jmayhew unpacking a line by kkoch...
What is at stake is, rather, the joyous laughter that something so strange and wonderful should even exist at all. That is to say, we can imagine poetry not existing: that would be more plausible. Poetry is like something that doesn't have to exist, but, miraculously, does. We laugh in awe and amazement at this existence. It doesn't serve any ostensible purpose but we cannot do without it. We literally can't know what it's for, what it's all about. Maybe its purpose is to induce in us this very sentiment of awe.

Jacket 12 - Rachel Loden - Eight poems from Hotel Imperium

Jacket 21 - Rachel Loden in conversation with Kent Johnson

another dry day for the dirt...

suzanne says about independence & all ...

somewhere in all this
liberty freedom  self sufficiency
pursuit of happiness talk

other words must also be considered

'Leaves of Grass' at 150: As Exuberant and Encompassing as Ever - New York Times ...
The Whitman of that great poem is a holy fool, a sprite, a personification able to be everywhere at once, thanks to its immaterial nature. But there has never been a spirit so aware of his sinews and veins, so good at loafing and river-bathing and arousal. The body Whitman inhabits is as inclusive as his mind and feelings. 'I find I incorporate gneiss and coal and long-threaded moss and fruits and grains and esculent roots,/And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over,' he writes, as though he were the subject of a strange Renaissance portrait.

Dreamtime Village

yesterday on the walk we met no humans but a large raccoon snuffling around the base of a tree not far from butterfield road. we clapped our hands. people in cars looked our way. and eventually the animal looked up. as we curved around it on the sidewalk the asphalt path back toward the gravel trail it tiptoed into the tall grass...

normally green things are very brown these days. our pond is a mud flat. lawn grass crunches. but my few strong perennials in the garden are toughing it out. the late-planted nasturtiums are struggling. and what is this... some kind of coreopsis? i forget...



out on the walking path the bread&butter is just past its prime... the wild bergamot is set to bust out bigtime. maybe i'll get some pictures soon.

Dr. Johnson's Revolution - 250 Years of The Dictionary - New York Times

WNYC - News - 150 Years of "Leaves of Grass"

are all Evangelicals fundamentalists?

How I read the Bible 4: Was Jesus a Fundamentalist?

nick's reflections on a painting of the annunciation by (x-carmelite) filippo lippi ...

An infinity of details achieves the
miraculous by means of second
sight. Lucidity in the presence
of so many details. These details
are partly occluded (submerged)
by means of their overwhelming
number. Endless depths are also
elicited by means of numerous
receding colonnades.

reminds me of another less dramatic but equally rich in detail ... befuddles the eye to have so much to see ...

Orion > Orion Magazine > July | August 2005 > David James Duncan > What Fundamentalists Need ...
There is, for most humans born on earth, just one mother tongue, and a given tongue at a given time consists of only so many words. These words can absorb only so many abuses before they cease to mean. America's spiritual vocabulary--with its huge defining terms such as 'God,' 'soul,' 'sacrifice,' 'mysticism,' 'faith,' 'salvation,' 'grace,' 'redemption'--has been enduring a series of abuses so constricting that the damage may last for centuries. Too many of us have tried to sidestep this damage by simply rejecting the terminology. But the defamation of a religious vocabulary cannot be undone by turning away: the harm is undone when we work to reopen each word's true history, nuance and depth. Holy words need stewardship as surely as do gardens, orchards or ecosystems. When lovingly tended, such words surround us with spaciousness and mystery the way a sacred grove surrounds us with peace and oxygenated air. But when we abandon our holy words and fail to replace them, we end up living in a spiritual clearcut.
...

The "Christian Right's" fully-automated evangelical machine runs twenty-four hours a day-like McDonald's, Coca Cola and Exxon-Mobil-making converts globally. But to what? The conversion industry's notion of the word Christian has substituted a "Rapture Index" and Armageddon fantasy for Christ's interior kingdom of heaven and love of neighbor; it is funded by donors lured by a televangelical "guarantee" of "a hundredfold increase on all financial donations," as if Mark 10:30 were an ad for a financial pyramid scheme and Jesus never said, "Sell all thou hast and distribute it unto the poor...

BBC - Arts - Poetry

Village of Mundelein Water Usage...
As a reminder, water restrictions went into effect May 1 and go through September 30. The east side of Highway 45 is permitted to water on even numbered calendar days and the west side of Highway 45 is permitted on odd numbered calendar days. Watering hours are 5:00 to 10:00 a.m. in the morning and 6:00 to 11:00 p.m. in the evening. Lawn sprinkling and the outdoor watering of trees, bushes, sod, shrubs, etc. All other outdoor use of water is permitted provided a hose with a shut-off nozzle is used.

Dept. of State: International Information Programs: Publications - Outline of American Literature - Key Literature Sites

sometimes in writing you say to yrself what are you running away from what are you hiding & it's always this. trying to prove. something. not saying that tess didn't feel guilty for having fallen asleep and allowed prince to die to die to die. it's not her fault. but of course it is always anyone's fault. given the way things are set up. as in writing one is always trying to say something that lies just beyond the next rise. and finally saying it flattens it for a while. when one cannot write one is fully flat for a good while. accident-free. not even worried much about what one believes. knowing that it only matters what one does what one does & what one does...

somewhere i heard there were summer pots and winter pots ... one is wide ... fat ... the other is tall... thin ... at fyp i'm doing mostly thin summer poems for the heat ... tho i think the summer pots are wide & fat in order to cool down sooner ... and the winter pots are tall & thin to wrap yr hands around for warmth ... but i could be all wrong ... usually am ... nevertheless ... those skinny things at fyp seem just about right for the weather ... open to the breeze ... not made of brick ... tho it seems skinny poems are less forgiving ... harder to hide in ... every word is a big sign ...

