Marco Giovenale, translated by Linh Dinh:

world dominion, XVII

the shifting of the earth’s axis, no? the collapse of the scaffolding on 4th of November Street, no? the landslide on Ischia, no? a pain on the ribs, no? the success of your last film, no? he was the son of an egyptian, from the first century, no? as elena walks by they turn around, no? a mouthful of air in mexico city, no? spike tried to get up, no? they checked the troubled breathing, no? the nurses were ready for the tracheotomy, no? the journalists arrive in small bunches, no? december hinders the ambulances, no? everyone frantic for presents, no? dust from the sarcophagus, no? she has already disappeared through the back door, no? the room spinned and the light went out, no? driving a taxi the wrong way against a check point he shot and was hit, no? they kidnap people arriving at the airport, no? there’s nothing to be done, no? now they go to notify the relatives, but there aren’t any, no? take a look, not even friends, no? the wife went out the service entrance, no? he only had beauty, no? not very brave but armed, no?

world dominion, XV

not satisfied? help us to improve_ © 2006 _supplying cross bars, a ministerial decree, and they won't be applied homogeneously to all emergencies, the production doesn't seem updated, the scientific one, of the majority of the minority group. why are there two doctors. unhappy. are you unhappy? help us to improve _ © 2007 _supplying medicine, aid, provoking a wave of responses of surprising proportion, unless specified it means that [omitted] has been prescribed for the interviewee. somewhat linked with vomitting. it's very frequent among children, and could appear as an isolated symptom, or accompanied by intestinal irritations. "it was absolutely important that we win." damages from the shed fire. at what point? help us to improve_ © 2008 _supplying workers. keep it hard. don't give up more than 100 euros, i'm not satisfied with my life at all, from the moment my mind became lost in thoughts this evening, i can't remember the password, from any assignment. "we've suffered too much." performances, odd sundays, double shots, dogs

The butcher goes: “It was a film of unheard of delicacy,” each word accompanied by a red line of cleaver falling on meat.

He smiles, forms little teardrops between his eyelashes. Raising his left hand, he leaves the tiniest gap between thumb and index finger: “An entire plotline filled with miraculous nuances,” and down goes the bone knife, on fat, traces of blood, mushy paste, oozes, of a flank.

With all that is immeasurable tiptoeing at the far end of the spirit, he brings down his forearm and smashes strips of marrow, shards of ribs, and fussily forms another larme—a tiny teardrop—recalling the film.

His audience is a little old man, crepuscular and illiterate, an anecdote sitting against the door, but then he falls asleep, soothed by the sun.

The chopping flings specks of nerves and muscles against the glass, blood and tendons pooling on the counter. The butcher stops and smiles again, his elbow on the idle blade, chin and pathos in his palm; his gaze very far away; while a fly comes and goes without pause, glowing like crazy, as if in happiness.

Mysticism

The murderer’s sister ties herself to a bed and sleeps without moving the entire time.

At the senate they stick a finger into their collars out of nervousness, turning red because the one responsible is among them, a fact they know well, too well.

They buy many bedsheets, thinking they’d cut them into ribbons to climb down.
But first they’d have to climb up, they’d have to be imprisoned, and this could never happen without legal proceedings, incrimination, and confession of guilt…

Everyone confesses. (Everyone is forgiven).

(They kill themselves out of shame). (For this they’re also forgiven).

Thanks to some offline encouragement, I’ve decided to start re-posting my column here at Harriet once a month or so. In my time away, I’ve been penning reviews of new working-class poetry volumes (an extremely critical one of the highly problematic The Way We Work: Contemporary Writings from the American Work Place, edited by Peter Scheckner and M.C. Boyes, for Labor History and another more positive one of You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-1941, edited by John Marsh, for the Labor Studies Journal).

And I’ve also been watching the economy plunge further since I last wrote for Harriet, reading of its effects on working people across the globe and trying hard to find new poems that innovatively address the current economic clime and its effects on workers in the U.S. and across the globe.

A reading I attended several months ago at the Mayday Bookstore in Minneapolis helps flush out the NYTimes article. David Roediger was in town to speak and read from his brilliant new book, How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon. I love Roediger’s work because the poet—either in spirit, voice, and/or text—is never forgotten (Roediger’s essay on Sterling Brown and new labor history, published in New Working Class Studies a few years ago, is one of the finer texts I’ve read on the articulation of poetry and labor). Along with Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived US History is a must read in these days preceding the inauguration.

I’ve also been reading my way around in the massive recent Nicholas Coles and Janet Zandy edited American Working-Class Literature: An Anthology. Weighing in at nearly 1,000 pages, the volume is a comprehensive take on the field. Coles, editor of the defining 1990s anthology Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life, and Zandy, author most recently of Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work, have scoured the shelves and archives to produce a volume that will, for the early years of the 21st century, be canonical in literature and labor history classes. My only real beef with the book (besides the fact that they misspelled my name in the bibliography!), which should be familiar to readers of my earlier Harriet columns, is the limitation that’s incurred by the adjective “American.” I’d like to begin to imagine what the volume might be if the defining title were simply “Working-Class Literature: An Anthology.” Can we push beyond the nation-state in our thinking about labor and poetics in order to (re-)envision a poetry (and working-class politics and poetics) that includes, say, Canada and Mexico and the rest of the world? Both in the years prior to this continent becoming these particular “nations” and in the post-NAFTA era of neoliberal globalization (and its potential collapse), how does (or might) poetry address a working world that is not so stringently nation-bound?

Amidst this economic plummet that is obviously both a national crisis and a crisis far beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, this seems a perfect time for poetry and poetics to simultaneously expand as well.

