(11-02-2023, 11:34 PM)rowens Wrote:   All that anyone knows and perceives is a Mirage. 

So, all we know and perceive vanishes when we approach it?

They took a picture of my kidneys.  Somehow it reminded me of when they used to prop up dead outlaws so townsfolk could gawk at them.

I got the Selected Poems of John Ashbery, but I've been seduced into reading a biography of Che Guevara.  I started it long ago, but got bored with the long lead up to his meeting with Fidel Castro.  But now I'm into the heart of it, tagging along with Fidel and his ragged band in the Sierra Maestra of Cuba.  I'm going to take breaks from the prose and read Ashbery as the Cuban Revolution progresses.

Reading is a sacred act.

I'm watching Bodies on Netflix, a time travel detective story set in 1890, 1941, 2023, and 2053.  I don't know where it's going, but it's holding my interest, which is all I can ask of television show.  Unfortunately, no unforgettable actresses.

Reading had always hurt, using both eyes at once, typing, using both hands at once. Everything is driving through pain and disorientation. Solution: Have no orientation.
   Also, reading words is easy with the right eye alone. And during an experiment with those pictures that appear to be a bunch of lines and colors but hide an image, I realized that looking at them with the left eye only, the images are spotted immediately.

As for Che Guevara, back when I knew people, I was the only one to sit through that long movie with Benicio del Toro. Land and trees and dirt and walking. And I had a pipe and beard at the time, too. 

.......

During the long days and nights of hangovers and aftermaths of drug and emotional self-abuse, I calmed myself and got myself together through imagining I had been abducted by aliens and had been experimented on with strange drugs and mutating lifeforms. That is story used pragmatically. When I get hot, I savor the feeling of toxins excreting from my body and sexually stimulating magical fumes from my healthy glands, and when I pull a muscle, I feel proud of having a high pain tolerance and how my muscles are going to get harder and stronger with each bruise. I remember in the old days after a week of wrestling matches, I would lie on the floor and watch tv, full of aches and bruises and cuts and scratches and cracked bones and think about how great I was. Now I have to exercise hard every day to keep weight off, and I'm constantly injuring myself and that old time pride is coming back. I watch old ECW events for inspiration and pure joy and savor the bruises and torn ligaments. My ankles lost, what is it? I forgot, but a long time ago I destroyed things in my ankles, and both they and my left knee bend in unnatural directions. I can't run. That means I have to take on everything that comes my way. I can still leap, but I often come down with a painful bend, and I have to be mindful when I walk that any moment my ankles might bend to the left or right. 
    Somehow, despite all the drinking, my kidneys are hightech mechanisms. But what will the doctors want to take pictures of? My lower body feels as torn and ruptured as the mother of Rabelais' giant, they may have to stick the camera down my ear.


.............................

December will be a great celebration of weaving a web that connects Blake, Hugo, Hölderlin and Lautreamont. That last solemn week between Christ Mass and New Year's Eve saved as usual for the combined effort of Cendrars, Celan and the Journal of Albion Moonlight. Every year I have a list of things to read at certain times during certain seasons and around certain holidays, but end up not reading anything. 


..............

The opening words of Genesis is a new thing, though you can easily see it as the Phallic mythmaking Hero whipping the Wild Feminine Nature Monster into some kind of Order. Her Kind is her Witchcraft. And this goes on not only on a Social and Historical scale, but on a Personal one, for men and women. This is the business of sticking our yangs in our yins.
Seeing Clearly, there is no distraction and confusion by mysteries and tendencies. 
As the Paradigm of the Day sets the Djinns in the right place and the Social Personality sets the Demons in the right place, banishing or transfiguring, Awareness of Experience as Maya is to be the very power of the drive, vitality, living. 
This is Art, Everything in a Right place. This Art is Magic is Maya. Wholly pragmatic. 
I'm not restricted by my sense or understanding of I, of self and other. I'm not restricted by the sense of a lack of those things. 
I'm not restricted by anything, I'm Affirming a Conscience, a Code of Behaviour, whatever will or choice there is in the matter is irrelevant. 
What Mysteries and Tendencies there are are only relevant as far as they are here on my turf. And I pragmatically and/or humorously transfigure them. This is play. 
......................
When using the concept Real to compare the Waking and the Dreaming, the only difference between the Waking World and the World of Dreams is Social. 
If you like playing the Freud route, it can be fun doing that through Dylan Thomas and Delmore Schwartz.

