tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58883672011-04-21T20:44:54.389-05:00Poetry, Poetics, &c. John Latta is the author of Breeze (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003) and Rubbing Torsos (Ithaca House, 1979). E-mail: lattaj@umich.eduJohn Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comBlogger4851100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1144152194019590602006-04-04T07:02:00.000-05:002006-10-12T14:02:03.053-05:00

DefunctHotel Point (October 2, 2003-August 11, 2005) got replaced by Rue Hazard (August 24, 2005-February 27, 2006).Rue Hazard (August 24, 2005-February 27, 2006) got its due comeuppance, replaced by Isola di Rifiuti (May 8, 2006 and continuing).

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1126721416885095702005-09-14T13:08:00.000-05:002005-09-14T13:11:12.156-05:00

Rue Hazard

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1123764283699831172005-08-11T07:41:00.000-05:002005-08-11T07:44:43.706-05:00

~Clôture brusque et indéfinie. “Effectuating long-consider’d Hermit-dive out of Pismirey,” whatever that means.Samuel Johnson: “That to the vulgar canst thyself apply / Treading a better path not contrary.”Incipient period of private writings. Valéry: “The notion of external things is a restriction on combinations.”To the vaunt’d pukka “community,” I offer th’obligatory public “Fuck it.”Ciao.Ciao

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1123675546601046882005-08-10T07:01:00.000-05:002005-08-10T07:05:46.606-05:00

~A coda (cauda L. tail, see caudal, a word mostly append’d to fin, and that by ichthyologists, the fish-tail toss’d to the cat, related to coward, turn tail and run) is what’s writ to seize up the end. Cauterize. Size up. It is engine and uncoupler to combatants and lovers, it relinquishes gently the giant spouting claims made in the flurry, so that the world’s combatants and lovers may continue.

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1123592493647587432005-08-09T07:54:00.000-05:002005-08-09T09:12:14.900-05:00

~Dinginess and vermin, a woman in the part of Thin Anguish, guttering down. Dora Maar: “Pure as a lake boredom.” Emptiness is not boredom, emptiness is too impure and prickly, firewheel and stickpin “of the cauteriz’d heart.” I miss everything. Milieu of frenzy. Culpable anarchy, the joy-gibbet. Rinsed linen. Poised syringe and nylon. There is no fraught silence I will not attend to—“It will

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1123503425367037082005-08-08T07:01:00.000-05:002005-08-08T15:08:08.073-05:00

~If, comme on dit, it’s Monday, it must be Baghdad. Kent Johnson’s ask’d for a room hereabouts to respond to Jim Behrle’s recent review: grant’d, amigo. Though I am notably a mild bystander to debates ferocious or pussycat’d, I thought I’d—singular nonce item!—offer up my two cents, contextualizing here for poor folks. Animosity runs deep in clowns. My favorite “instance”—one I liked to monicker

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1123502404292520652005-08-08T06:49:00.000-05:002005-08-08T07:00:04.403-05:00

~Solenoid stuck, the shiny ball jamming off the bumpers, banging away like a sluice gate, ratcheting up the numerals, going to turn the damn machine over with no hands on the flippers. Maybe one’s got to be of a certain Mechanickal Age to “get” that. Back when digital meant fine fingerwork. “The motives of the suspects remains pure specule, a perfect idea hid by its mirror-idea.” Picture that. I

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1123245767141775972005-08-05T07:38:00.000-05:002005-08-05T07:42:47.150-05:00

~Nietzsche names cynicism “the highest thing achievable on earth,” surely a statement in flagrante delicto with itself. Not unlike the dog slavering up its own genitalia, in solace perpetuum under greedy points of incisoral light. What things’ll exclude the corpulent reader of the madman’s books? Nietzsche lists—next to cowardice and uncleanliness—“the nook air of a soul.” Tactical, that. A nod

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1123161072269265402005-08-04T07:51:00.000-05:002005-08-04T08:11:13.136-05:00

~“The adoration of mountains, Mr. Poe read in Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos, and the contemplation of flowers distinguish Chinese poetry from that of Greece and Rome.” Guy Davenport. High yellow cirrus tresses trailing up off the cloudbank, oceanic lit spume. A photograph the “woman in tears” Dora Maar made: a paper-sail’d frigate braving waves of honey-colour’d hair, the whole mottled by a

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1123074933042614412005-08-03T08:11:00.000-05:002005-08-03T08:15:33.050-05:00

~What follows is, “verbatim with tidying” an unsolicit’d note and review sent by the redoubtable editor of Wherever We Put Our Hats, Jon Leon:John Latta,I read your post this evening concerning Kent Johnson. I discovered said poet in The Canary and I think he’s outstanding. Last week I finished a review on his Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz which will appear in wwpoh issue 2 along with about 8

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1122989250739669442005-08-02T08:23:00.000-05:002005-08-02T08:28:18.790-05:00

~Ravish’t to a T, that’s one way of feeling. Keats, admonishing the welter of blind choristers: “you need only agravate your voices a little and mind not to speak Cues and all—when you have said Rum-ti-ti—you must not rum any more or else another will take up the ti-ti alone and then he might be taken God shield us for little better than a Titmouse.” Oh Keats! He “had the right,” as they say. Too

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1122898783273321242005-08-01T07:07:00.000-05:002005-08-01T07:19:43.436-05:00

~Serious stuff for a Monday morning. To be got out of the way before I begin my late routine of mouthing off like Mehitabel. Kent Johnson—the one whom Ron Silliman recently compared to Darrell Gray, “the Actualist poet who drank himself to death far too young, especially Darrell’s work under the French pseudonym Phillipe Mignon, sort of a kinder, but not gentler, Kent Johnson” is how that

