Occupy Poetry

"The word produced through these men is the idea of an invert buried by his animal response to things, who has forgotten (through the martyrdom of time and things) that the word has been invented. The invert is he who eats his self, and desires that his self nourish him." -Antonin Artaud, fr. "Revolt Against Poetry," trans. Jack Hirschman

94 followers

49s

this already feels dated.

3m

dig the shape, tone of tweets but not the venue. epigrammatic. takes a special comportment & heed for relevance. tact.

10m

I like to share irrelevant things. like what I had for dinner. or what my cats might say in human language. I'm sure you appreciate these.

13m

poem-audiences will tolerate self-deprecating brags, too, as they're looking for something that speaks to them. don't retweet this.

 14m

consoling myself about how long since my last fuck by remembering the last time I fucked was in (sic) Lake Tuscaloosa. not working.

19m

least you can get away w/ drab confessionalism in poetry. just call it liminal. more patience. your audience obv. has nothing better to do.

1h

#insertclevercommentaboutwhathashtagsareintendedforandhowyouregoingagainstthenetworkgrainbutyoualreadyknowthisisoldevenbeforeitsposted

1h

art of the bad poem. smart of the favorited tweet. the canny everyday permits messianic interventions, but you can always follow DONGLORD69

2h

the form demands a certain wit achieved by some more than others. what interests me is the sense of implied mastery automatically conferred.

3h

"Your Tweet was over 140 characters. You'll have to be more clever."

3h

there's a sort of rigor in constraint, as well as relief. if you haven't said it by now, you're not saying it right. poetweet. psh. the myth of poetry as violation is outmoded.

5h

what're you gonna do when Kony gets famous. do #awp sluts look like porn bots (i.e. authentic). poems as temporal. tweets as immortal.

8h

"How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life." -L. Wittgenstein #wellread #lookatme #lastwordproblems

this isn't happening

she says I like to be tossed why don't you throw me around more like a plaything she's so light what if you break she says you're too worried about hurting me I once butted heads nearly broke this girl's nose I said I don't wanna hurt you sometimes she says maybe some pain is worth it and I did and she hits and again hits she tumbles she says pull my hair we nearly fall off sometimes we can't walk right after and I was afraid but she asks again and then again each time we do and I was still afraid of what isn't happening she doesn't break like I imagined doesn't bruise or dry even and I kept saying I don't I just don't want to hurt you she says I think that's your problem and I'm afraid I'm still afraid I left her in pieces she said you're missing the point I just don't want to hurt anyone I check up on her to see if she's okay she said you worry too much but I think she just doesn't want me to hurt to know she was hurt she wanted me to think she's okay and I don't want to hurt anyone I just don't want to hurt anyone I just don't want to hurt any

Maybe I'll start using this blog thing again?

http://www.napowrimo.net/

The Alphabet

An early short film from David Lynch's UCLA period.

David Lynch - The Alphabet

Another gem

Toni Simon and Nick Piombino read from Stacy Doris' 'Discourse on the Guillotine,' drawings by Toni Simon
Toni Simon and Nick Piombino read from the Cake Part from Stacy Doris on Vimeo.

Contradicta: Aphorisms

Contradicta: Aphorisms from Toni Simon on Vimeo.

Reading by Nick Piombino, drawings and video by Toni Simon.

States of emergent (see)

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents [i.e. liberals, historical materialists, etc.] treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge––unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable." -Walter Benjamin, Thesis 8 of "Theses on the Philosophy of History"

De rerum natura

"'Tis sweet, when, down the mighty main, the winds
Roll up its waste of waters, from the land
To watch another's labouring anguish far,
Not that we joyously delight that man
Should thus be smitten, but because 'tis sweet
To mark what evils we ourselves be spared;
'Tis sweet, again, to view the mighty strife
Of armies embattled yonder o'er the plains,
Ourselves no sharers in the peril; but naught
There is more goodly than to hold the high
Serene plateaus, well fortressed by the wise,
Whence thou may'st look below on other men
And see them ev'rywhere wand'ring, all dispersed
In their lone seeking for the road of life;
Rivals in genius, or emulous in rank,
Pressing through days and nights with hugest toil
For summits of power and mastery of the world.
O wretched minds of men! O blinded hearts!
In how great perils, in what darks of life
Are spent the human years, however brief!–
O not to see that Nature for herself
Barks after nothing, save that pain keep off,
Disjoined from the body, and that mind enjoy
Delightsome feeling, far from care and fear!"
-Lucretius

Seriously?

Innocent female protesters penned in the street and maced!

The Thoughtful Lover

"Deny yourself all
half things. Have it
or leave it.

But it will keep—or
it is not worth
the having.

Never start
anything you can't
finish—

However do not lose
faith because you
are starved!

She loves you
she says. Believe it 
—tomorrow.

But today
the particulars
of poetry

that difficult art
require
your whole attention."

