Oh, the jump cut, a poem

spectacle of the day:
human suffering;
independent spirit.

and that's too bad,
because I need you
to see me looking at you--

a brittle barbed wire.
rust-caked wrapped
top two by fours
between a receding horizon

a master editor wouldn't
know where to cut
because you never look
back over you shoulder.

----

Another question for the "umbrists":

Malibu, why would you ask for folks to send poems
to your worksheet/worskshop as "non-umbrists"?

If you are calling Umbrists, the group of folks who live
and play in the same locale, why not call the group after
the location and open the practice to all who wish to play?

This is important, I think, because referring to people
as non-people is offensive and pointless and quite possibly
only a sign of a meaningless spectacle to come.

----

Nick Piombino doesn't know this about me,
but I read the situationist and Lefebvrean literature
voraciously. He has been quoting Debord. Has me thinking.

----

For the Umbrists:
It is the practice of boredom to name and non-name
and it only works to differentiate.

To tag: in our capitalist market, folks strive to raise the price of boredom.
And the sign of value--exchange value--is a sign of abstract quantity,
a brand name.

And use value? Quality? Doesn't matter, when names
and associations and networks are more important.

----

A Prevelant Whine: Blogs are destroying the listserv. Good!

It's about time we slow down,
author our own thoughts,
cultivate some place,
produce some space.

Together, In solitude.

Exchange abstracts labor. My work is real work.
I want you to see it: the blog allows it to be visible.
Not the typing and such but it is what I make it.

Unlike the listserv which has a protocol that exists
to mask my work...and, be careful Umbrists, blogs aren't listservs.

R Lope is correct to get on Gunther for his posted forward.

----

When exchange is all that matters even shit loses its stink.

----

John Latta's recent ire directed at Ron Silliman (3/2/04) is, in part,
if he will allow my interpretation, directed in this way:
He says "a scene is not a community." He is correct!
One of the most concise, coherent, precise, and spot-on statements
I have read out here since falling in.

----

A scene is boring.

----

I have to repeat myself.
I wrote a week or so ago that a valued professor advised me
and my fellow doc candidates that what we do out here is
at best a waste of time at worst not doing the work of literature.
That only print is truly valuable. Problem:

The object is not the thing.

Holding a poem doesn't make a poem poetry.

----

Even among the older generation of writers who fully embrace the online community,
there is a nostalgia for the past that is projected onto PRINT or THE BOOK.
That is a lie. A delusion. A never-never land fetish for the past ordered
according to a hierarchy that those of us coming into our own cannot
see.

----

John, Ron may wish to reconsider what Emerson really was saying in "Experience".

----


I read with interest many chap book series that come out now. Every publishing venture
is so pre-limited that getting read in print is whim, speculation, spectacle. 700 copies, hand-picking a few authors. The attempt to create not only encasement but a garret is pathetic.

----

But, I sympathize. I try to write letters--no response. I value ecriture, which this is not. My fascination with many writers is in the diaries, journals, correspondence, rather than their public work. I admire authors who have found the power to publish series of books that focus on a singularly defined aesthetic.

----

So much for a poetics of indeterminacy, though.

----

Nevermind. San Francisco, Chicago, NYC, Chapel Hill, Black Mountain, Ithaca, Buffalo, Providence. All the little its. "IT" ain't there. "IT" ain't in Denver. IT ain't a location.

Where it was never was.

----

This is what I think the modernists got us to get wrong.
It is a misreading of imagism.
The misreading: a desire to see a thing rather than a desire to write concrete scene:

A desire to locate a scene rather than a desire to cultivate a community.

IT is here. Which is nowhere.

And if that offends, I understand, but I insist.
Either we open the market we claim doesn't exist
include every hack as well as genius
or cease to discuss community as if we care.

----

When my mentors inform me that I need to get my priorities straight
and those priorities are implied to be print-oriented, well...
I know what that means.

Get in line. At the back. Wait your turn.

----

And like many of you, I am sick of that lingering patronage.
We don't need it.

A community takes work and a throwing off ego and ownership.

----

Back to my umbrist discussion:
The Umbrist site "owning" a name.

I have a problem with that.

Ownership is a form of claim;

when we make a claim about ourselves,
we necessarily make claims on others.

Hence, Malibu, honest grrrl, says it like it is:
if "non-umbrists" want to participate...blah. blah. blah.
Why go public, kids? Why?

Please don't take this the wrong way, as some base insult directed at YOU,
but as a request to examine the mechanism of exchange.

One doesn't make a community like one makes a scene.

The powerful few in any locale may have the gumption to make a scene.
Children often throw their bodies onto the floor and make a scene.
Hysterics often play up their symptooms to make a scene.
Neurotics and Paranoiacs often cease med routines or
purposefully work themselves into frenzies to create scenes.

----

We know a scene when we make it
We feel a community when it is present.

----

The contrast shows how scenes are forms of oppression
no matter what their content while communities enhance
experience because of the form of presence regardless of content.

All of us together make a community. That's one thing better in blogosphere than
listservs.

----

and Boredom...Boredom is counter-revolutionary.