Tom Beckett's Continuing Difficulties

2002-11-20T14:24:00.000-08:00

This blog
is being
discontinued.

2002-11-10T09:29:00.000-08:00

In a much earlier post I mentioned The World in Time and Space, the special 4 issue volume of Talisman: a Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Norman Finkelstein's contribution CC: Jack Spicer particulary interesting to me for its discussion of idealism and despair in Spicer's work. Here are a couple of snips from the piece:

"Idealism and despair are to Spicer what the Prolific and the Devourer are to Blake: the dialectical engine of poetry."
(p.85)

"The truth of your poetry will mislead you into thinking that you know the truth, that you have written true poetry. Do not believe it---the territory is not the map."
(pp. 85-86)

2002-11-02T09:24:00.000-08:00

"Quaestio mihi factus sum."
--St. Augustine
(I have become a question for myself.)

2002-10-27T11:26:00.000-08:00

Poem as investigative tool: poem as philosophy and dildo.

2002-10-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

This Poem

This poem

Proffers

Its ass.

This poem

Penetrates me.

This poem

Is blue.

This poem

Is colored

Outside

Its lines.

This poem

Is parenthetical.

This poem

Is embedded

Within ___.

This poem

Operates among

Focal points.

This poem

Eschews

The copula.

This poem

Is fucked.

This poem

Sucks.

This poem

Thinks it's

A flower.

This poem

Resembles

A statement.

This poem

Is a

Bad actor.

This poem

Requires a

Degree

Of leniency.

This poem

Has read

The dictionary.

This poem

Gets up

And does

Something.

This poem

Wants to

Get to

Know you.

This poem

Is expedient.

This poem

Sleeps with

Its dreams.

This poem

Sleeps with

The fishes.

This poem

Schemes.

This poem

Is a form

Of waste

Management.

This poem

Teeters.

This poem

Oh

This poem.

This poem

Begins again.

This poem

Considers

Its losses.

This poem

Stares into

A mirrror.

This poem

Plays

With itself.

This poem

Is the body

In question.

This poem

Works

The room.

This poem

Is an

Empty

Container.

This poem's

Raptures rupture

A repertoire.

This poem's

Reversals are

Rehearsals for

A dance.

This poem

Exists on

An incline.

This poem

Persists in

An archive.

This poem

Is taking

A chance.

This poem

Multiplies.

This poem

Subdivides.

This poem

Posits

A rhetorical

Stance.

This poem

Pretends not

To know me.

2002-10-21T17:36:00.000-07:00

VOICE

1.

That, this,
The Voice
Is isolate.

Holes in
Paper pronouns,
Phantom comma
Come ons.

Shadows, fucking
Shadows, shadows
Fucking now.

2.

Sound surrounds
Written shadows,
Ghost written,
Ghosted texts.

Said moments
Tolled aloud,
Towed-around-
Ticked-cantatas.

What happens
Happens now.

3.

Signing light,
Singing dark,
Sexing up
The spectrum.

One wants
What one
Wants when
One wants.

Shadow, body,
Sum-thing.

4.

What it
Is when
It is

Exposed or
Interposed with
Shadows of
A scene.

One's seen
But soon
Undone fingerprints.

5.

Loss for
Words, void
Hand, other
Shadow lexicons.

Lesser words
Evade other
Hard orders,
Interfold, fade,

Feed into,
Feel out.

6.

Shadows bring
Into being
What he/
She enact.

Is sex
To gender
As shadow
To body?

Our shadows'
Forgotten adhesions.

2002-10-02T19:21:00.000-07:00

What am I looking at?

What am I speaking of?

In Ethics and Infinity Emmanuel Levinas speaks of how "the child feels the silence of his bedroom as 'rumbling'." I've never lost that sense of physical/emotional/psychological "on-edgeness"--which, again, I personally associate with the precursors of epilepsy--that extreme sense of a buzzing verge.

Thinking about my computer maybe being out of service for a time has made me think more clearly about this blog context. I'm not doing anything here I couldn't do, or haven't done, in a notebook. It's the tease of possible engagement with another that makes me not want to throw it off just yet. On the other hand I know that I know very little about what is possible.

Funny.

2002-10-01T15:41:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to adjust to being back at work. And am also having computer problems which could put a damper on this blog. So, stay tuned to see if there will remain anything to stay tuned to.

