Nina Power quoting Tiqqun: [Anorexia is] ‘the desire to free oneself from a body entirely colonized by commodity symbolism’.

Couldn't this also be a case of striving to fit the commodity?  To fit into the very public, very visible "sample size"?  Couldn't anorexia suggest there's no space for some figures, so why not become as "not-there" as possible?  Or, scarier, couldn't anorexia suggest one has no right to occupy space?

I like this line, well, portion of a line, from a poem by Seth Oelbaum:

will light ever go green?

Jackie Wang's "Against Innocense" (I'm mispelling I suspect) is awesome!  Terrifying and awesome; and it appears in a journal--or collective publication or whatever the best terms may be: I apologize for forgetting the name--that appears full of urgent, incisive analysis; there is, for me, definitely hope for the world when the world produces, despite all odds, this kind of amazing!  I am grateful.

This is more than less my favorite dress ever; it makes me remember an ad, or perhaps ad serries, from the late 80s; did he do other similar looks, or am I "dreaming"?  Oh poo, this is silk, ain't it?  And forever I've been thinkin' sequins and/or beading!!!!!!!!!!!  I ought to buy this book!  I wish I had a Vogue archive from like 198787 to 1992!

Without A Qualifier, Is The Girl (that trope) Assumed To Be Slim And Pretty?

"The Young-Girl is idle talk substantiated, inauthentic life made Queen: ‘Precisely because of her nothingness, each of her judgements carries the imperative weight of the entire sovereign order, and she knows it.’"  This is from a review by Nina Power who I'd like to assume is not a female in conventional bodily sense of a work titled  Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl by some one or matrix named Tiqqun.  As stated in the blogpost-title, is it just me or may there be some distressing homogenization of girls going on in this theory of the girl.  Maybe it's just me, but when I read the world girl, I think trim and lovely, or at-least conventionally attractive; and it's easy for me to imagine that it's the pretty girls who get to deploy girly power, who indeed get to be the girl; the fat girl is very, very different, I'm guessing, in discourses.  I think the confidence of the pretty ones--women and men and all the gorgeous bends--has yet to recieve adequate attention/theorizing.  Are aesthetically yummy people immune to difficulty--institutional difficulty included--well I'd assume not; but lookin' lovely nonetheless may make, in many instances, for some major advantages when it comes to having an audience or having the sense of nerve to act certain ways.  Ultimately I think this is not surprising--there's no clear reason why feminism should be immune to braiding amicably to capitalist logic/the logic of mainstream media.  I know, discursively, what a girl is; however, the term frequently makes me want to yell the question--and what, in the name of deliciousness (I love delicious as non gustatorial adjective), is a girl?  Too, the word girl, for me, already denotes heterosexuality, and I find that barfy.  Now, for a perhaps absurd torquing of what precedes: I love the word Girl! 

I like these lines from Carina Finn:

where I stole grapes from wooden crates
and cracked the skins between my milk teeth.

I think there used to be 8 people who are listed as BAG readers; now apparently there are seven; if I offended someone, please let me know.

On a very different note: I would lllllllllllllovvvvvvvvvvvvvvve to go to Kimbe Bay, PNG; and I'd love to visit Port Moresby for like two days.

Kimbe Bay has orcas, and I think it'd be a million times niftier to see one there as opposed to the Pacific Northwest.  I'm obsessed with mammals living in places they're not widely connected--the aforementioned KB orcas, Jaguars in Arizona, Pumas in the eastern United States.

I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order--pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature."--

The above quotation is, supposedly, from Kate Zambreno.  I am a fan of Kate Z, and very much think of us as electronic friends.  I don't like the above statement(s) though; well, ok, revision, I don't like conflating selfhood to an I or the directly experiential: I believe selfness can manifest itself in a fascination with cubes and rhomboids, or the color blue.  Rallying against the "objective" strikes me as problematic: if the world is reduced to the subjective, then how is it supposed to be legible; legtibility, I'd argue, depends on some relatively stable foundations (the key here is relatively stable, not to push the notion that foundations don't crack, morph, etc); if everyone is their own universe, then how can communication occur, how can connection occur?  Furthermore, it seems to me that the use of language is in some ways very at odds with selfhood: no one person owns language, has their own (unless they start from scratch and make a new one) so to write is already to enter a space that is massively beyond the self.  Well, this assumes one buys the position that language precedes self, that language is bigger than self, that one does not own language--even that which is supposedly their own. 

