Buggeryville

I have spent the last few days in bed, feverish, with a sore throat, barely able to think or move, nodding off watching old episodes of MST3K, hoping each day that this would be the last day of this nonsense.

I have not been reading much poetry.

But today I dragged myself to the clinic to make sure this is something I have to suffer through (viral infection, mono) rather than take antibiotics for (strep, tonsillitis), and I brought with me a book of poetry I was halfway through when I fell sick: Fred Wah's Waiting For Saskatchewan. This book won Canada's Governor's General Award for poetry back in 1984. I wouldn't expect a government award to go to a book of poetry that I'd find interesting, but things must work crazy up in Canada.

So I am out of it and I am reading poetry. And I am rolling along with the poetry nicely. And I think once again that poetry is not, as some would claim, language at its most difficult. It is the opposite, it is language at its easiest. I was reading this book, and sometimes half-reading it, and sometimes my eye would just fall down the page and not take in the text at all, but it was all right, because I was getting something out of it. I was taking pleasure in the text. I didn't need to worry about the complete architecture of the text, I didn't need to concern myself that there were things going on that I wasn't following, because that's not how you play poetry. I mean, you can if you enjoy that. It's there for you. But you, the reader, get to decide whether the pleasures of the text reside. And that is easy, isn't it?

Maybe if I weren't so feverish I wouldn't feel the need to say something so obvious.

What I was enjoying was the syntax, Wah's sense of how you can put a sentence together, which -- I mean I'm sure there are precedents, but it wasn't quite like any other approach to sentences I have read in a while. I enjoyed the Saskatchewan name-dropping as well, sure, but it was largely the sentences. From a section about a journey to China, where he looks for traces of his late father, a "prose" introduction setting the scene followed by a "prose poem" piece:

Aug 4
Get from Tokyo to Narita airport then to Seoul, Taipei and Hong Kong. Now wait in airport transit lounge in Taiwan for flight to continue. In Cantonese language territory I feel more comfortable with an exhibit of beautiful mainland calligraphy, painting and ceramics brought over by Chiang. Western piano music. I watch a bald-headed nun or monk and dark ethnic Chinese, maybe Tibetan. P reads a novel by Patrick White, goof plot she says. Eyes tired from what, body just tired.

Is that Chopin with the waxed evening light people me looking so hard for something to connect with sounds or faces an image out of all my images story unknown building blocks from then to now tangent to hearing a rhythm without having to pay attention to the melody?

100.8°F, says my unreliable thermometer. It's not strep, and I just have to wait for it to take its course. Time to lie back down.

Speaking of marginalia, Stephen Collis's book Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism has a nice example of marginal commentary on its cover:

The text on the bottom of the cover is from Charles Olson's copy of Emily Dickinson's collected letters. Dickinson has written: "Meeting a bird this morning, I begun to flee." Olson has underlined most of that, and the comment on the top is simply: "She fled a bird". Excuse my poor Photo Booth–ing, but I want to make sure you can see Olson's fancy "f":

Jordan Scott pointed me towards Parasitic Ventures Press and I am completely enamored. If someone wants to get me a copy of Michael Maranda's Wittgenstein's Corrections [pdf], which consists of Wittgenstein's handwritten corrections to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with the text of the Tractatus erased, leaving only the corrections behind... Daaaaaamn! That would be nice. But the whole catalog is filled with goodies, check it out.

In the early 1980s Pål Waaktaar wrote the following lyrics:

Take on me.
Take me on.

Assume you know no other context for those two lines than that they were written as song lyrics sometime in the early 1980s. Assume you do not otherwise recognize those lines at all.

From the evidence of these two lines, can you tell whether Pål Waaktaar was a native speaker of English?

The text reads:

Performance notes: "Baboon County, USA" is the only one that gets spoken aloud. I believe there had already been an episode where Homer cries out "Oh the huge manatees!"

Really recently. Like, in the last day or two:

Jordan Scott, Blert
Stephen Collis, The Commons
Donato Mancini, Æthel

So these three Canadian poets come down and read for us on Sunday, and then again on Monday not for us but nevertheless we were there so it was indeed for us, because there was no way, once we had heard them, that we were going to let an opportunity to hear them read again pass by, and I am starting to get weirded out, because we've had so many readings here lately that have left me feeling utterly delighted.

