Category Archives: Mechanics

Beboparebopawoebot

Worst may happen words will be wasted
but when the Old Kingdom cattle count
comes around you’ll be taxed every one
so omit unnecessary parts of speech
and craft each comment in mindfulness

As for punctuation use sparsely as if
on a desert plain flat and dry and open
for readers are offended by periods1
while snowflakes fall like plumules
to cover the withered words of summer

Do not read for meaning but for beauty
for you cannot stop the flow of words
the catastrophe of thought fills space
with light and shadow dappled colors
The purpose of poetry is clerestory

a window you can’t see out allows
light to fill the air enclosed inside
worthy even if you have to hear organs
groan like donkeys through the lovely
indoor sky and nothing you suspicion

1“Woebot tends to avoid periods at the end of texts, because user research has suggested that people experience them as aggressive”

The New Yorker, “Can A.I. Treat Mental Illness? New computer systems aim to peer inside our heads—and to help us fix what they find there.” By Dhruv Khullar. February 27, 2023.

Doubt and Drift

Faith is belief in what cannot be proven. If something can be proven, faith in it is no longer necessary. But most of us can’t prove anything. We spend most of our lives swimming around in a sea of faith – faith in people, places, things; faith in history, institutions, religions; faith in ideas, nature, love. We live by faith in these things, not just that they exist, but faith in that they work as designed, faith in how they should work, and faith in how they do work.

We no longer have faith in the news. “Popular distrust of the news media has been traced to the coverage of the stormy 1968 Democratic National Convention,” Louis Menand discusses in “Making the News: The press, the state, and the state of the press” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2023, 59-65). Underlying any loss of faith comes the realization that too much may have been invested in the building blocks of truth, facts, and how we think we do things the way we do because we’ve always done them that way. These blocks turn out to be soft and fuzzy and protean. What is true changes with the times, predicaments, what we want.

“As Michael Schudson pointed out in ‘Discovering the News’ (1978), the notion that good journalism is ‘objective’ – that is, nonpartisan and unopinionated – emerged only around the start of the twentieth century. Schudson thought that it arose as a response to growing skepticism about the whole idea of stable and reliable truths. The standard of objectivity, as he put it, ‘was not the final expression of a belief in facts but in the assertion of a method designed for a world in which even facts could not be trusted. … Journalists came to believe in objectivity, to the extent that they did, because they wanted to, needed to, were forced by ordinary human aspiration to seek escape from their own deep convictions of doubt and drift.’ In other words, objectivity was a problematic concept from the start” (p. 60).

We might find complementary or corollary application to other areas. Menand uses the 1968 convention to illustrate how the news is not reported but made, and that once the recipe for how it’s made is made manifest, and there follows general doubt and drift from the sources – from the who, what, when, where, how, and why of the story – the remaining mess makes for great leftover meals for anyone wanting to take advantage of that doubt and drift to further their own agenda, investment returns, popularity, hold of the reins. We might find corollary application of the argument in the doubt and drift in our times from religion, health care, higher education, police protection – all areas once strong with the faithful but we now look out and find empty pews. Damage control, by which is meant control of the news over the story, becomes paramount in restoring the faith.

But we reach a point where faith can’t be restored. The Jesus Movement becomes the Free Press of religion. Indie becomes the barbaric invasion of not traditional music, film, publication, art, but of the open-gate making, distribution, and profit (or not) of free expression. We can no longer die for our country, only for one another. We take medical advice with a grain of salt. The man wearing the badge, the clerical collar, the stethoscope, the suit and tie – might as well be wearing a newspaper. The homeless person is one of us. The Emperor wears no clothes. The Wizard is a humbug – and like he said, he might be a good guy, but he’s a bad wizard. We are out here on our own.

Wonder of the On-Line Literary World

This month, Berfrois, the small literary magazine, has closed its virtual doors. For the last 14 years, Berfrois, under intrepid editor Russell Bennetts, an economist out of England, has published daily writing, forming over time an eclectic list of contributors and an audience of intercultural competence. The end of active writing appearing in Berfrois comes 100 years after the closing of the modernist journals period, which ran, according to the Modernist Journals Project, from the 1890’s to the 1920’s, ending in 1922:

We end at 1922 for two reasons: first, that year has until recently been the public domain cutoff in the United States; second, most scholars consider modernism to be fully fledged in 1922 with the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. We believe the materials in the MJP will show how essential magazines were to the rise and maturation of modernism.

Modernist Journals Project, About page, retrieved 15 Dec 2022.

They were mostly referred to, and still are, as small literary magazines, little magazines. Most did not last long. Blast ran just two issues, 1914 and 1915. They were of course hard copy, printed magazines, small publication runs, small format. The most famous now might be The Egoist (1914-1919) and Little Review (1914-1922), which ran installments of Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Harriet Monroe’s original Poetry ran from 1912 to 1922 (still alive today as a kind of First Wonder of the Corporate Literary World).