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1122640943552539002005-07-29T07:20:00.000-05:002005-07-29T08:21:35.500-05:00

~Renegade connoisseur of blue Yves Klein, with prêt-à-porter Gaston Bachelard for backup: “the poet, living in ‘contented world-weariness amidst oblivious tarns’, suffers from the irony of blueness. He perceives an excessively hostile blueness which strives with an indefatigable hand to ‘fill the gaping blue holes wickedly made by birds.’” Blued blue. Van Gogh knew it too: “I paint infinity, a

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1122556746436197572005-07-28T08:11:00.000-05:002005-07-28T08:19:06.443-05:00

~The Luddite that inhabits my century says, “In order to make a few cents, think of a bath concession / In some little town like Gabii,” or try auctioneering, gabbling out the hysteria of commerce-lust over some bit of frippery, a ring, a washstand, a property. Prop: what the stagehand skids frowningly about whilst the curtains tremble with post-inertial pomp. Wallace Stevens writes: “Be content—

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1122468393214630652005-07-27T07:35:00.000-05:002005-07-27T07:46:33.223-05:00

~Down’d a reuben and two loggy green gherkins (early mod. Dutch, gurkkiun, dim. of agurk, augurk (also shortened gurk), cucumber—the proximate source is uncertain) at the Café Bitter, and thought about things for a spell. Smack’d into “Tykishness” (Hopkins). What is it? A too stern longing for th’abyss? The way a man’ll bark for hours up a cottonwood thinking he’s spy’d a skirt there? Dopey

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1122382337931620942005-07-26T07:49:00.000-05:002005-07-26T07:52:17.936-05:00

~Cadenza or glissando, either way I’d need to add a ledger line to hang some notes on. So big the number of notes. And in the morning mizzling showers, a viceroy flaps three flaps and dares no more—descends to dogwood leaf, all demimonde faded glory. A fado’d insect, the way the clang of an I-bean on concrete is a fado. Or a toothsome yip at midnight stirring out of the depths of a

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1122293855585987452005-07-25T07:01:00.000-05:002005-07-25T07:17:36.460-05:00

~Admirable the way fate places the down’d tree limb in the path of the cross-burden’d pilgrim, causing him to pitch headlong into the graffiti’d boulder, acceding the troublesome journey to another, and getting him to heaven scot-free. Or so saith the sophist. I’m rendering obliquely things best render’d oblique. Caesar dug that. If Keats—poor child!—can so gently lift the metaphorick’d earthworm

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1122037881688219462005-07-22T08:05:00.000-05:002005-07-22T08:11:21.693-05:00

~Ice-cube settling in a tumbler, a chink in the sultry night. A hinge into th’alert. Whereas prior: kraal’d soporific nodding. Kef-dreamy. “As if divinity had catched / The itch on purpose to be scratched.” How things is hid right up surfacewards! Think of Christopher Columbus, constantly on duty, he who one period went thirty-two days without sleep! Pestilential incendiary walkingstick man he

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1121949639044600082005-07-21T07:25:00.000-05:002005-07-21T07:43:46.743-05:00

~Baseball under a roiling sky of a myriad shades of blue-gray palette, a featherbed of a sky. And downpour, and resumption. And a muddy late walk with the dog, no moon along to hobnob with. The snatch and turn mode: these notes, deflecting the real, or swooping it up into its embrasure. Embouchure. Melville says human affairs are “sustained by a sort of half-disciplined chaos,” and continues: “he

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1121862805724753582005-07-20T07:23:00.000-05:002005-07-20T07:33:25.733-05:00

~Pitch’d resolve to sit out a few rounds, rather than to continue the cage-rattling obfuscatory one’s in danger of making a trademark hereabouts. Thinking I’d board up the place, notify the village authority a grand sell-off’d commence at sundown, bibelots and dust-catchers, perfectly plant’d impatiens, phloxes, hostas, snapdragons! And then, inevitalbly, the turpentiney-sour resolutions cark

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1121688764387044492005-07-18T07:08:00.000-05:002005-07-18T07:12:44.500-05:00

~“Brain-caking hiatus.”            —Paul Metcalf, on Melville’s “stuck” birth.~To work.

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1121432211869859862005-07-15T07:52:00.000-05:002005-07-15T07:56:51.876-05:00

~“It is the nature of sculpture to be there.” So saith Frank O’Hara about the husky-flamboyant David Smith, and he ain’t kidding. Achieved mass: no finicky script, no negligible twitter, no brokedown-radio-lambency: that’s why poets avoid the sculptural, it’s that inconsolable presence that terrifies and beleaguers so. They’d all druther be tootin’ around the hearth-flicker—“I love no roast but

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1121347229836809032005-07-14T08:17:00.000-05:002005-07-14T08:20:29.843-05:00

~Bastille Day, &our hero’ssmush’d upagainst th’alarmist& alarmingtemps réel,no palaisidéal construct’d by PostmanHorse visible. Sous lespavés, th’implacableplage, literallittoral, orbelittle’d litterof th’unviable,curiously wet.To vie unconstrainedly isthe point,unharnessable, ofswimming andmost othercalisthenickal orrevolutionary callings.~Read: What Ever Happened, by Tim Reynolds (If Publishing

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1121256379906766752005-07-13T07:03:00.000-05:002005-07-13T07:06:19.913-05:00

~Here’s a rictus grin to summer’s waywardness, lost focus, the teeth jumbled in haphazard lean, incised with dates and duties. Or, say, otherly focus, the timothy grasses plump’d with pollen, all the monocotyledonous sheaths upright and bluewintry-color’d, hue of Appaloosa and dogpatch, realm of Kentucky canine and clay scoop’d out of streambeds, a coprophagous treat. Harry Mathews says: “The

