Thomas Devaney

Oregon Ave

You can’t find a place to smoke anymore

Ro says, smoking and rifling

through her handbag looking for a number.

She sits in the backseat with Meg.

They’re not singing.

The ballgame’s on inside and outside

the game is always on.

Actually, sometimes they do sing.

What year is the car, a ’98?

A Ford? A Focus?

They always tip too.

 

There is dust, always; and terrible dirt;

but if that’s what you see you’re hardly looking.

We believe in the front stoop.

We believe in banging pots and pans and honking horns.

We believe that in the heat of day shadows come back.

Trashcan on fire says Things are hotting up.

The street’s a mix, water, water ice, LIVE CRABS,

jumbo jets, firecrackers.

Summer days are huge and often overlap late into fall.

Seriously, when you have a good spot, why move the car?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Thomas Devaney

    Thomas Devaney and Bill Berkson at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 2012.

  

Cold Fingers Light the Way

I read Bill’s essay on Ray, it was 100% Bill / 100% Ray.
Walked in the rain and got very soaked. 
              The old photocopy had surfaced from a personal slush pile 
in the dark lake of the TV room where I had been hiding. 
If anyone asked, I would have said I had been following the news. 
But it was more than that. I was consumed. I put my stamp on that. 

For much of Bill’s life he had been in the New York Correspondence School:
envelopes, photocopied GUM BALLS For Sale, and at least one secret love. 

I will incorporate the letters that seem appropriate in this letter which will be 
waiting for you when you return—

To the end he had a full head of white hair, stood 6’3” in his stocking feet.
And sharp words for Chelsea and all else that had gone “berserk.”

“Scratches show the surface as the surface,” more notes scribbled down. Elsewhere looking at the views as if I were seeing the feeling I longed to see and to feel.
A turn and a half-dozen more—Bill’s limpid prompt to his correspondent 
to find the courage to their own tenderness.

Envelope as a vehicle of its own. Another printed in Sharpie to WILIAM S. WILSON from RAY JOHNSON. Direct about their indirections and home.

The letters of each name, a plot as much as they are instruction for those who would bury the dead. Speaking in sweeping monologues to all of the living-room shades. King Lear of the Chesapeake, standing and gesturing in my mind, and signing-off in an email: “I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats. If it be man’s work, I’ll do ’t.”

 

Thomas Devaney

 

Hell-Dusted Blue Jeans

The Great Plains were over filled with blue jeans. 

During the war, the sky was filled with blue jeans.

Was I making up this story? some voice wanted to know. 

The corners of the mouth. In high school I worked at the Gap

selling jeans, corduroys, Mountain Dew. Provisions of nourishment.

Call of Duty, Mass Effect video games had colonized my

central nervous system.  A frame without a mirror to tell

my fate, I continued a hum along.     Like the Great Depression,

each person blaming him or herself for their own ruin.

The stories are all there.

Renee Gladman

 

Renee Gladman

 

from Proportion Surviving

Long before the fresh apple crisis, my life had some form to it. I would wake in the mornings—I would perform something. For example, the day I tried, as one with acute passion might, to win one woman over but accidentally won another—that whole time I had been living like someone. Though I can’t remember his name. His model of optimism provided me with a certain geography that I inhabit in time of need. This time the need was surprising. People tend to have faith that the juice they drink in the morning is the same juice they have always drunk. And apples take their shape naturally. The guy, whose name escapes me now, taught me to look upon others’ concerns as mine to make at home. I was fond of doing many things at home, but my favorite was drinking juice. When my friends came by—they liked to suddenly show up with all kinds of breads in their hands, thinking they knew what I needed and planning to force it on me—I had to tell them I was busy with my juice. Two weeks before the crisis, I had been writing some poems about it. It was a warm day, not entirely different from other warm days in San Francisco. People were on the street. Pale people were on the street, making it to the park and lying there such that the next day they were a little browned. The poems I had written were failures, but dense ones. It seemed appropriate to think the person’s attempt at wholeness was a series of missteps, which if drawn across an afternoon might prove interesting to other people. I had a way of reminding my friends that we were all in pain, but a fruit tart kind of pain strangers can’t help but enjoy. That day I had, in a sense, gathered all my possessions and gone out onto the street with them. I awoke that morning with an urgency to prepare myself for something—not anything life threatening, but definitely personal.
 