I will be the first to state that what I just wrote is by no means complete: I havn't really addressed the term "repression," and I am not at-all anti I.  Probably my key qualm is the use of the declarative mode; I am so sick of declaration serving as substitute for argument; please, please, give me generous, expansive qualifications not, oh no, I don't mean this nor that, a tactic which emphasizes language as personal possession of an I.  I love writing which highlights all the problems with its statements, which constantly decapitates its authority, constantly posits that one may be wrong, or incomplete, that tries to let in as many positions as possible, so that one gets, for a brief time, a kind of whole (a whole whose halflife, admitedly, will likely be brief).

 

At my mom-two's sister's house, I had a Manhattan for the first time.  I didn't love it, but I didn't dislike it either; and I get why people could like them.

In my prior blogpost it may look like I'm stating many blogs fit cozily with M Nussbaum's line, but I really mean those and this blog don't often do clarity in the august manner of her sentence.  Blogs are awesome odd spaces.

So I went to Kate Z's blog FFIMS and she's going on vacation from her blog, which is perfectly valid, and probably healthy, but I'm not thrilled.  I'm not in the habit of emailing her--and I love how she states in her bon-voyage from blogging blogpost (bon voyage is kinda a funny term to use as her departure note longs for burrowing, not the open seas or vast continents or somesuch) that she'll, possibly, be up for email exchanges--so no-more literary community I've gotten really used to, and am glad for; and FFIMS was, hopefully shall be again, its site!  Or location!  Or venue or square where, electronically, people meet!  And ugh I'm hopeless at the straightshot trajectory: this point (point is the wrong word but oh well) should have come earlier--true-true, I guess a single person can't be a community (ok, this is no longer feeling prior); and by comunity at FFIMS I mean the blogcomment streams; but Kate Z talks to and within those streams so she, surely this makes some plausible sense, becomes both singular and plural or, in other words, a community.  I have had brief email xchanges with Kate Z, but they havn't seemed to catch and hence, logos-wise oddly, stream; but woww have we had some lively exchanges at FFIMS. 

I love--and of course by love I mean do not love--how, with the prior paragraph, I had no intention of writing a labrynthine (and that adjective is generous) sentence but was initially aiming for conventionally chatty or rather, foremost, for conventional transparent prose.  I want to write prose like a novel by James Patterson: it's practically an algorhythm if that's the word for when a set of movements, a movement complex, goes reeling, gets replicated; it reads like no individual author at-all.  

Suspicious Of My/Mine

Although I don't think Nussbaum is anything like correct in her criticism of Butller in her essay "The Professor Of parody"--she seems to majorly underestimate how intimately linked JB's work is to "lived," off the page experience--I do like this point quite a lot, and it seems to me to be a good take on a dynamic one can get at some literary blogs (probably, eek, this one among others!):

"When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one's own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority."

Citation is interesting: it so often seems to be a matter of calling attention to persons not only ideas, to ideas as property of persons rather than ideas as dynamics which cannot be owned.  This may or may not relate to my wondering whether one can ever be true enough responding that someone has misread their point, has not gotten a meaning; how can a person own a meaning?  Not all readings are as strong, but to state someone has not gotten what they're doing freaks me because it privileges the author, and suggests that they are in control of their meaning, that they have done a great job at articulation and that any flaw in thought lies with the reader not the writer.  Another formulation could go like this: is this phenomena (overblown word choice, true-true) more accurately one of occluding egotism rather than generous engangement?  Note: ego is not an energy I wish to perma-diss; my point, instead, is that not all forms of egotism are exciting.  And can an idea be mine?  Can I possess one, or only--gorgeously--live in constellation with one or ones.

Although getting poems rejected is not as much fun as having them accepted, it was lovely to recieve a really kind rejection from G C Waldrep of West Branch.

Prose No Muse

For me, the crucial issue is not what can be done to change the status quo but, rather, to look intensely, meditate majorly, on what is so appealing about it. I don’t think the status quo is sufficiently understood by some whom critique it or, perhaps more accurately, imagine they do. I’d prefer one explores, sees emergent, how interred one is, and to think with ridiculous distance about whether one would like to embark on exploration yields new pleasures, new comforts so primary they’re almost natural, and in not quite being so are the more powerful. This stance, too true, may not afford hope adequate to sustaining any endeavor the status quo doesn’t sanction, and surely replacing its pleasures would raise maximal ire. It is so difficult to depart from status and be correct enough; nor is it sufficient to declare incorrect far more valid than previously established: flipping does not, necessarily, alter the stuff of very sentience; instead, it highlights the same old material a little differently. A little difference is not a bad aim. Most authority is insufficient. I’d be surprised if, were this state altered, satisfaction would soar. Kindness and dumbness have a relation to each other but I’m not, currently, sure what it is; no, I insufficiently am!