Apologies for the silence. I’ve holed myself in LA. And another apology for committing a blogging faux-pas. It’s always obnoxious when a blogger writes a post just to say that she hasn’t written for awhile. Who cares, right? Just get on with the program! I’m in the pit of LA and I’m trying to finish a writing project. I remember talking to Daisy Fried, a former blogger for Harriet, who said that she was fond of blogging in the morning since it warmed her up for her poetry writing. I can’t. I need to shut everything off to write. It’s terrible. So I haven’t even done much in LA (except watch an embarrassing number of hours of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservation). Haven’t hit my favorite hiking routes, taco trucks, not even the Museum of Jurassic Technology. How I love the Museum of Jurassic Technology. This is a poet’s museum. Every poet who’s been to this museum should write an ode to this museum. Anyway, I’ve been reading some fantastic new collections which I’ll blog about soon.

Selections from UbuWeb

January 2009
Selected by James Hoff

1. Sjollander/Weck: Extracts from Monument

2. Ron Rice: A Brief History of Anti-Records and Conceptual Records

3. Alan Sondheim: Run by Me

4. Ulay: Action in 14 Predetermined Sequences

5. Joseph Nechvatal: viral symphOny (28'09")

6. Henry Chopin Performance: Undated

7. CoLab: All Color News Sampler

8. John Cage / Wim Mertens "So that each person is in charge of himself."from A Dip in the Lake

9. Dec-Francis: Rant 2

10. Charlemagne Palestine: Island Song

James Hoff is an artist living in New York City. He, along with Miriam Katzeff, is the co-founder of Primary Information.

December 2008
Selected by Julian Cowley

1. Robert Ashley - Music with Roots in the Aether

2. Joe Jones/ Chicken to Kitchen Fluxus Meditation from Fluxsaints (1992)

3. Robert Wilson - Christopher Knowles The Sundance Kid Is Beautiful (1975) from Giorno Poetry Systems, Big Ego

4. Wolf Vostell - De/Collage [LP] (1980)

5. John Cage and Raahsan Roland Kirk - Sound?? (1966)

6. Nicholas Moore, Spleen (Ubu Editions, 2004)

7. Pina Bausch Documentary (directed by Anne Linsel) (2006)

8. David Behrman, Long Throw (Roulette, 2008)

9. Derek Bailey, Interview by Henry Kaiser (1987)

10. Vito Acconci, The Bristol Project (2001)

Julian Cowley contributes regularly to The Wire and occasionally to other music magazines. He has also lectured and written extensively on literature. During the 1980s he had the good fortune to work closely for several years with poet and critic Eric Mottram, whose inexhaustible conversation was, in effect, a foretaste of the UbuWeb experience.

November 2008
Selected by Neville Wakefield

1. Willoughby Sharp Interviews Vito Acconci (1973)

2. Bas Jan Ader - Selected Works (1970-71)

3. Pipilotti Rist - Video Works (1986-2003)

4. Chris Burden - Documentation of Selected Works 1971-74

5. Johan Grimonprez - Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997)

6. The Films of Jack Goldstein (1974-1978)

7. Gordon Matta-Clark - Splitting, Bingo/Ninths, Substrait (Underground Dailies) (1974-1976)

8. Lawrence Weiner - WATER IN MILK EXISTS (2008)

9. Psychic TV - "Unclean"

10. Robert Smithson - Bootleg of Hotel Palenque by Alex Hubbard (1969 / 2004)

Neville Wakefield is a writer and curator living in NYC. Recent film projects include 'destricted' a compilation of commissioned films by Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Marco Brambilla, Larry Clark, Gaspar Noe, Richard Prince and Sam Taylor Wood. Senior curatorial advisor to PS1 and curator of Frieze he is also creative director of 'tar' magazine.

Poet and cartoonist Gary Sullivan lives in Brooklyn with Nada Gordon. Together, they wrote the book Swoon. Gary's most recent book is PPL in a Depot. He has published three issues of a comic book, Elsewhere, and maintains a blog by the same name at http://garysullivan.blogspot.com.

September 2008
Selected by Rick Moody

1. Komar and Melamid & Dave Soldier, "The Most Unwanted Song"

2. Jacques Derrida, "On Religion" Part 1, Part 2

3. Assorted Street Posters

4. William Carlos Williams, "Danse Russe."

5. Beth B., "Stigmata"

6. James Joyce, "Anna Livia Plurabelle"

7. Tellus #14, "Just Intonation"

8. Hugo Ball, "Karawane," performed by Marie Osmond

9. Gregory Whitehead, "We All Scream Alone"

10. John Cage Meets Sun Ra

Rick Moody is the author of four novels, three collections of stories, and a memoir, THE BLACK VEIL. He also plays music with The Wingdale Community Singers.

August 2008
Selected by Ben Rubin

1. Erik Saite - A Day in the Life of a Musician

2. Richard Leacock - For an Uncontrolled Cinema

3. William S. Burroughs - The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin

4. Claude Cloksy - The first thousand numbers classified in alphabetical order

5. Robert Smithson - A Heap of Language

6. Vito Acconci - RE

7. Marshall McLuhan - The Medium is the Massage, Side A , Side B

8. Raphael Rubinstein - A Brief History of Appropriative Writing

9. Marjorie Perloff - The Music of Verbal Space

10. Steve Reich - Pendulum Music (score)

Ben Rubin is a media artist based in New York City. He has been a frequent collaborator with artists and performers including Laurie Anderson, Diller+Scofidio, Ann Hamilton, Arto Lindsay, Steve Reich, and Beryl Korot.

