Another poet I dug closely in my Serious Midwestern Young Man phase was James Wright. And when I read his poems I still like them on some level. I don't know if liking something is a problem or not. The guy has an ear for poetry. Listen to this:

Two athletes
Are dancing in the cathedral
Of the wind

Sonically that's pretty beautiful. Even if the line breaks are a little clunky. It's from "Spring Images", which can be found in The Branch Will Not Break.

I was heavily influenced by stuff like this for awhile. I tried to write a poem called "Inviolate Child", that was filled with long, mellifluous lines about a kid who lived under a tree in my Dad's backyard or something. I eventually abandoned the project.

Have you ever had a teacher, who inspired you at the time, and you needed that, but then you look back and realize that you are now in complete disagreement with much of what they said. For example, "you should read Robert Bly", which I did, and so for awhile I was one of those aspiring faux deep image poets, all hung up on 'image' and such.

An important breaking away point for me was reading The Sonnets, which somehow fit in with my weird worldview and nascent buddhism, I liked it immediately. But The Sonnets also allowed me to see all these other tributaries in plain view from where my writing currently was. To my mind it had some 'leaping', actually a dazzling, breathtaking, heartbreaking amount of 'leaping', but it was also much more free in it's associations and syntax then most work I was into at the time. And eventually of course, I came to realize that the whole concept of 'leaping' is actually pretty questionable, and that the whole deep image thing was basically an appropriation of the 'raw' by the 'cooked'.

I have serious 'earworm' from that Tegan and Sara song from last night's Conan. Even tho it's obviously snugly in the category of what I have pompously referred to, among friends, whilst enduring Iron & Wine, or getting snagged on any number of Grey's Anatomyesque tv dramas, relationship music. I don't quite know what it is, but I feel a palpable difference between music that is responding to or invoking a feeling of love (say to use an obvious example, Pet Sounds, or perhaps ironically but not reallly ironically, Loveless), and that music that to me just sounds like two Generation Y hipster-yuppies who live in say Williamsburg, Brooklyn or on the East Side of Milwaukee having a fight. A type of music that more than anything just alienates me, maybe from lack of that kind of experience. But seriously, there is a vein of 'indie' music come along in the last decade that resembles James Taylor and Carly Simon in sentiment and sound, no?

But all that said, the chorus of 'I just want back into your head' is at least not too cliched, and that terse piano line is about a good a hook as I've heard in a long time. And I find the way they sing way less grating actually than the Iron & Wine wispy-hope-you've-never-heard-Nick Drake mode of earnestness. You can interpret this in whatever way you like, but I think a woman's perspective is just more interesting when it comes to this proto-Garden State type Indie Rock.

Getting back into this album-- oh my GOD is it hot!

"There are blue shadows between people, there's a comfortable forest of legs."
-from Waltzing Matilda, "My Bodyguard", by Alice Notley

I'd have to say that Zodiac is one the best "Hollywood" films I've seen in a long time. It's just so meticulous. By far the best approximation of a period I've seen in a film. As for the chemistry between Mark Ruffalo's raspy bulldog cop and Jake Gyllenhall's boy scout with whiskers, it's maybe the lone weakpoint. Gyllenhall's earnestness just ain't as fun to watch as Ruffalo's slow boil. Robert Downey Jr plays a character who's exactly what you would expect a character played by Robert Downey Jr to be like- whimsical, cranky, jokey, flippant (as in flipping bird while leaving San Fransisco Chronicle copy room etc). But he hardly phones it in, and no one else does either in a cast that includes two of my favorite character actors, Elias Koteas and Philip Baker Hall. And there's also some of the best use of music in a film I've witnessed, especially in the murder scenes that are almost as well executed as HItchcock. And that opening song is by Three Dog Night? Does that I mean like them now? Oh well.

Fatables.

Shouldn't athletes just be allowed to do whatever drugs they want?

I know the arguement get's made that they're 'role models', but these 'role models' are already multi-multi-millionares living in a country where most of their fans will soon be looking at the concept of upward mobility as a quaint notion from the past.

Yesterday I was listening to 'Range Life', and this line just hit me like a gut punch, which it always does.

'school's out, what did you expect?'

This just somehow completely encapsulates life for me. And not just cause I'm not attending school. Maybe it's that the line's preceded by:

'but I've got absolutely no one, no one but myself to blame

don't worry, we're in no hurry'

Since Malkmus is saying 'but I've got absolutely no one, no one but myself to blame', the bridge of 'don't worry, we're in no hurry/ school's out, what did you expect?' could maybe be looked at as a response, maybe even like a Greek chorus of... no, no, I won't say slackers, but people who're somewhat drifting thru life. But then there's the response-within-a-response of 'school's out, what did you expect?'

The tone of the song ultimately seems like one of exasperation, 'if I could settle down, then I would settle down'.

Does anyone else like Freaks & Geeks? Wasn't the way it ended kind of lame? I mean c'mon, a Deadhead?!?

I think the posts on this blog fall into two categories, with some exceptions of course. One category is where I attempt to write a certain kind of prose, say in the area of poetics or criticism. And the other is usually a one-sentence explanation of why for whatever reason I'm just not up for an 'attempt'. Today I guess I was up for one of those attempts.

One of the most fascinating things to me about Clark Coolidge's work is the ark of his career. It's seems like one can divide it into roughly these phases: 1) in the late 60s, the early work, radically disjunctive, sort of word nuggets that form short jigsaw narratives like in Space, 2) in the early 70s, longer endlessly recombinatory works like in Polaroid, The Maintains and to somewhat of an ebbing-back-into-narrative-mode extent, Quartz Hearts, 3) in the late 70s, the more narrative Solution Passage, Mine: The One That Enters The Stories, 4)in the 80s, serial texts like At Egypt, and The Crystal Text. But it's also evident that as the work progresses, Coolidge is able to utelize all these various modes in more of an overlapping way. This 'career-ark' mutates to somewhat of an extent. On The Nameways Vol. 2, for example, utelizes disjunction, narrative and seriality. A Collected Coolidge, tho it would probably have to more than one volume, would go a long toward putting all this into focus.

I get hogtied in self-examination. You can definitely do that too much. But then I feel as tho I've let alot of people down, including myself. So now what, do I just write more poems? I mean I'm sitting here and I have a life. You're sitting there, and you have a life. But the thought tends to go something more like, "I'm sitting here, and you're over there working." I think work is important but I can never quite trust it. Last night I watched Manufacturing Consent again, and Chomsky said something like, "I just don't think people should have to rent themselves out in order to live." And then of course the response is always, "Ha ha, well yes Mr. Chomsky but you are a little naive about the world." Tom Wolfe in his fucking dandy suit endlessly placing everything in an imaginary context, and then still having the nerve to call what someone like Chomsky says 'patent nonsense'. So what is work? And where is this all going? And why do I feel like Sarah Jessica Parker, posting questions on my blog? I suppose I am naive. My left arm hurts.

We want poems that show us how much of the world?

For some reason I really want to listen to Phil Collins right now. The library is closing.

WHOAH!!!

Looking forward to appearing, sans glasses, in this film.

Ah... AH CRAP!!

John Coletti's wikipedia page.

Something that occured to me last night:

Would humans have domesticated animals if clothes hadn't been invented?

I mean, would you feel comfortable with a kitten your lap if you were naked?