideous overflow To a sailor. Patch light ideas connecting Image conversion with image taking place, image Might be apparitions that pop for him and trust him. Ah, start struck to a bit or a picture. Or enthusiasm (smoky), imagination And that chatter, calculation of spirit and point In the attraction of attention in tongues of old Coming up, the first western connection of far off seas

Hung over from admission. The is the pale Of devotion, events in a potion live within a kiss. Bodies chased with sweat by blocks, river humans And a house in search of a whole, a scale Of commotion, for one move and the next. And that Subsequent fight reveals flair for structure,

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A cumulative ace, limbs and torsos by an English author. So this is the perfect plan. And here's a creative code. For all its on or off old self, immersion, power and Command. When the world was wars and wars, according To cause breaking out from the conditions for events And their obsessed leaders. Brute editing, the way The frame's the response to survival aids to lust Contains the round rations on an actual summit. One teaches sense to a child saying you sense How we've always talked. It's open Earth Moon and Sun Words shown on a dialogue. Sun Moon and Earth or

Jupiter and its low narrative. It would be moons To a computer, the image of vocabulary, Grammar aiming at a crisis. To fast On the visual side and the looking one of the only Hard conception. So achievement has to do With soaking, while things set up to improvise With James. Speech picks Like chocolates taken from America To be introduced as chocolate. The old silent subject Of film, it became silent that our present Of mass and methods sphere and deepening. What don't I want to think about today.

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The chain saw. The bodies. There's this one Particle floating in and out. It has no real place or time. But it has this quality which we'll call surprise. You think of palms concealed to start. You're there Among the classes. And the language at half a word Half a word had been. Things without much tending And slept with a sort. To go by which has a rhythm Like bones and clean clinchers too They'd be whipping past. The long nights And the hot blood signal in kinetic alley concentrates And shocks through the source straight seconds Like penetrating a profile that broke its force, And thinking before using a reflection building up, data With the outline of organism meeting vision In the arts against my face. And hear the air rush past With access. Wrenching the phasing in logic to look at. That was blocking shapes and colors that was all.

You must now create the strongest of the species. Each letter in the writer's mind? Two thirds of a world is pressed for words, letters With the language shape up. And, brazen point Of the personal writer, the ones that got Great books did write Disks and digits with bands of light, moons in pools

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With curves like rough rates, names of aliens there Might be woolen and wool itself. I'd had A chance to tell rock from shadow, from this darker thing And make a shadow that was alive and was aware Of what it's doing, dodging A reflection of light, it touches A deeper shelter, a deeper skin leaving Tracks the brain blew away, the transfer Of former products in China to black and white Reasons, astronomical dozens of images The spirit of the fields are on The pole of our paradise sight and sound. Predatory signs which whiz by and stop, The lid and the soul, there are reasons for this.

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Diane Ward: Approximately

meaning a context or vision to confer with this which could be a book. meaning what I just said confers with this but a licking sound. Amplified and forming an idea far from original. A distance which becomes whimsical tension. For instance, then an origin, an image a fantasy becomes ironic; at home. Flat as you once thought a centering unlike mysteries in your imagining an animal. Difference in eye levels. Difference in relation and system. Elevating a problem in placement or face and in which direction. A metal square gradually marked. A metal square which is confrontational engaging. Off into intensity which is hard to concentrate. Two of the spaces of words with their own containment each of eighty directions. Two aesthetics granting activity value without practical functions. Following the implied direction of possessions, environment is a room more specific a person. You said something visual versus a thought you were attacking me. You said change/cigarettes versus intimate intricate and which is more interesting. Later a time motions are visual or visualizations which translate objects into words. A mass of timid outlines to each rigid color. A mass of smiles destroys a given warmth. Without only a loneliness to cherish. More specific a conversation hopefully beginning now. More specific the toxic and poison contributed to a phrase now dated and like a date benign. Respectable ideas are random, laying low or following up so forget what I just said or I think. Impossible only an advancing of thoughts their elements and results. No worth for what they're saying or value exists for this. It's fine that it brings tears to your eyes or doesn't. It's probably fine that what moves you is below you or not above you.