July 2008
Selected by Zach Feuer

1. Paul McCarthy - Painter (1995)

2. Pipilotti Rist - Video Works (1986-1999)

3. Richard Kern - My Nightmare (1993)

4. Bas Jan Ader - Fall I & II (1970)

5. Lynda Benglis - Female Sensibility (1974)

6. Sophie Calle & Greg Shepard - No Sex Last Night aka Double-Blind (1992)

7. Kembra Pfahler - Cornella; The Story of a Burning Bush (1985)

8. Robert Morris & Stan VanDerBeek - Site (excerpt) (1964, .mov)

9. Carolee Schneeman - Meat Joy (1964)

10. Dan Graham - Rock My Religion (1982-84)

Zach Feuer owns the creatively named Zach Feuer Gallery in New York City.

June 2008
Selected by Ron Silliman

1. Frank Film (1973), Frank and Caroline Mouris

2. The Name (1973), Robert Creeley

3. Recollections of Grande Apachería (1973), Edward Dorn

4. Reading at Goddard College (1973), Robert Creeley

5. Carnival The First Panel: 1967-1970 (1973), Steve McCaffery

6. Black Tarantula Crossword Gathas (excerpt) (1973), Jackson Mac Low

7. A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Matlin (1973), Jackson Mac Low

8. Heavy Aspirations (1973), Charles Amirkhanian

9. Armand Schwerner (1973), Phil Niblock (real video .rm file)

10. High Kukus (1973), James Broughton

Ron Silliman was once a slow left-handed second baseman. Now he lives in a faux forest in what was once the Biddle Estate.

May 2008
Selected by Christian Bok

1. Claude Closky: "The First Thousand Numbers Classified in Alphabetical Order" (1989) [PDF]

2. Derek Beaulieu: "Flatland" (2007) [PDF]

3. Darren Wershler-Henry: "The Tapeworm Foundry" (2002)

4. Claude Simon: "Properties of Several Geometric and Non-Geometric Figures" (1971)

5. F. T. Marinetti: "Dune, Parole in Libertà" (1914)

6. Survival Research Laboratories: "Virtues of Negative Fascination" (1985-86)

7. Seth Price: "Video Game Soundtracks 1983-1987″ (2001)

8. Trek Bloopers

9. Anton Bruhin: "Rotomotor" (1976-77)

10. RACTER: "The Policeman's Beard Is Half-Constructed" (1984)

BONUS TRACK:

IBM 7090: "Music from Mathematics" (1962)

Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia.

April 2008
Selected by Laura Beiles

1. Anita Feldman and Michael Kowalski, Riffle (1985)

2. MoMA: Writing in Time (2007)

3. Piotr Kamler, Films (1960s-90s)

4. Fortunato Depero, Verbalizzazione astratta di signora (1916)

5. Penelope Umbrico, All the Dishes on Ebay (2002-03)

6. Catherine Jauniaux & Ikue Mori, 'Smell' (1992)

7. Abbie Hoffman Makes Gefilte Fish (1973)

8. Mary Lou Green on Andy Warhol's Hair (1963)

9. Sophie Calle and Gregory Shephard, Double Blind (1992)

10. Cioni Carpi, Three Short Films (1960-62)

Laura Beiles is an associate educator in the Department of Education (Adult and Academic Programs) at The Museum of Modern Art, where she has organized programs with artists, poets, scholars, architects, and designers for seven years. In May of 2007, she received her MA in Art History from Hunter College, and received the Shuster Award for her thesis, "Creating National and International Identities: The Futurist Exhibitions at the Venice Biennale under Fascism, 1928-1942″. Prior to coming to MoMA, she worked at NYU's La Pietra in Florence and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

March 2008
Selected by Seth Price

1. Tessa Hughes-Freeland "Baby Doll" (1982)

2. Marie Menken "Glimpse of the Garden" (1957)

3. Robert Barry "Interview (1969)"

4. Ethyl Eichelberger "Jocasta (Boy Crazy) or "She Married Her Son" (1986)

5. Lytle Shaw "Low-Level Bureaucratic Structures: Principles of the Emeryville Shellmound

6. Taj Mahal Travellers "Taj Mahal Travellers on Tour" (1973)

7. Asger Jorn "Pataphysics: A Religion in the Making"

8. Racter "The Policeman's Beard Is Half-Constructed" (1984)

9. Tristan Tzara "A Note on Negro Poetry" (1918)

10. I.B.M. 7090 "Music From Mathematics" (1962)

Seth Price is an artist.

March 2008
Selected by Stephanie Strickland

1. Maya Deren, "Divine Horsemen"

2. "Concrete!" Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive

3. Jason Nelson, "Poetry Cube"

4. b. p. Nichol, "White Text Sure"

5. Yoko Ono, "Snow Is Falling All the Time"

6. Dick Higgins, "Horizons" [PDF

7. Ketjak: the Ramayana Monkey Chant

8. "Concrete Poetry: A World View" Mary Ellen Solt

9. Raphael Rubinstein, "Gathered, not Made: A Brief History of Appropriative Writing"

10. Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics

Bonus

11. Glossolalia: Speaking in Tongues

12. Caroline Bergvall, "About Face"

Stephanie Strickland is a poet. Her latest collaborative hypermedia work is slippingglimpse first shown at e-Poetry 2007 in Paris and published in hyperrhiz: new media cultures. Her latest book, Zone : Zero (with digital poetry CD) will appear from Ahsahta Press in fall 2008. She recently published "Quantum Poetics: Six Thoughts, in Media Poetry: An International Anthology," edited by Eduardo Kac, co-edited The Iowa Review Web issue, Multi-Modal Coding: Jason Nelson, Donna Leishman, and Electronic Writing, and also co-edited the first Electronic Literature Collection, published by the Electronic Literature Organization.