Is today’s on-line literary world, in 2022, now “fully fledged”? It might be, given the disastrous turn of events surrounding the social media platforms that create, sustain, and destroy – in situ. What can it possibly mean to be on Twitter, for example, with a million followers? Even 100 followers would be impossible to keep up with, even if managing your Twitter feed was all you did. Yet most tweets are never read by anyone. At most, they have the life span of a mosquito, and can be just as viral and vile. We shall be glad to see our current winter of discontent freeze them all in their tracks. For the tracks of tweets carry no real cargo.

Most poems are never read either, but that’s a different story. And I digress. Some of my own writing appeared in Berfrois. Mostly prose, discursive writing. Berfrois published the academic, the non-academic, and the anti-academic. Its editorial voice appeared often to be one of casual interest. In a sense, Berfrois was a general interest magazine, and sought to publish the best it could find of both the best and the worst – for what is often considered today’s worst of writing ends up being tomorrow’s best.

One of the most attractive features of Berfrois was the lack of advertising. It sought to be reader funded before its time. It might have found a good home at today’s Substack, where we find everybody that’s anybody cashing in their lotto tickets. “Thousands of paid subscribers.” Sounds lucrative, but a poor warrant to join a new fray.

A bit of money but a lot of time it takes to run these endeavors. And we run out of both, lose steam, wonder what all the fuss is about, what it might be like to go for a walk down Broadway unnoticed or dismissed, or to wander to and fro with no desire whatsoever to be followed. In the meantime, a heartfelt thanks to Russell Bennetts for his contributions via Berfrois to the life of modern journals.

Size Matters

Nothing moves unless moved
yet every mote of dust
scintilla of whispered light
black crow in pine snow
still falling all falling.

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished.

Matthew 5:18 KJV

All things all thoughts
big and small
full and empty
macro and micro
one and all
universal and local
sacred and profane
church and tavern
zero and infinity
one and none
colossal and small
corporeal and paltry
carnal and spiritual
tittle-tattle and –

and so on and so on

For that which won’t be
seen or measured
is big
but anything you can take
a ruler to
is small.

If all you can
do is compare
one thing
to another
you are missing
both
size and matter
what is
and what is not.

The biggest is yet
to be seen
the smallest
to be measured:

For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.

Colossians 1:16 KJV

Zest

Writing poems, you want to focus
on what to leave out; for example,
leave out phrases like for example,
one of the academics on a jaunt.

The leaves fall; for example,
consider the maple.

The maple tree green
red-orange
suddenly bare.

Another academic wishing
he was a real poet
and not just another drunk
in a bar after his night class.

Leave out articles, too (the, a, an).
And add detail with specificity.

The maple tree lime green in
spring turns to fall and rust.

Use a dictionary to make sure
you’ve got the best verb
for the occasion:
turns might become (now or later)
lathe, which suggests circular motion:

Lime green leaves
limbs on lathe
leaves shaved
disposition zest.

Also important to think
about when to leave
the poem
alone
go home.

But new ideas will arrive.
The place gets crowded,
maybe noisy:

The poet bartender
adds a piece of zest
to drinks she prepares,
which twists what
is said, lips pucker
distastefully sour –
better just have one more
and then get on home.

At the Spinning Lathe Bar
on each stool sits
a ball of yarn
she looms back and forth
warp and weft
she sheds, picks, and beats
takes up and lets off
replenishing drinks
replacing fresh pints.

Midnight and she wants
to go pee and go home
leaves cover the way
streetlights smolder
black branches wet
she approaches the stairs
of the Metro and falls
amidst the rusted leaves
still wearing her bar
stained apron.

She undresses in front
of the backlit window
her breasts are orange
tipped her yellow hair
in the streetlamp light
flooding her bedroom.

She climbs into bed
thinking Spring is
a seemingly happy
drunk Fall often sobers.

Punctuate Yourself

Punctuate, yourself.
A few points on punctuation.
Punctuate yourself!
Can we pull over, please?
I have to go punctuate.
But there’s nowhere to stop!
I’m going to runon.

Imagine you’ve just finished a possibly remarkable poem (into which you’ve poured the decanted, pure liquid of your heart and soul, not to mention other vital organs), if a poem can be said to ever be finished (be it ever so humble), in any kind of existential sense (which we know it can not – can never end), and the first, perhaps the only, criticism that is offered remarks on the lack of commas or periods – a comment on the punctuation used, or not used, in your poem, ignoring the fact that an apparent absence of punctuation is, still, a kind of punctuation. But in fact, your poem is called (critics love name calling) a run-on sentence. Or, in any case, that’s the only comment you get, that there’s a run-on indeed there is so you have no or little defense.