Prose, to me, connotes authority to such a degree that it becomes denotative. As someone who is massively suspicious of my own authority, prose thus becomes a somewhat absurd endeavor. I cannot end an argument, or even necessarily adequately support one. I am likely to start with one stance, and end with belief in its opposition. In my hands, argument is wrecked, made amorphous, no, jelly, jiggly stagnancy whose slops and winks, wee shocks and shiftings, make hallucinating going anywhere possible.

Yes, my interest in prose is at odds with my philosophy of power so, astride a deliciously cynical logic as topos, that renders mine dumb. This, almost comically, makes revelatory sense: I am keenly invested in faith that theoretically unsavory demographics are often no more possessed ponk than any other community once one adjusts for magnified visibility due to comparatively small size or, conversely, darn near invisibility due to hugeness; and of course, and of course that phrase is wildly frustrating, everyplace in between is crucial. Poles ably morph into polarities; I’d rather live in cosmopolitan country. Is it just me or does diaspora make more sense as a concept than community. I’m craving closeness.

Poetry, for me, is a matter of riding a language stream, an energy, a tidal rivulet; prose requires me to think more than perceive. I am not markedly good at thinking. Mostly I’m so focused on why my ideas are inadequate that this unconfident stance thickly scrims getting to any point I imagine could hit a chord with many others. I’m not cut out for self-defense and it’s precisely there that I imagine making significant points. Why I’d jeopardize what I imagine could be a strength is not even a question I entertain. Moreover, strength is nothing if not indefinite when it comes to its article. And underneath all this hoobla there’s undoubtedly self, matrix, defense, blank point whose chiasmus does not demonstrate equivalence nor support the thesis that equivocation is an outmoded model for what’s assumed to be happening. How I can even dare the word happening is ripe for wonder. I insistently don’t supply concrete examples. I do not bolster my prosy chunks with quotations. This manner could be determined to be egregiously egotistical. My fantasy is that this method (grandiose term!) investigates so much knowledge or, rather, the frequent condition of knowledge: devoid proof, citation.

This post was submitted as a blog-comment-box response to Kate Zambreno writing on her blog that genius is a fucked up, status-quo interred concept; it may end up at FFIMS, but very recently responses havn't ended up posted--this cld be because Kate is too busy, or because the computer cogs have decided to revolt and stuff has gone to an abyss etc; anyways, here is my ditty:

I'd argue that genius comes to inflect future status quos, but that almost by definition it cannot be the status quo at the time of its inception: Stein, Cezanne, Dickinson. Interestingly, it seems like Woolf was rightfully recognized in a quite short span of time. I do not mind the term genius because, for me, it basically just denotes work which displays insane ambition and manages, in the execution, to make that ambition something others can richly engage with. I do though think that calling a con temporary American grant a Genius grant is dumb: what that really says is those in the Macarthur committee matrix are super astute observers of culture--the most astute, and this is wonky; single individuals likely aren't the sole or even most crucial way genius gets recognized, but rather through a much broader swath of humanity. I do think Genius may not at-all be a generative paradigm for contemporary practitioners in a given field: 99.999 percent of those who practice are not/will not be geniuses; several decades can go by before the spore takes fire; and this doesn't mean wonderful stuff ain't happening in the interim!


adam s

ps: I've been loving H Bloom's latest, and it recently dawned on me that you and him have a ton in common as far as approach goes, that you all may be kindred! One moment in particular cld almost be you! I don't think either one of you, though, would be pleased by this connection, yes, so true!

much love!

Prose Anxieties

Take One:


Prose freaks me out. I expect prose to hide its seams and mine doesn’t. My poetry, however, massively more succeeds in this arena. Poetry feels fun, a playground of rhetoric and prosody; prose feels like failing at thought. I recently wrote the draft of a review of two books of poetry. When I look over the results, it’s hard not to think--wow, what a lot of work for rather paltry results. They’re paltry even if they are initial; and they’re not really initial: I’ve been making little adjustments all along the way.