February 2008
Selected by Alan Licht

1. Derek Bailey Interview by Henry Kaiser

2. Richard Foreman MP3 loops from Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty

3. Bruce Nauman "Record"

4. bpNichol — all sound works

5. Cornelius Cardew "Stockhausen Serves Imperialism"

6. Philip Guston/Clark Coolidge "Poor Richard"

7. Lou Reed "the View from the Bandstand"

8. Jack Smith "Buzzards Over Baghdad"

9. Richard Meltzer "Barbara Mauritz: Music Box"

10. Adrian Piper "Untitled 1968″

Over the past two decades, guitarist Alan Licht has worked with a veritable who's who of the experimental world. He has released five albums of compositions for tape and solo guitar, and his sound and video installations have been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe. His new book Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Media, the first extensive survey of the genre in English, was published by Rizzoli in fall 2007.

February 2008
Selected by Bettina Funcke

1. Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire (1969) and How to Live in the German Federal Republic (1986) - Note! Films Removed by copyright holder's request

2. UbuWeb Hall of Shame

3. Robert Frank, Energy and How to Get It (1981)

4. J. G. Ballard, Shanghai Jim (1991)

5. Pandid Pran Nath Ragas of Morning and Night (1968)

6. Hrabanus Marus De adoratione crucis ab opifice / De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis Augsburg (ca. 845)

7. Jacques Lacan, Television (1973)

8. Joan Jonas "The Anchor Stone" (1988)

9. Inuit Throat Singing, from Ethnopoetics

10. Assorted Street Posters (1985-present) from Outsiders

Bettina Funcke is the Senior U.S. Editor of Parkett Magazine.

January 2008
Selected by Alex Ross

1. Robert Ashley "She Was a Visitor"

2. Kurt Schwitters "Sonata in Urlauten"

3. John Cale "Loop"

4. The Films of Mauricio Kagel

5. Charles Amirkhanian "Dog of Stravinsky"

6. Bernd Alois Zimmermann "Musique pour le soupers de Roi Ubu"

7. Pauline Oliveros "Sound Patterns"

8. Ezra Pound "Sestina: Altaforte"

9. John Cage "4'33"

10. Robert Ashley "The Wolfman"

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His work has also appeared in The New Republic, The London Review of Books, Lingua Franca, and The Guardian. From 1992 to 1996 he was a critic at The New York Times. He has received two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for music criticism, fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin and the Banff Centre, and a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center for contributions to the field of contemporary music. He played keyboards in the noise band Miss Teen Schnauzer, which gave only one public performance, in 1991. His first book, "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century," a cultural history of music since 1900, was published in October 2007 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Harriet asks me to wish you all the best in the new year, and to thank all the readers, bloggers and commenters who've stopped by these last twelve months and more - please do keep coming back!

In the new year's resolution department, she also wants me to remind everyone to be kind as circumstances permit: to fortify and express your passions without injury to those with whom you find disagreement. H. loves the differing viewpoints represented here, but reserves the right (hardly ever exercised, in fact - a tribute to those who put in their two cents or flarf-dollars here!) to refrain from publishing remarks that aim to be hurtful and little more. You know, name-calling, etc.

I'd like to add my own warm wishes on behalf of Poetry, and especially to thank some Poetry Foundation folks who've helped create this interesting place but have moved on to other poetical pursuits, namely Emily Warn, Nick Tremelow, Elizabeth Stigler, and Milan Gagnon. We'll miss them, but hope they'll continue to drop by...

And now, a snippet of an new year greeting by W.H. Auden:

I should like to think that I make
a not impossible world,
but an Eden it cannot be:
my games, my purposive acts,
may turn to catastrophes there.
If you were religious folk,
how would your dramas justify
unmerited suffering?

Here's wishing you a happy '09!

And if that doesn't give you every last bit of information you need about the big event, then here are ten more stories from the past two weeks to put it all in persepctive:

The AP's bio piece, beginning with Alexander in stroller at the "I Have a Dream" speech.

""In that moment, really I am the vessel for the poem": A chat with Alexander on NPR.

"It's bigger than Oprah!": Graywolf, Alexander's publisher, plans instant inaugural book.

The National Review stays classy in their critique of Alexander.

Jay Parini praises Obama's choice in the Guardian.

An in-depth look at Alexander in the Philly Inquirer.

The HuffPo people are down.

"Protesting Mr. Obama's inauguration is much more important than protesting George W. Bush's inauguration ever was": CA Conrad asks Alexander to decline.

George Packer re-considers his initial rebuff.

Hoard your time, since you’ll need it to be alone to think and to write.

Be frugal, since it’ll allow you to work less and have more time to think and to write.

Try, as best you can, to have an overview of what’s possible in writing, the various strategies attempted throughout history, throughout the world.

Identify the writers or works you admire the most, and read them very slowly, as many times as necessary.

Have faith that you will get better at thinking and writing, and that people will notice it, even if stingily and reluctantly, since you’re not entitled to any attention.

Be prepared to be disappointed over and over.

Even if you’ll end up a mediocre writer, there’s an outside chance you will become an excellent reader, so this pursuit will still be worthwhile, sort of, even as you lie there, unheated, loveless and clutching your last packet of Ramen Pride.

