titles are for sucka's

I came across the flyer's I made for Czar Omega's last show:





They're a little too sentimental for my taste.

Yeah. Fuck sentiment.

I wrote some notes on a poem of Justin's that I still haven't given to him (or he still hasn't picked up). But I wrote something that I'd like to share with everyone. Regardless of context, I wrote, "As a reader I don't want to be told things, especially about things that aren't concrete, physical things, and as a poet we should never assume we know anything our readers don't, should we? We are revealers of truth, not fabricators--we act as subtle directors."

It's strange that I don't necessarily like imposing anything on a reader, but for some reason think I can impose something on myself, let alone another writer. It's only meant to be an open dialogue for the acquiring of poetic knowledge. I don't have any, so I'm taking suggestions.

perspective.

"Did You Write Any Poems?"

IN APRIL 1968 students occupied six buildings of Columbia [University, New York] to protest the university administration’s complicity in the Vietnam War and their insistence on building a new gym in Morningside Park despite the objections of Harlem, the city government, faculty, students. With other writers from the Columbia Review I spent nearly a week in President Kirk’s office in Low Library before getting beaten up by the cops in the final bust. The days in Low Commune were deliciously utopian — with approximately 125 students making decisions through participatory democracy, changing the world by example — and dangerous, despite our stance of non-violence. The right-wing students charged the building several times, setting up a blockade to prevent the anti-war students from sending in supplies. Fists began to fly, and the scene around the building roiled with constant near riots. The faculty decided to set up their own line in an attempt to prevent the situation from getting even more out of hand. Professors took turns standing on the lawn outside the building beneath the second-story windows to keep the right-wing students from charging Low Library and, attempting some parity, to keep the left-wing students from bringing supplies to the communards. It was not an easy time to be a professor at Columbia. To be arbiters, intermediaries between the students and the administration, was an impossible task during such polarization. After the “bust” bloodied over a thousand students, the faculty realized that the administration held them in almost as much contempt as they regarded the students, and most of them ended up joining the strike that followed the beatings and mass arrests. In the midst of Low’s occupation and siege, I was assigned to a shift to stand guard at one of the windows. Behind me and out of sight was one of those tall poles with a hook used for opening the tall windows — a possible weapon if indeed the “jocks” and other right-wingers made their charge. On the grass below stood the line of professors, and among them was Kenneth Koch, doing his stint on the faculty cordon. He looked up at me, smiled in his affable way, didn’t preach or wail or gnash his teeth, and he offered a friendly wave at me and the other editors of the literary magazine, Les Gottesman and Alan Senauke. He couldn’t keep from enjoying himself, couldn’t take things too seriously, which was in its own way very unnerving. But it was good to see him, in all his goofiness, and we waved back. He had thrown his lot in with the rest of the feeble faculty, which saddened us, although we couldn’t be mad at him. His humor lent him some transcendent grace. “Did you write any poems?” he chuckled up at us. No, we hadn’t. We set right off to punch out a bunch of spontaneous three-way collaboration poems, each of us taking a turn on the typewriter we had liberated from President’ Kirk’s secretary. So terrible, so embarrassingly idiotic were these poems that we threw them away almost immediately. The muse of Andre Breton and Tristan Tzara and Frank O’Hara had failed us, and moment-to-moment rhapsodic bop would sound only like Allen Ginsberg, and there was only one Allen Ginsberg. We couldn’t bear to write tedious Fight-Team-Fight anthems or lugubrious, boring manifestos. All we could knock out was intense, manic gibberish when what was needed was something entirely new written in a language no one had yet invented. Still, I marveled at Koch’s sweetness, his unwillingness to change his peaceable demeanor in the face of chaos and violence, his chuckle, and his question, “Did you write any poems?” I’ve always remembered that moment, and at other tough times I recall the question. Throughout my life, it has formed a kind of mantra. Driving headfirst off a cliff, hard knocks on the Indian reservation, wrestling with COINTELPRO, whirr of printing press, bombs in Beirut, broke, evictions, whiffing tear gas while taking a shit in Gaza — whenever there was conflict and danger, I would remember Kenneth Koch’s chuckle, see his sweet grin, and I would recall the pleasures of peace: “Did you write any poems?”

- Hilton Obenzinge

Christmas List

1. Missy Elliott's discography (yes, i would like someone to buy me every one of her albums)

2. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer

3. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975

4. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005

5. The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser

6. The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser

7. Collected Poems by James Schuyler

shoes

I'm thinking about getting some new shoes. Between these two:

They are the same shoe, I just can't pick between the two colors. I'm also thinking about buying some new dress shoes.