I'm surprised by how few people came to see the Canadians read. All the more for me, I guess. I think all of the Canadian poets who have read for us have delighted me (and no, I don't think it's just my Canuckophilia). Will this remain true once I'm actually in Canada?

(Answer: No, of course not. If it does, that will be weird.)

These are old.

This is the oldest manuscript of mine that I'd bother with. These are based on old poems. The Constellated Sonnets is a series of 150 poems in which all the words in each line but one are erased from Shakespeare's sonnets. The punctuation, as you'll see, is left behind. The words were randomly left behind; there was a second sequence that I started, The Collected Sonnets, which was going to feature words that I intentionally selected, but those were so much more boring that I abandoned the process after about a dozen poems.

Then, a few years later, I found out (by stumbling upon his book in the Strand) that Stephen Ratcliffe had done something remarkably similar a few years before I had. Then, a few more years later, Jen Bervin did something remarkably similar, and received a fair amount of acclaim for it. Perhaps there are a few other such projects floating about. Perhaps it is a hopelessly obvious thing to write.

Well, there are some differences between all three texts. Mine is the most rigorous, but also I think mine is the only one that uses a random method on the text; Bervin's prints the "unused" portions of the text greyed out, which allows more interplay between the original and her erased version. None of us, unless I misremember, did all 154 sonnets, but I came closest.

Nevertheless, I believe mine is the only manuscript that you can download in its entirety: The Constellated Sonnets.

Narración

(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(?!)
(?)
(??)
(¿del mismo qué?)
(?!?)
(!!!)

-=-=-

Narrazione

(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(?!)
(?)
(??)
(di quale stesso?)
(?!?)
(!!!)

-=-=-

Berättelse

(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(?!)
(?)
(??)
(av vad?)
(?!?)
(!!)

-=-=-

敘事

<什么东西?>

-=-=-

Spanish. Italian. Swedish. Chinese. More info.

This is not, strictly speaking, poetry-related, though if I tried I'm sure I could find an connection. Craig Conley has been featuring music-box renditions of classical music pieces on his blog, done in association with Ken Clinger. I requested some Erik Satie -- specifically, "Vexations", in which a short and highly chromatic piece of music is repeated 840 times, usually lasting eighteen hours or so.

I'm happy to report that Craig and Ken delivered, and I offer them both kudos and thanks. It is a marvelous rendition, creepy and soothing, simple and hallucinatory. I strongly recommend you go give it a listen, especially if you're not doing anything for the next eighteen hours and forty minutes.

According to the Poetry Foundation, "There are 0 Poets from Northwest".

That 0 includes Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and William Stafford. Not to mention a bunch of people who aren't in their database, some of whom you have met.

It should be noted that there are also 0 Poets from New England, 0 from Mid-Atlantic, 0 from South, 0 from Southwest, and 0 from West. There are only 1 Poets from all of America, and he is from Midwest: James Wright.

Canada has 3 Poets, and while I'm not going to Canada specifically for the plethora of Poets, it is exciting to learn that they have three times the Poets that my humble country does. It will all be different there!

Narration

(!)
(!)
(!)
Et qu'a t il donc fait ? Eh bien !
(!)

-=-=-

Нарратив

(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(?!)
(?)
(??)
(чего?)
(?!?)
(!!!)

-=-=-

French. Translator: M. J. Roy. Russian. Translator: unclear. More details.

Narrative

(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!?)
(?)
(??)
(what same?)
(?!?)
(!!!)

-=-=-

Erzählung

(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(?!)
(?)
(??)
(wesselbigen?)
(?!?)
(!!!)

-=-=-

Taken from the parenthetical comments of Karl Marx quoting Wilhelm Roscher in Das Kapital, vol 1. Translated into English by Ben Fowkes (Penguin, p.314, n3).

2. This is the other part of my follow up to Geof's comments on my response to Curtis's comments to Mark's post about readings. Assume that this paragraph is littered with links, which I am too thoughtless to provide.