I want to introduce the Pig Pen of this generation to John Ashbery:





throw:






And this is for you, TB:

---

I would like you who don't have energy to get into this discussion

to also read Henri Cole.


To read Pope, who busker is a disciple of, and

nevermind.

---

This reading
is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4DgPs1YIQ8


whatever:


https://www.amazon.com/Visible-Man-Poems..._author_dp


https://www.amazon.com/Middle-Earth-Poem..._ap_sc_dsk

https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Declare-P..._ap_sc_dsk







Awesome books.

---

A living poet who is popular,

that you can set your brilliance against.

Muchas gracias, I will listen to these soon.

I read the first few Ashbery poems, in between readings of the Guevara biography.  The poems are a genuine revelation/liberation.  By coincidence (or not), they collided with pages of the biography which revealed Che as a cold-blooded killer.  I'm not exactly reeling, but I'm feeling an excitement that's been missing and presumed lost during these days of being overly concerned about my inner organs.

And I wrote a poem about it for LPiA, pure imitation, but better than anything I've written in months.  (Emerson said "Imitation is suicide" but you've got to start somewhere when you are as lost in the funhouse as I am).

That will be my next poem, something called The Funhouse.

Your posts, along with my reading of Wallace Stevens, prepared me for this moment.  Now I can participate in my own revolution.  It will probably end as all revolutions do, by devouring me, but that's OK.  My Self is ready to blend into the mountains and jungle and kill or be killed (figuratively speaking) and maybe some better poems will be left behind.  At least that's my goal, my Forlorn Hope.

There's that essay or interview where Theodore Roethke's advice is to emulate the Greats, and your originality will lie in your failure.

---

Besides the Andy Kaufman reference, there is a book on the Theater of the Absurd with an essay on Jean Genet. The essay isn't important, but it mentions someone being lost in a house of mirrors and a crowd gathering outside and watching the person and his pathetic fumbles.


There is also an essay I wrote years ago from the point of view of a hostile critic savagely belittling my writing. I used a quotation from Genet under the title of the essay where he talks about using your own works and ideas as target practice, creating an art with a self-destruct built-in mechanism.


Why did I write this post? Who knows?

I was tricked by my unchanged clock into getting up at 3:30 a.m.  4:30 would have been bad enough.  

Anyway, I had time and quiet enough to listen to the John Ashbery recordings.  I'll need to revisit "Self-portrait...." in print.  It's much too long and involved to absorb via audio, at least for me; my mind wanders when I listen to anything but someone talking to me in person.  But I can read along like I used to do as the teacher read to us from The Wheel on the School.

My favorite part of the first video was when Ashbery lit the cigarette at the end of the video and the video went all dark due to the brightness of the flaring match.  Also, the cigarette box looked like a Dunhills, what I used to smoke long ago with great affectation.  English cigarettes.  Probably my imagination, my wanting to be like him.  And wanting to smoke again.  I'm obsessed with smoking since I quit.

Henri Cole will have to wait as I am too besotted by Ashbery and Che to pick up another book right now.  I'll probably watch the Soderbergh movie again when I finish this biography.

_________________________________________

I can't run. That means I have to take on everything that comes my way.

There's a great scene in the movie Lion of the Desert (1980) where the Libyan guerrillas fighting the Italians bind one of their legs just before battle so they can't run away.  And the Gauls used to tie each other together so that even if one died, the others had to keep fighting.  You're in good company.

I no longer read nor write novels. I read at least three poets at a time, and read them as one experience. You have no idea where this is going to go, but I composed this entire post in my mind during my Monday morning walk. I like to walk to the top of the hill at dawn and take off my hat to the sun.

I was serious when I said that I need a booking agent. In my prime, I was travelling around, but I was never In anywhere. I was like the homeless guy looking from the outside in into a fancy restaurant. I was there, but people was like: Why?

I, too, have been waking up earlier since the clock switch.

I, jesus, I'm just now noticing that every paragraph so far has started with the word I.





I want to travel around like I used to. But nobody believes in me, anymore. And I don't drive. They even got rid of the bus stop in this town. 