Don’t be afraid to be as weird, meaning as PECULIARLY YOU as possible. Try to say it all. Be shameless. Don’t hesitate to revisit a piece over and over to follow and capture everything that it really wants to say. Use each draft as a lead and a springboard into revealing something truly astounding, even if the actual changes (a revised noun here, an added adjective there) may be minimal.

Be as crazy and as perverse as possible, be inspired to the point of madness, but don't be glib.

Poetry should astound and frighten, not make you giggle for two seconds.

G. And what have you found in Iceland?

C. What have we found? More copy, more surface,
Vignettes as they call them, dead flowers in an album –
The harmoniums in the farms, the fine-bread and pancakes,
The pot of ivy trained across the window,
Children in gumboots, girls in black berets.

R. And dead craters and angled crags.

Louis MacNeice, ‘Eclogue From Iceland’

This sign greeted me when I arrived in Iceland just before Christmas. I heard no harmoniums, ate no pancakes and wore no beret, but the landscape and twenty-hour nights disarranged my vision and so my economy.

Ah! what came we forth to see
that our hearts are so hot with desire?
Is it enough for our rest,
the sight of this desolate strand,
And the mountain-waste voiceless as death
but for winds that may sleep not nor tire?
Why do we long to wend forth
through the length and breadth of a land,
Dreadful with grinding of ice,
and record of scarce hidden fire ...

William Morris, ‘On First Seeing Iceland’

As the lights go out, perhaps we will see further into the dark.

This post is partly what it's like being one of Harriet's ventriloquists. It splices text from Harriet bloggers, commenters, and anonymous robots who deposit semi-truck loads of SPAM for us to delete. Bloggers and commenters from whom I've pilfered include Kenneth Goldsmith, Reginald Shepherd, A.E. Stallings, Ange Mlinko, Javier Huerta, and Bill Knott. (By citing them, this is definitely flarf and not conceptual poetics.) I "composed" it for this year's MLA offsite poetry reading, which was held Sunday night in San Francisco where more than 60 (usually) masked poets read for two minutes each.

Our task is to mind the machine.

Hi Guys! Today I was surfing the Internet
just as everyday. I checked my Facebook profile,

I think it is fair to say that most of us spend hours each day shifting content into different containers. Some of us call this writing.

This loophole will give you a free gold membership to the largest sex and swingers site in the world.

The avant-garde community, drawing from anti-bourgeois, anti-individualist theory, disparages the reward system of the mainstream and replaces it with something far more nebulous and neurotic: Are people talking about you?

More and more I am convinced that what we need now is a revival of bad poetry.

The more you know, the more building blocks Martians will have to play with.

The non-economics of poetry create a perfectly valueless space in which the valueless works can flourish.

Hello Porn Lovers! I have found this new forum. There are a lot of different styles there.

What is working class poetry? It is when I used to teach poetry, and I would ask the students to imagine the speaker of Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" as a pizza or other delivery guy taking a toke-out to ease the drive . . . the landowner's "house is in the village" cozy and comfortable while the poor workslob can barely stop in the roadside to take a breather before his ass has to haul back to shlepping miles and miles…

TEMPORARY WORK OFFER: Would you like to work temporarily and get paid weekly? You don’t need to have an office and this certainly won’t disturb any form of work you have going on at the moment.

Seuss encapsulates the occasionally paranoid streak in American politics that seems to be the flip side of our inalienable rights, in the voice of some sinister hear-no-evil see-no-evil Darwinian apes. "Pretending to talk to who's who are not," they announce:

"A plot, plot, plot plot".

Luckily they are

"Hot-shot spotters of rotters and plotters
And we're going to save our sons and our daughters
From YOU"

Female body builders nude. Love to mail bombing of her.

The Blog clicks behind me now as it walks—tick, talk, tick, talk. Its nails need clipping. It needs its shots. It’s easy to forget it isn’t really a domestic animal, though. Sure, it shared the house for a while. But it was feral once. It can fend for itself. It’s a social animal—it runs in packs. It doesn’t need a master.

Free easy to use guide on how to use this loophole.

Here's the link: http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Bergvall/Bergvall-Caroline-Via-2004.mp3

universal tinge of sober gold ... (Keats, Endymion)

Photo borrowed from my daughter, bauble paid for in full.

POETRY FOUNDATION STAFF PICKS

CHRISTIAN WIMAN

Creatures of a Day
Reginald Gibbons
Louisiana State Univeristy Press
ISBN: 0807133183

Creatures of a Day was a finalist for the National Book Award, deservedly so. There are some poems in this book that have become a permanent part of my consciousness. I remember reading “Sleepless in the Cold Dark” in manuscript and thinking that, though you could feel the antecedents (Williams mostly), something here was new. The poem is flat-out beautiful, and it accomplishes its effects with such small, sharp precisions of syntax and linebreaks that you hardly feel your heart breaking until it’s already happened.

Twigs and Knucklebones
Sarah Lindsay
Copper Canyon Press

Sarah Lindsay’s new book is unusual among books of contemporary poetry for several reasons. It’s almost completely devoid of the first person pronoun, for one thing. Most of Lindsay’s poems are historical or (as in the stunning sequence “The Kingdom of Nab”) pseudo-historical. One of the most memorable poems in the book is a strange, moving piece called “Elegy for the Quagga.” A Quagga was a zebra-like creature which was hunted to extinction in the late nineteenth century. Lindsay links this extinction with the eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, and by the time you finish this poem you realize you're never going to hear this sound that is the poem’s subject -- and yet you're now dying to. The poem ends "a kind of horse, less picture-esque than a Dodo, still we mourn what we mourn, even if when it sank to its irreplaceable knees, when its unique throat closed behind a sigh, no dust rose to redden a whole year's sunsets, no one unwittingly busy two thousand miles away jumped at the sound, no ashes rained on ships in the merciless sea."