Renee Gladman

Fig. 14

These sentences will electrify the plain with black gathering; they will be blackened and will rise and cleave, magnetically, in an intake of housing

——

These sentences will edge the void, will edge the plain and edge the towering structure; they will grain and blacken where they house and swoop where they fail

——

These will flutter and spire and go dark with grain

——

These sentences will be half of something loving and half of something gone

Renee Gladman

Prose Architectures 206

Renee Gladman

 

This drawing is not FIG 2O

Fig. 20

 

These sentences will line the plain in modules for listening; they will hold and wait and lean in an absence of weather; they will be the calmative for the field

——

These sentences will make a tight, enclosing harmonics where the linking phrases turn and gasp in miniature and will lean in muted light

——

These will distill the question about the weather—“Is it fine?” “Are you fine today?” They will flute and silo

 

Joshua Harmon

 

from SONGS OF OUR LIVES: STEREOLAB’S “PAUSE”

IV.

In The Tempest, Caliban famously confesses, “Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments / Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices,” as good a description as any of spooks speaking to spooks via high-power transmissions over the MHz bandwidth, skywave propagation, and one-time pad decoder. Or of how we remember—how we hear, even in their absence—certain songs we once played so frequently that now they seem etched into our minds and memories if not the air around us. Caliban speaks these lines while he’s advocating the overthrow of Prospero, and recalling a time the island was “his,” a time he still dreams about: “The clouds methought would open and show riches / Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked / I cried to dream again.” In our remembered pasts, everything always belongs to us, if only because the memories themselves are ours; everything, because it is unattainable, seems a kind of treasure, all the more valuable because of its elusiveness.

Joshua Harmon

 

LANDSCAPE

I'm not fixin' to get rowdy, venture
off-radar, fuck with open source code: spring

hills of squills, the rarefied checkout line,
the tiny guest bedroom still undusted

since winter: we've formed our truces today.
The technological wonders beetle

away from words: real refinement (I can't
follow) urges a pass, and what, I ask, 

does anyone want? Discovery creeps
wormwardly along a mathematics

of mingling my mother warned me about—
anyway, in the beautiful valley

my haloed seeing rues transparency,
shoos such likelihood aft, away: I yawn,

yearn, perceiving only how vertigo
secretaries me into the office.

__

LANDSCAPE

I traffic in the elided spaces
inside my head, the ineluctable
tangent, the staid dust-bunnies of belief:

I count on the one thing I can't count on,
and oh I admire the anecdotal
country, a packed luggage of inertia

offering the bed's critique of resolve
and difficulties. I'm only looking
for some average fun. Once I took care

of taking care, I had little left to
worry over, but my sense of relief
emerged mostly from being overlooked,

okay? Such chronic scraps wangle, shimmy:
an endless F.A.Q. I skimmed, at best.

Joshua Harmon

from Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie

It’s cinematic, the blank billboard at the edge of the woodlot: available. The houses are available, and an ersatz drunkenness is available, and a little snow completes the night. A plow blade chips away at a forfeited afterlife. The soul uploads winter on a dial-up line and awaits affirmation. Spruce boughs bend against primitive roof, and as I start to forget the legal loudness of a muffler on a truck painted with red and yellow flames, an uncontrollable restraint stretches itself between cold sheets and grinds its teeth for hours. Sparks from a jumper cable. Speech bubble filled with black marks. The way moonlight stains snow that’s thawed and re-frozen so many times calls my bluff. The wind still says “As if…”

Amy Gerstler

My Ego

is a dented suit of armor, a designer gown
with grimy lining. She's the cause of false beliefs.
She fucks up my ability to love. She's prickly
and tender as an artichoke heart. She proposes
to me so frequently I can't hear other people
speak. She's a self-annointed guide who materializes
at my side with a flourish of trumpets and a bullhorn.
She's a forged love letter, a jailer impersonating a
friend. She's a series of flashbacks in which I'm
both victim and hero. I try to bribe her into exile,
but she calls herself my servant and falls weeping
at my feet. I'm forever banishing her, this mistress
of disguises, even as she clamors back into my lap,
begging my pardon and getting all kissy with me,
grabbing my hand and jamming it down her blouse.

Amy Gerstler

Saints

Miracle mongers. Bedwetters. Hair-shirted wonder workers. Shirkers of the
soggy soggy earth. A bit touched, or wholly untouched living among us?
They shrug their bodies off and waft with clouds of celestial perfume. No
smooching for this crew, except for hems, and pictures of their mothers…
their lips trespass only the very edges of succor. Swarms of pious bees precede
her. One young girl wakes up with a ring on her finger and a hole in her
throat. Another bled milk when her white thigh was punctured. All over the
world, a few humans are born each decade with a great talent for suffering.
They have gifts that enable them to sleep through their mistreatment: the
sleep of the uncomplaining just, the sleep of the incomplete. Our
relationship to them is the same as our relationship to the trees: what they
exhale, we breathe.