2. This is the part where I repeat that there is nothing particular special about poetry on the page that makes it more excellent that poetry which is spoken aloud or written in the snow or photographed or recorded on CD or repeated by trained parrots or dreamed of in one's sleep or implied in a conceptual piece or read in the tea leaves or whispered in the wind

2. Geof wrote: "But I, as a critic of poetry, am concerned about the value of particular poems and oeuvres over the long term." And if "value" there is being meant as something like "worth", if Geof is suggesting that his job as a critic is to be concerned about whether a poem is good or not, then I say: No, that's not your job at all. Your job is to explore how a poem or oeuvre is situated, or how it functions, internally or externally. You provide an entrance, or a new light; you make it as though we have read the poem in question not just once, but dozens of times. You get us past the initial work of reading and allow us to enjoy a more profound and intimate relationship with the text. (And these are things that Geof does all the time as a critic, and this is why I read him!) But we will leave talking about whether a poem is "good" or not to the fourteen-year-olds.

2. Geof wrote: "Most people who experience poetry at all experience the vast majority of it on the page, and silently." This is probably true if we think about poetry as "the things done by poets that get marketed as poetry". But happily we are not bound by what poets think poetry should be. There are other linguistic acts that resemble poetry, that do the things we expect poetry to do, that we can (or have to!) read and enjoy as poetry -- and if we consider that kind of poetry, then I suspect most of it is not written down on paper at all. And given how rare it is for someone to read an actual poem-type poem that has been written down by a poet and published by poetry, but how frequent it is for someone to hear some buoyant and charged turn of language in slogan for a new ad campaign on the radio (and how the ad campaign is probably better poetry than the poem). And even if you're not willing to go that far, I suspect more people hear Garrison Keillor read the poem of the day on NPR than actually read a poem during the course of a day.

2. Geof wrote: "[M]ost people cannot hold in even the surface information presented to them in a poetry reading, so they receive the important aural value of the poems, but not their entire intellectual value." Once a poem has presented you with its entire intellectual value, is it still a poem? Perhaps at that point it has become prose. No, perhaps at that point it is no longer language, it is no longer readable. "I'm fine with this situation and love merely taking in the sounds and as much of the sense as I can, but this means I'm never getting the whole poem." That's right, you're not. Poetry is a reminder that there is always more to get. It is a hydra, offering sevenfold the danger for each skirmish won. Or: It turns every text into a hydra. It is a werehyrda.

There is a curious line in Ezra Pound's "Canto IX":

grnnh! rrnnh, pthg.

The typical dictionary is not terribly helpful at elucidating this line, so we must consult a more specialized work. Craig Conley's All-Consonant Words Dictionary offers a more likely source for discovering the meanings of such obscure and vowelless words.

And yet, none of those three words appear. At first, it seems that yet another dictionary has failed us. But this is where we can use skills picked up by working with medieval texts: Perhaps these are scribal errors, mistakes in the transmission, or else they might be variants of already familiar words. Can we, then, find similar words in this dictionary?

gnnnh.

interj. a groan of pain.
<“Gnnnh!” he said, and drew himself up into a ball to escape the pain of his emergent teeth. —Diana Gabaldon, The Fiery Cross.

It is easy to misread a hastily written "n" for an "r", and we can posit with great confidence that "grnnh", especially with its exclamation point, is actually "gnnnh", this pain cry.

rrrrrrrnnng.

n. the ring of a telephone.
<When he woke up, the killer headache hadn’t gone away and the phone was ringing. A fourth ring. A fifth. He still made no move to pick it up. Rnnnnnnnnng again. —Morrie Ruvinsky, Dream Keeper: Myth and Destiny in the Pacific Northwest.>

At first this seems an unlikely reading of "rrnnh", what with Pound's word having so fewer Rs, and an H instead of a G. But then we recall that this Canto would have been written in the late 1910s or early 1920s, when telephony was in its early stages, and ringer boxes -- which at that point weren't even in the telephones proper -- had not been perfected. There were, we can see, too few Rs. The final "ng", which we pronounce as a satisfying /ŋ/, was then the softer /ɲ/, which Pound spelt the Portuguese way, "nh".

Pthr.

n. the title of a work of art by Michael Paulus based upon illuminated eye charts of the 1800s but modified so that “clinical function is surpassed by style and frivolity” (MichaelPaulus.com).

This one is the most problematic. We can write off the capital P being in minuscule as Modernist poetic license. The "r" becoming a "g" -- it seems unlikely to be a scribal error, and you'd have to be Russian to hear those sounds as related. And, worst of all, this art work did not exist yet, and Ezra Pound's ability to foresee the future was demonstrably not that great. We must reject the dictionary's offering as untenable.