2002-10-01T14:56:00.000-07:00

OK, it's been pointed out to me that I might have as many as 7-10 readers.

2002-09-30T14:17:00.000-07:00

Yesternight Barb
reglued
my dictionary's
ravaged spine.

2002-09-30T13:57:00.000-07:00

Equipoise: the body as site of dissonance, the body as assemblage, the body as scarecrow.

2002-09-30T11:36:00.000-07:00

Here's a poem I wrote a couple of years ago that is important to me. It was one of three poems collected under the title _Panels_ in Stephen Ellis's Oasia: Broadside Series, No. 62:

EQUIPOISE

Head filled with cotton

Ears filled with static

Eyes filled with darkness

Mouth filled with tacks

Arms filled with water

Breasts filled with nettles

Cock filled with needles

Ass filled with glass

2002-09-30T10:34:00.000-07:00

My sense is that almost no one is reading this blog. Maybe half a dozen people. That's probably always been about the extent of my actual readership, regardless the context.

It's been 2 1/2 years since the last time I've read in public. It was a pretty horrible experience and may well be the last time I read in public. The reading was in Columbus, Ohio( It was a bar reading and I pretty obviously didn't appeal to the audience's beat/slam/narratizing expectations). But over the past 20 plus years I've read in NYC and San Francisco a few times--with unbad results, and at other venues too. With Jessica Grim and John Byrum I co-coordinated a reading series in Cleveland called Ear Witness which brought in such luminaries as Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Joan Retallack, etc.

I've published in magazines and
anthologies internationally. There have been chapbooks, broadsides, bus posters and other ephemera. I edited a journal called The Difficulties for ten years. What I have never been able to achieve is a sense of connection with someone who steps up and says "I believe in what you are doing. How can I help you?"

2002-09-30T09:40:00.000-07:00

The promise of poetry is the promise of a prospect, of a vista, floating before one. The promise of poetry is the promise of unconditional love, the promise of the kiss that is truly returned.

It is my sense that most human beings are in some way held hostage by themselves. In trying, against the odds, to write, I am trying to find the key that will open the door to let me walk away from myself.

2002-09-30T09:08:00.000-07:00

Ah, shit.

If I knew
what I
was doing

would I
be doing
it?

2002-09-30T08:44:00.000-07:00

The warm voice of Norah Jones on the stereo. Dog with me , sharing the chair, at the desk. Coffee cooling in a mug. Wine chilling in the fridge for later. There's a great bag of bagels, too, that I picked up when out with Jessica yesterday. Today is my last day of vacation before a return to a grueling schedule at the Health Dept. Earlier this morning, some desultory beginnings of work painting higher reaches of the underside of the peaked back porch roof...stopping when I felt too wobbly in the knees. Funny, my little brother Jim--an ironworker in NYC--has no fear of heights. He is, in fact, the most fearless person I know. I must have absorbed all those fear genes for him.

Speaking of fear...it's very much what the project of this weblog is about. How, that is, to face down a sense of lifelong failure as a writer and a man. How to use this quasi-private/public context of mumbling, stumbling, fragment uttering, ruminating, stuttering, singing, miming, ventriloquizing to acquire some higher degree of confidence in my ability to carry on.

Part of what was moving about the Hamilton exhibit yesterday--beyond the dizzying inventiveness--were the ways in which she wed body parts to text through metonymy and perceptual overlays. I'm still thinking about this, still trying to find the words for a mouth as aperture and frame, for the megaphone effacing the artist's features as it disgorges its unruly piles of linen.

2002-09-29T16:38:00.000-07:00

Poet Gary David was one of my hosts during the stay in New Orleans mentioned in my Sept. 25 post. He sent along this poem based on his memories of those times:

The Astrophysics of Memory

Back in the days when I banged poems
out on an old Smith Corona manual,
the future never looked brighter: a cliche
of Jim Beam and Falstaff beer on Felicity St.

in New Orleans. Nights when heat made sleep
a dream beyond my clammy reach, I'd go
down to the Half Moon. Six nickels
used to buy a sweaty mug of brew.

I'd watch the oyster shucker-- his black rubber
gloves shielding him from deadly scrapes.
(Latex does these days.) I really knew
he'd never find a pearl-- me too.