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1121172103518400292005-07-12T07:37:00.000-05:002005-07-12T07:46:55.540-05:00

~tendsindintendsindintendsindintendsindintendsindintendsindintendsindintendsindin

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1121030925741253612005-07-11T05:27:00.000-05:002005-07-11T06:20:06.800-05:00

(larger image)"Moins de travail, plus de rêves." --- Anne Boyer~John Latta is off paying a call toOdalisqued

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1120826490825852362005-07-08T07:37:00.000-05:002005-07-08T07:41:30.833-05:00

~Neck-tickle leads to palpable ear-wig larva, softly green—judging by the fore-pincers—one millimeter, longreaching for you.~A fine drizzle wets down every-thing and onenotes the “inherently geometric structure of the landscape.” Cézanne scrawls a letter:The sun is so startling it makes it look as if objectscould be lifted off their outlines . . .I put myself into the hardchalk perimeter ofa body

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1120136426612224922005-06-30T07:52:00.000-05:002005-06-30T08:00:26.620-05:00

~Off tomorrow for a week or so, points in the cluttery east, meaning the usual incognito namelessness of the shy man with a burden of books, a bookish man with a shy binocular’d look, ordinary company to keep, unkempt, with songs for a far off songstress bare-audible under the city hum o. Meaning I doubt I’ll get to knocking down any doors, or at any doors, or upturning any governmental Hummers

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1120052995375147112005-06-29T08:37:00.000-05:002005-06-29T08:49:55.383-05:00

~Big haul in the mail, The Poker, and new Flood Gilfillan, and Friedlander pamphlets, (joining the Gam, the new New American Writing, the Szymaszek Emptied of All Ships) and my resolve (is it resolve?) to tarry a little, to stay the habit so easily glommed to, falters a little—whence all the fleury fandango and rev anyhow? The urge to subvert th’expect’d up to the point of re-becoming (expect’d)?

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1119965162200754002005-06-28T08:21:00.000-05:002005-06-28T08:26:02.206-05:00

~Here’s a feller I identify with: Tithonus. Got the P. D. G. Zeus-monsieur to hand him down a jangling bunch of keys, immortality-style, and forgot to ask for the “Forever Young” number. Caught the dewy-fresh girl at the roadhouse, sympatique and blowsy, made a keen-edged double blade of a couple. Only she’s interminably dewy-fresh—he feebles out like a bug, some desiccant exoskeletal knee-sawer.

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1119878518888882832005-06-27T08:05:00.000-05:002005-06-27T08:21:58.946-05:00

~Think I is wont to continue flailing, th’earnest perusements of books’ll wait. “Maybe it’s just melodramatic stuff.” A sentence I wrote yesterday. Another spoke of something’s being “autobiographical sounding”—I could’ve point’d it into th’oceanic, I could’ve made “depth-charge” a metaphor for something. I wrote “intensity, a live coal”—I did not use the word “scarred.” Borderline preciosity,

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1119620333752291402005-06-24T08:29:00.000-05:002005-06-24T15:10:40.666-05:00

~Pages accumulate, great sapient arrivals by mail, industry panning out in stacks, squared off, diabolically correct, containers for the scuffle and brush, language beating its little empty heart out like a tom-tom. My dog croons sleeping, dream-jittery. Who recalls Plastique Bertrand, isn’t “French punk” oxymoronic, je suis croonaire? To note that a Madame Blognard inhabits one of Jacques

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1119533246797730492005-06-23T08:16:00.000-05:002005-06-23T08:27:26.806-05:00

~How about a magazine call’d La Fourmi? Or, better, La Fourmi, Pissant! How about The Ant? How about The Pismire? Or Le Pire, or Le Pied? I continue with my obvious disregard. I like it here. I like it most everywhere, circumference and rod. Call it a chuzzlewit’d field holler. Pointy-head eschewment. Mental chaw. Might go, “complexity is not a crime.” Might go, “nothing is plain.” Might go, “

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1119446201292680242005-06-22T08:11:00.000-05:002005-06-22T08:16:41.300-05:00

~Gathering up a hank of tulle, or lace, some fine loose weave, and letting it hang like drapery over my eyes: “I kind of like veils,” to nobody in particular. Or a statuesque blonde in a caftan sewing nearby, stretch’d out leggy on a bed. A man with the poor hygiene (tobacco-black’d teeth, stringy hair) of a German intellectual is targeting me with some French conversation: “Something something

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1119361399986766262005-06-21T08:29:00.000-05:002005-06-21T12:50:59.323-05:00

~Received:Down Spooky, by Shanna Compton (Winnow Press, 2005) ($14, 3505 El Dorado Trail, Suite A, Austin, Texas 78739)Lodged somewhere in a cupboard in one of the back rooms (first built) of th’Hotel is a squib about Shanna Compton’s chapbook call’d Down Spooky. I’ll skip the fuss and muss to find it. (Okay, here it is.) What I recall is exuberance and dash, a willingness to go full-tilt any

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1119271501280902742005-06-20T07:41:00.000-05:002005-06-20T10:21:09.246-05:00

~Road to Damascus breakdown and hobo shuffle. Call it benign lethargy. A katydid stuck like a tie-tack to my brow. Call it shifty-eyed under the high pressure ridge. Call it temporary petulance, donning the fuggits against th’expect’d. Call it jujubes bestuck in the molars, the keyboard. “Reader Number One say to Reader Number Two, ‘If th’Hotel shut down, what we gonna do?’ Reader Number Two say

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1119012789821455822005-06-17T07:49:00.000-05:002005-06-17T07:53:40.110-05:00