I keep getting muscle spasms in my lower body. It hurts real bad, and it's like, like?, it does, these painful lower body muscle spasms, pump blood anally out and drips down my leg.

I haven't seen a doctor, and this has been happening since 2016, but I have been eating better, and drinking less, and working out again these last three years.


And I feel real good. The Fool card. I'm still bleeding, but my body is a lot less fat and more muscle. 

I drink less, but I still do, drink. I say, I'm feeling a lot better, but let's get drunk and see what happens.

I'm telling you this story.

I used to have hangxiety, that's a thing, real bad. I don't have that anymore.

So, I said, let me get drunk, this weekend, and see what happens. Let me get drunk and have a nightmare. Something to rev me up and get me inspired.


So, I get drunk and say and do some questionable things. But, I don't go into public, I haven't been into public since August. I'm doing a hardcore retreat thing. Really, I'm just hanging out around my room.


What I'm going to talk about now is dream healing. This is or has always been important to me. Could be to you, too. This is a poetry site, you shoulD have that creative navigivity. 

I used to wake up in the 3 AM hour in agony. Now, that no longer happens. 
   I had a dream last night that I went to hell. It was like an Event Self-Help Conference at a Hotel. I noticed that Adolf Hitler was there.

After I went on stage and talked, I was in the hallway looking for the bathroom, and Hitler came up to me in a lowkey way and took me off to the side, and said to me that he was used to being the main guy here. And, not in so many words, he explained that my own self-guilt had me as the creepiest and perviest guy on record. And explained to me that I had drank myself to death, and my self-loathing and assumption of how pathetic and creepo I am had put me in a rather high place. And he wasn't really ready to give up his spot. So, he talked with some people in power, and had me brought back to life. And I woke up.

I'm trying to not use the words "I" or "me" in any future poem I write.  At least for a while.  I read what I write, then read a John Ashbery poem, and then I feel like giving up writing.

I could just do cut-ups the rest of my life.  Cut-ups make me feel good, but no one wants to read them.  And I want to be read.

Yes, Hell is no doubt an eternal self-help session.  I don't think I've ever met Hitler in a dream which is surprising since I've read a lot about him and the whole Nazi era.  Anyway, that's a good dream story.

If you're bleeding, you ought to see a doctor.  As Dracula said, "Blood is the Life!"  It may be something simple.

My only remaining literary type friend lives in Houston.  He seems to have completely given up, retreated into building those model kits kids used to build in the 1950-60s: monsters, airplanes, things like that.  It's like I can see him slowly retreating into himself like a crab.  He lives in an assisted living place, because he has neuropathy in his legs and feet and can't walk very well.  He doesn't read, doesn't watch movies, I'm not sure what he does all day.  A friend brought him down to visit a couple of weekends ago, but he couldn't wait to leave.  He's given away most of his books.  One reason he came down was to give a bunch to me, so I could donate them to the local library if I didn't want them myself.  Mostly art books.  But he didn't seem to want to talk much.  This is tragedy.

We once read The Cantos aloud to each other, taking turns.  We made it through the whole book.  

____________________________________________________

I watched the Joaquin Phoenix film "Joker" last night.   I saw it when it first came out, but it warrants a second viewing.  I had forgotten the body horror aspects.  Phoenix must have starved himself for the role.  His backbones and ribs are on spectacular, uncomfortable display throughout the film.  If you could squeeze America into one small area, you'd have Gotham.  America can only go on as it does because it's got all this empty space to fill.  It can push the irrational poor out away from itself, so that the better off, "rational" 1/3 of the population can live in imaginary peace.

Trump is the Joker, but without the smile.  He's the Penguin, without the wisdom.  He's all of Batman's villains, cleaned up and crammed into a business suit. He's not the anti-Christ; he's King Herod.  Who Romans are, pulling the strings, I have no idea.  But it's not yet time for Batman/Christ to show his hand.

There was another part where the Devil showed up and told me that he would take on any bad things I've done. I realized later that that's what Jesus does, too. We can blame all our bad impulses on the Devil and absolve all our bad behaviors through Jesus.

Jesus & The Joker stand high in my room. They are two of the Figures in the Doctrine of the Three Crosses. The Jester, Healer and Thief.

These months, I don't go anyway except in the woods and fields and roads. I have made Feast Days, one or two a month when I eat whatever and drink and make merry.
The rest of the days, I wander around, stopping every few hours for rituals and a breathing-posture method I made up that balances my neurology.