The Fifty Minute Mermaid
Nuala Ni Dhomhnail (translated by Paul Muldoon)
Gallery Press
ISBN: 1852353740

Because the Jack Spicer book is already on everybody’s list, and as everyone’s trying to economize this season, here’s a two-fer, The Fifty Minute Mermaid (Gallery Press), poems originally written in Irish by Nuala Ni Dhomhnail and translated by Paul Muldoon. What you’ll get: two terrific poets working in tandem. Her poems are sexy, wry, and completely original, and especially striking in Muldoon’s translations. Though she’s been a surprising poet for years, this book is, even for her, a departure. She’s not so much writing the biff-bang-pow individual poem as poems in sequence with a cumulative effect. Muldoon says that hers is a particularly local kind of Irish, locatable almost to a single neighborhood. Yet it should appeal to just about anybody on the planet because... it’s about a mermaid. Who doesn’t like mermaids? And what’s a better language for mermaids than Irish? These poems convey the strangeness of the Irish language - and of merfolk. Muldoon, of course, is ingenious at deploying the oddities of the Irish, which must be one of the ur-languages of poetry.

George Oppen
Collected Poems
New Directions
ISBN: 978-0811218054

I’m cheating here because it’s not exactly a brand-new book, but what makes this paperback reprint special, besides being a lovely book to hold in your hands, is that it comes with an audio CD so you can hear George Oppen read his own work... a revelation in itself. Oppen goes a long way back with Poetry. He was published many times over the years in the magazine, and he's one of the few people who can say that his book was reviewed in its pages by none other than William Carlos Williams. An absolutely essential book.

FRED SASAKI

Sleep's Powers
Jacqueline Risset, translated from the French by Jennifer Moxley.
Ugly Duckling Presse

ISBN: 978-1933254425

In 2008 Ugly Duckling Presse created a Dossier Series "to expand the formal scope of the Presse. Dossier publications don't share a single genre or form--long poem, lyric essay, criticism, artist book, polemical text--but rather an investigative impulse." One of eight titles so far, Sleep's Powers by Jacqueline Risset (tr. by Jennifer Moxley) is page-length and little-longer essays on sleep, dreams, and imagination‹and, consequently, everything else. It's episodic pullings from literary (Proust, Bataille, Beckett, Rimbaud, Kafka) and personal history (her purring cat, fear of the dark, refuge in the bed of her little brother). Born in Besancon, France in 1936, Risset is considered one of her country's most important poet-essayists, and UDP is one of the few places to read her in English. Offset and letterpressed at an edition of 1,000, it's a dream gift for the insomniac in your life.

EMILY WARN

my vocabulary did this to me The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian
Wesleyan Press
ISBN 978-0-8195-6887-8

Dear Jack Spicer, You can blame Kevin Killian and Peter Gizzi for completely ruining your effort to prevent the distribution of your books beyond the Bay Area. Even posthumously, you created a force field that made it difficult to find any of the small press editions of your work. And even if one did, it was impossible to understand the scope of your work—your poetry dictation, your letters to Garcia Lorca, your packrat collection of written forms (baseball line-ups, bureaucratic forms, footnotes), your zany poems—until now. Not since Whitman has a poet worked so hard at listening to what form poetry wanted to take. Though you might be miffed that your collected poems “is already on everybody’s list,” as Don Share pointed out, we’re not.

HANNAH BROOKS-MOTL

King Driftwood
Robert Minhinnick
Carcanet
ISBN: 978-1857549652

One of the best Welsh poets writing today, Minhinnick’s latest book is full of long, investigative poems that wander freely, but never formlessly. Often weird takes on the dramatic monologues, these poems feature collisions: natural meets unnatural, literary and classical allusions spar with extreme contemporary ones, form battles apparent formlessness. Minhinnick’s interest in hard science scrapes against his other interests in a sort of primitive mysticism and hermits, castaways and other people on the fringes. Though Minhinnick writes well about extreme places, these poems are as interested in extreme mental topographies; like maps, they want to show everything as much as they can.

KATIE HARTSOCK

The Walking-Away World
Kenneth Patchen
New Directions
ISBN: 978-0811217576

The Walking-Away World (and its companion volume, We Meet) introduced me to the work of Kenneth Patchen; he immediately became a favorite. TWAW presents the picture poems—paintings and drawings integrating text—he created over the last decade of his life. Combining his brilliant “creatures” and lyric observations intensified by their brevity, this book delights, distresses, and delights again.

Poetry Magazine Critics’ Picks

JASON GURIEL

The Essential George Johnston, selected by Robyn Sarah
The Porcupine’s Quill,
ISBN: 978-0-88984-299-1

Among the recent and much-hyped rebootings of various reputations – including Crane’s, Spicer’s, and O’Hara’s – this slim thing, The Essential George Johnston (the inaugural edition of a new series on Canadian poets), is an unpretentious, 64-page relief. There is nothing romantic about Johnston’s obscurity. Until his death in 2004, he was an exacting poet who wrote about the unfashionably everyday, with an attention to form (both fixed and free-ish) that was rigorous but natural. He published in the New Yorker, and taught, but was no careerist; if the poem wasn’t fully realized and utterly essential he didn’t write it. This pared-down selection – smartly arranged by another exacting Canadian, Robyn Sarah – is itself all-business, right down to the elegant but unfetishizable cover, a no-frills affair that forces you to turn to the poems – real poems – without delay. Okay, it came out in 2007, but nevermind the copyright date; it’s still the best book of the year.