~One sore horse today. Two hours shoveling potash down into the gully’s ’nough for any man. Or throwing high white projectiles (“God is a big white baseball”) for two hours to a scramble of kids (“—Mine.” “—I got it.”) So I hump’d home and sat dastardly in my mayhem, hummed a little tune. Here’s a thing I snatch’d off someone: “Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1118928334419126322005-06-16T08:21:00.000-05:002005-06-16T08:26:51.550-05:00

~Received:Xantippe, No. 3 , edited by Kristen Hanlon ($10 or 2 / $18, P. O. Box 20997, Oakland, California 94620-0997) Cover photograph by Trane DeVore.Poems by Fanny Howe, Elizabeth Willis, Devin Johnston, Michael Sikkema, Dario Campos, Joshua Edwards, Kirsten Kaschock, Brian Strang, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Colby, Brennen Wysong, Laura Walker, and Joshua Corey.“Free Again,” a chapbook by Joseph

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1118841892766312042005-06-15T08:10:00.000-05:002005-06-15T08:24:52.776-05:00

~Received:Wherever We Put Our Hats, No. 1, edited by Jon Leon ($5, 429 Euclid Terrace B, Atlanta, Georgia 30307)Poems by Aaron Tieger, Kate Schapira, Alli Warren, Tim Yu, Joel Dailey, Bruce Covey, Jennifer Moxley, Eric Ambling, Jon Leon, John Latta, and Aaron McColloughEditor’s remark: “All necessary words welcome.” Pound-pithy, terse, and just. And fits the magazine to a T. Straight, no chaser.

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1118754415056357682005-06-14T08:00:00.000-05:002005-06-14T08:06:55.063-05:00

~Semi-alarming temptation to say “Bah!” and be done with it. Season of Etta James and constricting tempers. Season of “Brooks Run Into the Ocean.” Reading David Antin (i never knew what time it was) for lack. And the occasional nugatory:because time is measured by change         and change destabilizes all things         especially human things         because we are all temporary steady state

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1118666301863403912005-06-13T07:30:00.000-05:002005-06-13T07:40:00.063-05:00

~Bought (50¢ Yard Sale):Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets and More Poets, by Donald Hall (Ticknor & Fields, 1992)Hall on Marianne Moore, who’s tired of “branding”: “My last communication from her was bewildering. On a postcard . . . she mentioned that she would probably have nothing to contribute, “except that I don’t write Syllabic Verse although of course words have syllables. M.

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1118411802619974042005-06-10T08:33:00.000-05:002005-06-10T08:56:42.630-05:00

~Reading a Hugh Kenner lecture on Gerard Manley Hopkins that Mark Woods point’d at a few days back, I find what needs repeating: “To generalize is to be an idiot, wrote William Blake in the margin of one celebration of high-minded generality, the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds.” Kenner’s talking about Hopkins’s brave insistence on particulars (along with that of W. S. Gilbert—of “and Sullivan,

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1118323784405030142005-06-09T08:25:00.000-05:002005-06-09T08:29:44.410-05:00

~Didn’t I used to collect phrases for the moon? Insect racket and neighborhood scents, that hardy cut grass laminate sealing down a sub-nasality of exhaust fume and barbecue dreg? So, tonight—the moon a crescent dent, mark of a hammer-blow just glanced off the sky’s low matte finish. And a peculiar blood-in-the-urine pinkish tinge veering to orange.~Baseball practice with G. First year of kid’s

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1118234524390272062005-06-08T07:31:00.000-05:002005-06-08T07:42:04.396-05:00

~Proposed addition to th’Evans / Moxley Flaubertian Dictionary of Received Ideas:Clark Coolidge: Always use the word “percussive” when referring to Clark Coolidge’s “difficult” poetry. Note knowingly: “He’s a trained jazz drummer.”~Received (Bridge Street Books):Rousseau’s Boat, by Lisa Robertson (Nomados, 2004) ($10, P.O. Box 4031, 349 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, B.C. Canada V6B 3Z4)How

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1118151133680231372005-06-07T08:25:00.000-05:002005-06-08T07:45:09.556-05:00

~Ben Friedlander sent me a fatten’d envelope of perusables (and listenables) and I my own ornery self drug home a collection of Fairfield Porter books and it’s vaguely tornado weather and I twist in ineffable circles, not knowing how to proceed.Received:World War II Radio Speeches: Draft Text / Prototype CDs, by Ezra Pound. “Historic recordings of nine speeches housed at the National Archives II,

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1118061687962746262005-06-06T07:29:00.000-05:002005-06-06T07:45:03.056-05:00

~Read: Memoir: 1960-1963, by Tony Towle (Faux Press, 2001)“Jane was the painter Jane Freilicher, in fact the “Jane” I had encountered in several of O’Hara’s and Koch’s poems. I had once thought she was a shared rhetorical device (‘Exactly, Jane . . .’) . . .”~The purely plodding in America crave to get going. ~Roundabout trial and error of selecting the “next” book. Flow Chart, no. “The force /

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1117807122426827502005-06-03T08:43:00.000-05:002005-06-03T08:58:42.433-05:00

~J. is off to Florida—“the state with the prettiest name, / the state that floats in brackish water, / held together by mangrove roots”—early tomorrow morning. There where “birds are outsize. Pelicans crash / into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard, / . . . like pickaxes, / rarely coming up with anything to show for it, / and going off with humorous elbowings.” Elizabeth Bishop. (

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1117719605729018642005-06-02T08:34:00.000-05:002005-06-02T08:40:05.743-05:00