The only problem I have is the bleeding. Nothing seems to remedy it except total fasts. So, it is apparently digestive oriented. It happens less and less the less I eat and hurts less the more I exercise, which is not how it was at first. I simply don't think about it, and it doesn't distract me. And it's a go-to trope in my personal mythos.

Juaquin Phoenix's character from The Master is my favorite of his. That's how I see the world. Jean Genet said that if people saw him as a lowlife criminal, that's the world he will depict. William Burroughs aestheticized being a drug addict, Artaud being crazy, Genet being a thief. I intend to aestheticize being a creep. The kind of guy who says, Hey, you want to read my poems. The kind of guy with the social skills of Lloyd and Harry from Dumb and Dumber. People who have jobs and families can't be seen with me anymore, they could actually get penalized. I always know how to walk in the most off-putting way, I don't even have to think about it. I always know the exact wrong thing to say in the right manner. 

I have no interest in stories. I have some novels I might get back to one day, but I don't think about them. I'm into situations. Occurrences, Atmospheric Descriptions, Anecdotes. Narratives are only useful for narrative poems and for the Symbol Sets of Rituals. Moment to moment, to call things moments, is like Aqua Teen Hunger Force episodes, continuity is situational. You have character types in each of the characters that feed over from one moment to the next, but whatever happens is irrelevant. 


The whole of human reality and society and culture is materials for jokes and poems. That's all.

I don't know, do know, why you bother mentioning Donald Trump at the end of your post.

The two-party system in the United States has this prefabricated ability to use nonentities as massively important figures in the reality of the world.
They would? become less important as the maturity of multimedia world relations go on.


That they have the decision-making power that they have is the things everyone should be looking at.
There is no kayfabe: that they're putting on a show, but they're really smarter, things going on.

The political system of all Earth nations is an extension of Royalty which was an extension of Religion.  

Religion was out there, Royalty was stupid, Politics is an illusion of leadership. It's not leadership.


To criticize Donald Trump is the same as to criticize The Situation from The Jersey Shore.

These people have nothing to do with anything that's going on in the Cause and Effect Experience. They are Tricks in the Symbol System of Awareness.


This is Documentary Culture. This is the Bible. People are expected to be Artists, Poets, Makers. And they base their best materials on this stuff.

They allow the Cause and Effect Experience that they see as Reality to have to do with these people. They give these people Symbolic Systematic status.

---

Public Figures are masts. That's a new social-cultural word/concept I've invented to be used in this sense.


These masts are big energetic receivers. We put our energy into these masts, and not into real human issues.


The news spends all day and night informing us about these masts. As though concerning ourselves with these masts is something.
Really, we're giving all our emotional and intellectual energy to icons and idols no more, no, less important, than the djinn we got over worshipping centuries ago.


You can say that me concerning myself with poems and jokes is just as bad. But is it?

(11-08-2023, 08:34 AM)rowens Wrote:  I don't know, do know, why you bother mentioning Donald Trump at the end of your post.

I don't know either.  Something about the movie Joker made me think of how inferior Trump is compared to the fictional construct that Joaquin Phoenix et al. created.  Trump is himself a fictional construct, more so than most human beings, but a tawdry failure, which curiously is what Phoenix is playing at first in the movie, but his tawdry failure is transformed and transformative.  Trump will never be transformed into anything but a shabbier version of himself.  His followers are reactionries, Joker's are revolutionary.

I think I will watch The Dark Knight tonight for another dose of an even more radical Joker.

That is the Joker I have next to my Figure of Jesus. It's the Dark Knight Joker that came out of a cereal box. He stands there like the ape of Jesus. And Jesus is the ape of him. They are each, in turn, the jester of each other's authority.