With prose, I feel the need to decently prove what I posit. This, at times, surely makes me a village explainer. I don’t relish that witticism, but would rather risk being tedious than reveling in authority. Authority is a dynamic I both adore and distrust; this state is to the degree that my entire being is compassed.

For some ridiculous multifoliate reason, I expect my prose to encompass as much analysis of a text’s structure as can be articulated with a sufficiently streamlined quality that another party may comprehend the attempt. This is a tedious process, this fitting of evidence to perception through logic which can sufficiently prove connection.

For me, composing poetry is all about glide. Glittering thought seems to so often be a swift state, so it makes sense that poetry can compass realms. Poetry can efficiently do what I want prose to when put this way. This may in-part explain why I believe poetry as much as any book of prose can assay. I do believe this; I also know my draft of a review of Karen Volkman’s Nomina and Sandra Simonds’ Warsaw Bikini is another matter.

The crucial difference, I believe, is the matter of foregrounding self. Poetry is the self saturated selfless, an ecstatic stream, so suppression of the personal is minimized. In my case, though, prose is a matter of knowing my self is informing my analysis, and trying to rave in favor or against or to be puzzled at a composition as if this stance is solely logos. I do not quite get why I, someone who prides themselves on being capable of assessing something with logic readily (if only hypothetically) accessible to a third party, insist on such different standards for poetry and prose or, rather, or rather in attenuation, for my praxis regarding these great arts. The disjuncture is especially pronounced when, as has hopefully been pointed, the standards may be at cross purposes for my prose.

Take Two

A boy once told me the heart has an exegetical discourse attached to its art. But isn’t it bad to lie in purportedly plain prose. No boy said anything remotely like the opening sentence. I don’t know how I’d feel if I overheard somesuch verbiage or, juicier, if such a statement were directed to my attention and its supposed delectation. Although I may not be schooled in prolepsis, I can readily imagine I’d feel embarrassed that such a sentiment would go public, live, from mouth to, well, if we’re still assuming me, probably agape.

Of course, attenuating circumstances could prove decisive. Let’s say, for example, this scenario is happening with someone quite sexy, and by sexy I mean aesthetically. If this is the scenario, then I would be chuffed to be in relation to such a speaker. A qualification is necessary: I’d be chuffed if the speaker’s a sexy gay guy, or a gal, or transgendered, but not plain Straight. If he is Straight and he speaks to me thusly, I will abstract him into a portentous dude in some sentence or another. If I am expected to pay for every second of the pleasure, then I’ll pass.

What makes any of the above not be a Prosepoem! Poems are language which is; they have to happen, but are not restricted to that which has or really will happen. Well I don’t feel out of one mode and wholly in the other is for sure. Perhaps perversely, I see this as a failure: to be plain prose, efficient as a rose a spring morning, strikes me as the most desirous stance. And OMG, let’s not even get started on--oh, no, there’s sufficient logic; I feel ok not justifying what by now is a growing elision.

Take Three

I, to use a figuration I don’t even like, am too anorexic for prose; I want to go quickly, traverse continents in a line-break. But that’s so colossally skittery. And aren’t anorexics the focused, type A dispositions! Thankfully, it stands to reason that as I get more adroit at prose, I will come to relish its realms. Currently, I’m afraid of getting boggy. I might very well mean some scenarios are too sad to go slowly through. I love the irony of that “very well,” that syntactic flourish, that rote emphasis and minor clarification.

Here’s a sad scenario. It’s been me all Summer. The New Boys at the bar I go to on Sundays are adorable: they’re early to mid twenties, handsomely cutie-pie, and appear friendly. I am totally intimidated. I was not able to tell one of them in particular how cute I think he is. It’s really too bad for me I don’t know how to line-dance. So much of my identity is predicated on not having superb motor skills, thus such an activity registers to me as So Delicious but impossible. Absurdly, I love the figuration delicious--it certainly exceeds felicitous--but qualm that it ties in, and makes a bow from, the opening disease.

Lesbian

My Lesbian chapbook was not accepted by Bloof Books, nor even a finalist; I'm ultimately not surprised, but still a bit sad: I think Bloof wld have been an excellent venue for the poems, and could have served as a site to start some explosive discussions regarding the figure of the Lesbian and poetry.