~I find it bizarre and troubling that Ron Silliman—for all the high-hand’d talk of “community”—refuses to acknowledge criticism. That he so adamantly refuses to engage—in what is merely the latest example—with Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg’s combined defense of th’eclecticism of the Poems for the Millenium anthology, against Silliman’s potshot nitpicking. Modus operandi Silliman: simply

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1117628418925276072005-06-01T07:13:00.000-05:002005-06-01T07:20:18.956-05:00

~Th’indefatigable Lance Phillips’s got a spanking new Here Comes Everybody up, an interview with proprietor John Latta of th’Hotel. ~How to Imagine notes. Gianfranco Baruchello talking about the “feeling of being finally in possession of a language or an instrument of knowledge that finally has the ductility that it should have,” and how it’s provided him with “a new kind of rhythm, a new sense

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1117543436605346102005-05-31T07:28:00.000-05:002005-05-31T07:46:02.546-05:00

~A turn unhinder’d is what Signals it, a riotous gravitasInsuperable. To condone, say, officially,The undoings and unravellings ofReason’s clerical mischief, that’s whatI’d like to see here.Off under the burdock’s elephantineLeaves, a snail is shooting Forth one “eye,” then th’other.~A veritable nigh-backwash of receivables, and noted:118 Westerly Terrace, by Susan Howe (Belladonna, 2005) ($4,

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1117200786963374822005-05-27T08:13:00.000-05:002005-05-27T08:33:07.010-05:00

~ Received:Bookforum, Vol. 12, Issue 2, (June / July / Aug / Sept 2005), edited by Eric Banks, &c. ($3.95, 350 Seventh Ave., New York, New York 10001)Fiction Editor Albert Mobilio’s pull’d together twenty or so writers—Don DeLillo, Joanna Scott, Lydia Davis, Richard Powers, Lorrie Moore, and Jay Cantor amongst them—to squib on Pynchon’s influence thirty-some years after the publication of Gravity

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1117116515619325682005-05-26T08:46:00.000-05:002005-05-26T09:08:35.653-05:00

~ Received:Eureka Slough, by Joseph Massey (effing press, 2005) ($5, 703 W. 11th Street #2, Austin, Texas 78701) Cover illustration and design by Wendy Heldmann.If I’m recalling rightly the smallish poems in Massey’s Minima St., then these (presumably) newer poems are getting (incrementally) bigger. And Massey’s diction’s getting wilier—specificity making for a clean precision of image and a more

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1117026560493450172005-05-25T07:48:00.000-05:002005-05-25T08:09:20.550-05:00

~ Received:Radi os, by Ronald Johnson, with an Afterword by Guy Davenport (Flood Editions, 2005) Designed by Jeff Clark of Quemadura. Cover: details of William Blake’s Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve.                                    love shall outdo                            death, and dying                                                    assume    Man’s nature,

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1116941507407378502005-05-24T08:20:00.000-05:002005-05-24T08:31:47.416-05:00

~One finds few and (mostly) restrain’d hints (pointers to the conflict) regarding the early language poetry / New York School animosities in Alice Notley’s Coming After: Essays on Poetry. What one sees is an attention to conversation, speech, that (I’d like to think) lends some credence to what I see’s the seesaw of “American” verse. Teeter goes up for writing, totter for speech. The

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1116851403946077432005-05-23T07:20:00.000-05:002005-05-23T07:30:04.220-05:00

~How quickly “one” gets pegged—by a variety of forces—into what, for some, amounts to a constricting, a cutting off of available directions. Note: in 1998, less than thirty years after her first book, Alice Notley, sees the need to announce (“The Poetics of Disobedience”):For a long time I’ve seen my job as bound up with the necessity of noncompliance with pressures, dictates, atmospheres of,

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1116593120788214432005-05-20T07:36:00.000-05:002005-05-20T07:45:20.823-05:00

~Where’d I see Tom Beckett’s voucher that Ron Silliman admits to the use of “strategic overstatement” in critical writing? As if that explain’d it. Sort of like the guy who’s constantly getting off a stream of fuckin’ this, and fuckin’ thats. Where’s he going to go to find an expletive when it’s needed? Or an intensifier in all that hysteria? Strategy must needs be based on a sense of measure, is

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1116507370384115192005-05-19T07:53:00.000-05:002005-05-19T07:56:10.390-05:00

~If materiality’s gain’d by making the language itself visible, do the material tics lead to mannerist predictabilities. Is “plain speech” a materialist tic? Equal to baroque gussyings-up? Perhaps the “baseline” changes: Hemingway’s pared-down prose is a hard-edged material after the redoubtable verbiage and slush it reject’d. Against a period-style of “plain speech” gone to invisibility, the

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1116425729238775682005-05-18T09:06:00.000-05:002005-05-18T09:15:29.246-05:00

~Stray Ashbery (Selected Prose) notes. Reason enough to read Locus Solus: to encounter the Roussel-invent’d fluid “resurrectine,” which “if injected into a fresh corpse causes it continually to act out the most important moment of its life.”Artaud pointing to Surrealism’s “inattention to the object.” Is metaphor itself found’d on a vacillant attention? Attending (to) two objects? How Ashbery,

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1116253034351650072005-05-16T09:11:00.000-05:002005-05-16T09:20:13.146-05:00

~Received:The Hat, No. 6, edited by Jordan Davis and Chris Edgar ($12 / issue, or $20 / two issues. 323 Degraw Street, #2, Brooklyn, New York 11231)Okay: sense of something extruding here: that under the hat is clump’d a retinue, a crowd, a mayhem—truth is, I don’t know what to call it, not exactly a “generation” (too serious, inaccurate), not exactly a “school” (too many delinquents, too many

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1115988862515046982005-05-13T07:45:00.000-05:002005-05-13T07:54:22.526-05:00

