San Diego Poetry Guild

notes on guild, poetry, and San Diego

4.27.2004

SAN - HNL - SAN

SAN: 04.21: 8:30 AM : flight delayed one hour, six hours to Honolulu, three hour time change (splash back) -- Moriarty last night in 26 B on a "poetics of distribution": check penultimate page for great prose poem about the life of a smallpress book -- repetitive stress: hand cramps to hold a pen

pending blog report on last Friday's "Communication in the Wild" showcase at UCSD (i.e., Guild in the Schiller Room, smart board dies), using Lazer on the current state of American Poetry and Meyer's "End of the Wild" on the downright scary state of Planet Earth (both in current Boston Review), to triangulate a new-old poetics of life in the wilds of poetic activity (all action is interaction, blah blah) -- well, that's the plan

for now, note: "security" at the airport is now "everyone's responsibility" (in the same way, say, The Alphabet will soon be everyone's required reading) -- i'm glad to be a writer in the age of writing machines

first class seats are going fast -- i find it easier to travel when i write through it -- Lazer end-notes (6) his own potentially limiting interpretive framework in assessing a "next generation's" approach to the problem of interpretive frameworks but insists nonetheless in the ur-text that younger poets need a more strictly defined (and guarded, theorized) linguistic and/or philosophical framework -- "in the interest of airport security"

oh, but really, I want to say: Look around, read, surf the net, fund a fat anthology: the truth is out there

Tinfish 13: Dirty, Filthy, & Mucky -- on the ground, first class is first class; aloft, the "front cabin" -- coach pisses aft, is asked to respect the privacy of those in the front cabin -- the guiding hand of evolution, writes Meyer, is unmistakably human -- a three-tiered hierarchy of life built around human selection -- weedy species, relic species, and ghost species -- over the next hundred years, upwards of half of the earth's species are destined to become relics or ghosts -- landscape transformation, geochemical modification, biotic consumption and manipulation, and, for the front cabin, privatized urination and defecation

thus, a guaranteed future of biohomogeneity, with an imaginary wild to entertain ourselves

on the screen, pre-inflight movie, an early history of Hawaiian Airlines as inter-island cargo transport business -- "Hawai'i starts here" -- okay, but back to poetry, which, as a threatened wild (with a whole lot of relics, ghosts, and weeds), is also a kind of imaginary wild (dirty, filthy, & mucky) -- to spot it (re Lazer), maybe check "communication" as/in organs of technology and (thus organized) activity systems rather than hunting post-Language "use" of Language poetics "as a means toward new modes of composition"

also, some energy of late (not Lazer) trying to resuscitate "the form" of "the lyric" (caveats re "the" notwithstanding) and therein lies one of the big problems -- forget forms, and even the long list of "qualities" a given form might afford, and think more about activities, and specifically communication activities, in relation to poetic movement, networking, interaction, production, distribution -- under the kooky fetishized radar of form and artifact, the busy buzz of poetry and poetix as communicative activity system

"marinara," i think during lunch, may be code for "vegetarian" -- guy in 33B spends an hour building "leadership" powerpoint slides on his laptop then switches to "unreal" video game, scores bio-rifle, wastes Hyena -- "poetry is not derivative enough" (Yunte Huang, "The Token Road," in Tinfish 13) -- maybe an hour to splash down -- to watch a film at 35K feet is, to me, a bit too out-of-body, like, not wanting to lose touch with the fact that we're up here, in violation -- "Type answer here" -- but able to read lips well enough to understand that angry character #1 has just said to #2, "I hate you!" -- purple interface where "unreal" video once was -- "lie and tell me you are human." (Adam Aitken, "To a Cyborg," in Tinfish 13)

