"Grey. Gray. Grey.
Gray. That that
employs a is blacker
than that that

employs e which is
redolent of
white whose e is silent
white. White."

More GS for HG.

For HG Poetics:

"It is my opinion as well as that of others that the word grey spelled with an e is 'greyer' than the same word spelled with an a: gray.

Can the poet be correct in assigning the color white to this letter [E]? Admitting, therefore, more light to the word so that it becomes itself lighter, creamier, if you will, on the other side of darkness. The blackness of a. Gray holds to itself more blackness than does grey ."

--Gilbert Sorrentino, Splendide-Hôtel

Content analysis of this blog

15%: Insecurity and fear
10%: Promotion of my other blogs
10% Sheer nastiness
20% Judgmental bile
20% Sucking-up to other bloggers
10% Utter Triviality
25% Supremely briliant critical insight

How I write:

(Who cares?) Mostly in my head. When the poem is done, it goes right to the computer screen, sometimes directly onto the other blog. It might change a bit in the typing; before it is in material form it is not wholly fixed. If I'm not near computer, I'll scribble it with Waterman fountain pen; not a particularly expensive one, but a fountain pen nonetheless. (Disparity between relative fineness of writing instrument and wretchedness of my handwriting, duly noted). I won't revise much unless I'm transfering media (brain to paper, brain to computer, scribble to computer). I prefer to suppress.

It occurs to me that this method only works for extremely short poems. Therefore my poems tend to be short.

"They flee from me who sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them, gentle, tame, and meek
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking in continual change."

Ok, I get it: he's not getting the babes he used to.

"Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise / Twenty times better..."

I'm with him so far. But then the poem shifts gears: "But once in special / In thin array after a pleasant guise / When her loose robe from her shoulders did fall / And she me caught in her arms long and small." Now he's talking about one particular woman.

In the third and final stanza of the poem he lays on the irony pretty thick, with "gentleness," "goodness," "kindly." "We are both free to see other people now," in modern parlance. Now the poem has shifted into a complaint that this particular woman has left him. Was this the point all along? Then the inconstancy of which he complains makes no sense, in relation to the beginning of the poem. What he conceives of as "newfangleness" or "continual change" was always so: the illusion that the wild animals / women were tame was just that, an illusion.

Wyatt seems to like abstract nouns. I do too.

I keep thinking of writing a particularly snide post about someone, and then supressing the urge. Eventually this urge will go away.

Who's checking my blog at 4:34 a.m.? Either a European or an insomniac.

Goatee update:

I am going to be a beatnik for halloween. I have the black beret and turtleneck, am still looking for the horn-rimmed glasses. The goatee is coming in slowly, however. After a week and a half it is still scraggly. It is coming in salt-and-pepper. After halloween I will shave it off immediately.

I saw guitar deity Pat Metheny last night with his trio of bass deity Christian McBride and youngish drummer Antonio Sánchez. It had been a while since I heard any live music of note.

Interview with Kent Johnson conducted by Rodrigo Garcia Lopes, Editor, Coyote Magazine, Brazil: "Increasingly, that is, Language poetry and 'avant-garde' styles growing directly out of it (under myriad denominations, like 'post-language,' 'abstract lyric,' 'ellipticism,' 'new synthesis,' 'third generation New York school,' and so on) have come to be the zeitgeist at virtually all the elite and many of the second-tier creative writing programs-few serious younger poets with any degree of reading have an interest in writing the scenic, first-person lyric of narrative experience. What's happened is that most younger poets now want to write the fractured lyric of intellectual, self-reflexive experience, or else some theory-inflected version of the cool, campy Frank O'Hara-like poem, or some hybrid version of these styles. This 'experimental' atmosphere constitutes the ascendant period style --the poems of our climate, as one of our famous poets once put it-- and very few literary journals or presses of consequence today are truly hostile toward this fashionable 'innovative' work."

I wish this were true. I suspect it has some element of truth to it. I suppose that would depend on one's definition of phrases like "all the elite," "serious young poets with any degree of reading," "very few," "of consequence," and "truly hostile." There's a lot of wiggle room there.

I haven't seen work that answers to this description in Poetry or The New Yorker . You can't buy a book by Clark Coolidge at Border's. The New York Review of Books has never reviewed a book by Marjorie Perloff or Charles Bernstein, let alone Ron Silliman.

I'm sure there is a Frank O'Hara cum Language lite style out there: I saw some it in both of the BAPS in fact.

Compete with other poetry bloggers for marvelous honors and awards! Doesn't that sound like a wonderful idea? In fact, every blogger could have own awards meted out on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. Everyone would be a winner all year round.

Anecdote of Arnold Schönberg in Tennessee

Arnold Schönberg was four foot eleven
in Tennessee
had he lived there
which he did not

In Kansas he would have been six foot three
but that is the wrong anecdote
In Tennessee he hung out twelve tones to dry
on an anecdotal clothes line

Stravinsky was almost as short, Berg and Webern taller
Schönberg ate no peanut brittle in Tennessee
which is rigorously true
like nothing else in Tennessee

I've been reading some Thomas Wyatt and some criticism on him. His versification is a mystery, since his iambic pentameter is quite unscannable, whereas he other meters are perfectly regular. No two critics can agree on what he was doing, or whether he even knew what he was doing.

I'm that jerk who has to point out what everyone already knows but has the good sense not to say. But in what sense can what I say be said to belong to the already known if there is a taboo against actually saying it?