Kit Robinson

Parallel Lives

     i.m. Kevin Killian

Poetry is a waiting game
You wait for the line
To fill the stanza
With life
A stolen moment
From the distribution center
Of language
We just work here
The sound
Of a barking dog

Light the fuse
And a series of small explosions
Takes place
Like tin cans strung together
That dangle from the rear bumper
Of a car marked up
With soap
JUST MARRIED
As line marries line
On into an unknowable future

Fill it with life
Look out the window
Walk to the corner
Pick up the phone
Decisions, decisions
Break for lunch
Dig the streets
Hum a tune
Be there for somebody
Somebody special

All along
That engine sound
PG&E is repairing the lines
Where they connect
Under the streets
We live in the city
The definite article
Celebrated in these lines
Whose center is everywhere
Whose edge is nowhere

After foraging for mushrooms
In the outlying forest
The bearded Russian
Sits on the bus
A backpack full of them
On his lap
Leningrad 1990
A memory carried forward
Past the lives of comrades
No longer with us

The poem arrives
Sooner or later
If at all
All the splendor
All the ardor
Spills out onto the table
The periodic table
The elements of our lives
Add up to
Minus a sudden breath

Kit Robinson

 Linseed Oil

     i.m John Ashbery

Seriously though, I don’t think you comprehend
The magnitude of what we’re looking at
Not enough pairs of white socks
The sounds of crows cawing behind us
Plans without maps
Maps without sufficient colors
As if our employment were merely temporary
Which I suppose it is
Like everything else in this joint

Hard to emerge from the long shadow of the master
Possibly impossible
A breeze picks up
Feeble sunlight grazes the leaves
The air smacks of distant fires
But we can still breathe 
Then change into something more comfortable
You better believe it
Poking at memory with a stick

Who goes there?
Lend me your ears
Rome was not built overnight
Nothing better to do
In which case forget it
Time is an elastic band
For wrapping cables when you tear down the set
Easy to speak lightly of it later
Hard to save while using

What we say to each other
Should be plain and wide
Like a body at rest
But gets tripped up
In the welter of everything else
Not a bad thing
When you consider the great escape
Into thin air
Of our impressions

The wherewithal gets lost en route
The color of alphabet soup
Soon everyone is picking favorites
Or pushing up daisies
As the case may be
A case each of red and white vocabularies
To be opened whenever the spirit moves one
Early and often
Or after they’ve all gone home

Kit Robinson

 

Sweetness

Blue jeans and black cotton pullover
give the skin a sweetness powered up
from inside, a nostalgic glow and current
Sunday dazzle, as Pepsi and generic
Tylenol she brings him fashion a scrim
across blankness, the harmonic bolster
placed fair beneath head in the shape
of a hay bale. Hair cropped shift
and nuzzle in the buzz garden flyway,
a seam-blent parallel sound fray empties
the power mower mention in the mental
pink section. Hot to say, the stretched-
out use of language in these lanes
approximates the happy and wonderful feeling
of being alone on stage, making up a mess
of greens for the family, always expected
home at any moment. Linking them, the separations
bend plausibly in light, and we can see into
by far the deepest afternoon shade, sun
on the backs of our necks, summarily chatting
and swatting away the cares that troubled you.

Leveling

Into the been, the wire, fleeting, scantily,
because just enough space has been brought
forth, on account, strange, unfastened, about
to tip over in the occult, remaindered gloom
apart from a fist and a lemon batched
in time, the wholesome moment slags
then ripens and bolts down two thirds
of the standard operation known as once,
once more rising to the varnished, complicit
occasion. That complicated a sentence could
only be produced in a matter of monuments
criss-crossed against a dime folio, more
forgotten than accidentally picked up. The
shining genius in an hour, all four legs of the
bed planted squarely on solid floor, hoists
the tattered pennant of doing okay. By the time
this gets divested the concommittent aspects
collide, and there are wonderful packages waiting
in darkly darkened claim rooms at foreign
stations, a form of transport closely aligned
and in alternating venues policed, diced, cleaned.