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Formulas to constrict imagination to a mind what it's saying thinking and what you want its direction. For this there's an age to define as urgent as people. For this habit a catchy title like musings handfuls. More points exist around which become you than are not. Ends based on emotional gusts; the hands are yours that wish to hold. Ends as a pivotal screen viewing concealed metaphors for beauty. What the question value in days formulated frequent written words weeks. I don't know an arching sounding around us. I don't know where movements standing pointing as vacuum. Where the word which wasn't interesting belongs as redefinition. Where speed replaces the idea and becomes it. Internal is categorically beautiful bombing as we expected them whole sentences erupt up and fall. Headlong, concrete piece by concrete piece a sight or irrational pleasure. Heading away to detail and immediacy. Another form is untouchable and moves a cage into softness. A wooden syntax of shadow forms a pillar of its own. A highly syntax confusing both image and word and detail and notation. A shape which is rounded off so that comers fall away. Blank and another ordering attention paying off. Blank intensity stares.

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Ron Silliman: Blue

for Gil Ott

The Marchioness went out at five o'clock. The sky was blue yet tinged with pink over the white spires which broke up the east horizon. The smell of the afternoon's brief shower was still evident and small pools of clear water collected in the tilt of the gutters, leaves and tiny curling scraps of paper drifting in the miniature tides which nonetheless caught and reflected the swollen sun, giving the boulevard its jeweled expression. Government was therefore an attitude. Dour, the camel pushed with his nose against the cyclone fence. The smell of damp eucalyptus is everything! You stare at your car before you get in. From here we can see the sex. They are folding the flyers before stuffing them into envelopes. Badminton is nothing to be ashamed of. Grease and old tire marks streak the road. From here we can tell the sex. Rust designs that old truck door. The number of objects is limited. Some leaves on the fern are more yellow. Sooner or later you will have to get up to change the record. That buzz is the dryer. Longer ones demand a new approach: there's not enough water for a second cup. These crystals are useless on a sunless day. More than that, the fence is apt to give, pulling free of its posts. Tell me the one about the fellaheen again. It's a trap: they want you to think that light is Venus. Under a microscope we see them absorb their elders. A spider plant is only one design. I took the message. At dusk, very little is neutral. The corner merchant, a quiet Persian, nods to her as she waits for a break in the traffic. Those who are not consigned to the prolonged concentration of driving have already fallen asleep. At the intersection the sidewalks are rounded. The flower closes slowly about the unsuspecting fly. The thickness of the gum limits the rhythm of his chewing. Wasn't he happy here, viewing clip after clip of that old successful launch? The glove compartment never held a glove, nor I. So you go faster, hunched over, avoiding the headlines in the boxes. The taller buildings suck the wind. That butter only appears to be firm, the hood never will quite shut. Between what were once squares of concrete, anonymous weeds bunch & spread.

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If challenged, its first response is to spit. This took place at the museum. Wires slope from the pole to the house, where they gather, entering a narrow pipe along its side. This conveys motion. I am writing in shadows. Don't you worry about accessibility too? Mother simply likes to have the books. Like a serenade, only earlier. He lets the clay on his hands begin to dry. Fuchsia blossoms stain the walk, the doorknob strangled by rubber bands. Another thing, pepper is not a corn. So what is despair? The cyclist trapped inside her helmet? The girl sent to the grocer for milk? The moment before? The mops on the old porch have begun to dissolve. Don't turn the light on till you get the shade. Atop a small house, the cartoon dog types away. Turn the page. Shorter is. The fern sits, its clay pot in a pool of water. In doubles, that's called poaching. The back of the television faces the window. From here you can smell the sex. Give those socks a little more time. More narrow. At the arched door of the restaurant she checks her watch, a delicate gold bracelet dangling from her wrist. Bands of a deep orange streak a near purple sky, the brisk air shuddering in the small trees, slender branches bending back. Children begin to gather up their toys; lights on, their homes begin to glow. The host, recognizing the Marchioness, invites her in.

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Alan Davies: Lies

Truth is lies that have hardened. This should be obvious from the fact that the obverse is also correct. The same obviousness obtains for correctness.

Truth, which will never be more than the notion of truth, keeps for itself only its own overguarded presences. It is the equator without hemispheres, without a globe. This line, which merely appears to establish itself, is non-equatorial, in extremis. Truth is the purest notions of dominations, not without persons, not without social exigencies, and not aside from the facets of the experienced tracts of truth. It is, in and by itself, the misnomer. It is most certainly not true, not not true. It is the failed tautology, tautology without equatability, the terms of which are so very easily subsumed by the notions of there being terms.

Truth is the effort of intention to make of space protracted space, of time, protracted time.

The distance between truth and that which is known is that distance between intention and that which is truth. Truth is the shifter among concrete fact, the tightest of attentive experience, and the most indissoluble of intents.