HNL: 04.22: 6:30 AM: in short, less form and artifact, more performing facts -- here, at Steve and Leigh's, the mangos drop ripe from the trees in the backyard, for breakfast, and Donovan, now two, takes his in smoothies -- note: a poetix of the discarded as formal impetus for book production -- e.g., Steve's Hamburger commissioned to fill a hundred or so abandoned hamburger sleeves -- and now: empty checkbook (with Bill Luoma) chapbooks

on SAN time, I wake at 3 a.m. and spy Orion's Belt through large, southern-facing picture window -- on the glass (that is, hanging from the belt), translucent violet and blue Viacom-branded puppy stickers, a cluster of them above Donovan's toy rack -- last night, driving north, palm groves huge and dense at the foot of the hill, like "weeds" in the low areas of my neighbor's backyard

Donovan wakes and wants, seeks out (crying), Mommy -- all of my friends it seems are stuck in a similar "what will it take" mode re G.W. and public opinion polls -- Susan booed when he threw out the first pitch on opening day in St. Louis -- fans glared and we wondered, at dinner: can you boo the man without booing the "president of the United States"? -- since, by their own design, it's all about character now, then, logically, no -- but that surely doesn't bode well for "the president," Bush or otherwise

but back to poetry: Deborah Meadows has written "through" Moby Dick to create a "theory of subjectivity" therein -- Susan Schultz has published a portion of it as The 60's and 70's as a Tinfish Press chapboook -- Donovan operates a "Smart Kitchen" along the smaller north wall next to the kitchen -- Steve and Leigh often take him for a drive at night to put him to sleep

"...lyricism, spirituality, sensuality and social analysis collide" (Tom Beckett, in Tinfish 13) -- and so, poetry: experimental inquiry (robust ethnomethodology) -- and for the dissertation: "The message far outweighs the medium" (Lissa Wolsak) -- a lot of weight in that "outweighs" -- but "letting myself tend toward inner explosive processes" is only so much wiggle -- better: "...the floor as my main work surface when it is time to compose."

Illustrator and In-Design for book-making, 2:15 PM, back in the house of coffee -- 8 miles down to Waikiki, up to Diamond Head Crater, back again -- Wai'alea Boulevard, and finally, caffeine i can count on -- on CNN, MJ's in trouble and W needs another 50 billion

HNL: 04.23: 11:00 AM: Steve's Hamburger: "serving it, not serving it" -- later, with Leigh and little D., through heavy traffic up to north side of island, strong trade winds easterly would last through the night, up at dawn

SAN: 04.24: 2:00 PM: light lift of happiness now on day of return, relief, wanting home, and end to April, and so, back to poetry: Rodrigo's Platform a spit-shine of lexico-historic perturbations, or, cluster to bomb it up, or, an easy read like polychromatic thumb tacks on the tongue -- "antithesis ho!" (73)

my choice: chicken, turkey, or cheese ravioli -- the baby, crying at take-off, since sleeps in father's lap to my right -- Disney in kid-sized pieces today -- now dark approaching this main land, main event

in Disney animations, nobody really dies, they just pass into some finer, subtler form and later return to assist the hero, make good on old promises, uncomplicated, bodiless, until that moment toward the end when, mission accomplished, they rise on a beam of jelly-belly light, leaving our hero alone but wiser/stronger for it, and fade to credits, theme song, fake out-takes, ar ar, ...

TV screen shows pixelated map of west coast, plane's trajectory charted in red: one inch from San Diego -- in sum, to distinguish between a social economy of publishing, networking, blurbing, boosting, etc., as a kind of activity system that supports poetry (as literary form) and a poetics of systematic activity itself, where the map of activity (a trajectory) is or becomes a poetry, perhaps in performance, in the act or transaction -- poem scripts the factual build-up of systematic writing activity -- sounds kinda lean, i know, but add lush in the moments where the red lines of poetic trajectory lift off the screen or page and into multiple dimensions to become real (big) planes coming in for a landing -- otherwise, Steve's right: the language of current occupations leaks in -- though I pledge as i kiss the ground to place a new premium on this sort of tropical activity and fact-finding adventure -- poetry can go there

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