·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

The NYC demonstrations were a delight to see on C-Span - the absence of any narrative intervention on the part of the Network let the evidence (the sheer mass and particularity of signs, faces, clothes, drumming, body movements, dancing , water bottles, etc) and the event speak for itself. It was also a delight to see that one’s apprehension of provocation’s for a full scale police/demo riot did not take place. I can only suspect that the Fox people were disappointed not to be able to manipulate the visual possibilities of such a riot into a pro-Bush screed.
There are several days to go. My hope is that the demonstration will continue in all forms and work to keep outflanking the right wing dictates of a dull and predictable Convention.
And, of course that no wacko group unleashes some major terrorist act. In Najef, the after-attack images in yesterday’s New York Times, struck me as an all-out terrorist attack on the neighborhoods and the cemetery surrounding the Shrine. Jesus, what our tax dollars can buy and perform! What’s going to spare this country reciprocal acts I don’t even want to contemplate. It becomes more and more obvious that Bush & Co. has dug us all a very large hole into which to continue to fall.
More than ever, (this, too, I feel in my bones) it’s absolutely essential - individually, publicly and collectively - to work for the revival of life impulses (over paranoid self-destruction) to reclaim the domestic and international body politic! I wish I could be in New York - they’re doing it big time.

It’s curious - but repetitively normal - the way in which San Francisco, the experience of living goes so mute in August. Perhaps more than most North American and European Cities, San Francisco is taken way down by the fog. It’s curious - but repetitively normal - the way in which San Francisco, the experience of living goes so mute in August. Perhaps more than most North
American and European Cities, San Francisco is taken way down by the fog.
Though today is wonderfully blue and warm, the Twain cliche about “August in
San Francisco being the coldest winter I ever spent” remains tangibly true.
It is also tangibly true in the brown grasses that deaden the hills. It’s a
time in which -barring getting out of town - that flattens the psyche,
eliminates the ego, taunts any aspiration; it’s bottom of the ocean time.
Keep breathing and wait for the September lift.

Well that’s it on one, personal level. The other level is national. There is
a deep - I sense - deep collective apprehension of what will happen in New
York next week, the site of the Republican convention. Tens or hundreds of
thousands of demonstrators are on their way to cement a fluid and tenacious
opposition to the Bush Administration. The Courts have denied Central Park
as a place of public demonstration. It looks like a Republican Party set-up
to create anarchy and mayhem that can be exploited. Fox and the other cable
Networks cannot wait to show images of violence - Cop confrontations,
shattered windows, etc. - as a demonstration of how peaceful and proper
Republicans are “at heart and in principle”. Equally pernicious is the
Administration’s attempt to cloak New York with the fear of another
terrorist attack. The Public is left in the middle of anticipating a
Collective cauldron that could backfire in the favor of this hopelessly
inept, corrupt Administration. More than inept, an Administration that is an
ideological disaster with nothing but destructive consequences both domestic
and international. The details are obvious and deeply saddening.
Yet, as one who cannot go to New York, one waits with this stultifying
apprehension that Bush & Co. will wrench events into their electoral favor.
Probably no proverbial light here in August, but definitely a storm. As WCW
finished his preface to Howl “…we are going through Hell.”
I sense in my bones that’s true.

Eighteenth Street below
Dolores Park:

A slow August rain &
What do we worship?
The woody green altar,
the spiral “carpel”
its fleshy, red follicles
tender as silk
Inside the thick
Disparate white petals:
The Magnolia tree
Leaning down
On the lower edge
The Park this morning
For one moment
Briefly sighted.

*
Trolley-Stop: 18th & Church:

Dark blue spots punctuate
a white, sheen dress.

Black, knee length coat over red pants
A slightly darker, red strap purse
Parted, long brown hair down
The side of each shoulder: the eyelids
don’t lift - not even - one tiny bit.

*
Cumberland at Church Street:

Navy blue shirts & shorts
Twenty Firefighter trainees
Top of the Park stairs
Peddle feet up and down
The woman trainer’s staccato voice
“See the Sixth building down -
the white one with two balconies -
that’s where Giappee made
a fine rescue off the ladder
from the high balcony.”

History on the run.

*
Down 21st from Sanchez:

Across the tops of green hedges
White-threaded spider hammocks
Raindrops caught, clustered,
Mercurial edges of light – glimmering -
Uneven rims inside each sphere.