---

This poem I first read when I got that Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. It's a d a levy poem


from Tombstone as a Lonely Charm (Part 3)
if you want a revolution
return to your childhood
and kick out the bottom

dont mistake changing
headlines for changes

if you want freedom
dont mistake circles
for revolutions

think in terms of living
and know
you are dying
& wonder why

if you want a revolution
learn to grow in spirals
always being able to return
to your childhood
and kick out the bottom

This is what ive been
trying to say—if you
attack the structure—
the system—the establishment
you attack yourself
KNOW THIS!
& attack if you must
challenge yourself externally

but if you want a revolution
return to your childhood
& kick out the bottom

be able to change
yr own internal chemistry

walk down the street
& flash lights in yr head
at children

this is not a game
your childhood
is the foundation
of the system

walk down the street
flash lights in yr head
at children but be wary
of anyone old enough to kill

learn how to disappear

before they can find you

(that is, if you want to
stay alive)

if you want a revolution
do it "together"
but dont get trapped in
words or systems

people are people
no matter what politics
color or words they use
& they all have children
buried in their head

if you want a revolution
grow a new mind
& do it quietly
if you can

return to your childhood
and kick out the bottom
then become a being
not dependent on words
for seeing

whenever you get bored
change headlines
colors politics words
change women

but if you really want
a revolution
learn how to change
your internal chemistry
then go beyond that

walk down the streets
& flash light at
yourself

---

Maybe we don't even have children buried in us. Maybe we have nothing. And that's fresh

It's Election Day in America. Edgar Poe was killed on that day. It was in October, in his time.

It feels like a preternatural, I'm not sure what that word means, holiday. I feel the spirits of American history along the lamp posts of the night


This sense of Question and Answer, Problem and Solution. These are perpetuating the split that seems so valid in day to day human life. The origin of us and them.


The This and That is a powerful thing. It leads to all things that happen.


1, 2, something.


That's patterns of the human pulse.


Slow down a fuckin moment and look at the 1/2 pulsation.

---

It's Election Day, and what I'm saying is viable. So, forgive.

Thanks for reminder about Outlaw Bible.  I've taken it off the shelf and put it on top of the Che biography.  A first step.  The d a levy poem is an inspiration.

I'm bogged down in Che, but I hate to give up since I'm more than halfway through it.  My life is mapped out in books.  I thrive on the details of non-fiction.  You have to wade through a lot of dreck, but then there are moments of clarity about the subject that make it worth the slog.  Unlike Sherlock Holmes, my mind is cluttered with those, but they often give me inspiration for a poem or at least a line.  There's also the ego trip of knowing more than most people about something long forgotten in the hurly burly of what's new.

I was underwhelmed by Heath Ledger's Joker, after Joaquin's, and now I see there's a sequel coming out in 2024.  Something to live for.

Someone should make a film about Poe's last days.  As I remember it, they are a mystery, that is, they can't account for his whereabouts during those last two or three days.

It feels like a preternatural, I'm not sure what that word means, holiday. I feel the spirits of American history along the lamp posts of the night.

The theory I read is that he was bribed with too much alcohol and then taken to vote for the party of the briber's choice and then cut loose.  Shanghaied for democracy.  Nothing more dangerous than the demos.

(11-08-2023, 09:27 AM)rowens Wrote:  ...

This poem I first read when I got that Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. It's a d a levy poem
from Tombstone as a Lonely Charm (Part 3)

if you want a revolution
return to your childhood
and kick out the bottom
...

---

Maybe we don't even have children buried in us. Maybe we have nothing. And that's fresh

Just having a bit of out-of-context fun:

"if you want a revolution"
I don't want an actual violent revolution cuz those tend to get people in power that
are worse than the ones that lose it. But I can think of some personal revolutions:
Like getting the energy to paint the window trim on my house.

"return to your childhood"
I'm assuming there's some kind of metaphor working here and not depending on an
actual time machine. One way is to unlearn everything you've learned since childhood.
Profound. A way of saying revolution is impossible? Though maybe through drugs/brain damage?
That's pretty iffy. But hell, we're talking about revolution here so maybe induced
brain damage is the way to go.

"kick out the bottom"
Haha, okay, that's definitely one of those cool-sounding, macho things people put in poems
to get attention. Maybe the poem's advising you to perform some sort of drastic act that
changes the basis/bottom of your being/essence or what not (somewhat like #2 above).
There must be a self-help book somewhere with detailed instructions; probably only a
Bing AI question away.

So: If you want a revolution: Become a different person.
Gee, thanks for the criminally clichéd advice, dude.