Today, a few minutes ago, I got a notice from Fence rejecting some poems from the Lesbian chapbook of the paragraph above.

I wonder if unironic Lesbian poems are just a terrible match for editors of this epoch.

Word For/Word

Here's a link to poems of mine up at Word For/Word, an excellent journal: http://www.wordforword.info/vol20/index-poetry.html

I continue to be a bit baffled by Kent Johnson's appearing upset that his name has been used, by Craig Dworkin, as part of a naming experiment, as part of a riffing on authorship.  With his interest in heteronyms, secret groups, forged authors, it strikes me as fitting that Dworkin should then author a book by Johnson.  In the current Claudius App, the two have an xchange, and I can't help but wondering if it's a spoof: Dworkin's explanation of the genesis of the book makes some sense--it's a funny story in which he encourages a student of his to write in a different style and publish under a different name.  I love that the name settled on is Kent Johnson's!  From what I see, it appears that KJ is against appropriating the names of people who are, in the "contemporary" "moment," alive, and that he views CD's experiment as libelous; but their xchange is so, well, politely stagey as opposed to overtly angry; am I really supposed to believe this isn't a self-conscious experiment on behalf of Dworkin and Johnson?  Because I am a fan of Johnson, I choose to believe that he knows that this occurance is, darn near, necessary for the life of his name games and that this in fact is exactly the sort of screwiness which he had hoped to see.  Now that real live names are involved, it's delicious; the experiment is "in the world at-large" and on the page: the experiment has become vascular, part of circulation! 

Lastly--for a second or two one can be fooled by the CD as KJ BlazeVox book, but it, at least for me, was easy to then realize that one's looking at a kind of joke.

I doubt the formatting will be maintained with the poems below; yah, nope; hmm, it's, sort of, I think, interesting to see the spacing/prosody be different; the "goal" of the poems is to fuse syntax to spatialization, to make syntax ekphrastic, or faux ekphrastic, as there is no actual artwork the poems are stemmed from; ok, one more description attempt--I hope the poems are forthed from a syntax which resembles stroking paint onto canvas, marks which carry-through the bodily movement which it took to make them and I think this is, at this stage, not clear enough but hopefully the theorizing will improve:


1.39

I was there before

Land became scape scrapes

Paint off with a palate knife just

In case an intruder tries funny

Business art and overly

Protective are constant interlopers

Lollops that grin then trolls trippy

Wrangling of viscera from where and

Why remain un concluded clipped.     


1.42

As an egg optic nerve a nervous

Parting portal to

What nourishes whom and where

Am I looking turns features

Formal fit for such and such a property

Pertains framed fully aware conventions

Catalyze their inevitable cancelling does

Not concern some continuities much or any.


1.46

Cardiac arrest is a serious

Risk take care of your

Heart a sign scrawled on a crumbling

Wall a metaphor but if

Not a transference then what is

A message

How did such statements get here

Hirsute stems bracket bloodhot narratives

Known then as now to be a real

Nostrilful they say the first pull makes the way

Or there are those who speak

Differently demands some other

Observer an architrave of

Finely wrought gut geared towards disdain

Emerged critical scrutiny not immediate diss.    



1.48

Brindled, barnacled, belted to a trim

Tree the color of

Seraphim

Fans itself out in flames lustrous as love

That core, that ice

At the central-most

Periphery, its

Apex, price, and no price,

Not even the gorgeousness surrounds

Me, this coast

All tree, convinces my wits

It’s just my pounds

Not very

Terribly an entire ecosystem, necessary as the sea.



1.49

Cicely on styptic plum is this

A fruit or pigment makes her

Fatigue more beautiful than logic

Doesn’t hold candle of renderings

Melts down to mangled nerves ash on

Eyelids summer harvest sheens her

Every glance gardening with scalpels

Instead of wheel barrows she drew

Burrows into and this square micro

Millimeter is full of great shakes.  

Madelynn Wickham's (name mispelled and her other name is Sophie Kinsella of the Shopaholic series) 40-Love is a good read--funny, moving--and fascinatingly literary given SK's other works; this novel, in some ways, seems to be a version of Between The Acts.

"I loaf and invite myself to lock and load"--from Joyelle Mcsweeney's latest book; I like this riff on Whitman.

Just got a rejection from Cutbank of "Coal/Cole/Kohl" poems; oh well, one of these days an editor might want to publish a piece in the "series."  Or it might be that the trope/concept of make/making-up, the poetry of Cole Swensen, and the subject of coal-mining doesn't mesh together into a dynamic of interest for most.