-W.C.W.

to his cowing mistress

can't
chew
ate
form
aye
earning
tree
ken
dole
hour
i'm

Disruptive distinctions

Sometimes (well, oftentimes, and with the semester beginning, oftener-times) I need diversions, stark as a good Onion headline ("Nation's Weirdest Teenager Buys Season One DVD Of 'Murphy Brown'"), but nuanced enough to colonize my interest for several accidental minutes. At once permanent—or for the moment, permanently accessible, as in, wherever there's a WiFi hotspot—and ephemeral—no "object" in the sense of tangibly differentiated space; always remote from "I"—the projections/projectables/projective virtual "things" so far incapable of being possessed, bought (copyrighted?), except through Lindley's temporal act of installation (in this sense, of course, it is owned), or if I permit the temptation to fetishistically stick it to my desktop background; what do I want to say about them? Something simple. Something like, "She does it best." Isn't this the point, by varying degrees of totalizing statement, which art critics arrive at in their praise of a person, or his/her craft? I don't know. I'm happy it isn't my business to be an expert on such questions (for now, at least), but if I could just give a more intelligent, less inherited, sense of what I mean by "transfix," when I say I am trans-fixed (I stand or sit, and I am moved) by these pieces. If I could only inhabit these virtual works besides just within my own mind—but that thinking is illusory. The material, the tempo-real cannot (shouldn't?) be transmuted by the mind (only within its conceptual parameters). Nor can the virtual object coagulate, calcify, inhabit space in a solid, intransigent way; and this is the axiomatic takeaway of the medium itself: nothing, essentially, exists in this way. All is finally subject to corrosion, structural decomposition, liquification, elemental reconstitution.

I'm not nailing this aesthetic definition-thing down. It would be a mistake to think I could even attempt a potent critical investigation of Lindley's craft. And I don't mean for this reverence to lend more autonomy to the work than is due; it is just one of those pieces I would rather (for better/worse) let speak for itself.

"D.2" by Kasey Lou Lindley

Whoso list to punt

Lately I've been producing stuff of a different kind, so I figure now's a good time to let go of the few poems I was hoping to get "published" this year. Of the five or so, I was least fond of "roominations," however I am grateful to the editors at Übernothing for its publication. So without further disparagement, I enter/exit the quixotic threshold of "literary" anxiety and cheerfully present four mediocre pieces of a sort that may look nothing like what I'm currently doing; nor can I expect them to look like themselves 1 in the future:


of plural and obstinate

of plural and obstinate
of cause and affect
of absorption and distress
of authority and love
of home and difference
of opinions and suspicion
of limits and extension
of contents and formed
of motion and continence
of you and our
of lapse and track
of hearing and thus
of quiet and indicative
of life and end
of progress and history
of facts and undeterred
of intention and sense
of being and withheld
of judgment and regardless
of cooperation and contempt
of court and defense
of nation and state
of mind and body
of water and finality
of ambition and slumber
of reading and life
of examination and wastes
of time and where
of which and resisting
of definition and infinitude
of possible and specified
of variable and absolute
of reason and passions
of other and binary
of one and same
of kind and quality
of care and privatization
of wealth and share
of space and occupation
of land and sea
of consciousness and habit
of perpetuum and disruption
of stasis and variation
of use and significance
of relative and general
of particular ands


on time align

beckons back to the gee
ography of it

doesn't appear this
pier's for peering

does & shouldn't be
couldn't would'st

an other's gaze at
quarter to ten

better head back
& meet de pressed

did you set the DVR
such a gift time

brushing trace thru city
grass no mention made

of the water reference no tide
besides

the eye floats itself
surfeited engulfed the point

of reference look out
& see you're observed

speech wears its watch
down the well of inscrutability

a 4-way stop step
forward pacing deliberate a-

cross the walk slows
white pickup each awaiting

the other's halt in
time meted tension

anticipate the steps
observing each climb


speak compared cruelty 2

speak compared cruelty
compared could have
but older which
pity these breakfast for
enemy about existed that forever
families certain rank
privilege including they
had to have
would all me could
had believe get from first
this would axe insult
lightning cemetery
we over that terror
or deserves their reverence
worst ludicrous ever
elect it other a
of and families own
they occurred
could it were asked it
he didn't voluntarily
steal the crimes
myself I to prove
change you to thing
watch they become body
shout of invented
whose is on have
wholesome gov't
not real to extraneous
out the to loyalty was
Connecticut power
founded they alter
their expedient


to thing of

there's no seeing thing
thru barricades

to see
has been seen

or be—their no thing
threw craves

scene of nothing been
to white no

thing alights a bee
whose knees have seeing

that's the matter
of to and/or is

another matter bar-
ricuda undersea

between (these) more &
less parallel beams, mat-

erial batters
being seen to nothing

the mattering of
manners bantered

like light's umbrage
sees there's no matter

to thing of


<#
AMB

1 All my poems tend to undergo variation/transmutation in the act of revision, in the presence of new poems/ideas, and esp. in the labor of performance.

2 This poem was constructed via a simple chance-operation using pages from a volume of James Baldwin's collected writings. The (incidental) content/form lends itself to surprisingly justifiable hermeneutic manifestations, particularly when read aloud at various tempos and cadences. I plan to experiment with it more (perhaps using voice-layer technology) at some point. Comes what may.

Missing you, Sarasota <#