Truth succumbs to a pressure of indifference. This makes of "it" "truth."

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Hard words don't get called true, except on the verges of hatred. This is a failure which specializes, and in itself, but the most solid things know this and it is they whereby we know that we have been otherwise mistaken.

Truth articulates itself only in relations with non-truths. Facts don't make these mistakes, because they stand in, for, in for, and as, some kind of solidity. Truth articulates, it mentions, itself, only in relation with things which are not true, not because opposites are necessary (they are not), but because truth is a special form of the untrue and thereby finds itself most articulate in that presence.

The realm of truth is the realm of the alphabet. Thus is recognized its limitation: that truth is completely inscribed within the alphabet.

Truth is that flourish which a mind makes in an effort to make of itself a perfection, an aura which it will not mount without the angles of straight arts.

Truth. I. e. The idea of truth.

If you walk down the street as truth you walk down the street the other side of the street from violence.

Truth is some thing which resembles, as its exterior, some other thing. It is the appearance of the exterior of this thing, and without it, as evidence, which makes of its semblance, a thing wherein we recognize a truth.

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The practice of truth is a hollowing of what is real, the removal of the substance to ensure the (false) sanctity, the (false) perpetuity, of the form. Form is, as such, deserving of those interests which thus elevate it. Truth, in its methods, merely imitates the just formulations of form, and within the results of those methods which it must then attempt to erect, to stabilize, as facts. Their appearance as supreme facts is merely a function of their resemblance, which they have, after all, manufactured, to forms. It is perhaps only the extreme effort which must be made to make a statement appear true, which makes us call it a truth when we recognize it. Truth is the evaluation of the boundaries to which it reaches, its limits, its husk. That is to say, when we say of something that it is true, we say that it has stopped.

Each moment is a retrograde moment, and it is moments which are productive of truth.

Truth is present only to itself, which is why nobody notices it until it is talked about, and why everyone notices it when it is.

Truth and or lies. That is not the question.

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Bruce Andrews: from Confidence Trick

Audible About heart is more colloquial, that not your line!, keep your hearts in line, to say & less done, rave on, to do & more, distinctively all drums The confusion of the language matches the confusion of the sentiment Machines in motion: goosebump, the usefulness is tight security points And fake histrionic breast selfexamination Neo-gothic beat wraps itself up, calmed down with boxing magazines, plutonium separation anxiety Epoxy affixes get secreted Dragooned dork bird, more or less cut, health & efficiency Rest, doilies, Jesus, white cum Sure I m sympathetic, kilojerk, megajerk convent wire, I think I m going to get a really sunny declension laced with stabs of politicized savagery Lady Day gets my disposition I wish a hydrant could sleep Embalming fluid fuchsia, if you play the marimba loud enough in public image to prove that it occurs; rubber belt up front Vegetable braille, fade to grey; the deepfreeze mice product saints And mole embellishing bulletproof modulation idiot phone, let the royalty stay on, to become the palace caretakers Would take more than a sentence we could invent for the purpose Big generation not about to go away to listen to my insults Black tie talkathon; safari cards make learning fun Sure, language comes before industry, tory crap, or at least it wants trouble; we do play reggae but only by whites Fix the lock a whoop freeze the tension, polyglots are adrift: History of the World Pt. 1 Flyboys; delinquency is nervous, the perfect dictator, a tendency toward motion sickness, why is the ministry full of fallout? Their voice is quavery their voice quavers they have a quavery voice, scissor set, capitalist shit, dirty looks; quote mind quote bound gag & teepees air; loose wires rebuff speed Nervous enema murder will out Irrelevant to talk America, murderers, unlimber up los microwaves with pull-out bed protect self-interest goo on Broadway any one of these wounds might have seemed fatal, do you know an opposite, do you know an operative Yes we did find traces of nembutal juggernaut cop out ahead of itself especially Velvets-like Scientist, Islam House, is ripe enough, city fun; like depictions yellow jacketed become a little more normal

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Squalid with pity no squalid with piety, we don t torture, we have little lung plungers Bathroom sex can count assorted percussion; saliva of the junk man Manual silver salvation hotel fee; asparagus urine chokes crab grass (shockabilly) A pair of adrenalinedup bloodhounds on her chest, or in the military, crawling chaos be a pepper on a suicide deal Not convincing enough to be a black & white commercial on the skids, we am on the skids, it was pretty fair organization: vague wool, I aggravated the catarrhal throbs in her diphthongs I want eggs All systems go Let s get a little sugarshack I just cry to clear my eyes Cleanliness can be assured by teaching a boy to wash his penis Test my knowledge of life in general I dunno Void That protozoa