Oops: it appears that Cloud City may be for official students only!

Recent rejection from Lana Turner; I wonder if I"ll ever send poems which "fit"?  I get rejected by C Bedient at-least once a year!

I, a few minutes ago, sent a manuscript submission titled Country to Cloud City.

Urgh--rejections

Pleiades--ok, this is no biggy to me; but I thought two of my submissions to 1913 would make for really good matches, so that's rather deflating/frustrating, and especially because I'm quite fond of 1913.

I guess this is revealing what a wretched aesthete I am: I am cheered that Evie Shockley's poem in honor/in anger at the death of Trayvon Martin does not just repeat an end-word in each couplet to form its Ghazal-ness, but also employs that, for my mindearheart, utterly necessary front-rhyme preceding the repeated end-word.  Honestly, I find, aside from its prosody, the poem a bit dull: there's indisputable truth in it, but it's sociological more than linguistic, and so I am not taken to a "new" location for consciousness, and so the poem for me ultimately ends up lacking urgency and instead seems like a summary of some of the worst of racial politics in the USA.  That said, the newly added couplet which directly references TM works the best I think, as the idea of being punished for surviving is poignant.

Here's a link in which a sequence--Taking Off--is mentioned: http://www.robmclennan.blogspot.ca/2012/03/ongoing-notes-late-late-march-2012.html

My full-length collection, For Days, is now available at/from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Days-Adam-Strauss/dp/1609640772

Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I just spent two hours updating my CV and--pshoosh, the computer got rid of it!  And I had been saving it frequently, but then the only version available is the one when I initially opened the document today.  Annoying!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

          So I think one of the questions Derrida may be arriving at in an essay of his questioning and celebrating work by Emanuel Levinas (is it just me or is that a particularly beautiful name?) is to query why words mean what they mean: why is the word duck a feathered water bird; why is creator God. I’m ten pages away from completing a perusal of this essay by JD. It’s been both dull and engaging, utterly difficult to discern and incisively sinuous.

          I’m nowhere near even a thoroughly rudimentary comprehension, but can this billow, this veil, this rending, this rendering, this shimmer in flakes as they fall and refresh, ever conjoin such a total moment as I declare comprehension, which might be one way of saying I can’t confidently provide even one illustrative quotation, and to cite several and argue their connection is more work than I’m willing to accomplish.
          When I look at the scene cast by my reflection, my sense drapes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse in shimmering webs like spider weavings as well as clouds. Webs makes for, ironically, relatively easy philological departure to nets, meshes, “language grill” according to one translation of the Celan. And, ah lovely logic, the webs I drape here and there across Virginia’s pages are in fact nets she has conjured, enwrapped me in.
          Now that an hour and a half has elapsed, I’ve completed a perusal. It’s taken me several days but, finally, I have glanced at each word on all sixty or so pages of Jacque’s essay. I think it has been worthwhile.

Urgh, I Meant To Write Prose and May Have Gone Prosepoem:

Love without reason is often unattractive, which is different from love due to an unstated reason or complex of reasons. If I follow the contours of my thought as exactly as I can, I suspect every inch forward will project its own path; with hilarious rapidity one is scrambling through a forest; and please, friends, do not forget kelp! Hearing only the drawl of water and the respirators and its bubbles is like silence because a lovely property of silence is it amplifies small sounds into raison detres. Like many phenomena, silence does dissatisfy. Paint and marble, wood and glass, can bore one into the cusp of slumber. At times the said materials will wallop one in wave upon wave of sumptuous refreshment. Reason is, foremost, at-the-time. At no time have I worn a shirt, let-alone a dress, which feels like delicious water pours down one’s back. I have, while kneeling in the tub and washing my hair, frequently thought how wonderful such dress would be.





If I Could Give A Lie Detector Test Across This Nation Here’s What I’d Ask (Surely A Sandra Simonds Homage):

Are you grossed out by man to man sexually and/or erotically?
Are there times when any arms and hands, regardless of what sex, cradling you would feel positively good?
Do you think Lesbians or Queers are really sort of weird?
Do you think given equal stresses, given equal hurdles, a woman and a man are precisely equal one another?
Do your erotic/sexual fantasies star exclusively or predominantly one race?
If the prior answer is yes, and perhaps especially if you’re white, do you think this is racist?
Do you prefer brunettes or blonds?
Which one exudes maximum lick-lick: the Manhattan yuppie stud or the Country hunk?
If you are a man, which of the prior options would you rather look like?
Have you ever pretended to be a model, but of your opposite gender, while in the privacy of your own room?
Do you believe men and women are so innately different there’s no point in arguing that both are human matters far more compared to recognizing how alien woman and man are to each other?
Is there any resource a country’s government is obligated to provide to every single one of its citizens?
Do air and water count as resources?

