ABlog

No new post since June, October now heading out. so I haven’t been very good at the glance at teetering on the edge of definitive perception in words. couldn’t get into the spirit of blog, didn’t appear to be blessed with the gift of blog. had to stop because I wasn’t willing to be just unbuttoned abandoned disheveled enough in semi-public. provisional. rough drafted. first thought not best possibly but with a certain verve. well if this is going to go on it’s got to be really a diary in public not diary of my private life I mean but diary of art thoughts, pregnant glimpses. something in my reluctance no doubt that could be analyzed having to do with peripheral vision--being from the provinces of gender and such.

after all this was the week I had to say to the class of boys: "as someone with a vagina--"

topic for another day.

so: reading Pierre Bayard’s entirely sensible thoughts about reading as reflected in that silly "Questions for" column in the Times Magazine: "It’s important to know how to read from the first line to the last line, but there are also other ways of reading. You can skim books, you can just have heard about them, you can have read them and forgotten them."

I wish my students knew this wish I knew this. In fact it’s how I often write poetry these days, pages of scribbled lines which I then forget or misread, like seeing a blurred image when you take your glasses off. isn’t this the matrix of metaphor? where the mind somehow leaps to a foundationless but strikingly apt conclusion. Just two weeks ago I bought a book by Louis Zukofsky containing his "Poem beginning ‘The’" and wrote my own "Poem beginning ‘Okay now,’" having read little more than his title.

Went last night to issue project room heard Wanda Phipps read poems over/against films by Joel Schlemowitz, several of which "incarnate" her poems in visual/audio form in surprising ways. The films enforce a different mode of reading, making the words of the poems into visual characters that present themselves on the screen, that step forward and announce themselves singly or dance about in spiral galaxies, while Wanda’s voice speaks the text as in an echo chamber. Just the thing for me, falling in love more and more w/ repetition these days.

Reading, thy name is legion. Pass it on.