Now I compose on a computer. My future
verses? "Memory eclipsed," my head dozes.

2002-09-29T16:30:00.000-07:00

Today I spent a pleasant afternoon in the company of my friend, poet Jessica Grim. We met in Wooster, Ohio to take in an exhibit of conceptual artist Ann Hamilton's work. Hamilton's work is intricate, labor-intensive and hard to tear away from. I was particularly fascinated by a series of pinhole camera portraits that were taken from the vantage of Hamilton's mouth. Her mouth as aperture and framing device! More about this later.

Jessica is the author most recently of _Vexed_, a collection of poetry that will soon be available as a pdf file on ubu.com.

2002-09-28T13:37:00.000-07:00

After Nature (Random. House, 2002)by W.G. Sebald is a volume of poetry published posthumously in the wake of his unexpected death in 2001. Although it is his most recently published book its composition precedes in time his previous books-- The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo and Austerlitz.
After Nature is comprised of three long poems. The first "...As the Snow on the Alps" is a poem about the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grunewald. The second,"And If I Remained By the Outermost Sea," focusses on the Enlightenment botanist-explorer Georg Steller, who was on the Bering expedition to the Artic. The third, "Dark Night Sallies Forth," is autobiographical.
Sebald is unique in his ability to make all times contemporaneous. In "Dark Night Sallies Forth" one gets to hear him state this as an intimation of method:

But if I see before me
the nervature of past life
in one image, I always think
that this has something to do
with truth. Our brains, after all,
are always at work on some quivers
of self-organization, however faint,
and it is from this that an order
arises, in places beautiful
and comforting, though more cruel, too,
than the previous state of ignorance.

If you've never read Sebald then this little blurb probably won't do much for you. But if you're interested in something like a practical poetics of history, then this is a body of work to check out.

2002-09-27T06:52:00.000-07:00

I didn't sleep well last night. And I had a strange dream. In it I was standing by a slot machine which suddenly began dispensing a mixture of coins and trail mix. I hadn't been playing the machine. My sense was that someone was operating it by remote control in order to bribe me or to suggest the appearance of my doing something wrong. And then there was the matter of the small feathers I kept finding in the trail mix. I like trail mix but not with feathers. So I would toss the feathers over my shoulder. There I was: pocket full of coins, feathers floating behind me, munching trail mix, and wondering if it was an ethically appropriate situation to be in.

2002-09-26T12:21:00.000-07:00

Emily Dickinson wrote: "Dwell in possibility."

I'm trying to psych myself up, trying to entirely open to what wants to come in, trying not to say no.

Just say gnosis

2002-09-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

Here's another random passage from Vanishing Points of Resemblance:

"When I close my eyes I fall asleep. Once I dreamt I was watching myself standing apart from myself while dying in a mirror. Gradually I realized that I was, indeed, dead and that no one could see me anymore. I moved into a small ranch house where all the windows were closed and curtained, where the air conditioner was turned up high to dial down the smell of my decomposing flesh."

2002-09-26T09:57:00.000-07:00

In Italian the poet is il poeta--masculine article, feminine noun.
In French genre also means gender.

At what point did I realize that Lissa Wolsak's poems all appear to be arias?

On the first page of the current state of the manuscript of Vanishing Points of Resemblance my narrator says:

"I used to want to be a woman but that was too much work. Now I try to write which is almost as bad."

Melted cheese on pita bread. An apple. Jasmine tea.

2002-09-26T08:49:00.000-07:00

That "hybrid" text (Vanishing Points of Resemblance) mentioned the other day, a text I weave and unweave only to weave again, is a poem that calls itself a novel. Or perhaps it is more accurate to call it two genres entwined.

2002-09-26T06:31:00.000-07:00

I meant to type a poem is passion'sresidue. Funny that divide between eye and mind.

2002-09-26T06:20:00.000-07:00

"Meaning is a physiognomy."
--Ludwig Wittgenstein

If that's the case
what part
constitutes poetry
on Meaning's Face?

The hunger for a body/the hunger for a word: sex & text.
Sex & text: there are many points of convergence.
This notebook/weblog/wetspot may touch upon a few. A poem is meaning's residue!

2002-09-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

Keith Jarrett's La Scala is on the stereo. The wine in my glass is getting kind of low.