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Lynne Dreyer: from Step Work

Writing becomes distant and portraits of hosts crowd the space. The next page becomes as cornered and concerned as a studied artifact. Thoughts not towards anything but embodying a lot of writing. Too many military wives are being arrested. The tiny bit of wandering summarized by a spartan attitude of space. Is this coercement? It becomes confused like who is doing the demanding? You demand that he doesn't demand enough and a strikingly pertinent dream flashes clean blue. Is this the mind turning home? Who's home? Mine? Theirs? Tribal gestures? Chants? Automatic is a bracketed word. I'm trying to save my writing. Case histories in the mail when I meant to say another mystery is in the mail. Certain things are allowed. Quiet the boxed books. Go into the cool clocked room and count the mysteries and not the historical plots for death becomes a little naive active intrusion. Commas preserve the lightness as sun-visor calls german to her dogs. The white side of the leaves shimmers, first with skin, then secrets, and finally the secret writing. The work cracks itself open into planetary relief, whispering, calling back the dream. "Red foxy lady! S.W." They're tired. They've never dared dream in pictures. Prepare that to the site where the people are leaving for the water shortage. They file past the grocery, past all of the stores and each sits on his own individualized pad. Trilogy. They come in to peer, neutral, sporadic, as in an operatic jerky voice, screaming, testing out their vigilance. The apology becomes electric, flam-flakey. They come back from their country carrying their vowels and words moving chronologically forward to forget their past. Death becomes the independent hand, crowded like the seeds. It becomes a caricature of itself, and the shallow walk becomes its harmony. Floridian gorillas are decorated with active superheroes. The sex warp is active, complete, trans- lucent. Wet my eyes and then the shadows can wall us in. They become timed and lasting: waiting for the family to be reunited, waiting for the family to be tried. Take some scene and think about winter, hand on cup, chicken hand image, and finally the dream image of the woman opening the door. Are the women opening the doors? The multiple image becomes its plot. The gestures have begun.

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I use your electric eyes and they become the solitary hand that opens my arms. The sympathy house is for your feet and the effort is cleaner, purer, and dumb. The basic red rat eats into your open mouth as it sharpens its teeth. We are all adults. Indira keels over in a joke. The most heavy light is on the vicious fence built around us, as the ethereal music drums out its predictable beat: the beast of burden through the mouth of a frog. The summer statue is a baby and will direct you to correct yourself. The book becomes its own marble face. "Don't ask me to talk." "It was raining down south." "Why the working dogs." Into the open mouth that feeds you the planes and mothers are becoming. Are they known? Are they becoming known? You are ready and invited. Where are you? In the country chair in the new and clean century, look into the eyes that really see you. These are the new remedies of the ancient years. Is it factory or heartbeat? Do you remember?

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Tina Darragh: ludicrous stick

to clean over: T formal. whip. b. or surpass completion or etc.: They need into shape. 6. 1 19) 7. lick the d stroke of the tongue by taken up by one str cream cone. 10. See salt b. a brief, brisk burst of ac pace or clip; speed. 12. jazz. in swing music. 13. lick and a perfunctory manner of doing some time to clean thoroughly, but gave promise. (ME lick(e), OE liccian; c. akin to Goth (bi) laigon, L lingere, GK (up) - licker, n. Lick (lik), n. a ring formation in the the face of the moon: about 21 miles in lick er-in (lik er in), n. a roller on chine, esp. the roller that opens the st the card and transfers the fibers to the Also called taker-in. (n. use of v. phra licking (lik ing), n. 1. Informal. a.a p thrashing. b. a reversal or disappointm 2. the act of one who or that which lic licorice (lik e ish, lik rish viewing point

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Ray DiPalma: Hadrians Lane

Beautwelve fills the whisper and all want fragments why along to check the short page what your convictions this is shudder and this is antenna mail Not from here like a lot of wax lost wax in fact misplaced the emptying the song finishers indexing the aces ring phone and circulate here and there a wave or Something much harder for sleep like dance rendering the up trace or crossed cowers for a bow Beautwelve makes for silence the big polar wag the shift heads to roam The volume cores the abject delirium of capital the compressors fill from middle out with a wierd blue light too much focus on the night too few stars a big chunk of it How inert the dutiful to stare right into how inflected as it were to bend or shape from a straight to a narrow this is the way from however to how best you hound the path Remote air logic to take the measure from ether logic to casual fulcrum block can it go up and out into that remoteness strain to the then and then and then softer flight

