Things I never knew we needed #471,313

Dog condoms.
 

Comings & goings

Cassie Lewis has started up a new blog, The Little Workshop. Welcome back, Cassie.

I'm also adding ecce mulier, an anonymous blog "posted by R.L." although up until a couple of days ago it was "posted by Nietzsche's Wife" which I kinda liked since it reminded me of the great Charlie Mingus' tune "All the things you could be by now if Sigmund Freud's wife was your mother". I mentally translate ecce mulier as "Behold the Donkey-Driver", but since the blog emanates from Mexico that might be construed as racist, so I'll let it pass.

I've also linked to Poetic Inhalation's eye peasant page, a comprehensive listing of "written creation links".

& I've drawn a line through all those links - although the link is still there - to blogs which have been silent for a number of months.
 

Robert Creeley 1926-2005

A COUNTERPOINT

Let me be my own fool
of my own making, the sum of it

is equivocal.
One says of the drunken farmer:

leave him lay off it. And this is
the explanation.

Robert Creeley

The exhibition of vispo

at the Durban Segnini Gallery in Miami, Florida has closed, but the entire show is still viewable here.

Well worth the visit. Several visits in fact.
 

Graffiti memories & junk emails or: How much is that Doge in the window?

Once I was young & had so much more orientation & could talk with nervous intelligence about everything – no, that's the beginning of a novel by Kerouac. Let's restart. I remember when Rock was young. Uh oh. Elton John.

Okay. When I was younger, so much younger than today, I found humour in a couple of much-quoted & -reproduced pieces of what I would describe as repartee graffiti, that is graffiti where a line is answered by another line in someone else's hand.

My favourite was always My mother made me a homosexual to which somebody had written underneath That's nice. If I gave her the wool would she make me one too. But close behind it was

I hate grils
You mean girls you fool
What about us grils?

I was reminded of the second sequence – which, of course, reminded me of the first – by the subject line of a junk email I received today. Fsreh e-book on how to make wemon really happy.

But I'd almost been brought there yesterday by a google search for doges fucking women that ended up at the pelican. How could I not resist tracking that back one step? About sixty results, one of which appears to be an essay on Ezra Pound by Jennifer Scappettone, another from the Muse Apprentice Guild – why am I not surprised? - but most of the rest mis-spellings - the car brand; he doges the blows of his opponent; a few looking for bestial sex sites. Or should that be bastial sox?

Git along little doge...
 

Heading
north for
a couple of

days.
I might
post. Might pass.

The Nightjar

Jean Vengua has revamped the format of her poetry blog The Nightjar. Gone are the surroundings that used to remind me somewhat of a Quaker kitchen. In their place is a black background. The page is crowned by a photo of arched windows reaching towards a flat roof, a dark blue sky above, all seen from the perspective of someone looking up.

The presentation conveys a depth, a darkness, an infinite night with the words as stars. &, in what is probably a totally subjective judgement because I've always liked her work, I feel an additional power, a strength, a hard-edged beauty in the new poems that are posted there.
 

A very moving piece

by Allen Bramhall at tributary on the death of his father after a long illness.

It is undercut with an emotion, a grief, that you cannot help but share.
 

A rare pleasure

to be able to include a link to another New Zealand poet's blog.

Have added Jill Chan's Navel Orange to the sidebar.

Some recent work of hers appeared in the latest issue of foam:e. Earlier poems can be found at the New Zealand electronic poetry centre.
 

Pour Prévert, some autumn leaves

              l                         t
l
  e               l
                            o
          u
                                r
       f            e                          s
                     s

            i
     s
 
        e              m                  e

After joy, sadness

I
have donned
sackcloth & ashes.

Tom
Beckett's blog
has gone dark.

Vaudeville
apparently needs
organs to survive.

I
will happily
donate my heart.
 

pelican dreaming is 1 year old today

so it seems appropriate to recognise the occasion by posting the poem from whence it got its name.

PELICAN DREAMING

Later he would walk down to the lagoon
to look for the pelicans. They were
his touchstone, the way their
solid bodies gave substance to the
landscape, a centre to it. Only when
they found him would he return.

What part
of
      NO
don't you
under-
stand?

N?

No,
O.
 

Savaged
& ravaged
by rabid mosquitoes.
 

Have added another couple of poems to Series Magritte, The Misanthropes & The Wedding Breakfast.
 

"The thing that's really become important with me now is my involvement in ear research. I know you would think I'd be involved in eye research, but it is not so. It's ear research because I have so much respect for hearing. I don't know what would have happened to me if I hadn't been able to hear."
Ray Charles

Metropolis

is
full of
Moloch & marquee.
 

Felt the need for the ocean today, so this afternoon drove the forty kilometres out to it. Then twenty kilometres along the coast, pausing every so often, before turning inland again.

Apart from the wave caps, the sea was the colour of wet sand.
 

Have added

The Pillow Book - Makura no Soshi - of Shin Yu Pai to the sidebar.

& have just finished reading Unnecessary Roughness, her wonderful & witty collection of sports poems. It takes the piss out of everything athletic, but with an incisive insight that would probably get her a major coaching job.
 

Eileen Tabios on Philip Lamantia

At The Chatelaine's Poetics Eileen has a wonderful & deeply moving series of posts.
 

e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s

In keeping with the expansionary intention of Tom Beckett's philosophy for the blog, former interviewee Thomas Fink becomes current interviewer of the wonderful Sheila Murphy at e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s.

