The serious scholarly activity of PhD poets, sane and measured as it is, or purports to be, is simply professionalism, ventriloquism, transvestism. In the arts there are no rational theses, just the dressed up rantings of hallucinating primitives. Poets are witch doctors in suits, shamans with TVs, witches who ride old Volvos instead of broomsticks. [...]
First off, I apologize to mentally retarded people, developmentally disabled people, mentally-challenged people, differently-abled people: you did nothing to deserve the insult of being compared to Republicans. In my mind your honor is intact, I simply note that RINO can stand for something else. It was the Glenn Beck rally that got me thinking about [...]
I wrote this poem for my daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Scott, and read it at their wedding last weekend. It is a pastoral poem. I couldn’t find anything to read, despite ransacking my library, and these lines popped into my head. Why not follow the trail, i thought. This is the result. I really [...]
On False Naivete
Not long ago i sent my curmudgeonly friend Philip a Kimya Dawson song I like, and he sent back a curmudgeonly reply, to the effect that he loathes Kimya Dawson and all of her ilk because he loathes false naiveté. I do still love the song I sent (Underground) but find his analysis [...]
Day 1
i have loved lies
the I’s of deception
remote and infinite
there is no gesture
that can brink it
and so the circle closes
not a halo
but a worm hole
out of Dr. Who
stretching from one
devastated planet
to another
from a planet of dust
formed from the crumbs
of ingested matter
to a planet of curfews
formed from the dust of crumbs
of ingested matter
but our bees
don’t chew [...]
5.22.96
framed by the shirt
she cannot kiss back
his bad groping taste
between them like a bloom
of ocean algae
with snarling lips his cheeks
roar up and down
red nails in a fist
awkwardly stiff
his hands hang on
to her shoulders
My friend and saviour Stacey has a new blogh, about homesteading with her friend Scott in in remote regions of the north. It is called Cooter Hollow. I am envious of their venture, though I know I could never endure the mud, the smoke, the hauling of water through snow and ice. But I have [...]
11.3
Lydia, out of nowhere, called to say she was in Chicago and would be arriving late the next night or early the morning after. She still had her key. We looked at her bed. It was the same bedding that had been there when she left. With no real enthusiasm we stripped it, flipped the [...]
Volume 2 of Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, Circa 800-1830 is out. Volume 1 is one of the most extraordinary books of historical scholarship I have ever read. It builds upon and expands vastly theoretical and conceptual approaches pioneered by Anthony Reid. It’s been too long since I have read volume [...]
contact: jon@lastbender.com