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Well it seems there's a drubbed restraint makes for the go road an empty bit of hum nice target maybe or perspective's arena squared in the calm wake of looksee And Beautwelve has a gander for totals sprints the high street and makes for the fog number shadow clue and mark it from rut to rut frost heaves apprehend then the gallery of trees Appetites tug at the argument and mood freight a brain nab for smooth talk addlers of give go all so much carbon the think's gummed coordinated like currents but breaks the ankle Obdurate wince to scuff the instanter the junk prick cracking the ellipse so now it's how you say an oval and hung in a corrosive pose you get at it prying

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Carla Harryman: Statement . . .

Paddles sloshing in tunnel. Volume: all thumbs. Dis-ser-vice? Naaa . . . The pilot on the steamboat said my craft is timing. Roads love to be roads when they are beautiful. Taking apart cakes for the following: the same. Blue sun promulgates chained air cruising horizon. No sugar in this ocean-no statement in the bean. Since then pavement. Swollen itemized dinner plates or randomized brains. Mannerisms in Visionary Traps ululating, master uneaten sponsor. "Nice day out there." "Mind your own business." Tables have turned. Huge are the shrubs. Look like bushes to me. One grows the other. You call that difference? I call it point in time. A prototype of wandering celebrations bends the puppets. Those pupils make metaphor five times the size of Fidel Castro. Mutilate utility, dumbbell. I want you to hatch. There is only one event. All the results are delusions of grandeur. Rabbit. Rabbit. Rabbit. Nothing underneath. Rabbit.

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A new day. The same development. Ice on the streets. Labor from without racial identity. People skating to work, even beyond the line of hybrid trees in the bordering country. lies. Edging pathways shreds on Promise that river a piece of jelly. Drift happy river mind frieze

golden ore brassy fish. We see the plunge will be taken. We see the happy traveler. The dancing burlesquers hide her acceptance speech. Awkward confrontation with her fate, the foregrounding of herself. A fiddling detective douses her with water. The detective loves to hear people scream. Clues grow in relation to sound. He is old and she is hungry but they can't make a match like others even less fortunate. It's the middle of the week! They will make friends and through friends find jobs and through jobs they will meet.
(Everytime one visits France the memory goes higgledy piggledy in lines around Luxembourg Gardens on a sunny day. People compete with the flower beds for visual domain. It is where vertical and horizontal meet. Psyche and surge bubble in the pond, which no one looks at, except babies. Police are the only artifacts from the deep, walking around saying whose child is this, whose infant is this, whose this's?)

Tale trips from faery to dower. Church to cure. Lovingly stabilized. 95 baggy balances suggested to keep X alive.

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Ted Greenwald: Eight Poems

all over the body finishing touches

STARING DOESN'T HELP Staring doesn't help Nor does running around Music doesn't help Especially songs Getting together doesn't help Nor does staying apart Seeing someone else doesn't Nor does seeing you Sleeping doesn't help Nor does waking Dreaming doesn't help Nor do any facts Running doesn't help Nor does sitting around

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as far as I can see you are there

those is that

how do we (how do) this (this) (how) how

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If so Then so So Often If so So often Then not If so Then so

FINALLY UNDERSTANDING Finally understanding No job, layers of consciousness Quick hits Finally understanding Quick hits Starmaking machinery Finally understanding No job, layers of consciousness

industrial amazement turns to slush

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Susan Howe: from Defenestration of Prague

Skeletal kin tilt italic lunacy long illness of little difference Seventy memories masks singing and piping to be (half words) beginning and begetting strangers nodding to one another stumbling and scrambling (uncertain theme) random form strong arm of my name Emblem sign strewn flapping (flapping of ravens in rain) What sequence

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Mothers hide harmless weary for antiquity the simple Eglantine Soldiers moving as toys in a world soul War Obdurate as ocean he went forth conquering and to conquer Anathema who was my father Empty dominions beyond structure

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Alan Bernheimer: Two Poems

Topic A
No scenery in the scenery Attraction of fact Puts construction on things You have been somewhere before Units combine plausible shade Cloud in front, sun in back Atoms extended in space

Florex Gardens
The choo-choo train passed through the fields like clockwork day in and out, each instant carried forward against wobble that wrung drones from harem schemes into a drowsy backstroke down the bank of fragrance hanging over still flowers grown for the dinner table. An oval bed of nails held the arrangement in the half-light from an adjoining room, where perforations trained puffs of air against metal fingers to draw Brahms from the upright. Struck tons push the replica through ether. Promising geometry blossoms would furnish slender future one way or another.