Sunless Tanning
Christian Dating

These are the two most
recent spammers in my
“Comment” box.
I also suspect there is
a relationship between
these two activities - getting a tan
without the sun and dating
while being Christian -
but like an odd couple
presented in an old-fashioned
freak show, I prefer to giggle
rather than figure out
this curious pair.
But if you have any ideas
as to why this combination
may - by some - be considered
so perfect, let me know.

MARCH 18, 2003
by Michael Lally
Is from Libellum, publishers
211 West 19th Street, 5th Floor
10011
(36 pages, cover by Alex Katz, no price or distributor mentioned, but you can probably ‘Amazon-it.’ )

In keeping with the times, someone brought this small, beautifully designed and produced book, instead of pro forma wine, to dinner last night. And what a timely gift! Lally read this at an anti-war poetry reading of the title date at the Paula Cooper Gallery. Indeed I think it’s the best contemporary political poem I have read. (I recently read Zukofsky’s A-10 - written in 1941 - which is also right on the pulse, as well).

Lally - who picks up Frank O’Hara’s open voice, questioning ‘personism’ persona - takes that mode a full step further - and essentially both the country and the globe into a dartboard of targeted questions aimed at multiple political hotspots in which each line of fire keeps splitting the rhetorical board into pieces (Iraq, Palestine-Israel, Voting Machines, Torture, etc). Instead of “personism”, one might call the mode “a-personism” - where the person’s voice becomes an Everyman who is the antithesis of most everything you find of FOX TV. (Lally taking the pants off O’Reilly and his ‘factors.’) I can only exemplify, from near the start:
…
If some white folks build
a housing complex on an Indian reservation
with money from white supremacists
and they use the few resources
the reservation has to make their housing project
bigger and better than the Native American houses
and some of the Native Americans
demonstrate against this, and the response
of our government is to build a barbed wire fence
around the white enclave and send soldiers
to man watchtowers and protect the whites
and this pisses the Native Americans off
and their demonstrations get rowdy
and some Indian kids throw rocks at the soldiers
and the soldiers shoot and kill some of these kids
and the Indians get even more upset
and vow to stop the settlements
and get the whites off their land…

The 34 pages mount into a literal ‘tour-de-force’ - harsh & cleansing, and a genuine public poem, where such is so rare. It’s such a difficult thing to do. (One thinks - through out the sixties and seventies - where most public efforts at the form became either a parody of Howl or somehow could never break away from the umbrella of that work. Z’s “A-10″ is a refreshing forbear of Howl - tho more mediated in its anger and rebuke). Lally’s poem strikes me as a genuine break through - partly because its so both deeply informed and felt, but the more so because it radiates the vulnerability that I think many of us experience now in relationship to what appear as overwhelming Corporate, etc. odds. While, at the same time, the work is definitely an unshakable call for “the rocks” in whatever form one can shape those in language, or whatever counter-offensive medium - say ‘voting’ - one can still count as one’s own.

I say get it and spread it around.

“ADOPT-A-HIGHWAY

GODFATHER
BAIL BONDS

HWY 5″

Outside Red Bluff,
California

*

One person’s litter
Is another Company’s butter
There’s always a body (possibly)
In the Public trough
There between the gravel & the weeds
Gothcha’

*

“Lost: Parakeet, it’s yellow
And black dots. No Reward
Just a BIG THANKS.”

*
Aphasia folds the hour or
“He can’t remember shit”:
The lament of 60 now 63:
He walks with a golden edge
Not a wedge, her ‘other’, call it
“This blessing, that blessing, let’s go
All around, “hang in there”, blessing.”

*
On the wall of the Doctor’s Exam room:
“Alcatraz” in gold type on white
A red guard tower on a black sky:
“Mark Rothko, No. 10, 1950,” blue
Sans serif type on white
Pale yellow, white and blue rectangles
Each with shaggy, decaled edge:
“Muir Woods,” red and black lined bark
On a Redwood tree over a black forest
Black ground & white type:
“Testerosterone Gel 7% CII
Ask Your Doctor Now If:”
A company’s advertisement
In a permanent silver frame.
Blood pressure equipment, blue
& Lavender Velcro arm straps
The black squeeze ball, a double-dial
Against black and red numbers (”100″ etc.)
Recessed under the glass lens:
White tissue across the exam table
The aluminum hood over the extendable lamp
The gray leather Doctor’s stool:
The slash of white light at a 30-degree angle
Through the slanted, gray Venetian blinds
down across the bottom side of the exam table:

The components by which one waits, examines,
Measures. Useless. Useless. Useless. Impatient
Patient.