& as I write this, a kingfisher swoops across the yard to pause in a tree. I am a firm believer in omens.
 

36 Views of Lion Mountain

# 1

Lion
does not
appear

in the
lexicon

of the
traditional
owners

of the
land.
 

Philip Lamantia (1927-2005)

Man is a room
     where the malefic hand turns a knob
     on the unseen unknown double's door
 

Making it
happen, in a
slow
dispirited
way.
 

 
 

taiL

The Use of Torture

Severely
beaten. Knocked
unconscious. Eventually came

round
to their
way of thinking.
 

for Miss M.

cat kookaburra
late-night owl

the
avariciousness
of another
avatar

attacked by
angry ants &
in defence
a self-
inflicted
mortal blow

attempting
to emulate
the Worm
Ouroboros

auto-erotic
asphyxiation
 

Speculative Fiction

FROM: Sgt. Mark Ed
Important Message
To President / Managing Director..

Good day,


My name is Mark Ed, I am an American soldier, I am serving in the military of the 1st Armoured Division in Iraq, As you know we are being attacked by insurgents everyday and car bombs.We managed to move funds belonging to Saddam Hussien's family.

We want to move this money to you, so that you may invest it for us and keep our share for banking.We will take 50%, my partner and I. You take the other 50%. no strings attached, just help us move it out of Iraq, Iraq is a warzone. We plan on using diplomatic courier and shipping the money out in one large silver box, using diplomatic immunity.

If you are interested I will send you the full details, my job is to find a good partner that we can trust and that will assist us. Can I ! trust you? When you receive this letter,kindly send me an e-mail signifying your interest including your most confidential telephone/fax numbers for quick communication also your contact details. This business is risk free. The box can be shipped out in 48hrs.

Respectfully,
Sgt. Mark Ed

Ah well, it makes a change from Nigerian scams. But you think they'd get the spelling of Saddam's name right. Or is the misspelling meant to be proof of the email's authenticity?
 

a disturbing fact for the day

The bodies of Arctic people, particularly Greenland's Inuit, contain the highest human concentrations of industrial chemicals and pesticides found anywhere on Earth -- levels so extreme that the breast milk and tissues of some Greenlanders could be classified as hazardous waste.

Nearly all Inuit tested in Greenland and more than half in Canada have levels of PCBs and mercury exceeding international health guidelines.

Snail Mail

He
wrote a
letter while the

mail-
art blog
delivered the post.
 

Gecko

 
 

spec   intro   tion

Marquee & Music

At first the
tinkle
of a temple bell
but with
each refresh
the line
grows
longer.

Jukka's marquee pieces, more beautiful than ever, now come with or without accompaniment. See / hear / be amazed via Nonlinear Poetry.

& it would be remiss of me not to mention the marquee pieces by Jack Kimball at Pantaloons. The latest one is quite splendid.
 

sit 11

a visual / textual piece posted by harry k. stammer to his eponymous blog on 3/2/05 is wonderful. harry's work, textual, visual, visual/textual, textual/visual (& occasionally textural), both on his own blog & at As/Is is some of the best work going on around the place in any field.
 

Luca Antara

At Luca Antara, Martin Edmond posts the contents of his new book Luca Antara which don't include any mention of Luca Antara.

But what's there prompted me to answer "yes" to his question "..would you want to read a book like this?"
 

Lady Guinevere's hay(na)ku of love

The
beat of
my knight's heart
is the pulse
of my
daze.
 

non sequiturs
                                   followed

 

Will no-one free me of this turbulent priest?

Vaudeville without Organs. Tom Beckett is back!!!!

"I'm not sure I should be here again in the world of personal (poisonal--to give it a 3 Stooges inflection) blogging, but I am weak. Poor impulse control, don't you know. So, a soft opening. No e-mails to announce the rebirth. I'm not reborn."

Ah, Tom,

Withdrawals
in Winter
are alWays Worse
 

& so, in honour

I've decided to repost this poem that first appeared on As/Is since it seems quite appropriate.

My life in Vaudeville

for Nick Piombino because he didn't / ask the question
& for Tom Beckett because he gave me / the title

The players in the orchestra pit
are aging, some are
already dead or too infirm
to hold their instruments. Only
the drummer manages to keep
a beat; & that occasionally
runs ragged since his
bass drum had a triple bypass
four months ago. Nobody
wants to play this type of music
anymore. No fame or
fortune in it. The singers have all
left, the jugglers drop more
than they catch & local bylaws
have taken the fire-eater
out of the program. Two years ago
my partner died. No one to replace him
so I've been using a dummy
whose response to "Why is there
a gryphon in the garden?"
is a very wooden
"Because Thurber took the unicorn".
We've had the North Korean
Totalitarian Drill & Marching Band
in for a couple of weeks but now
they've overstayed their visas
& are due to be deported
in the morning. There's nothing
left except to clear the last
tableau & close. Next week it's
strippers, sound machine & a single
spotlight. The theatre's being re-
named, either "Vanishing Acts" or
"Pussies Galore". They'll probably
go for the latter. Boom tish.

the letter e

Jukka's latest kinetic piece, letters, has me transfixed. There is something magical, mystical about the transformation of the letter

e

as it disappears off-screen to the right.