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Robert Grenier: Six Poems

TWO out to make one bird high above spiralling southward water

SPAWNED BY THE FOAM INTELLIGENCE the monster goes back into the sea or such sludge as remains for it ugh matter more akin by rockhard doing to the origin of things than Dr. Frankenstein

THOUGHTLESS DOTH change shoes

NEXT HAT other hat ma mind my mind mine

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INTERGLACIAL AGE much colder this afternoon world getting warmer polar caps melting must bring on the ice I say

FOOL madman though ye beem

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Michael Gottlieb: from Social Realism

Widowers have more dignity. The flames starting from the ears. That's what I say: it's worth a try. An honest revulsion. To press the professional way, with live steam . . . Arrive pressed, neat, party-perfect. He trailed along to several 'discussion coffee groups' before he realized he was gradually getting inveigled into a cell. They had made up a playful nickname for him, then he realized that everyone there had a nom de something. Of all those who contributed more than once, his were spread the thinnest. Some people have a knack for making things happen, always landing on their feet, making the best of whatever hand Fate deals them, not sitting back and waiting for the world to come to them, rather, reaching for as much life as possible, some people are full of vim and vigor, few are poets. Listen to your heart and call right now, toll free. You sure you want to tangle with him, he plays rough. Look at those people going through their lives, happy, content, never knowing how sick they really are.

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He's dangerous, he's corruptable, he's been fired by three companies. "I hate these blindfolds" Don't you think you owe something to your government, to your country, where else could someone like you have had the opportunities you've had, squandered the advantages you were blessed with? It is true they were off-duty at the time, though when they had a chance to pull themselves together it turned out, technically, they were in uniform. Listen, you have nothing to worry about. You have plenty to be depressed about but nothing to worry about. She billed herself as a lay analysand.

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Lyn Hejinian: Province

The town is a whistler turn on a rock The water runs a working curve A taste never rested architecturally horizontal between tides Puddles fill a fresh safety Sunsets swarming an igloo on the right day Perhaps affinity is the 'maverick' Posted flowers to stakes of rain I recede in a structure of feeling derogatory and prolific Fate strikes while one sleeps encyclopedic syntax Curricular luck in an apparent withdrawal (that which went without saying) Birds and neighbors' radios deftly with a board refill the room 'reading meanings' my knees then stare-the exchange fits reality neatly
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A random stone raps the shadow With one interest light corrected dreams Themes read as Greek the patience of a panorama The scale is closed The span has an instinct for ellipses subjunctive strangeness The scud casts doubt on status in addition fills unclouding file across scan A return on your identification threatens evolution skimping the subjective Ants are hysterical about social detail Canons of resemblance are in the solvent frame Every turnip strives to be a man proenforcement, prolific subtotals, flat gates professions of attention span The color has a bend in it The corrugate perceptions raise trajectories fascination nags

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Hannah Weiner: ftom Spoke

Aug 17 all these on my forehead words are seen mattress I was openly I didn't think I was acid problem I was quilt I was waiting for the entire I was waiting for an hour to pass by I was curtain conscious I was was spelling it correctly I was conscious i was important i was also leader I was blue pen conscious BIG FOOL I was writing in it with it I was I was paper conscious I was a

problem to my inmantes I was

sentence I was liquidated just one I was overweight too

I was conscious I was pillow case I was in the closet I was an iron put the public in the problem living room couch and dont mind with the buttons and dont spend any mothers money on a pillow case too conscious I was also publicly I was hysterical I was secretary I was Indian I was

underline the words above a pillow case following instructions

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I TEASE THEM more I would tease them just a little bit I was also sentence FOLLOWE I was organizer imply I conscious was in debt just once just once over hilarity I was above the line word except was entirely conscious in the hospital experience but I licked my under the line my wounds I was bilbarious I was overt under the line overt the word underline do it twice I WAS big UNDERLINES I was print I can openly Indians movement as a leader humble in origin an anti-christ special under the line special which is the underword as I CAN SEE IT names as I am in trouble in overcoat dont mention test these reactions I was openly tested with an conscious taking the pills I second

B I L L M E A N Ssorry

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Barrett Watten: from One Half

Relax, stand at attention, and. Purple snake stands out on Porcelain tiles. The idea Is the thing. Skewed by design . . . . One way contradictory use is to Specify empty. Basis, its Cover operate under insist on Delineate. Stalin as a linguist.... I trust replication. Gives, Surface. Lights string The court reporter, distances. That only depth is perfect . . . . Comes to the history of words. The thought to eradicate In him. The poetry, by Making him think certain ways . . . . White, to each of these cancels Shadow, fog. Collapses self, And invading enemy wins. The argument itself, disassembling . . . . Objection. Of essence is the Time falls apart in his hands. Hatred, under the engine, Of daily events. I trust wheat . . . .