Instead I'd like to suggest that it is a transliteration, done to obscure its origins, as a kind of code. You can map "p" onto "π", "th" onto "θ", and "g" onto "γ". "πθγ", of course, isn't a word in Greek -- would that there were some Greek All-Consonant Words Dictionary that I could consult to confirm this! -- but capitalize those letters, "ΠΘΓ", and you get Pi Theta Gamma, perhaps nothing more than the name of some obscure fraternity.

Now, I am no Pound scholar, nor a member of any such fraternity, so the possible connections or the exactly meaning of this reference is still unclear. But the scenario being described in the Canto is now reasonably clear: Pound is in pain because the phone is ringing and he is sure it is just the boys down at the frat calling him again, perhaps hoping to get him to come by the house, have a few beers, whereas all he wants to do is work on his epic poem, the one that would change history, the one that would explain history, and yet he knows they will keep calling to try to get him to go, and so he cries out in pain. The birthing of an epic poem is like getting one's baby teeth in, a painful process that will change everything about how you interact with the world. But for Pound there was no one who cared enough to apply Anbesol on his tender gums -- certainly his fraternity brothers wouldn't! And so this deftly coded message was inserted into The Cantos and resisted interpretation for ninety years.

We often talk about the impossibility of being a poet without a cat, but how can you be a poet without QAT?

So lately I've been playing Scrabble (well, Scrabulous) on the Facebook with poets.

I prefer to play open-dictionary Scrabble, which rewards the suspicion of words rather than the strict understanding of what counts as a word and what doesn't. It seems more poetic.

I prefer to play SOWPODS rather than TWL, which is to say, to play using the international wordlist rather than the American wordlist, because SOWPODS contains more words (including a few that are patently real words, like DA, and words that are really useful, like ZO [a variant of one of my favorite words, DZO] and CH and ST). Also, I might know a certain word is acceptable, but forget whether it's TWL-acceptable or not. That is not as much fun. Crazy words are fun. So I prefer SOWPODS.

Also, I am pretty good at it. My rank (which is done chess-style) on Scrabulous is currently a respectable 1561. If my chess ranking (which, when I was playing much more often, peaked nervously somewhere around 1350) were that high, I'd be pretty content.

I've only played against maybe three or four poets (most of my poet-games have been with Kasey Mohammad or Michael Kelleher), which is clearly not an adequate sample size for me to have much to say about the Scrabular poetics of those who identify as poets compared with that of those who don't. Also it's only led to one poem (that I've kept) so far. So I encourage others to hit me up with a game. Remember, "regular" (not "challenge") game, SOWPODS dictionary, if you don't mind -- though I'm not the type to turn any game down.

2. Geof sometimes writes to imaginary people. This is productive for him. I don't want to deny Geof anything he finds productive. I find it productive to write for people I know, or for people who ask me to write for them, or for (against?) people I don't know who have said things I disagree with. The ages, as mentioned last time, refers to future people, people we know nothing about. Perhaps I value writing for people I know because it seems to have some effect. Perhaps I suspect that writing for the ages is a way of dealing with a situation in which one's writing doesn't seem to be having any effect. But I value Geof's writing a lot (and not just because he keeps saying absurdly nice things about me). And anyway, perhaps this relationship with the future functions like religion, like faith. And anyway, just how imaginary is Geof's young, imaginary visual poet? Or, just how real are the people I know? Well, I should like to think that they are pretty real.

2. Perhaps this is because I have been reading a lot more academic humanities writing than poetry lately, and so much of it pretends that it is doing this truth thing but really seems to be engaged in this process thing. Or a dialogue, or a dialectic. And I am thinking of poetry in a similar way. I'm writing this blog entry to push at an idea of what poetry is and could be, and once it moves I will probably feel the need to push at it in some other direction. And I write poetry for largely the same reason. And anyway: Poetry is important to us now inasmuch as it is important to us now, and not inasmuch as it will be important to other, imagined people in the future. The future-people, as we used to call them back when I worked in politics.

2. "The history of poetry, which began as oral expression, is not particularly germane to any discussion of today's world of poetry" wrote Geof yesterday, which I might agree with. Certainly, I don't think my appreciation of poetry is bound by how it was appreciated in the past, my definition of poetry isn't limited to what it meant in the past -- although it might be informed by all these things, or illuminated, or problematized, or (bam!) kicked up a notch.

2. Also, I think you could take this -- "The history of poetry, which began as oral expression, is not particularly germane to any discussion of today's world of poetry." -- and point it in the other direction. Future history is not particularly germane to any discussion of today's world of poetry.