Is it the smelling like an old towel,
the mildew'd effleurescene shiny surface

of things gone cloudy? Is it the way the night blooms up so seriously, recalling one to
one's own? Badass syntax takes me down. Cerberus nosing the dogfruit'd remains. ... & mr. latta's syntax is that ... worthy sin tax ... good stuff ... wake up yr lazy brain mama syntax

Campaign for America's Future

Lake County Adult Learning

Instructional Resources for Adult Literacy/Education

Vintage Catalog | Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

K A I R O S: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy

o ... Eeksy-Peeksy ... is back ... we can be happier now

about that sadoff piece from the apr ... "trafficking in the radiant: the spiritualization of american poetry" ... i was dense last night ... am a little less so this morning ... here is this passage near the end where he makes his point from a sort of then-now perspective ... the then is roughly 1965-1975 .. he writes:

Those years registered wide-sweeping critiques of institutions, governmental and otherwise; during that time we saw enormous growth in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the feminist movement. the scientific, philosophical, psychological and metaphysical discoveries of modernism became a pervasive discourse in mainstream culture. Freud's ... Einstein's ... Heisenberg's ... Nietzsche's ... Sartre's ... Derrida's and Foucault's work all suggested a world without a priori design, a world where truth was relative and shifting. The movement toward acceptance of these values had a great effect on our poems and our lives. In poetry, respect for the irrational and materiality was expressed in the surrealist and realist poetry of the generation of Simic, Tate, James Wright, Merwin, Levine, Rich, Etheridge Knight, Ginsberg and others. Traditions counter to the canon, many overtly social and political and linguistic ... not only thrived but influenced the terms of our poetry during the years that followed. These poets' faith and doubts were tied to the social world and the here-and-now on earth. It's not that they lacked a faith in the impalpable, but rather that the impalpable -- love, for example -- grew out of the material world and out imaginative associations with it.

aha ... sadoff goes on to discuss the now ...

The social and metaphysical ideologies that underlie our poetry now both reflect and alter the terms and spectrums of our poetic arguments. [s. gives example of how the centrist bill clinton is now percieved as a paragon of liberalism] ...And to be clear, I'm talking about how conventions, seeming expressions of individual need, grow out of specific social and historical moments, and unexamined, drive our poems. This commitment to the other-worldly, then, affects our commitment to this world.

he's working from an atheistic perspective ... but it's not so far from my own closely held notions ... i guess theologians would call it an incarnational view ... the belief that "the other world" can only be known and active upon us via a close attention to and high valuation of this present world ("effluvial, filled with goodness as well as darkness, sufficient beauty and difficulty") in which we find ourselves ... it calls us to see better what it is ... s. seems to be objecting to the a priori imposition of a spiritual ideology that blinkers a poet to the relatively unstable flow of whatever is actually present ... he wants that freedom ... "without consolation or excuse."

sometimes i think i will say more ... then i worry that i won't say anything worth saying or reading ... then i worry that i will show my foolishness to the world ... as if i haven't done that already ... as if ... then i think i am too old for all of this ... and too young ... then that i'm not smart enough not only to say but to do or be ... anything ... but i'm not complaining ... and this is not what they call angst ... i'm just typing ... but i do feel a tiny bit like j. alfred prufrock .. and i have never really liked that poem ... never much at all ... but that's ok because there are plenty who do ... so one who doesn't won't matter so much ...

i was looking at the new APR that arrived today ... an article by ira sadoff called "trafficking in the radiant: the spiritualization of american poetry" and i haven't been able to finish it because i'm not sure what he's saying and i keep re-reading passages i don't get ... and i still don't get them ... but i like that title very much ... he's clearly against this spiritualization ... but i will have to read some more and report back to you once i find a quotable bit that makes his point better than i could ... i guess ... but it all makes me very self-conscious .. because i am supposed to be a spiritual person but i don't write recognizably spiritual things ... or i hope i don't (that passage on our recent chapter excepted ... but was that spiritual or just religious ... these things are so befuddling) ... hope i don't because whose business is my spiritual business anyway ... certainly not almost anyone's ... and i wouldn't presume ... but of course what isn't spiritual after all ... what isn't ...

i read 12th Night yesterday and finished it today ... then i began Tess of the d'Urbervilles ... and find the beginning much smoother going than i'd expected ... i'd read it long long ago in college and had a pretty muddled sense of it ... but it's a long book ... so there's still plenty chance for it to get muddled sooner or later ... and probably will ... no fault of its own ... probably

Lyn Hejinian - Introduction from The Language of Inquiry ...
Poetry, to use William James's phrase, 'is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected.' This is not to say that poetry is about transitions but that 'aboutness' (in poetry, but, I would argue, also in life) is transitional, transitory; indeed, poetry (and perhaps life) calls conventional notions of 'aboutness' into question.

in December's grip

the gripe was for more sun

and now the gripe, the sun


and by Dissatisfactions

one by one

capacity for pleasure

is undone

... ain't it the truth ... but not me boy ... i went out walking in the steamy bright sunshine this morning & i sweat a bit ... but it was a good thing all the way ... a very good thing ... hot & heavy as it was ... a good thing ... soft edges all over the tall grass and the birds and bugs ... all a good thing