Shotgun to the head. This was the '60s, so he was writing poems about LSD. He was arrested for giving a poetry reading that had bad words. He was outlawed as a poet because a couple people under the age of 20 was caught with his self-published books. Maybe he thought the people he was addressing had never heard of these sorts of things. John Lennon hadn't yet written Revolution, so maybe it wasn't so widely discussed, or it was so widely discussed that nobody remembered it.

Spirals is where the whole poem starts. While a spiral circles, it also changes. Seems like the same old thing, with extra coils.

The Psychanalysts see the root of all human society in childhood, the Behaviorists in potty training, Analytical Psychologists see human culture through the lens of archetypes, Psychiatrists think in chemicals, some people see Original Sin, some Karma.

d a levy saw Cleveland in the '60s. He and Charles Bukowski were friends and admirers of each other. They wrote whatever came to mind. One used mainly alcohol, the other weed and acid. He never got past being a teenage Woody Allen with acne. Never made the New York trip. Had he gone to New York, he would most likely have blended in and would be unknown today, instead of little known. He died at 26, missing the mark of the 27 Club, but not his head. d a levy is dead. He's no Maya Angelou.


................................


I kick out the bottom, and I never get filled with anything else. Even when I use things that are old to say something like: I'm a Fool, born every second. That's the Thief, the Forgiveness portion of the equation. The thief is forgiven. The Healer heals. The Jester laughs.


He doesn't laugh through logic. He's not sharp with the Enlightenment hip or the New Age enlightened. He may be sharp for the sake of whatever. That's all.

I liked the d a levy poem.  Seemed to stand the test of time; felt original to me here in 2023.  It got me to dig into the Outlaw Bible.  There is a collection of levy's work in print I'm tempted to get since he was doing concrete poetry too, back in the day, and I've a fondness for that too. It's kind of expensive, but not unreasonably so.

------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/dalevy/dalevy.htm

I found this website and have been reading more d a levy.  I really like his long poems.  Am right now reading "Suburban Monastery Death Poem" which seems to be the only one of his long poems presented in its entirety.  I missed the sixites because I was born about 5 years too late, but this poem is what I've always been looking for, a poem that makes me feel like I'm living in that time, even if it is in Cleveland, probably like being in Houston in the 60s, it's immature I know to want to live in a past time, especially one as deluded as the 60s, but fuck it, that's Me.  

I also ordered the printed collection of his work and am hoping it contains the whole of his long poems.

_____________________________________________

I can't seem to bring myself to read the last pages of the Che biography, to read again the horror story of his capture and execution, even though he was a blood-soaked Quixote who thought, like Marx, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot & company, that he'd found the magic formula to trigger world-wide Revolution.

There's a funny bit, during his years in Cuba, when Russians replaced the American tourist as the principal foreigner visiting Cuba.  The Cubans didn't like them, because they smelled bad and didn't use deodorant.  It was such a problem that Che mentioned it in one of his televised speeches, explaining that the new "revolutionary man" might have to do without deodorant until Imperialism/Captialism was crushed.

Still reading the Outlaw Bible in my spare moments.  Miles to go.  So far, the next poet who I found to be as interesting as d a levy is Bob Kaufman.

I can't find my Outlaw American Bible of Poetry.


I got it years ago when it was like 30 Dollars. A gay guy in New York told me he can steal anything for me that I wanted. He had a brother who stole his dogs and put chips in their heads. He was gay and living in a place in New York. He stole things for me. That's all I remember about him. At that time, I was young, and older gay guys liked me. More than any women ever liked me.

...
I had something else to say, but I don't remember what. While I'm remembering, I want to say this about New York.
  One day I was, first, I had a book of poems I was writing called Fire and Water. I was walking along a street, and two women came out of an apartment. One of them looked like Emily Browning. I followed them for about ten minutes. I was very paranoid-feeling. They were so far away from me that I couldn't hear what they were saying, but I heard, in my paranoid mind, the girl who didn't look like Emily Browning say: : "Somebody's following us." And I went down another street.
  I later learned that Emily Browning was living on that street at that time. So, it's possible that it was her. I later wrote a letter from New York to Australia to her. That was later that month. She was there the whole time. Whether the girl I saw was her or not, I don't know for sure. I was projecting her face everywhere.
  Me and this Jewish guy, it's important that I say he was Jewish so that you don't right away assume antisemitism, were sitting on a bench near a fountain that had torches lit in structures around it. I looked through the glass where in lantern looking things there was fire, and watched the spray of water so that I saw fire and water in one sight.
  When I got back to VA, I started trying to rekindle excitement with a girl working at B Dalton, a Cancer, like me. In my room, above my raven, I mean, writing-desk, I still have papers, I used to staple notes and programs of books I was writing, the poem order of the Fire and Water book is still there. Was about me a Water Sign and E. B. a fire sign, but ended up a book to both Muses, EB Fire and DN Water.