Notes on White space cadences

One way I--very recently, as in loastnight/morning--like to think of my use of white space as measure is to liken it to  a glotal-stop: there's a pause, an arrest, a halt, a collapse or jerking, but in the service of motion (the glottal hlt does not end the articulation, it reloads it, keeps it going energetically), of projecting forward and downward through the poem; in other words, I don't intend the spaces to be pure pauses, but more like springloaded spots, places where the poem can further bounce.  Maybe the spaces are my dream of a poem actually moving, not being a composition but rather a movement, a moving organism.

Another note: I wish I could write at any spot on the plane of this blog, not stick to the designated plane: type into the far-right margin and ignore the actual spaces intended for blog entries etc.

I saw this link at Silliman's blog; I'm a fan of these two poems, which are listy, but more than lists, as some entries are enjambed over multiple lines, so rhythmic tedium doesn't set-in, and instead one gets a delicious waxing and waning rhythmic effect:

"I WANT A GARMENT"
"I SAW A SHIRT THAT SAID"


Here's where they can be found: http://peepshowpoetry.blogspot.com/2012/03/blog-post.html

On a different note: Drunken Boat rejected the poems I submitted.

On Tuesday a friend of mine and I met up for beers and he was much flirtier than usual, which was totally lovely--mmm, it's been too long since I kissed and groped and cooed cuteness.  I hope we do this again!

Next week Kate Durbin will be in Vegas---Yayyyyyyyyyyyy, I've really wanted to meet her for a while now so I'm happy to have the chance!  If only Gina Abelkop and Kate Zambreno would be here too!  Or maybe they magically will be!

I submitted some poems to Spork lastnight; here's the opening of one.  I, frankly, think this start is horrid, tho I think the piece gets better as it goes, and that the subject is important:

Literacy: A Privilege


I am
A poet
But I
Would never tell you in
Person. I do not
Avoid embarrassing practice
Nor do I court it,

I am not comfortable with the opening two lines' declaration; I do, though, think the linebreak redeems a bit: breaks up the certainty of the declaration; or does it make it more emphatic?

In a recent post, I used the word lame; I shouldn't do this: it screams implicitly privileging conventional bodiedness and if I get angry at subtly--well not subtle, but contemporary discourse would say so--bigoted words like straight, I surely ought to be mindful of other words with related problems.

I do feel terrible about being irked at BlazeVox as I hate how much crud has been slung its way as of the past 6 months; and yes, I agree I should have made sure that what GG sent me lastweek was the most recent version for correction; only after the fact did I see he sent me a september version.  I wish my first full-length book felt like a "victory" not a span of I-flubbed-up.  This process has lessened my self-esteem; especially now that the editor thinks I'm a crap.  I guess it's been a good learning experience; well not good, but good that I've learned I don't enjoy seeing work to the print-stage and that I'm not good at this stage of the game.  I have a bad feeling what gets printed is going to be neither what has already been printed as a sample or the most right wrong version, but rather some new monster.

Ugh, I've got good blurbs, and I do think the poems in the collection mostly work pretty well--so I'm so sad that I feel like the whole thing is a big pretentious joke!

I guess with knowing typos I can't send the work to R Silliman or, for that matter, anyone; or is this me being absurd?

 

I really hope the prior printed version of FD is what gets printed more, and not a wonky version!

Ok, For days is not going well; GG is pissed, which seems not wholly fair, as recent problems have stemmed from me being sent the wrong version of the manuscript to correct, so I corrected an off copy and hence now there's a weird hybrid with the latest fixes and old errors.  I vote for running the printers version, which has two tiny errors.  GG is annoyed and finds this lame; I don't want to continue this swamptrudge!  Ugh I'm grumpy.  I imagine BlazeVox will never "do" a book of nine again; which is fine, as honestly GG and I just don't seem to communicate all that well.  It's sad to start a work's entrance into the world on such a crap note, but oh well--I need to be done with For Days, and two uncapitalized first lines won't kill me nor a reader; and the printers copy is something GG  does not seem to have, so I vote for no-more messing around with corrections that I may avoid more of the prior mentioned hybrid versions.