2002-09-25T10:16:00.000-07:00

I'm back--like a bad taco.The dog's been walked. We successfully hosed down several tree lawns. And I'm contemplating a large quantity of beans and rice which has itself been hosed down with a generous amount of Louisiana hot sauce. Mmm.

Circa 1975 I spent a few weeks in New Orleans with friends who shared a house on Felicity Street on the edge of the French Quarter. Merde but we had some times. One of the places I loved best, but which I gather is no longer,was Buster Holmes Cafe. It was a black family run, workingman's establishment. One could get a large plate of red beans and rice and a hunk of fresh French bread for 75 cents. And one could buy a Falstaff beer for another dollar. It was a little piece of heaven, not least because one could eavesdrop on the local talk which was beautiful indeed. I wrote an early poem there from the conversation of a man who threw watermelons for a living.

2002-09-25T09:28:00.000-07:00

I'm on vacation this week which is how I've had the time to plunge into this experiment with a weblog. My children live away, my wife is at work. It's just me and the dog and the guinea pig. It's a cool Fall day. Earlier I spent a couple hours painting another segment of our back porch. I'm an unenthusiastic but thorough painter. Right now I'm taking a little break before I walk the dog and eat lunch.

One of Lorine Neidecker's fascinations was with the work of the Japanese poet Basho. I've always loved his work. I was thinking about this when I was on a ladder on the porch:
tall poet falls from
ladder
plop

2002-09-25T07:44:00.000-07:00

One of the books I've been savoring for the last couple of months is Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works, edited by Jenny Penberthy (University of California Press, 2002). Penberthy has provided a useful introduction and extensive end notes. The book is rich and repays multiple readings. One of my favorite sequences is "Next Year or I Fly My Rounds Tempestous," a group of short poems written on 1935 calendar pages that are reproduced in holograph. A sample from a March-April 1935 page:
Her under-/standing of him/is more touch-/ing than intelli-/gent; he holds/her knees with-/out her knowing/how she's boned.
One of Neidecker's most moving sequences is "For Paul." The Paul in question is Paul Zukofsky, the concert violinist; Louis Zukofsky's son. Zukofsky,the Objectivist poet, was a correspondent of and mentor to Neidecker. They were also, briefly, lovers. She became pregnant and Zukofsky insisted that she have an abortion. Her friendship with Zukofsky continued at a distance--Lorine living in Wisconsin, Louis in NYC. Louis married Cecilia Thaew in 1939. "For Paul" was written in 1949 when Paul Zukofsky, at the age of "5 or 6," was a young musical prodigy who was already playing and composing music. "For Paul" is playful and melancholy by turns.Here's another sample:

I've been away from poetry
many months

and now I must rake leaves
with nothing blowing

between your house
and mine

2002-09-24T09:52:00.000-07:00

from an old notebook:

who sees what
is falling where

making or unmaking
masking or unmasking

figures bodied here

2002-09-24T09:31:00.000-07:00

This weblog began, really, as a measure of resistance to creeping despair. Partly because I live in Kent, Ohio, outside of the power centers of NYC or the Bay Area, I've had a tough time getting my poetry seen. I've published several chapbook-sized works (most recently Wagers of Synthesis, Zasterle Press, 1997) and pamphlets but have never had the occasion of a full length collection. The discouragement alluded to earlier has led to a number of mini literary suicides. I've destroyed a couple hundred pages of poetry in recent years. It doesn't make sense to work in a vacuum. A pile of unshared work at some point becomes a drag on one's being. I'm hungry for constructive, thoughtful exchange and I'm hoping somehow that this open notebook format of publishing begins to open up something different --in terms of my own daily practice and in terms of connecting with others. I have written before that the risk of poetry is not unlike an unsolicited kiss. That kiss can be perceived as an intrusion. Or it can be returned. Smack!

2002-09-24T08:36:00.000-07:00

The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry in Our Time(a quadruple! issue of Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, #23-26) weighs in at 740pp. It is, by any measure, an ambitious and welcome project. Editors Edward Foster and Joseph Donahue deserve praise for their groundbreaking collection of reviews, essays and interviews that attempt to survey and interrogate some of the most interesting trends of the last few decades: "gnostic poets, Language writers, poetry slams, feminist literary journals, Asian-American poets, neo-Objectivists, visual poetry, E-poetries, African-American poets, small magazines and presses, Los Angeles poets, New York School poets, neo-Surrealists, prose poetry, poetry anthologies, and much more."
This is a volume that will have an impact for years to come.