*

Multiple grief, seasons:
Heart multiplies
beyond reason:

You tease “your woman”
Call her “wife”
Challenge your dead brother
Either “Box” or “Ship out”:

Love is a dispassionate enemy
Archeology is memory:
Drill a hole in the floor
Beam by bloody beam
Dark, dark the blood
Swish it in the moist ground
Go deep, go swift
Twist her throat, then his,
Syllable by syllable
Twist the known
Break, break it
Sentence by gradual sentence:
“Talk to me, Talk to me”
May the Dead
Lizard on the hot, red step
Throat puckered, swollen
Push, shove
Syllable by syllable
Word breath sentence
Come, gather, move, liberate.

The American Casket Company
“No Customer Left Unsatisfied”
Muskogee, Oklahoma
1910

*

In an odd country go intimate:

*

Walking, the body a lit wick
Each eye, flickering:

*

The lavender lip on her tong
over the wide, chrome-spiked, leather belt
under her dark brown - no tattoo - spine.

*

Magnolia trees in full blossom
In the high, thick green leaves:
The soft white, unfolding blossoms
A hemstitch - various - the trees
At the upper edge of the Park.

*
Summer at Delphina’s: Bolinas Halibut, Naiman Farm
Flank steak, Fulton Valley chicken, Blue Lake beans
Strips of Zucchini, a pesto called Falsetto: one eats
Both signs and language, as well as the, humm,
Incredible, to put it delicately, extraordinary cuisine.

*
Brown bread slices tossed off curb’s edge
A dozen white & gray pigeons pecking from each center out.
On the gray asphalt each brown crust forms an empty rectangle,
the edges slightly curved.
What is emptied evolves
What stays: continuity, form
The integrity of impoverished frames.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I am off to Ashland, Oregon for a few days - blackberries & Shakespeare -
King Lear, I hear!
Back Wednesday. As usual, I appreciate your comments.

Walking Theory #67

The tenderness of washing (soaping) one’s balls.
The President of the United States can’t say that.
Decorum is a doctored thing.
A doctored thing is often an “ouch,” perhaps much more:
Even for someone’s “higher” notion of security, or a scruple,
A nation or person does not go there
Willingly.

Walking Theory #68

The political history of pricks:
Pricks pry, pricks lie, pricks – unless infected –
Don’t cry,
Prickety, prickety
Prick power, prick punch
She took the prick to lunch.
Humpty-Dumpty sat on a prick
Humpty-Dumpty had a
A passionate prick is a wonderful thing
A politically passionate prick may be one or another
His prick is not her prick
Her prick is not his
Tired pricks and old pricks are just as dangerous
As young pricks each and everyone variously gorgeous
Or not: shrunk, extended, half way up or down
If you are a prick you are always a prick
Some say a good prick is hard to find, hard to quantify,
Hard to illustrate, etc., etc.
Prick it up, says the boss
An arc’d, happy prick, fertile & full
Is wonderful & zooms around inside the house
Out into the garden, out into the streets, up hill
& down into the bars, coffee shops or
Back into the Park where it lies up or upside down
Among trees, beautiful people & in-between the grass
A hungry prick is a natural prick, a sunshine prick,
A bird with slippery, silver wings & feathers
A winged prick is a pleasure to many
Flying hither and yon
Speaking at town hall meetings, making stupid,
Funny ads, but best of all, if not in bed,
(Morning, afternoon or night) farm, truck or office,
Bookstore, drugstore, grocery store, most real best
Out on the dance hall floor: sly, tucked
Rhythmic - watch those subtle steps - a smooth suit on the fly
A tisket, a prisket, a basket
Let the heat rise, take the smooth prick on high
Feathers to the sun, feathers to the moon

Don’t talk about the politics or brains in a prick
Neither will ever count for much

A good prick in time brings children into beautiful line.

Walking Theory #69

Diva without mercy
Enchant me not:
This is a far as
You are going to get.

Walking Theory #70

Weekend ghosts on the empty morning basketball court
The ricochet of ball to hand to asphalt up to the rim
The ricochet of shoulder, elbow, stomach, hip
The ricochet of touch, move, break, leap or pass
The imagination of court as collective cure
Or collapse
The blankets (blue, green, grey) around the homeless on the wet grass
Are we not rootless each and every?
Note the row of four pepper pygmy trees along the walk
The bumpy, old nodules as wisdom disguised on the trunk
The shower of thin, green leaves, a kaleidoscope spinning
Between and among branches in the light
The scope of healing versus war
The official restoration of the death penalty in Iraq
The jokes with which some nail and mark the language
In the coffee shop the young woman with short cropped, auburn hair,
Gold chain threaded in links around her wide, freckled throat
Over bagel, cream cheese, purple and silver onion,
Sliced, a red tomato. She tells me something, I forget.
Sometimes the visual sacrifices the voice
The tangible the much more definite calling.