Ugh finalizing For Days is a p in the a; there're so many versions/pdfs that it's all turned into a mess; in as "clean" a manner as possible I want this thing out!

Today 4 poems werre rejected by Fence; there's one which hasn't yet; it'd be lovely if it wld be taken; but I suspect next week it too will be rejected.

Eleven Eleven rejected me yesterday.

I lol ought to make a list of rejections.

Here's a link to some poems from For Days: http://www.scribd.com/doc/82374139/Free-Poetry-For-Number-Two. 

Here's some other links to poems of mine published decently recently:

http://www.countrymusicpoetry.org/index.php?pr=Strauss_1

http://www.cricketonlinereview.com/vol7no2/23-adam-strauss-work-it.php

Am maybe getting back the bug to write poetry: rounds about bedtime lastmorning I started to want to plop poems out!  Or little epigraph-like ditties.

Ugh--I am freaked out by the job-search process; CVs, asking for recs, it all freaks me out; I wish I could see myself as a professional not, perpetually, a student; of course, being a perpetual student is good, but I need some explici8t confidence!  I want to teach poetry workshops!  Comp really is a good gig, but some variety wld be awesome.  In a few minutes I'm going to join AWP so I can look at their joblist!  It's terribly late in the year for this, but I guess I need to start anyways!  I don't want to rot in Vegas

Ok, good news: my book, For Days, will be out shortly from BlazeVox.  I hope someone decides to formally review it or post a note on their blog!

Other news: I havn't written a poem for a while--over a week; I get that this is not a big gap, but for me it vaguely is.  Sometimes feeling stressed makes me write lots and lots; but not this time!  And what I should be attempting is popular fiction--in my mind/dreams it makes sooooooooo much sense for me to do this; and then, ugh, I get too PC for popular fiction.  Or am I all wrong and a manuscript centered around designer names and which stilletos to wear is ripe for deepness!  I feel like any fiction attempt I make will just whether or not I want it to get academic/academic feminist.  Ugh, I need to purge this pointless fear and just crash out a hundred pages and try and write my way to Robertson Boulevard, valet parking, insane creditcard bills!  Agh but then, back to academia, I get stressed that writing abhout rich girls shopping is just the height of not expanding gender representation--which of course is true and apt, as since when is popular fiction expanding representation (hopefully I'm very wrong 'bout this!).  If I was eager to write parody things might be easier; but, yikes, that's not my dream! 

Ok, I wish I am the type to write really long blog entries, to just go and go and go, and be personable not clipped.  I wish prose felt natural to me; I wish delving into the minutae of my freaked-out life seemed like actual fodder for paragraphs. 

How is one supposed to negotiate feeling pathetic and egotistical;  I embody the combo but it's not a sweet run.  Some "prestigious" acceptances wld maybe do wonders: a poem taken by the Chicago Review, for example.  Or Conjunctions.  Or the Denver Quarterly.  For years I've been good about relentlessly submitting poems; and, alas, I'm getting burnt-out; it's sorta sad to do the whole SASE chore and know that a few months later I'll get a rejection-slip.  Wow yah if anyone wants to hiss at me oh blogger why do you care 'bout prestige publications.  And, not funny, the answer is because I guess it might make me marketable.

Note: it's not that I've not been published in some plum places--I totally have; I'm just greedy and want more!  More! 

APR--please take one of the poems I sent you all yesterday!  Ditto Pleiades!

Ok this may be the most self-centered gripey blogpost I've yet spewed; hopefully I'll get better at this mode!

From a Montevidayo blogbox comment by Kent Johnson:

"Conceptualism is fine, but that Dworkin (though in this case it’s safe to say the act is by a whole group) would go so far as to put my name on something I haven’t written is really a bit too much. I don’t care what he says “the next frontier of propriety” will be. This crosses a line"

Honestly I find myself a touch surprised--or maybe dissapointed--by KJ's stance: his interest in challenging conventional notions of authorship seems to align with Dworkin's move.  Or maybe not because Yasusada traffics in a wholly fake author, whereas this BlazeVox book brings the mess of messing with authoprhsip into the very moment.  At any rate, this development feels to me like a logical extension.