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And doubt it, to control by disOrientation. Eisenhower Did not come to power. Terms for the period, state . . . . Figure. State is severed from States of affairs? You Speak for themselves. Materials, the voice comes out . . . . Only I trust the materials. The Offspring are in relation By chain of command to Inculcate extremes. Uttermost . . . . Oxymoronic logic in these fears, Such. Canned corn, peas, Meat. Fixation on these things Gives only to isolate a few . . . . Mexico and Canada. Remembering, She sends the package And finally, dies. The one Image. I trust the thing itself . . . . To speak, and be struck down By remorse. Pure relation. That, given the time, an Assailant, in training films . . . .

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Bob Perelman: Third & Townsend

Rear the great monument to the brain's nearest and dearest. It commands these things: the numbers, flow charts, hands beckoning, standing psychic debris, grandmothers' involuntary memories to appear. The package is addressed to no one in particular. The Doggie Diner near where the freeway ends in midair is proof that we invented random numbers. Traffic pours through this thought-world and the tongue starts up, tripping in slight twists. Glossy agreements stir sentences in sleep until the monster sits up. It could have been anywhere, but once the building is built potted plants, plate glass doors are set down conspicuously to hold chance at arm's length.

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Some get religion and are gone. Pounding on walls, yelling above the serene radio blasting in the dark, only desire can carry a tune, make us live through the implosion of conscious seconds. Water in pipes runs a sound check, demands registration. Orders descend the brainstem, spew into a swamp of unheard melodies. The results stare out. There are pictures of the old buildings, but not of the exploded supporting cast.

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Douglas Messerli: Causes of the Crack Up: An Explication

A sentence is hard for a sudden to spin into space. See the hand perch on to fish out on the limb so to speak? It's not to place but the verge of, a breath only a comment can clear the way to. The distant scars. There's no question of diversion, the willingness to hug a huge escape to right where you never left. The unsuspected masses, collapses into itself a self. This is what is meant by cement.

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P. Inman: from "backbite"

for Bob Marley

tract wrote school, arm nane of reddening. self all in evenlies, most of language looking for a landscape. wriit ence hoar

never mind that decide protrud ure horizon, tlanth nettle mensity. "for our next entitle " pores

crance xisp

(rire occudes). (slicp

capitalism only knee-deep, hine mimempt.

grote trave thack drooth encloi, (oftens ommilm) hairstick. (mollen off question)

serie incents. fame, in its national dystrophy; sud enumen.

weakener drits,

plier marn.

symbol dakota. from lie crint design. theory a huge chaucer, ochre the lay down

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Charles Bernstein: Four Poems

Playing with a Full Deck

Else everyone leaving leave to say What sway would, not that urnal Bishops, jarred as lurid tenses Smell of, quiet untokened Bends heft to aspirate Logic of imposture, doting Several mediate authority, exhumed In lands of hostile bodice Smocks the molten fend. Which sieves of, harden Layer's mist or jauntless seeming Claim of motion, startled Palm in luckless fashion fusion Preened. Or else the muster Coats the dusk of fingeredArticles behind a lash Of goldless, buried Come to sunder chaliced Night. Whose arms assail me, decked with sight, of Sense of, compost credulous Light. Or deck the doors Discard and faded.

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What chainlink beckons, held in Hand, for pleading bleeds the Finer augur's talon. Redress Without defame, insists what Losses snare, here to where determine favors show. Gleam of Your unbridling, diffused arc's Indifferent spar-the slater Letters oak-lined portion, flagrant Sorrow end up, calling. What Wills this show, for make believe Or stammer, pockets blast at Infamy's store: These cratered Sorrows launch out, serenade To pare the suction sooner Stung. Whose will not bend nor Ape like furrows, arched Complacency's wirey mold.