Robert Grenier on Larry Eigner

 

June 17 68   # 2 1 2

 

moon 

arithmetic
in the night 

rain

This would be a mere ‘journal entry’ were it not for the fact of the way reading this poem puts one in the circumstance being presented—i.e., doing arithmetic “in the night” (inside) wherein at first the moon is shining (outside) and afterwards (in the progress of the poem)—after one has been doing some arithmetic—in time, it rains.

The work of doing arithmetic (by, presumably, a human?) is one space ‘inside’ (and in immediate one-space-relation to) the shifting ‘outside’ conditions nonetheless represented by different/four-letter words.  The preoccupied/continuing work (of a human?) is thus literally situated (by the spacing-structure of the poem) within a wider, ongoing event, of which it is a part.

Stepping back a little ways, it’s like seeing ‘him there’, in the house, through the window, from the street (as in a Vermeer)—or from space—maybe even writing a poem (in an essay called “not / forever / serious” in areas / lights / heights, LE calls “language in verse…a math of everyday life”) ?  And certainly the moon/phases of the moon, etc., have had something to do with provoking mathematics.

Very ‘condensed’/‘simple’.  In the Kansas typescript (see IV, 1708), this poem is centered on the 8 1/2 x 11” page (unusual for LE), using the whole page to frame/focus the image in its ‘window’.

Seeing the words as composed of numbers (of letters) going about their business in/on the grid of the typewriter page.

 

Robert Grenier

 

WIND
DYEUCALYPTS

 DARK       FIR     
   NESS     TREE     
  DOUG        IM        
       LAS     INNERN     

Robert Grenier

 

from

Minimalism X: Isolation & Concentricity - On a Poem of Robert Grenier

At an extremity of tenderness and awe, I've spent the better part of my adult life in astonished regard of an early mentor whom I encountered at the threshold of my sense of myself as a writer and thinker about literature. After an intense year and a half as a student in his writing class at UC Berkeley in the late 1960's, I maintained but sporadic contact with him through the succeeding decades, until we reunited in the shared labor of editing Larry Eigner's Collected Poems [Stanford University Press, 2010], a task of some seven long years. 

Life is often a series of disagreements or misapprehensions, and the resolution of them, often in doubt, may lead to revelation, or confusion. But as regards an objective standard--my appreciation and fascination with Bob's work--there has never been any wavering of my devotion. I often think that I am usually about 5-7 years behind Bob's progress, in terms of how fast his mind moves forward in time. I think it probably takes that long for me to become comfortable with, and to appreciate, just what he is doing at any particular moment. I recall the first time I encountered his S C R A W L works. Although I've never actually seen him "write" one, I watched as he collaborated in the imaging of them by a photographer whom he had contracted to document the work in chrome positives, using a 35 millimeter camera. This was a laborious process, but one which Bob was certain he needed to do, since there seemed no better medium available to preserve the work, which consisted of hand-drawn "visual" poems on facing pages of small art notebooks, in multi-colored inks. Each notebook contains/ed unique works, which cannot be "translated" into other media (such as print) without disturbing the character of the image, which is everything.

Meanwhile, an earlier poem, from his collection Series [this press, 1978], stretches the limits of traditional poetry, at a point in time in which it was/would have been well beyond the known bounds of anything critics or writers of that time would have thought of as "literature." It was so far ahead of its time that it eclipsed possible existing definitions of "poem" to achieve a surreal presence, eerie in its contrast. Here is the poem in its entirety:

JAR 

Take a moment to consider. Don't rush. Listen to your feelings. In typing the poem, I'm at a loss to know quite how to present it. Does the poem exist on a typed page, or on the face of a rock? How big are the letters, and where "in space" does it exist? What does it mean? If it's the evidence of some intention, what is that intention, and in what sense is it an "expression" of something, by someone, at a moment "in time"? Since it is not buttressed with any grammatical referents, but exists alone, separated from all other language (words), its isolation implies a regard which magnifies or reduces its possible significance as a "fragment" of speech. 

The word, a noun, suggests that it points to, or stands for, the object to which it refers; but that referentiality is without qualification. Does the word jar stand for all jars, or just one particular jar? In a philosophical sense, all jars are jars, and nothing else. But not all jars are alike, and the generic jar may be elaborated into varieties of types and shapes and styles of jar(s). But the word jar, by itself, can't have all those meanings, or conversely, it can incorporate all the senses of (or versions of) jar, inside itself. Call it the set of all possible jars which exist in the universe. 

Curtis Faville (The Compass Rose)

                                                       ************

Robert Grenier

SENTENCES.

