Fashion Trend Spotter

That specific traffic sussing
a specific anxiety related to fashion
in a confident little cougar cat.

Meow.
Am I
right,
people?

How’s a pocket constructed people
are such individuals, it’s so
personal little cougar cat

that writes home once:
here’s the occasion here’s
me, a color story being forecasted
as being different from a prison

—in this prison they can write their tepid earless poems and read them.
Other poets can earn up to $200,000

so I guess
we must ask the susséd ones about
what draws one person to love
civil war
while another is drawn
to animals?

Well Meaning White Girl by Alli Warren now available from Mitzvah Chaps.

"When is The Collected Alli Warren going to be published?"
-Michael T. Hauser

Mr. Hauser voices with clarity that which is surely on all of our minds, and though we here at Mitzvah Chaps cannot answer that question anymore than we can afford extra toppings on our pizza, we can safely say that if you order Alli's chapbook Well Meaning White Girl, it will be 'popped in' the mail within a week.



Specs:
19 Poems by Alli Warren
Cover designed by Anne Boyer
Edition of 150
Saddle-stitched in Kansas
$7 (includes shipping if you live in the contiguous US)
Includes this poem:

FERTILE CORRESPONDENT

The looping points like likeness and so forth
asserts that everything happens because
I do not know how to work metal
I am less effective I devote a great part of my time to
the interpretation of signals When signs are slow
in coming I do not hesitate to seek the slightest touch
by water by wheat berry by cotton thread and flintstone
I lick around the perimeter and then I lick under
that other totality to overthrow with a flick of tongue
that I might run to the top of a high hill
without weariness sprout a disc and make bold
claims Aim to come correct come morning
after morning there is full range in weights
and extensive looting Insert two fingers to bring breath

To Order:

and the hills have green balls

there is texture or
residence in
some jungles

we have to clear
quite a bit of bits
out of.

this's true
too--authentic voice is
all of a sudden
don't go there.

be sure to give us that in
juxtaposition.
justin, position
your timber
at my lake

and bye bye.

and w/ rope, Tyrone's chicken

what in the box
is the fuck is in
really in
muy muy in
tre in
buon in
discerning the in in in
is this:
is fucking in still
is coming in/let in
very fragrant in
Latin
Patton
or
Tourin
in shape of Tyrone
Tyrone's round about
here's a daily constitution
by Tyrone
what tie Rhone
what already
now in Germany
a German inbox
is fueled well
too fucked in
a sense: a cold headless
carcass of chicken
in a word:
Tyrone's

Iffn' My Next Wife

Put the ball
the moment you have beaten
it.

Return drills
to Armani's
village
where all cocks
align all dogfights
with other thus
with other colors/
urine/colors/urine
name another color
and I,
I will irrevere your
ass
at last.

Better than no one ever; thank you, Carson Cistulli

I am a person of many interests, to the detriment of excelling at any one of them. At least that's what I tell myself to account for the mediocrity that extends into all the nooks of my life.

I know that I am mediocre because every time I think I have gotten better at something, or an sort of good at something, I encounter an example (or countless examples) of people that are better at me than that thing.

Latest example: I like to think that I my baseball fanaticism is a nice balance between objective/statistical analysis and irrational things like "he plays for my favorite team" / "he wears high socks". I could probably write an article about Rickie "Skittles" Weeks to that effect and have it be pretty fun and informative to read, even for the most casual of fans. I might even be compelled to do so were it not for this article by Carson Cistulli of FanGraphs on Mark Bellhorn. I think it's one of the best sports articles I've ever read. It just so purely reflects a love of the game, the rational, irrational, the vibrancy and depth of the game that I love.

I cry at stupid things. If I listen to "Vacant Skies" by Sparta or "Adlai Stephenson" by Sufjan Stevens in headphones, I know I'll tear up big time. When I think about that 2008 US Presidential election, I fucking whimper. This article makes me feel ok as a human being, and I guess that is worth crying about.

if my life was a TV show

everyone's favorite character would be Rhoads Elliott Stevens.

from Daily Kos:

Democracy-Hating Boehner Making Threats

LOL

Jesus H. Freedom, 12/25/0000-7/4/1776-9/11/2001-??/??/????

"Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)"

Where were you when the world stopped turning that September day
Out in the yard with your wife and children
Working on some stage in LA
Did you stand there in shock at the site of
That black smoke rising against that blue sky
Did you shout out in anger
In fear for your neighbor
Or did you just sit down and cry

Did you weep for the children
Who lost their dear loved ones
And pray for the ones who don't know
Did you rejoice for the people who walked from the rubble
And sob for the ones left below

Did you burst out in pride
For the red white and blue
The heroes who died just doing what they do
Did you look up to heaven for some kind of answer
And look at yourself to what really matters

I'm just a singer of simple songs
I'm not a real political man
I watch CNN but I'm not sure I can tell you
The difference in Iraq and Iran
But I know Jesus and I talk to God
And I remember this from when I was young
Faith hope and love are some good things he gave us
And the greatest is love

Where were you when the world stopped turning that September day
Teaching a class full of innocent children
Driving down some cold interstate
Did you feel guilty cause you're a survivor
In a crowded room did you feel alone
Did you call up your mother and tell her you love her
Did you dust off that bible at home
Did you open your eyes and hope it never happened
Close your eyes and not go to sleep
Did you notice the sunset the first time in ages
Speak with some stranger on the street
Did you lay down at night and think of tomorrow
Go out and buy you a gun
Did you turn off that violent old movie you're watching
And turn on "I Love Lucy" reruns
Did you go to a church and hold hands with some stranger
Stand in line and give your own blood
Did you just stay home and cling tight to your family
Thank God you had somebody to love

I'm just a singer of simple songs
I'm not a real political man
I watch CNN but I'm not sure I can tell you
The difference in Iraq and Iran
But I know Jesus and I talk to God
And I remember this from when I was young
Faith hope and love are some good things he gave us
And the greatest is love

I'm just a singer of simple songs
I'm not a real political man
I watch CNN but I'm not sure I can tell you
The difference in Iraq and Iran
But I know Jesus and I talk to God
And I remember this from when I was young
Faith hope and love are some good things he gave us
And the greatest is love

The greatest is love
The greatest is love

Where were you when the world stopped turning that September day

'save the date'

i read your poems and you are my favorite poet and i don’t know what to do with these feelings that feel magical and stupid

thank you,
thank you.
i thought you might like how my body puffed up like a bird
i had to readjust my feathers
i have a melty look on my face i think
it can be made without a lot of money.

today i traded a plane voucher for a bag
of gold donuts
gold hubcaps
gold crystals
gold l.e.d. screens
good old golden sadness of the ancients
spreading the sad sad seed of the
male unicorn’s single prong
of sadness.

thank you thank you i give you
the predictable
the fertile correspondent.
it is a song i wrote
in bed beaming in early evening.

this expensive weeping
sweeps you like a machine up
your warm walls thank you
now. thank you,
i didn't know there would be
the hubris of mummies.
maybe we can harvest the hubris of bird mummies.
i know where some of those are.

(I) Love (Science) Poem

w/ a tire you add
to a motor
some tension
makes a spire where
things--

tender parabola
inverses and
I tend a parabola too
your bottom
lip.

there's such trickle
some sun--
not ours--
as dark as yellow
can go
animal almost.

you said something of tax
to the center of cities
to your brother
for incentive to
privately produce iron
beams
true tested
(sweat) across
my forehead you
don't
seem to notice
or mind.

imagine this world
class structure where
everything's of carbon
date me.

Young writers.

I am now no longer in my mid-twenties. That means, to me, that I am old. People/writers I look up to are younger than me. Lamenting my transition into the "late twenties," I'd like to celebrate a few younger writers, who have accomplished far more.

Cote Smith is 25. His friendship means more to me than he knows, I bet. He recently had a crushingly good story published by One Story called "Hurt People." Here is an excerpt from the story and a chance to support Cote and One Story by subscribing. Here is one of the editors' blog entry about Cote's story, his "concerns," and his talents. It is probably more interesting than anything I would say.