But Boxes Both Boats, Growing Tireder as the Day Amasses

Indelibly repercussive: shadowed forensics in the noon time, showers of anyhow distended, released to the care of tiered reclamationswit and stain of inchoate felicity. Death defying darning, ambassadorial clip mimic dazed proclivity almonds might snarl the looser for its fold. Contain this charm, permit what clutches spore.
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Idiopathic Pathogenesis
Time is the grainy thing that cordons its own descent like lips drawn to a fire, at evening abandoned to arcades of nomenclature and fields of diplomats. Always a sudden mirage as turned in jackets wisteria-bloom of hurled departure grooming houseboats for duplicity's declaim. Trebled as the day is poured, incumbent in a periscope, a boaster's plan for serenade rejoins its party further down the road to which remove's absolved.

Air Shaft
Quick as a whip Wide as a gap Is wide. Somewhere Someone sears. Cachet in the hypochondriac Moonlight, sway in The censorious Goon flight.
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James Sherry: Epistle Apology

Riding from the capital to my home in New York, I noticed that autumn was still intense here in the south and I thought to write a poem, a posteriori, that would, by its rhythms transmit the rush and transition of the season, but full of regrets for not having been able on my trip to formulate or remember answers to certain questions that had been put to me about myself and my work, I am attacked by anxiety that the placid beauty of leaves changing color out the window of the train cannot alleviate. All the pieces are present; I have merely to put them together with procedures that . . . or are the procedures laid out yet. Autumn is when leaves get very colorful as they are dying, a high culture phenomenon. The remnants and abilities profundity, rationality, spontaneity have a great impact on the senses, but because what will happen soon is so obvious that it's not really threatening, except through fear of change, most remain increasingly calm throughout. And it's not a mistake either to go about our business or to shape what was too unformed to emerge this season into a thought that can be stated next spring when there'll be another chance to reach more people. With certain friends I feel compelled to know more about myself and to express it more clearly than I would or even feel is true. The brilliant propositions distilled from years of labor that seem to abound in the great literary, scientific and philosophical works of the past, but are more simply perceptions of particulars, are too far away to be grasped completely in every conversation and in any case can only come out from an explanation of how I feel in all my inconsistencies about a given topic and this itself, which I often don't want to admit, incites my mind to riot away from forthrightness which is its refuge. These bare bones thoughts, mutated into strange shapes by generations or a nodding acquaintance with someone some- what beyond critical mass, do not have the clarity and impact of the leaves peaking, and I feel more comfortable, that it is scaled, as I ride to where the leaves are all on the ground and the branches up in the air. It is less exciting, but to speak nature as well as the honed abstractions of native discourse is to remember all the dialects.

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On the other hand I can only convince by being myself. The rough edges showing in the thought in the rhetoric is a way out of the abysses of mind and aids insofar as communication is possible. The notion is elitist, but I don't think that the elites will support it either just yet. This is because a multiplicity of languages, as distinct from a universal language, which by now can be seen as praxis, includes science and technology languages, genre languages written in detective novels and science fiction, Black English, even literary language, that is, all one thinks to say in the way one thinks it, and as such is a recursive concept the ruling class cannot sustain. To accept that complexity does not have to be unified or that unification is packaging language for consumption is to under- stand both the plan and the intention. To skirt an issue to give it credibility and leave a hole where itself is and assume that it will be seen as intended is an aesthetic that can only survive in its nest, impossible outside of art, although I am here pointing to where this started.

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Arakawa and Madeline Gins

Instantaneously and repeatedly, Blank serves as a station for our senses, making possible an impression of continuance. Subject comes to be formed in much the same way. And so, Blank comes to be found thoroughly interspersed throughout Subject, forming an integral part of any act. When trying to bring it into focus, it must be remembered that Blank is widely dispersed, capable of behaving in many different ways at once, and itself plays a fundamental role in the act of focusing.

This is from a series of paragraphs being formed to establish Blank.

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Ken Irby: ftom Etudes

whether at fault quaver at crack the heart breaks freight not the affections each time winds oracle the body it hurts nothing helps that does not help the passing day pass free to die out through what trust can take and wish were mine were yours foolish most to only want to give to love tears, for a lodge of sorrow, seeds, or grit for, for that long house and smoke of memory, history's time afire

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[requiem tudes for Louis Zukofsky]

word boundaries orenda sumbur <<lf they ask, it is you>> exalted master asper macbenac ma che ben' art' mackerinact for 'im 'at's gawn awa' o Swan over the dark stripes where light bright oil <<To glow-not to grovel>> from It Was "the country of Watteau" where everyone is just about to rise and go light leaves like black under wind back of pagoya & I-light, I-lid, I-through, back take light & dark up the heart <<For the living>>

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