Whale Cloth Press, 1978. Item #1310 

500 5 x 8 in. cards in blue cloth covered Chinese-style folding box. 5 5/16 (w) x 8 1/8 (l) x 5 1/2 (h) in. This is no. 63 from an edition of 200 copies, composed on an IBM Selectric typewriter, using a Courier 72 (10 point) ball. Card stock is 110 lb. index white. First edition. Half-title card pressure toned from box, all other cards and the box are fine.

"I certainly don't think of myself as a Minimalist Poet, whatever that means. I'd just like the things to stand on their own, without assumption of necessary content, or even of one person's voice or authority/ authoring…I'd really like the reader to really participate in the work, such that both make an experience. Not many poems admit of really 'reading in,' really finding something which is both there, in the words, & given to the words by the state of mind & feelings, the intelligence of the reader." (Robert Grenier, letter to Burroughs Mitchell, 19 October 1976.)

"…Sentences is composed of discrete lyric poems, but it is also a work of visual art that explores fundamental phenomena of how we read, recognize, and remember poetry, either aloud, in the mind, or on the page or screen. Sentences, in other words, can be read as a complex set of interactive experiments in how poetry is mediated and experienced." (Both quotations from Paul Stephens, "Really 'Reading In'": A Media-Archival History of Robert Grenier's Sentences.)

Robert Grenier

CAMBRIDGE M'ASS : FOR JOHN BATKI : 

FOR ANSELM HOLLO.

Tuumba Press, 1979.

 Poster, 41 x 49 in. The original Tuumba Press edition of this "poster-poem-map" that marks Robert Grenier's turn toward the visual in a stunning work comprising approximately 255 short poems, some excerpted from his 1978 work Sentences. The size of the poster was determined by the largest sheet-size the offset press would accommodate. Cambridge M'ass is dedicated to John Batki and Anselm Hollo and was pinned to the walls of poets and others across the literary world throughout the eighties and beyond and has become quite scarce in the original.

Robert Grenier

 Oh, it’s hard to imagine now… Just looking at it on the floor, it looks really black and white. And I remember seeing it, actually, anew at that  [retrospective] show at Southfirst Gallery [June 2013], on the wall there. And Maika Pollack, whose gallery that is, really liked it and I thought well, what is this darn thing ? It’s been in my closet or piled up behind this and that for many years…and so I hadn’t had a chance to look at it, but I saw it as this—and I see it now, especially in this new version—as really black and white…and peculiar. It’s like, “what is this Thing ?”—there used to be The Thing, and It Came From the Lagoon, or it came from…Boston Harbor perhaps ?…which, in those days...maybe it’s a little cleaner now, but it was kinda grubby and grungy, and dripping with…stuff. But I really like the way it…appears…out of the blackness of the ‘Great Beyond’, which to me is like ‘Time’, you know ? It’s…way back there, and it kind of…rattles around. I remember at the time thinking that it was sort of like…some kind of Japanese figure, like a creature in a Noh play, that started out…and then BLAGH or WHUH ! So, there it IS. But at the time, yeah, I thought, hmm... Well, after—this was after doing that box of cards Sentences, right ? —after you’ve isolated things down to one, you’re left with the problem of how to present more than one, which would involve either the ampersand, the and, or…the plus sign. So, it was part of an attempt to try to figure out how you could bring words into space…in a way that was an alternative to the speech-based poetry of the time that I was raised in. And I was thinking earlier today, what a sacrifice it really is to abandon the…not simply the voice of the poem, but the whole range of musical articulation, in sound…which had been my whole experience of poetry… Listening, as we were, to Pound’s late reading from The Cantos, it’s such a magnificent articulation of language in sound. And in my immediate experience prior to this—I was raised on the realization of speech in Robert Creeley’s work—I was so impressed by that, that it seemed that there must be something else that could be done, which would not simply repeat the long tradition of the spoken word, and poetry as sound, in that range that Zukofsky specifies, from speech to music. William Carlos Williams to John Dowland, or something like that, where the poem is sounded in so many fascinating ways… And looking back at this, I think, gee wiz, why did I abandon that ? [laughs]

Lee Ann Brown

Bodies Can Move This Way

Very fast like a car or waterfall 
Absence gap for stored-up music 
Evidence for the stolen nonce 
Your trick is all to the good

Our planetary hour
takes jumps 
Drop it doesn't mean stop

The fixed will fly perpetually 
in the blue hour some light reading

Silk nets are strongest 
Morning glories grow best in poor soil 
Music maker Fire tender

Photos stones 
The air sign to burn
Time your desire and circumstance