~One of the “Adagia” in Stevens’s Opus Posthumous: “Hermit of poetry.” Another: “One reads poetry with one’s nerves.” Publish’d 1957. Surely a source of O’Hara’s “You just go on your nerve.” Written 3 September 1959. Though I remain suspicious of that “surely.” ~If it’s Thursday, mention the Lumina. Mention the starling ratcheting up they ornery little voice-boxes in the scrubby wastes

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1115904032174389862005-05-12T08:02:00.000-05:002005-05-12T08:20:32.416-05:00

~El doggo flop’d on the bed, J. out and about, G. monkeying with a newsletter, stretching titles big, or slanty, or shadowy. Post-repast slack-hand’dness, that’s it. Feeling a little like a chump about yadda-yadda-ing the solid Mr. Stevens. Maybe th’impulse crops up at the cold instigation of that particular poem, its avow’d set-piecedness. For who’d refuse to admire a man capable of so

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1115819389357928272005-05-11T08:24:00.000-05:002005-05-11T08:49:49.620-05:00

~Received: Alaskaphrenia, by Christine Hume (A Green Rose Book, New Issues, 2004)A little song keeps running around my head, that Blind Blake “Diddy-wah-diddy” thing: “I wish somebody ’d tell me what ‘Alaskaphrenia’ means?” Which is interrupt’d by “One must have a mind of winter . . .” and which, yadda yadda yadda (you should have it down “cold” by now), flying through the Stevensesque details,

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1115730946698811672005-05-10T07:57:00.000-05:002005-05-10T08:15:46.966-05:00

~Received (The University of Michigan Press): Material Witness: The Selected Letters of Fairfield Porter, edited by Ted Leigh. Introduction by David Lehman with additional notes by Justin Spring. (University of Michigan Press, 2005)Out of a letter of 6 August 1971 to Ron Padgett:A poem that one likes is not necessarily one that is easy to make a picture for: but that is in itself interesting, it

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1115644314001643392005-05-09T08:03:00.000-05:002005-05-09T08:11:54.006-05:00

~Weekend’s like a balloon, seeming infinitely elastic at th’onset, “a bag into which everything put ends up belonging,” only to go whizzing off in a high wet blubber, skewing to th’air, dodgy and inept. Left: limp, wrinkle’d, spent nothingness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know it’s a metaphor. ~Managed only a few notes, raw, uncomplicated by commentary (mayhaps) out of (mostly interrupted, furtive,

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1115384617084690332005-05-06T07:51:00.000-05:002005-05-06T08:03:37.326-05:00

~Okay, quick show of hands. Ever get that pinch’d gut feeling ’s if some demonological hayseed’s trying to paw out th’innards (Haystack Jones, professional wrestler of the Friday night fights “era,” call’d it a “tiger claw,” no?) that admits that, today, right now, you detest all that poetry baloney?Poets, ptoouii. That unreasonable malarkey of import in the lining up of words. “‘Personville,’ is

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1115301700020239682005-05-05T08:52:00.000-05:002005-05-05T09:01:40.030-05:00

~Received:The Joyous Age, by Christopher Nealon (Black Square Editions, 2004) Design’d by Quemadura. ($13, 1200 Broadway, Suite 3C, New York, New York 10001)Before I turn’d to the opening paragraphs of Christopher Nealon’s recent essay, “Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism,” and got (gently) bludgeon’d with “a kind of Frankfurt school turn” (I admit: I’m useless when

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1115217313328460882005-05-04T09:07:00.000-05:002005-05-05T12:54:32.016-05:00

~Beckett, reviewing the possibilities of art criticism, ending with a kind of motto here chez Hotel Point: “Let us not speak of criticism proper . . . Otherwise, one does general aesthetics, like Lessing. This is a charming game. Or one deals in anecdotes, like Vasari and Harper’s Magazine. Or one puts together catalogues raisonnés . . . Or one frankly devotes oneself to a disagreeable and

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1115125420290292072005-05-03T07:47:00.000-05:002005-05-03T08:05:39.013-05:00

~Received (Pepperwood Grove / King’s Highway Crossroads):Drawings, by Eve Aschheim (Black Square Editions, 2003) Catalogue of a 2001 exhibition, “Eve Aschheim-Kasimir Malevich” at the Galerie Rainer Borgemeister, Berlin. “All works 12 X 9 inches, gesso, black gesso, ink, graphite, charcoal, Koh-I-Noor Negro lead on Duralene Mylar.” Mount’d in th’aftermath of Borgemeister’s death in a car accident

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1115036989482230682005-05-02T07:26:00.000-05:002005-05-02T07:29:49.483-05:00

~“Sociability spoil’d the boy,” round two. A lazy nap-bless’d Sunday. Ruminating the scatter’d pockets of conversation left in the rooms, admiring the terrific parcel of books brought, lunching off the leftovers J.’d made—the walnut-y pesto, the rococo beans Siciliano, the ricotta’d up mousse au chocolat, the Pepperwood Grove noir! Welters of unprocess’d “stuff” at the breakwall. And for now, my

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1114781804092570262005-04-29T08:21:00.000-05:002005-04-29T08:53:49.906-05:00

~Received:Entanglement, by Allen Fisher (The Gig, 2004) Cover by Allen Fisher, four panels (5-8) of allotment days. ($22 US, 109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, Ontario, M2N 2B1 Canada)Nate Dorward, who put Entanglement together—edited and typeset—must be a one-man dynamo. I received the book as part of renewal promotion offer’d by the Chicago Review, rather skeptically ticking the Fisher box, knowing

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1114695997858827292005-04-28T08:37:00.000-05:002005-04-28T08:47:54.803-05:00