But punctuation is pertinent to poetry, and poets should take due care to punctuate their poems. What is punctuation? We often, maybe, think of punctuation as a tool used to separate. To insert. To come between. A wedge in thought and time, or speech. We insert a punctuation mark. We dot. We apostrophize. The punctuationist seeks to achieve stasis – no more morphological change, by which we mean the study of shape. Punctuation, then, suggests change. To mispunctuate is to risk sudden change in selection and variation – in other words, to introduce ambiguity (mutation).

Adorno wrote a short essay on punctuation, on punctuation marks, to be specific – as if punctuation consists of a kind of graffiti sprayed across one’s text.

Note how Adorno moves from anthropomorphic comparison to explaining writing as driving a car. And then apparently turns on the car radio, and there too, in the canned music, finds punctuation. He thus shows the difficulty of even talking about punctuation as it might exist in its own right.

We find punctuation endlessly interesting, and appreciate the attempts of our readers to find clarity and avoid ambiguity in our writing. Unfortunately, achieving clarity and avoiding ambiguity are often not the primary aims of poetry. What is clear is often opaque. What is meant is often not what is meant at all. This is not to suggest that poetry is a game of hide and seek (though that does often seem to be the point of the universe). Poetry may indeed be viewed as a kind of punctuation – where we insert in our day or night a comma or period of rest and pause, of relaxation, where, or within which, we may reflect and attempt to come to terms with our predicament.

Indeed, we might even say that poetry is punctuation. And punctuation is poetry, even if mispunctuated.

Art from The Arc

I paint for the same reasons I write: it’s a physical activity that is peaceful, happy, and all about light. Though for some time now I’ve not been painting much. When I do paint, the images come from some underground reservoir, the same place many poems come from, a vision from the inside, if I can say so without sounding too psycho, as opposed to en plein air, painting what one sees on the outside. I read recently that Monet painted dozens of scenes of the River Seine – the same scene over and over, but each scene in different light. I’ve never seen a Monet painting in person, only pics of them, often the light different in each photo, and I’ve often wondered what Monet would think of that, the light in his paintings changing with each reproduction. The light in a parlour or museum likewise might change the scene as it was seen and painted. That effect is not unlike sound effects, where the splendid, carefully practiced arpeggio heard on the radio is accompanied by static, a dog barking in some distant yard, or a trash truck picking up the street cans and noisily dumping them into the void.

I did see some Rothko paintings in person, some time ago, at a show at the Portland Art Museum, and I was surprised by how thinly he applied the paint to the canvas. You could easily see the warp and weft of the canvas. Of course you’re supposed to view from a distance – the same distance for everyone? One’s eyesight too changes the light. Way back in my school days, I once tried to argue that Monet’s impressionist style was the result of cataracts, but I was struck down by an art student who argued that the work of the impressionists was the result of an art theory they had invented and implemented as a complicated statement on reality and vision. I still think it might have been cataracts.

I started painting with my two granddaughters when they were little and liked to play with paints, unconcerned with talent or any kind of “I can’t draw” self-criticism. We all three painted for the same reasons mentioned above: peaceful, happy, and light. And fun! At first I bought new canvases from an art supply store, of modest size, 20″ by 20″ or so, but I then started to find large canvases at garage sales, priced cheaply enough, far less than I was paying for the new ones at the art store, and I bought them for us to paint over. The garage sale finds were not Monet’s or Rothko’s, so no harm was brought to the art world by our painting over them.

Recently, over at The Arc, a non-profit thrift store not far from us, out on the sidewalk, against the wall, behind some smaller items, I spied a large canvas, 26″ x 60″ x 1 & 1/2″. They wanted $10 for it. A great find. The visions of what I might paint over it started drifting in like a slow moving moon, the light in a park changing by the minute. But when I got the painting home, a canvas print of some sort, the kind used to decorate hotel rooms or small business lobbies, I began to have second thoughts about painting over it. Something about it said no, put me up as is.

So I did, and here it is, for your critical review. Please leave a comment! Is it art? Is it good? Why, why not? …B, care to comment? Ashen? Dan? Bill? Barbara? Lisa? Susan? All you artists and art aficionados out there?

The pic in the bottom right corner shows one of my basement paintings, sitting on the piano, which I took down to hang the Arc find.

Variations on a Theme

One word at a time.
Onewordatatime.
At a time one word.
At a word one time.

Word data time.
One word one time.
Timeword dow.
Wordtime.