2. Ted Berrigan's funtastic poem:

People of the Future

People of the future
while you are reading these poems, remember
you didn't write them,
I did.

2. But of course it can be fun to think about what the future people will think about a poem. And productive, maybe. But it doesn't seem at all important. Or even relevant. But maybe sometimes it helps some people keep going. But maybe sometimes it gets in the way.

2. The only options for the future-people are to misunderstand me or ignore me. Either option seems great.

No, not a werewolf. I was a person who attended poetry readings.

Maryrose alerted me to a very nice post on Mark Wallace's blog about how nice poetry readings are, how they allow poetry communities and poetry-based relationships to flourish, and how keen this whole world is.

Curtis Faville responded in the comments with some concerns about such "poetry communities" and how the performative nature of a poetry reading says nothing about the quality of poetry on the page, which he seems to equate with the quality of poetry.

Now, resigning myself to the role of poetry blogger, I'm going to use this opportunity to reply to both of them, first to suggest that Faville is a bit off in his sense that the page is the proper home of poetry, and to bear witness to my own experiences with poetry communities.

1. The page is not the ultimate arbiter of poeminess. That is limiting and ahistorical. It denies the poemy effectiveness of language when spoken. It is a giant "fuck you" to sound poetry. It insists that poetry is not for now but for the ages. But, as someone who lives now and not in the ages, I could hardly care what the ages or those who live in the ages think. Their poemic concerns are, by and large, none of my business. They are a wildly unpredictable bunch, who never return my e-mails. I'll let them work out poeminess on their own; they won't decide what I get poemy goodness from.

2. The performative nature of the page is indeed different from the performative nature of the reading, and one doesn't necessarily translate into the other. I think I just mentioned this.

Now, on to my experience as a teenager who, unlike Wallace, had access to poetry readings. Then we'll get back to this. (We will, today, ignore the role of the internet.)

When I was 19ish and growing up in New York City I started going to poetry readings. For a while I went fairly regularly to readings at the Ear Inn. Perhaps some of you reading this also were going to readings there then. Do you remember me? At the time I looked something like the guy on the left, the taller one:



No, you probably don't remember me. I found going to these poetry readings mostly an alienating experience, mostly (with a few exceptions) filled with endless encounters with unwelcoming careerists, whom I had nothing to offer. I was a quiet, awkward teenager. I had little to offer for a careerist poem. Even the poetry zine I was publishing was more interested in what people who didn't consider themselves poets wrote than "real" poets. I was largely superfluous to the scene. No one seemed to be talking about things I was interested in talking about anyways -- no one was talking shop, certainly, and if they had it probably would have been a very different type of shop than what I was interested in.

So I had access to a poetry scene as a teenager, and found it to be fairly disgusting and off-putting. It was nice to see some of the poets whose work I enjoyed read, and it made me feel connected to moderately famous people, but these connections were fairly ephemeral and certainly were nothing like what Mark Wallace is talking about.

And then I moved to Portland, where there wasn't a poetry scene (of the sort of poetry I was interested in, anyways). A handful of (generally non-careerist) poets got together (read: were organized by David Abel) and started up a scene, and it's doing well now, and now I finding myself agreeing with Wallace's assessment, that the interaction of interesting people is one of the main draws of "being a poet". I'd even go further, and suggest that some of the most interesting poetic moments happen in those or out of those interactions -- or, at least, it's been important to me. (See: Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie by Lytle Shaw, and eventually there will be a link to a pdf for The Redundancies here.)

So now I've lived in a place with a dysfunctional (for my needs) poetry scene, and one with a functional poetry scene (for my needs), and I'm about to move to a third city, and I am, frankly, a bit worried that I won't have a functional poetry scene in this new city. Which is to say, that I won't have poetry in this new city. In that sense. And what will I have to do about it, or what will I be able to do about it.

3. Which makes Faville's reaction -- of withdrawal, of burying one's head in the page, and declaring it to be the true place of poetry -- seem all the more tempting; it is safer, more controllable. Hell, we can all agree, is other people. But I'm not ready to give up on the possibilities and the poetics of human interaction yet.

For a while I was interested in "interestingness". For a while I was interested in "infinity". For a while I thought that it would be interesting to create a work that was infinitely long but which, to someone (probably me), for some reason, by some metric, might be interesting along its entire length.