Alli Warren is probably somewhere around 25 (maybe I am way off), but I know she is younger than me. She is way more successful than me, that is for sure. Ron Silliman called her "one of those poets." It seems like she has been writing good poems forever; for example, here are some poems from 2005-ish in EOAGH. Here is a more recent e-chapbook from Duration Press called No Can Do (warning: PDF download in link). I will have the privilege of publishing a chapbook by her via Mitzvah Chaps very soon. Other info on Alli-chaps can be found here, here, here, and here.

Sam Pink is 25 or maybe 26 depending when his birthday his--his book I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It was published in 2008 and it says that he is 25, which is a weird thing to put in his bio since it will only be true for less than one year, unless the book was published on his birthday, then it would be true for one full year. Sam is published damn near everywhere on the internet. His stories aren't really "stories" sometimes, sort of in the way that Lydia Davis's stories aren't really stories sometimes. That's not to say that the "content" or "style" of Sam's work is anything like that of Davis, but it's pretty good.

Types of Rarity

1. Rare pleasures
2. Freak natural occurrences
3. Prodigal human abilities
4. Pangs (as in of brevity, missed chances, passing greatness, or awe)
   

will someone please tell me how this happened?

Money is not real.

From The Money Masters, via Linh Dinh's blog:

The Fed was deliberately designed to appear as a sort of government body to hide the fact that it is a private banking cartel whose member banks share in the vast profits of seigniorage (i.e., the difference between the cost of printing/minting or otherwise creating money [a few cents per $100], and its face value). Yes, the Department of the Treasury does still mint our coins (at the US mint) but that represents under 1% of the US money supply, the great bulk of which is simply bankbook entries - electronic keyboard impulses in computer memories - created by banks on-the-spot to fund loans they make in response to loans applications their "customers" submit (hence the competition by banks for your loan applications and credit card borrowing).

Wouldn't you love to have that exclusive ability - simply to type numbers on your keyboard creating bank accounts, and then write checks or charge purchases to those accounts (actually, no - it is gravely unjust to everyone else and is impoverishing the world for that power to be in private hands).

Blog Trolling

I'm kind of obsessing over Linh Dinh's pictures of Bethlehem Steel, the viewing of which flanked my reading of Dale Smith's blogpost about Collapsitarianism-- a connection so clear that it seems cliché. I am big walking ball of superficiality.


Some new blogroll links:

H.O.W. Journal

Resisting Poetry Blog

Blue Hour Press (amazing e-books!)

Do people remember what blog names I used in the past?

Here are the ones I remember (in what I can remember of the order):

The Naming of Things

Chick Fuzz Pea Brain

Kee-Wahn-Kee-Lo

Jimmy Eat World (thank you Kari)

phatic, adj.

I Gasped.

extremely soft retarded kitten

just about rotund enough (thank you Kelly)

On the Internet It Is Stupid to Imagine Boundaries

It Is Stupid

I Is Stupid

Jhumpa Lahiri (current)



If you remember other ones please post them as comments.

Blogroll Updates

People / Places:

Matthew Henriksen's Hyacinth Losers

Shane Jones

PennSound

Poetry Project @ St. Mark's

Rabbit Light Movies

McSweeney's Internet Tendency


Presses / Publications:

Black Warrior Review

Forklift, Ohio

Danforth Quarterly

Cannibal

Dalkey Archive

Fewer & Further Press

Duration Press

Ugly Duckling Presse

here.

Abraham Smith from joshuamarie on Vimeo.

this was a fantastically quick turn around: i have a poem on 3:AM.

who are they/what is poetry?