....


I still don't remember what I was going to say.

...

Something about The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.

I got the d a levy book a few days ago.  It starts out with his "concrete poetry" which is as far as I've gotten.  He may have been a charlatan or a genius or maybe a little of both.  I'd have to study the history of concrete poetry to have any real idea where he stands but I'm not sure I want to spend the time on that.  I wish I could scan and post an example.  Maybe I can.  He didn't believe in copyright.

It's call Zen & Concrete Etc., edited by Ingrid Swanberg.

Anyway, looking forward to his "lexical" poems, as they call the more traditional poems that he wrote.  

When I was in my first "poetry workshop" in college, there was a flamboyantly gay fellow.  He mostly seemed obnoxious and narcissistic, but he had an uncanny ability to "see" what I had been thinking about when writing a particular poem.  For example, I wrote a poem about Picssao's Guernica, never mentioning Picasso or Guernica, and he spotted it.  He did the same trick with another poem of mine.  

When Allen Ginsberg read at our college, this guy managed to worm his way into the after reading party (unless he was making it all up, which I suppose is a possibility.). Anyway, 20 years later I went to another Ginsberg reading, and there he was, in a suit and tie and with a child.  After the reading he was unsuccessfully trying to gain a private audience with AG, but failing.  A telepath, but also a charlatan.

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Got to the beginning of his regular poems.  "Cleveland Undercovers" is sort of a Cleveland version of Howl.  I think someone who knew Cleveland in the early 60s would probably get more out of it, but there was plenty there to keep a know nothing like me reading.  I briefly considered trying to Google the Cleveland references; maybe someday.  But I don't think it's that important, to figure out every unknown reference that is.  I think I can post at least some excerpts in the name of research and study and still be obeying Copyright.  Stay tuned.

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I finished Zen & Concrete last night.  I'm glad I discovered him (thanks to you and the Outlaw Bible).  I won't soon forget his poems.  Cleveland was his House of Usher.  For whatever reasons, he felt complelled to entrench himself there and fight an impossible battle against a mostly indifferent public, except for the local morality police and their servants, the real police (there's a section of afterwords by people that knew him, including a description of his obscenity trials and tribulations).

Just found this article, a good summation of his life and times in Cleveland:

https://clevelandmagazine.com/in-the-cle...f-d-a-levy

And this, an amazing collection of a levy publications mentioned in the above article, digitally scanned:

https://clevelandmemory.contentdm.oclc.o...m/d.a.levy

I suspect I'll be spending a lot of time at the above site.

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d a levy's spontaneous bibliography, p. 1https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Uq1639r...sp=sharing

d a levy's spontaneous bibliogrphy, p. 2 https://drive.google.com/file/d/17IuJlq7...sp=sharing

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A concrete poem from one of Levy's magazines by b p nicell:   https://drive.google.com/file/d/11mN1-u4...sp=sharing

Kenneth Koch and Jay Wright reading their poems in the Coolidge Auditorium, Nov. 15, 1976 | Library of Congress (loc.gov)



These is the same recording.



Jay Wright must have more readings, but this is all we have online.

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TB will probably appreciate Kenneth Koch.

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David Lerner and Jack Micheline and the guy doing the Baudelaire stories stood out to me from the Outlaw Bible. I can't find it. It's in those piles of books in that room.

Jim Carroll is stressing the French connection.

That French connection is in a lot of it.

They couldn't get Bukowski. Bukowski made a point to reject the French and complex stuff.


Bukowski knew all the stuff enough to reject it, and make that a point.


I will now reject all that stuff, too.

Bukowski took after Artaud and Artaud's "No more masterpieces". No more masterpieces needs masterpieces to exist before and after. Artaud was willing to destroy will and art.


Bukowski, like Onita the wrestlre, created big business out of wounds and ignornace and limitatioats.



I have perfected this. I call this: Shining Ignorance