~Received:Saline, by Kimberly Lyons (Instance Press, 2005) Cover image by Brenda Iijima. Cover design by Anna Moschovakis and Brenda Iijima. ($10, SPD, 1341 Seventh Street, Berkeley, California 94710)There’s something primary here. Boldly color’d (“a sudden / canary yellow leaf”), with an emphatic precise certainty (“Dial a red telephone and meow / to a cow”) interspersed with other diffuse

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1114607242135185692005-04-27T07:56:00.000-05:002005-04-27T08:07:22.136-05:00

~Home in rain. Walk’d the dog in rain. Patch’d the bicycle tire that’d skidded my ass down the morning street. (Leapt on (the borrow’d) J.’s bike to ride to work, dorkily low-riding it, knees up around earlobes with every peddle. Though (secretly) I enjoy being a Kafkaesque spectacle, a giant insectlike creature with haunt’d eyes and a bad haircut.) Genius is all haunt’d eyes and bad haircuts:

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1114520572870932922005-04-26T07:57:00.000-05:002005-04-26T08:02:52.873-05:00

~—I love it when Ron Silliman talks about intellectual dishonesty.—Oh yeah, it’s so . . .—Dirty’d!—Always!—Already!~A curious schism adulterated:One of the typical weaknesses of penny-ante avant-garde sentiment, lulled by illusions, is that it resents its own attachment (read: communitas) as an infected wound, that it bears a childish love for its debility, that it adores overestimating itself in

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1114432541295791072005-04-25T07:27:00.000-05:002005-04-25T07:35:41.303-05:00

~“Ostentatiously thinky”? Skim’d the David Orr “column” (poetry, apparently, is now relegated to the ranks of th’other irregularly column’d featurette’d hobbyist-fodder—beekeeping, gardening, philately, &c.) whilst spooning down my milk-sodden’d roll’d oats and couldn’t, indeed, determine the difference betwixt, however “ostentatious” and “unthinky” the quotable Milkdud present’d. Several “

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1114177449581188102005-04-22T08:28:00.000-05:002005-04-22T08:44:09.583-05:00

~Received:The New Review of Literature, Vol. 2, No. 2, edited by Paul Vangelisti, with Douglas Messerli (Fiction), Dennis Phillips and Martha Ronk (Poetry), Standard Schaefer (Nonfiction), and Guy Bennett (Translation) ($12.95, Otis College of Art & Design, 9045 Lincoln Blvd., Los Angeles, California 90045)Poetry by Jaime Saenz (tr. Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson), Diane Ward, Ralph Angel, Brent

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1114093975675137442005-04-21T09:15:00.000-05:002005-04-21T09:32:55.680-05:00

~Scuttlebutt Corner: Plotz’d and flub-slumgullion’d we be by continuing calls for an anthology of the Spice Girls Circle. Weren’t they sort of “media-made”—not unlike the Monkees, and the Plasmatics? O Wendy O! Drinking buddies a backup band do not necessarily make. As Anthony Burgess reported elsewhere: “Say, an anthology of small potatoes . . .” Question: is Michael Palmer consider’d a Spice

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1114001220099372762005-04-20T07:30:00.000-05:002005-04-20T07:47:00.103-05:00

~To the “Captious and wrangling reader”—as Bunyon writes somewhere in a whole series of notes to a whole series of (variable, explicit) readers—though between the two of you (readers) I know neither to wrangle (much). Explaining to somebody recently how everything I write gushes (seeps) into the miasma known as Blogland—the back half of my brain-function start’d a separate conversation with

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1113916088787758832005-04-19T07:55:00.000-05:002005-04-19T08:08:08.793-05:00

~Bought (Friends of the Library):Private Parties, by Jonathan Penner (Avon / Bard, 1985)There’s an excellent possibility that I got Penner confused, though with whom? Aucune idée. Even looking for a suitably dorky paragraph makes me ill-at-ease. (He used “dorky.”) “So Duane had left New Rochelle and hitchhiked to Sandra’s and Otis’s house in Mamaroneck.” Yeuh. Thumbing it closely I think of guy

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1113831948911870582005-04-18T08:44:00.000-05:002005-04-18T08:45:48.913-05:00

~A fine weekend of bedazzling warmth and sunlight provid’d backdrop to delivery out into the rare social unconstraint, sitting in good company porch-bound and free, plucking out songs to African peanut soups, Sephardic breads, and a daughter soon-to-be-grace’d Shakespeareanly. Assez, beauté, ralentissez. ~ To work.

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1113572615923975042005-04-15T08:39:00.000-05:002005-04-15T08:47:13.300-05:00

~A thought-experiment, Casanova-boost’d, Simulcast-style. What if one were to argue that:Of late, in these States, th’availing (two, major) poetries’ve been defined into gel-status, which is to say sealed off from each other behind poetic definitional boundaries like so many monads that contain the principle of their own causality. Fortify’d by endless righteous commentaries (a busy two-way

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1113486357511283422005-04-14T08:43:00.000-05:002005-04-14T08:50:59.103-05:00

~A friend just sent me here (mp3) or here (Real Audio). Off The Voice of the Poet: Frank O’Hara:“To the Film Industry in Crisis” by Frank O’Hara was recorded May 11, 1957 in New York City. The poem was read by Frank O’Hara and Jane Freilicher. The music was arranged by John Gruen. Permission courtesy of Maureen Granville-Smith, executor, Frank O’Hara estate. The recording was part of Evergreen

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1113485223829278632005-04-14T08:20:00.000-05:002005-04-14T08:27:03.836-05:00