Blogging and Meaninglessness/Ethics, Pt. 2

what are the moral/ethical/personal/existential/social implications if Silliman's Blog is my sole 'window' into the 'world' -- not just the poetical or literary one, but all the world? like Africa and shit?

this morning i wrote this poem in bed and read it to Kelly. i told her i had written a poem that meant something for once. she asked what it meant and then i talked for a long time and felt i had said too much but she said she liked my explanation. i don't remember what i said it was about, i could probably paraphrase pretty accurately, but i'm not going to, i'm just going to title it "Pooem"--but now this whole thing in bold has become the title i guess.


for the sake of making fun
of space—

in order to use everything i know
in a poem—

i shit out what fish
sleeps still in my bowels:
what i know is something
like the sting of empirical dung
on my hole.
i don’t know what a tannin is—science—
but i have examined deeply
the beaded head of a broccoli sprig,
blotches in shrimp asses
much like my own.
it is a comfort to own your own bowl
for scatting
i'm learning—
by trial and error.

but for instance i think i know for certain
the slant of sun—
the poem—the sonnets—the Berrigan—
the one that hit me
in Mequon
after they extracted the rat
brain from my cheek,
but i don’t: tell me
what’s one word—
tell me one word
that makes the sun made of
real sun
or at least of a pulsing mote—
something more like the cat
shit i felt through a towel
this morning—
light a real light,
Marx a real armpit:
woolen.

revolting the way i know
to claim
the means of producing a poem
of my own:
i dipped a leaf in honey, clipped it
to a bank door—
called it a pun.

(what i know is to press up—
my bulb hits a notch—
and you come)

one word makes fun of
shit we spin and it is:
lint-pile-i-love-ya

and once again dig toward my ass
through my tummy.
space is a helmet with mirrors
for eyes in my mind.
this poem could not use all
i know / used all i know
in the lines about poo.

headphone home #1

i have been sitting in my bedroom with my headphones on for several hours now. sometimes i do this--just sit and wonder how all these sounds can make me want to die and live forever. one song that i continually come back to (it makes me cry because i can't imagine how all the parts come together to form this whole) is "Vacant Skies" by Sparta. i went to see Sparta at the Metro in Chicago back in 2002 or 2003 with Erick and I think Aaron was there and we missed the first song, which was, of course, "Vacant Skies," and i never forgave myself for being late.

so now, sitting in my room, having happened across the song in the trolling of my iTunes, i figured i'd see if i could relive what i missed at that concert, and lo and behold, this video of a totally decent quality on the You(series of)Tubes. if you watch it, please note the amazing work of Jim Ward's alien-like fingers at the beginning of the song (he's the front man, and the skinniest person on earth, so it shouldn't be hard to figure it out).



i told Chloé recently that i try to give my life meaning by making soundtracks for it. one way to do that is to constantly remake soundtracks for the movies in my head. i just titled this post, thinking that it would be something of a recurring theme working with my deeply nostalgic use of music. here it goes.

this Sparta song was on an EP that came out when Jesse and Cush were living together on the East Side of Milwaukee. Joshua Hren came over and we listened to the cd in Jesse's room (there was only one room--Cush slept on the couch--the landlord thought they were gay). there was a certain dim light. i can almost remember what i ate. i parked on the north side of Brady Street, just west of Farwell. perfect weather after it stopped raining. after listening, i think we recorded, very coarsely, a song that we referred to as "0.9% Interest" on Josh's analog 4-track. (that was for the band we wide-eyedly called Kindness Quotient.) i still have a different recording of it in my GarageBand files. at the time we thought it was great. but held against something like "Vacant Skies"--at least the way i see it--it was nothing. nothing i touch ever is.

i think, now, that why i listen to music, why i blog, how i use culture is to realize that other people move through life in the same ways i do. some of them would be sad without me. that seems an odd jump to make. with music it is stupid not to make those connections.

Magical Icon Below, Please Click as Many Times As You Would Like Please.

Let me be sentimental and extremely appreciative for a minute.

From an email, sent by my friend Aaron to a bunch of our "ilk":

Flight from KC to MKE is $286. 610 miles from Lawrence to Milwaukee by car, 30 miles per gallon, round trip gas would have been about $80, so a flight would require an additional $206. I am starting the "Get Baumann to Milwaukee and Save the Woodland Pattern Poetry Marathon" fund with $100, if we can come up with the other $106 the festivities will still be on.

I am not worthy of living.

J.A.R.E. presents . . .

Original art by Becky Evanhoe.


Colors (To: Aunt Pat) (1990 or 1991)
wax crayon on stolen letterhead
8.5" x 11"
NFS