GEOF HUTH

Kyotologic
by Anne Gorrick
Shearsman Books
ISBN: 978-1848610040

Anne Gorrick has developed the reverberating poems of Kyotologic ostensibly upon the foundation Sei Shōnagon’s famed thousand-year-old Pillow Book, yet these poems are anything but imitations. Gorrick’s is a unique and affecting style that depends upon both the look of the poem on the page and the sound and meaning of sentences and phrases. Working with a finely tuned poetic ear, she weaves her almost-stories out of words and phrases to create beautiful and surprising meaningscapes. Her primary technique is a sophisticated use of repetition: she takes a phrase, repeats it at irregular intervals, often mutating the phrase often during this process. She builds her effects slowly within her poems so that these wonderful constructions do not seem like anything less than the wonders of nature sitting before us as they always were supposed to have been.

The Alphabet
by Ron Silliman
University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 978-0817354930

Size matters, and that is one of the messages of Ron Silliman’s thousand-page poem, The Alphabet. Written in 26 sections, one for each letter of the alphabet itself, Silliman does not so much create a world as reveal one for us. He does this by atomizing his experience and replaying these fragments for us in a huge ongoing reel. The effects are almost like watching a home movie so filled with jump cuts that you cannot hold onto an idea for more than a few seconds, but so full of sharp memories that you could hardly bear to turn away. This book is huge and demanding, but also one of the most accessible bits of experimental poetry you are apt to see. The language is clear and usually declarative, but the unavoidable effects of the accumulation of quotidian detail, when properly controlled, is a grand emotional and intellectual experience.

CARMINE STARNINO

Crabwise to the Hounds
Jeramy Dodds
Coach House Press
ISBN: 978-1552452059

The most exciting Canadian debut this year, hands down. Part-time archaeologist Jeramy Dodds specializes in densely metaphoric accounts of god-knows-what (surrealist tall tales? gothic head trips?) that nestle so enthusiastically into their internal rhymes, assonances and alliterations that you can’t help but believe—and reread—the ravishingly unbelievable things he tells you (“Capillaries are winter maples scrubbing the mist. / Blood cells are dust-taxied down a flashlight’s path.”) Marrying a maniacal love for oddity (“The tubas are full of fog and fallen thoroughbreds”) with a loathing for recycled language (“Shipwrights shoulder-pole / bedrolls and Swede-saws / through a cellophane of rain”) Crabwise to the Hounds is a five-star livewire act.

Elephants & Butterflies
Alan Michael Parker
BOA Editions
ISBN: 978-1934414057

I love this book's noise, its chant-like rhythms, its crazy mix of fact and invention. Alan Michael Parker’s skill is really a kind of serendipity: poems pivot from satire to nostalgia to brashness with self-delighting philosophical curiosity. Like the seven restleness, reinvented sonnets at the book’s centre, Elephants & Butterflies strives for a style nimble enough to turn on a dime. The properly lived life, according to Michael Parker, is a place where a busted Toyota teaches you to “junk the sucker and sing a song about it.” Can't think of anyone, anywhere, writing such happy, high-energy poetry.

ANGE MLINKO

Bosston
by Ed Barrett
Pressed Wafer (9 Columbus Sq, Boston, MA 02116)
ISBN: 978-0978515645

Bosston is the love child of John Ashbery and Dennis Lehane, and it does for the Boston Irish what Robert Lowell did for the Brahmin, creating a mythos at the intersection of tribe and city. A noirish feverdream of buried voices -- some literally buried, like the murdered moll Deborah Hussey -- it begins with an excerpt from a Boston Magazine article about the intimidation of the State Senator Dianne Wilkerson for her role in ending housing discrimination against African-Americans in South Boston, and as it builds we meet, among others, Emerson, Thoreau, Wieners, Yeats, Dice-K Matsuzaka, the Virgin Mary and of course the Bulger Brothers.

"Boston is a brand," he said firmly with a directness he knew would not insult his audience but showed respect for the unwritten codes and allegiances they had made their money from: a few of them after a brief time in the business; others at the summit of a longer career who knew how expensive memory and sentiment were and could afford these waters of human existence.

...

Its dead will simply not stay buried.

Bosston's publication earlier this year completes an unnamed trilogy that began with Rub Out (2003) and Kevin White (2007). Barrett came to his adopted city by way of Brooklyn; having lived in both places, I can attest to the mood of secretiveness that pervades both towns, the long shadows around their gilt-edged libraries and the angels in their cemeteries. Barrett's terse, gothic prose poems read as disjunctions but work furiously at that underground conjoining that real poetry does.

Fiona Sampson

For All We Know
by Ciaran Carson
ISBN 978-1-85235-439-8

For All We Know is a numerologist’s dream: a haunting, filmic palindrome of seventy sonnets and double-sonnets that provide the harmonic ground for love poetry of unusual delicacy. But it is also a psychological and political thriller, which extends Ciaran Carson’s uniquely necessary project of contextualising the Northern Irish Troubles within European history. Intricate symbolism – a watch, perfume, a patchwork quilt, a pen, Bach’s fugues – “trips” the reader between episodes. Yet, despite its virtuosity, this verse-novel is a moving and profound meditation on the fugal nature of time and love: indelible lyricism uniting the extraordinary multiplicity of its forces. (Small wonder it’s short-listed for the 2008 T.S.Eliot Prize.)