{Those looking for Walking Theory pieces #62 - #66 - see previous entry}

I just received this lovely little, yet sweetly complex volume from David Kennedy (British poet and bookmaker) by he and his wife, Christine, writer and, in this case, a photographer in cahoots with computer & printer . “A Lean-To Edition” from The Cherry On The Top Press, it’s an unnumbered, handmade edition. The page format(s) - including see through circular punch cuts, transparent acetate and opaque white and colored stock - and a double entry to the text and visual images - betray any fuller description that I might offer.

There is a kind of artist book I usually especially don’t like - the precious, Chinese designer box of internal cuts, typography, colors, illustrations etc - and zero content of any significance, except some kind of bizarre homage to craft and skill. This is not that.

The book - in all of its typographic, paper and visual intrigue - is a structural analog to walks and an investigation of the geological footing, terraces, stairways, and structures of buildings of the Medieval town of Auzon in the Haut Allier area of Auvergne. The question and challenge for the Kennedys and the book I suspect was how to confront the significance and lure of an ancient ruin: “The spur/ in an open casket of verdure”, a stairway that rises aside a wall into nowhere, geranium pots that block a porch, the presence of pumpkins, a Roman tower looking steeply down, the implications of a serpentine lock on the entrance door, deer’s feet nailed to the gate, a minimalist echo from a voice of a disappointed troubadour - on each page here mounted - through text & or image - glimpse by glimpse .

The compression of this into a book object whose investigation both radiates out and at the same time holds mystery in - I find rich and very impressive - at the same, quite modestly done (tho obviously a hell of a lot of work).

I did not receive a sales prospectus with what is a gift. But I am sure David Kennedy will be happy to provide the particulars. Email him at:
D G & C V Kennedy: dgk@kennedyd.fsworld.co.uk

Walking Theory #62

He was real dead, there was

No question though each:

The words rarely chop a ghost in half

Each journey an incision

Did one fail? Was one at fault?

No one can explain the dead

No more than I can continue

Not to love:

The rose in time

He rose, rose again

Whoever is a spiral

Nevertheless the rattle:

Walking Theory #63

The dead travel without mercy

But demands. Embrace

Who ever it is – provide

As much absolution as you can –

Then push them gently

Over the edge:

In that interval

Provide an instruction:

Look for love

Lie down in a storm of light

Breathe unto another:

A piece of quartz – glimmering –

On the lid of each eye

Myrrh between the lips

Hands clasped over a thin robe

A white rose budding on your groin.

Walking Theory #64

Sight: Site

On the trolley wire:

Mourning Dove

Humming Bird

Mourning Dove

Walking Theory #65

Kit Robinson at the podium
About to read at 26 Grand Street:

“How is the water, Kit?”
“’Water kit’? You mean ‘the bottle’”?
“No. How is the water?”
“It tastes pretty good. Now
I want to read a few poems.”

Walking Theory #66

Morning: no desire to penetrate the low hill, dark fog.

Ignite my face. Clean my heart.
The litany is not so long.

“Litter me not.”
The Park to its visitors.

The boyhood blond curls on the homeless man’s head
Sandwiched between the L-shaped blanket atop the grass.

The man with two wire buckets of green tennis balls,
one racket and a red light, about to step off the curb.

The young man with a lit cigar at the trolley stop.

The abandoned Levi jacket a-drape on the dry leafy bank down to the track.

A tiny white piece of Pigeon shit on the dark green bronze curl on the statue of
Miguel Hildalgo Costella, liberator of Mexico, 1810.

The two brown Boxers racing between the three momentarily extended figures – left arms out, right heels raised: T’ai Chi.

The way his silver cell phone is so small it fits between his ring and middle finger.
She stands in front of him, jutting her hip, she wants to make love, later.

The upside-down, blue paper, 3-D glasses on the black grease gravel between the trolley tracks.

The way one assumes dimension: to appear, grow, flourish,
Get damaged, disappear.

The mystery of the way one re-appears, again and again,
Then not.

The eruption of everything. The all night crystals.

The caldron - solar yellow, amber, the liquid - the way it boils over,
swinging across the horizon, an infinite bottom, an infinite gift.

The mystery in the complication of pores.

The way one supports images with images from within.
The way one continues.