For more information contact
Talisman House Publishers, Inc.
PO Box 3157
Jersey City, NJ 07303-3157

2002-09-24T07:04:00.000-07:00

My e-mail address: TBeck131@aol.com

Comments, discussion are welcome.

2002-09-24T07:03:00.000-07:00

I'm currently working on a number of projects besides this blog. Included among these projects are: an extended, hybrid work (which is extending very slowly)called Vanishing Points of Resemblance and an e-mail interview with Vancouver poet Lissa Wolsak.

Two of Wolsak's most recent books are the booklength poem Pen Chants or nth or 12 spirit-like impermanences(Roof, 2000) and an essay on poetics called An Heuristic Prolusion(Documents in Poetics Series, Friends of Runcible Mountain,1999).

On the surface what distinguishes Wolsak as a writer is the brightness and originality of her vocabulary ("Words in their most ulterior super-natures, refusing centrifugal and centripetal social forces narrowing everyday exchange," An Heuristic Prolusion), a vocabulary--vocabularies, really-- bound up musically with wonder and anger and a spirit of resistance toward all of that which would deaden one. In an e-mail she once told me "I am at war with/in repetition."

Behind the glittering vocables is a fierce investigative intelligence that has found its metier in the operatic epistemo-spectacles of her long poems.

2002-09-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

When I was at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in 1999, the photographer Judy Dater told me that "In the dark room I close my eyes; when I take a photo, I look away."

2002-09-23T15:57:00.000-07:00

Speaking of lyric poetry...If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho(Borzoi,2002), translated, introduced and annotated by Anne Carson, is a wonderful collection. Here's her translation of fragment 130:

Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me--
sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in

Carson is the author of several volumes of poetry and 2 booklength essays--_Eros: the Bittersweet_(Dalkey Archive Press) and _Economy of the Unlost_(Princeton University Press). Both of these essays are extraordinary. The first deals with the concept of "eros" in classical literature and philosophy. It is not a dry and dusty tome but more akin, as the back copy says, to William's _Spring and All or Gass's On Being Blue--it's not just a book about passion, it's a passionate book. _Economy of the Unlost_ is a comparative study of the ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides and Paul Celan. It's an eccentric but rich juxtaposition.

2002-09-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

LYRIC INTERFERENCE

1.

No body

Cares where

It's hidden

Shadows unwrap

Two or

Three things

One knows

An envelope

Pushes back

2.

An envelope

Pushes back

What one

Means by

Distance, this

Dance of--

"Anywhere, over

Here, put-

It-there"

3.

"Anywhere, over

Here, put-

It-there"

Shadows gather

The things

One knows

What one

Means by

"Sing" wrestles

4.

What one

Means by

"Sing" wrestles

No body

Knows how

It's spoken

Shadows assemble

To cast

An understanding

5.

Shadows assemble

To cast

An understanding

Lyric interference

(What distance

Means by)

No body

Cares where

It's hidden

2002-09-23T09:04:00.000-07:00

This blog will work at the intersections of innovative poetry/poetics/sexuality and daily life. Think of it as a notebook left open on a desk. And ,as in a notebook, entries may be rough/provisional or polished to a high sheen. Feel free to sneak a peek. I welcome comments.

A few months ago I was asked for some poems, and "given your ongoing work in the lyric," to contribute a piece of writing about lyric poetry.
I sent the editor a sequence called "Lyric Interference" which I doubt he's interested in but didn't respond to the request for a statement or essay about "the lyric" because it felt too big and important to deal with at the time--I felt, that is, inarticulate, unable to sit down and formulate some sort of considered response.
For me a poem is like epilepsy, epistemology or an episiotomy--
I can't recall the seizures I experienced as a child except in terms of the stories others have told me about them as filtered through my own memories--there have been, however, physical flashbacks to their precursors which I associate with buzzing flourescent lights and certain heightened states like drunkenness, anxiety or sex;
Perceiving knowledge in terms of forms realized through a series of convulsive moments of realization;
Interventions in aid of something coming out--but in terms of a painful cut.
I can't disassociate a word from its sound. Language reverberates--lingers, loiters, as material process/being/thing. It makes a slice in time.