At a one time word
at a me wime tord
da da
ta ta

twon word town time
drown mod me at
meet word time mate
mata mada

one word at a time
at a time one word
a word one time at
a time word one

excuse me sir
you dropped a word
dripping yes
time drow

don’t look
for nonsense
where there is
none

look to the heavens
look to the skies
look where
you’re going

look at the mud pies
stuck in the gutters
rise rise rise down
falling swimming with

outword crescendo
there is no progression
now is the time
to decompress

Inwait

Inwait watching listening
to what he wants to hear
then to critique that lesson
passably betraying purpose
occasion audience intent
the critic in wait teases out
the objections passive
aggressively indirectly
disconnects the circuit
breaks the circle of care

the critic lies in wait
for pretentious chichi
affectation of what is
stretched thin to impress
takes a back seat alone
in the cynical corner
and enjoys the play

meanwhile the husband who hopes
the woman who kneels knows prayer
the child who tries to please and fails
drama takes place in an empty house

words linked absurdly together
like barbed wire avoid likes
but attract comments like flies
to sweet sticky paper

happens all the time
you who always
those who never
it argues thus
near dusk
all at once
it comes out
without revision
without a second
thought

that’s ok it’s not easy
hitting a baseball
being social
attending holy mass
body and blood
sitting alone
writing a poem
being a critic

keeping the secret
watchdog beware
keeps it chained
to his heart barking
champing at the bit
coughing up crud
it’s not easy
being a critic
lying in wait
taking the bait

still the sun also
rises and climbs
and falls but too hot
too cold too close
too far away
too bright too long
too short a day
for the critic
on the hunt
for something to say

Comma Splices

If I wanted to use one,
I’d use two, one for me
and one for you, 4 to a
bar, 5 to a fence.

Comma connotes pause,
like a cat’s paw does,
when lifted midair.

Pick up your comma poops,
put in scoop bags,
and place in the trash can.

The Once and Future Comma Queen
will return to Gramarye.

Pause, and enjoy, an ice
cold comma, tonight.

Harmonic Bohemian Comma Scale:
lunula moon, clipped ring finger
nail, crow talon, gypsy jazz plastic
guitar pick, muddy udder rudder,
silent scythe, silver clacker spoon.

There is no substitute
for a comma, either
you use one or you don’t.

Comma rules form
a book of spells,
a Grimoire.

Subbing in Substack

I spent a few hours this week delving into Substack, the online self-publishing venue giving independent writers the opportunity to build a syndicated portfolio intended for a dedicated audience of subscribers who read for free or pay, often on sliding scales, the writer usually offering more content to paid subscribers. It’s a little like busking, where the musician sets up on a busy street corner and pulls out the axe and puts out the tip hat.

One great plus of Substack is that there are no ads, few distractions. The presentations I’ve seen are clear and clean. I was already a free subscriber to Caleb Crain’s “Leaflet,” a combo newsletter of his bird watching photography and his lit-culture-watching writing, and of Julian Gallo’s “Cazar Moscas” – wonderful title that, which means to catch flies, or to fish with a fly, apt metaphor for Substack. When Substack began, in 2017, not too long ago but maybe a long time in online years, the idea was to establish a newsletter, so that with every Substack post an email notification went automatically to subscribers. And that’s how I still read Caleb and Julian’s new pieces. And this week I discovered and subscribed to Patti Smith’s Substack. I had become aware of podcast capability at Substack, and when I found Patti there, I saw that she was also putting up short videos, which I immediately found attractive for their simplicity, honesty, clarity. They didn’t seem to be performances, but downhome one way conversations, personal, if you will, in of course an impersonal, voyeuristic way. For example, I saw her in her everyday place in Rockaway, and it looked exactly like a lived in beach house might look if it indeed was lived in.

Anyway, I had been interested in moving my “Live at 5” guitar gig from IGTV to some other venue, not really all that interested in seeing my seventy something selfie on the silver screen anymore, and growing tired of Instas addictive format, and I thought about podcasting, that is audio only, some guitar, song, story, poem, conversation. Then I became aware of Substack’s video capability and before I knew it, I was going live on Substack with a “Live at 5” show. Or so I thought. The whole enterprise ended in disaster. As near as I can tell, Substack does not enable live streaming. You have to upload either audio or video, and the videos are limited to, it appears, under 10 minutes. I had by Substack “Live at 5” showtime 16 free subscribers. I’m not sure what they ended up seeing or hearing, if anything. And then, late last evening, I discovered the “Live at 5” video I had made for Substack in the photo gallery of my Samsung device. It was just over 5 minutes long. I watched a bit of it, stopped it, and deleted it.

Interested viewers may check out another version recounting my subbing at Substack experience here. I’m reminded of Dylan’s famous words, “and I’ll know my song well before I start singing,” an admonition I’ve never paid much attention to, and also reminded of the Nobel Prize time Patti forgot the lyrics, which was no big deal, but of course everyone had to make a big deal of it, as if pros never get nervous or forget the words.

Where do I go from here? IDK. Real time with real people might be nice.