This was the closest I came. Keep Walking is probably impossible to read to one's self and get any pleasure out of. It is more of a script or a score than a poem, or more of a performance poem. For a while I was thinking about Morton Feldman and issues of scale and repetition and variation. For a while I was thinking about how we evaluate poetry, and the impossibility of engaging with "the total object", the poem in all its senses and manifestations, the elusiveness, and how being "elusive" relates to being "interesting".

I have never performed this entire piece aloud, but in order to get a sense of what it would sound like, I had the computer read it, and the computer's cool and clinical voice worked nicely with the text, and so, pending a human reading, I offer it to you. It is four hours long. It could have been longer, but I didn't think it would continue being interesting.

I would read the whole thing on request, though. It would, I hope, be interesting.

Download the pdf of Keep Walking. Or, perhaps better yet, listen to the mp3 (4 hours, 84Mb).

Nick Montfort has implemented a text-creating program called "The IBM Poem" written by Emmett Williams in 1966. I am not entirely sure I can describe the algorithm clearly, but basically you seed the program with a bit of text, and then the program expands the text by looking at each letter of the text and adding something to the end of the text based on what that letter is.

OK, that wasn't clear. But you start with a word like "IBM". You then start with the first letter in the text, "I". You look up on your table that when you have an "I" you add, say, "ibis" to the end. Now your text is "IBM ibis". Then the next letter is "B", which your table says gets "bib": "IBM ibis bib". Then M, which maybe the table says leads to "bistro": "IBM ibis bib bistro". Then you've got a space, which you skip, and then the "i" in "ibis": "IBM ibis bib bistro ibis".

So you can see that the text you're creating creates itself, in some sense.

I have been working with this idea, off an on, for years now. I found the idea for it in Jackson Mac Low's poems, and in particular in those written around 1960 for what would become the book Stanzas for Iris Lezak. Take, for instance, the "3rd Asymmetry for Iris", which is reproduced in the new selected Mac Low, Thing of Beauty, but which doesn't seem to be online, so here are the first few lines:

Public understood by "logic" its child
upon NICKEL descent, endowed Republican source, to only orange duality.
Being Yard
long. Ordnance gives invalidates cost.
ICE to spent
cave human in lessons "different."

Us photosynthesis. On name
Negroes, Iowa come Kausika embarrass life
do explain steady contempts each not to

Etc. Mac Low here is, I believe, working through a source text, so he does not always get the same word for each instance of "u", which makes it a somewhat different computer program than Williams's. But what I'm most interested in here is this idea of expansion-by-alphabet.

Of course, there's no reason why this method has to only connect a letter to a word -- the letter "a" could lead to an entire phrase, or to some other rule -- an "x" could lead to a rule of deleting the last three words, or a "h" could cause a switch to an entirely different table of correspondences. And the table dictates the frequency of the events in that table -- in most situations, an "e" is going to come up more often than a "q", but if you stack the table in a certain way, that might not be the case at all. So I've found it to be a very dynamic and useful tool for creating texts, and I'm glad that Nick brought to my attention another part of the history of this idea, and if there are other examples of work done along these lines, let me know.

I read Juliana Spahr's Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You yesterday. The first two poems in it are terrific, and develop a method of using language; the remaining poems use that method to talk about various topics, and that is fine, it is a fine way to talk about various topics, and it is not that those topics aren't interesting, but who goes to poetry for topics? Though we do like our topical writing to be informed by poetry, perhaps. So there is a method and some examples. It is, in this way, a resource.

But then I tried to find a copy of the first poem, "localism or t/here", online, and all I came up with here hits to an mp3 of her reading the poem. And I have not yet listened to the reading of the poem, but it seems like this poem cannot be read aloud. But to explain this, I would have to have you read the poem, as a text. Eventually I found that the preview on Google Books allowed you to read that first poem. So, go read it, it is short. (Those of you who were at the Borders reading and remember my poem to Bryan might think that I was influenced by this poem then, but I had not read it, and I suspect, instead, that Juliana Spahr and I share a few influences.)

It is odd that it is much easier to find an audio recording of a poet reading a poem than it is to find the text of the poem online, though. (See also the other day's link to a recording rather than a text. Although now that I look again, I found the poem on Google Books as well. Hurrah to Wesleyan University Press, I guess!) Is this a good thing? Are poets (or publishers) stingy with their texts?