Frankenstein vs. the World

Three cool new works by Mike Basinski in the current issue of the online magazine experiment-o:

Tags: mike basinski.

I listened to David Antin talks for 7+ hours on my drive home to Maryland today. I love this poem:

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Tags: david antin.

( . . . via Shola . . . )

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Tags: stefan zweig.

Tags: smog.

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Now that it’s time
Now that the hour hand has landed at the end
Now that it’s real
Now that the dreams have given all they had to lend
I want to know do I stay or do I go
And maybe try another time
And do I really have a hand in my forgetting?

Now that I’ve tried
Now that I’ve finally found that this is not the way
Now that I turn
Now that I feel it’s time to spend the night away
I want to know do I stay or do I go
And maybe finally split the rhyme
And do I really understand the undernetting?

Yes and the morning has me
Looking in your eyes
And seeing mine warning me
To read the signs carefully

Now that it’s light
Now that the candle’s falling smaller in my mind
Now that it’s here
Now that I’m almost not so very far behind
I want to know do I stay or do I go
And maybe follow another sign
And do I really have a song that I can ride on?

Now that I can
Now that it’s easy, ever easy all around.
Now that I’m here
Now that I’m falling to the sunlights and a song
I want to know do I stay or do I go
And do I have to do just one
And can I choose again if I should lose the reason?

Yes, and the morning
Has me looking in your eyes
And seeing mine warning me
To read the signs more carefully

Now that I smile
Now that I’m laughing even deeper inside.
Now that I see
Now that I finally found the one thing I denied
It’s now I know do I stay or do I go
And it is finally I decide
That I’ll be leaving
In the fairest of the seasons

Tags: chelsea girl.

“Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco. These were the high points of the Beat Generation’s struggle for artistic freedom. Their immediate predecessors were the Black Mountain College community and the Abstract Expressionist painters. In the 1950s the Beats seemed to me to be the only vital thing that was adventuresome and tried to work for a better society, and it was available to everyone. It was not just a fad, or passing phenomenon. It was a valid achievement in American culture and remains so for the people who follow after, all over the world. The young should care about these things, and seek out the books so they can read about the men who lived freely, the men and women who took a chance and became independent from the stuffy worries of their elders. They gave a philosophical alternative from just duty or Christian beliefs. That tradition has now been established, but we are always in danger of losing it. If I didn’t have my poetry I would be broken hearted because I don’t think there’s much in the world other than a gradual degeneration of your morals. I think of poetry as something of a spiritual act.

I like my poetry to have an emotional validity or veracity. If I can get something out that’s emotionally true for myself and a few others that’s good enough, and I would subject the form to that statement or utterance.

Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Joanne Kyger, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Jack Spicer, and Steve Jonas. These were the most interesting people I knew. It was not deliberate that we were influences on each other. We just did a lot of things together.”

Tags: john wieners.

Tonight I was going to post this breathtaking video of The Field Mice’s last concert at the Tufnell Park Dome in 1991, but the poster on YouTube disabled embedding. Here are the links, it’s worth it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LZghrIc2sk      (part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZpUDBYan1w (part 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z91h3a546jc     (part 3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fml7iJEYrjo      (part 4)

Tags: the field mice.

Read Bruce Boone’s blog. His posts, mostly about his late lover Jamie, rise to the lovely intro Thom Donovan gave his novellas this January at SEGUE: they set the reader “adrift in a world of saints, sacred mysteries . . . [they are] crushing and evental.”

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