What do you think? I think they're pretty classy.

what do you think? should i?

Please indicate in your submission whether or not you'd like criticism in the case that we decline publication your work.

For some reason, this statement makes me leery of start-up, online journals. While I appreciate an informed, objective eye and new perspectives regarding the successes or failures of my writing, I feel like as a writer, I deserve exactly that--an informed, objective perspective of poetic merit. Shouldn't the editors of these "start-up," online journals provide some sort of legitimizing statement as to their credentials, or does a flashy website assume some sort of legitimacy?

Regarding the specific journal where this particular statement was taken, maybe it's the absence (obviously unintentional) of the preposition of between publication and your that makes me hesitant to submit. Or maybe it's my persistent insecurity? Or is it my love affair with poetry that makes me feel like I have more poetic exposure than the editors of these start ups? Should that matter--obviously not. I might read a lot of poetry, but I still don't know anything about it. Maybe I know a little bit. Shit (see persistent insecurity). When am I allowed to feel comfortable to show the world what I think I know? And when will I feel comfortable enough to accept everything that I do not (which is everything)?

My poetry is an argument for uncertainty. I am not yet knowledgeable. I cannot interject a point or idea into a line. "No ideas but in things." The lines are my providers. I need my poetry to teach me about light and about the weight of this earth.

a father for no fathers again and another one

No interval of manner
Your body in the sun.
You? A solid, this that the dress
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhinsisted,
Your face unaccented, your mouth a mouth?
jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjPractical knees:
It is you who truly
Excel the vegetable,
The fitting of grasses—more bare than
jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjthat.
Pointedly bent, your elbow on a car-edge
Incognito as summer
Among mechanics.

- George Oppen, from Discrete Series: "Town, a town ..."





I will lift the light out of it too, George.

My goodness.

In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the morning

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

I met Peter Gizzi today. He recommended I read George Oppen which I will definitely be doing. He also recommended I read Abraham Lincoln. Yes, Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Gizzi recited verse from memory and dazzled us with his knowledge of 19th Century Americanism in relation to the Moderns and subsequently its relationship to people like John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara.

I see the poets of the New York School as pioneers (duh) in their ability to eclipse experience with their imaginations; a sort of funneling of realistic experience through the guise of a twisted imagination. No longer was experience the focus. Imagination was emphasized for some of the early moderns (see Dickinson and Williams), but for some reason it was not until the likes of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch that we (at least for me) were able to see a transformation of imagination rooted in experience but turned in a way that wasn't everyday but was still somehow familiar. I know a lot of people cite O'Hara as the "do this do that" poet where everyday experience was emphasized, but there is something so much more to it than that.

A reproduction of nature is not and should not be the focus of art. Abstract expressionism acts as a god in the fact that it is creation in the most fundamental sense of the word. Using materials around you to produce something that is not currently present. Nothing Pollock or de Kooning created existed before the paint was applied to it. The wheelbarrow was there for Williams just as a taxi was there for O'Hara. Williams got people to recognize and appreciate what they were not recognizing and appreciating, whereas O'Hara got people to be excited about the things they were recognizing all the time. This is O'Hara's imagination at work. Yes, Frank O'Hara is a god in the same sense that Pollock and de Kooning were.

Peter Gizzi talked about poetry constantly looking back at the vacuum of history. One's experience is what a writer draws from for their subjects, whether physically experienced, overheard, read, etc. Where will my imagination take the experiences I've had and/or possess? That is my ultimate curiosity for my life and my writing. What will I do that no one has done? Will I? Can I?

It is appealing to me that writing is a continual present and future action while the physical act of reading is one of the past--words are going past you as you are reading this for instance, but as I am typing this words are appearing and currently are and will be after this word and this word and this one too. Gertrude Stein stated that "For a long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everyone accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling." What is avant garde? What can I make that will reject anything without immediately being accepted for that rejection? What can I do that is new? David Lehman states, "If we are all postmodernists, we are none of us avant-garde, for postmodernism is the institutionalization of the avant-garde." Can one create something new without being "avant garde?" I guess so?

But for the same reason political poetry is suspect, wouldn't anything rooted in tradition be so as well? Art based on and pursued because of the ideas and beliefs and agendas of others is half art to me. Most political poetry is attempting to further the agenda of someone else, and is, therefore, not inherently original to that author. Does that apply to anything outside of the avant garde? What is the avant garde. Fuck. !

I should have asked Peter Gizzi.