Selected Poems 1969-2005
by David Harsent
ISBN 978-0-571-23401-1

David Harsent is a self-evidently major poet. Though much admired by his peers, he’s so busy with the rest of his writing life – as librettist, novelist and writer for screen – this could easily be forgotten. Selected Poems 1969-2005 (short-listed for this year’s Griffin International Prize) traces the development of an utterly individual voice. As well as early dream-poems, it includes great poems of his maturity from Legion and Marriage – my personal favourite, and an extended study of love, desire and the art of looking. Harsent articulates our dreams and nightmares. His luminously-accomplished verse is vivid, direct and undeniable. The book’s a necessity for any serious poetry library.

Before the internet, writers interested in weird, amateurish or specialized lingos had to scrounge for them in used book stores and porn shops. There was no Google to barf verbiage onto your lap. I used to spend hundreds on magazines with names like Over Fifty and Fabulous, K.O., Soldiers of Fortune, Flying Saucer Digest and Teen. Bad, bumbling English is always a happenin' planet, stretching your horizon, dude. In the visual arts, one artist in particular, Jim Shaw, alerted us all to the weird, goofy world of amateur creativity. He collected thrift store paintings and arranged them in installations. His 1991 show at Metro Pictures, NYC, was declared by critic Jerry Saltz as "one of the most important shows of the decade [...] it brimmed with dementedly entertaining art [and] unlocked the doors to scores of dead, forgotten, or otherwise devalued painting genres. It was a gold mine of overlooked pictorial information, a mother lode of untapped graphic imagination and pictorial possibility." Sounds like flarf to me. It was flarf, flarf, flarf, before there was flarf.

The concept behind "Found Paintings and Drawings" at Momenta is intriguing--that out in the everyday world lies a trove of incidental art, much of it made by non-artists, waiting to be identified and sanctified.

This "discarded or abandoned" art, rescued from the gutter, the trash can or the thrift shop, will reveal its worth when displayed in an appropriate art space--a space that by its very nature validates objects hung within.

The realization of this idea falls flat, however, because Linh Dinh and Eric Heist, who put this exhibition together, seem to have assumed that anything drawn or painted can be transformed into valid art just by pinning it to a wall. And so they have covered the walls at Momenta with incidental doodles and vapid paintings.

Most of the creators of these works--the "artists," as it were--are anonymous, but the checklist does tell where each object was found or purchased, as if this information somehow added value or conferred legitimacy. The works themselves tend to be not interesting or insightful or well-made, although they score high as curiosities.

The fact that someone considered each of these objects worth saving is supposed to imply that they are. This assumption applies only in a few cases--for example, a felt-tip marker drawing of snakes that comes close to being decent folk art. There's a lot of strangeness represented here, but not enough substance to justify all the work that went into this show.

The exhibition of Found Paintings and Drawings at Momenta is small and includes only a few really memorable pieces. But it is provocative in subtle ways, and in its cumulative assessment of things that can become art. As time passes, objects move in and out of the definition of art, and when enough time has passed they are almost automatically grannted the semi-sacred status of art objects--no matter how trivial they once may have been. Found art is just beginning the journey through time. It is enough now that it piques our consciousness.

One work in the show, which was organized and curated by Linh Dinh and Momenta director Eric Heist, consists of four fragments of oil-painted canvas salvaged by Wade Schuman from a dumpster at Freeman's Auction House. It's unusual because it is the work of a well-trained artist. The more or less rectangular pieces--each containing a head or heads--were slashed from a large, perhaps 19th-century,genre scene. The group in its dismembered state has been appraised at over $1,000 — so the reason for the mutilation and abandonment is mysterious.

Dick Torchia, who was instrumental in formulating the concept of the show, contributed several items, including a ballpoint doodle on paper bearing the logos of the Whitney Museum. Under a field of scribbles, in fragmented wiry writing, it says," God HELP us all."

Many works not surprisingly reflect the art interests of their collectors. Judith Schaecter, whose stained glass often deals with martyrdom and pain, contributed a found sketch of a head with asymmetrical howling mouth and tiny sections of exposed brain.

The truth is that artists have always been collectors of found images, and writers, perusers of junk literature, be it pulp magazines, signs, correspondences, or scraps of paper found on the ground, as was said of Cervantes. Much of writing is framing (or reframing) of found material, or of pointing to what otherwise would escape notice. Googling has allowed our sampling, collecting instinct to go into overdrive, hence something like flarf is inevitable, just as collage had to coincide with the advent of the illustrated magazine.

Google, copy, cut, paste, then add or revise. It's another set of options, among many. I translate a 2005 poem by Bui Chat, born in 1979 and living in Saigon:

for the spirit. for the body. for living or five reasons why you should choose vietnamese poetry

an advertisement to assist ly doi at the vietnamese poetry booth, at the all-world poetry fair (planned for 2012)

trust
it’s a product that has endured for a thousand years

reliance
it has been proven by science to be a food with many nutritional benefits

certified
it has been granted the certifications ISO 9001: 2000, ISO 14001, GMP & HACCP

guaranteed
no cholesterol, no chemical preservatives, no artificial colorings

a necessity for an active life
because vietnamese poetry is a nutritious food:
• provides instant energy for the body
• increases the body’s immunity & spiritual strength
• contributes to a speedy recovery of your health
• improves memory & mental power
• helps to alleviate psychic tension
• improves young mothers’ abilities to breast feed
• is good for your blood thanks to its ability to absorb and use iron

note: this product is not a medicine, and should not be substituted for medicines

Top image: Headless Beat Girl with Text and Paint Brushes in Neck, from Jim Shaw's book, Thrift Store Paintings (Hollywood: Heavy Industry Publications, 1992). Bottom image: Joseph Cornell. Untitled (to James Card). 1951.