~Okay, quickly: the story of Vincent Voiture, courtesy of Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters. Voiture (meaning “car”) got charged with defending to the French Academy (sclerotic defenders of the language) the use of the conjunction car (meaning “because” or “for”) in lieu of the Academy’s preference for pour ce que. Which Voiture did—in a “noble” style:At a time when fortune stages

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1113400845878470012005-04-13T08:56:00.000-05:002005-04-13T09:00:45.883-05:00

~As a member in good standing of the sterling conglomerate of market analysts (an huge and unremarkable body in these States, most conditioned to “lives of quiet desperation”—as Thoreau’d say), Ron Silliman is likely to know (and cherish) the dictum of the repeater: “Say it enough and they’ll come to think it’s so.” Nothing else could explain the relentlessness of Silliman’s (insufferable)

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1113311724692095012005-04-12T08:14:00.000-05:002005-04-12T08:22:09.983-05:00

~Erm, just look who’s the careless reader now! It’s Mr. Latta! So enamour’d be he of calling Mr. Silliman a twit (that rustle of short-i insect noises awhirr in ’s head), he didn’t read none too careful and sees now that Mr. Silliman call’d none “twit”—it were the finer man Mr. Shakespeare (who is, one supposes, allow’d). Sorry, Ron Silliman. The remainder remains.

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1113311176853057052005-04-12T07:57:00.000-05:002005-04-12T08:06:16.856-05:00

~Received:Verse, Vol. 21, Nos. 1-3, edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki. “The Second Decade” issue. ($20, Department of English, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602)A white brick of an issue. Randomly sampling (a sort of “sortes Versiclianes”):Dear Neruda—he’s a langoustine of a man, a violet maiden in multicolored fleece,both hands paralyzed from swatting political lice. Neruda! A

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1113227009651081992005-04-11T08:34:00.000-05:002005-04-11T08:44:46.346-05:00

~Bought (Friends of the Library):Trial Impressions, by Harry Mathews (Burning Deck, 1977)A Queneauvian exercices de style that runs riffs and variations on a morsel out of John Dowland’s Second Booke of Ayres:Deare, if you change, Ile never chuse againe,Sweete, if you shrinke, Ile never think of love,Fayre, if you faile, Ile judge all beauty vaine,Wise, if too weake, my wits Ile never prove.

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1112878367192776462005-04-07T07:45:00.000-05:002005-04-07T10:26:57.820-05:00

~—Missed Dorothy’s ruby slippers, isWhat he is shouting, theDog is barking loudly atThe two wiener dogs theHomosexual couple walk by, goingSaunteringly slow, as if earthWere not for us, norUs for earth. See Thoreau.~A conversationalist, a terrific con-Versationalist, is what gets saidIn circles where the socialMagnum of plonk is pass’dAnd th’individual skanky boozer isSuspect, just the way oneIs

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1112795709717249262005-04-06T08:44:00.000-05:002005-04-06T08:55:09.723-05:00

~What good is a collectionOf moments scissor’d out ofThe raw hurly-burly ofSheer indisposable ongoingness, that crassAttenuated noise unscissorably shorn, isBut one of the thingsI’d like to know: there’sAn equal number of others.~O mechanicals of freesia! OGlabrous pinpoints! O palliative!The clarity of ubiquitous school-Stunned imponderables blows up aMalarkey of sorts. I getOff here. I churn

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1112708267542273102005-04-05T08:30:00.000-05:002005-04-05T08:38:43.653-05:00

~Putter’d about putting supper together—G. and J. off “orchestrally”—and decided it’d be a good moment to listen to the CD accompanying Bruns’s The Material of Poetry. Play’d the first six pieces: Steve McCaffery’s “Shamrock” (underwater blub-blubs, glug-glugs, strangle-snores), McCaffery’s “First Random Chance Poem” (the emergent repeat’d name “Julian Dowager” and tonal moaning combine for dirge

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1112625219573419862005-04-04T09:17:00.000-05:002005-04-04T09:33:39.580-05:00

~Bought (Friend of the Library):Settling the Score: Essays on Music, by Ned Rorem (Anchor / Doubleday, 1989)Desire to say “the divine Mr. R.” getting the better of me—tongue making exploratory of cheek. Lines out of a 1974 piece call’d “Why I Write as I Do,” half-Nietzschean exhortatory bravado, half-Rousselian inter-hiding Russian dolls:         What can be told about music that the music itself

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1112368689800114142005-04-01T10:06:00.000-05:002005-04-01T10:18:09.806-05:00

~Reading Report (Lyn Hejinian at the University of Michigan, introduced by Khaled Mattawa):Lyn Hejinian’s slighter than I’d pictured, direct, precise in her enunciation—a half-smile flickers and darts around her mouth, a lively thing that bespeaks intelligence, bemusement, a kind of grace. Just a hint of “girlishness” in the voice-timbre: one gets th’impression she’s comfortable in her skin, and

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1112280114084332362005-03-31T09:23:00.000-05:002005-03-31T09:41:54.090-05:00

~Received:The Poetry Project Newsletter, No. 203 (April / May 2005), edited by Marcella Durand ($5, St. Mark’s Church, 131 East 10th Street, New York, New York 10003)Nicole Brossard on lies: “I recently asked myself why it is that we do not react more to the enormities of the lies surrounding us . . . Is it because without noticing we have become used to living among them as advertising,

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1112197411101829812005-03-30T10:37:00.000-05:002005-03-30T10:44:35.753-05:00

~Farewell, Creeley. Just as I put a final touch to it, I see the news come up—died in Texas, pneumonia. So I open to the “Foreword” mention’d below, first sentence: “The comfortably adamant presence of things in this attractively various writing is a constant pleasure.” Mr. Robert Creeley wrote that, may it serve as epitaph. ~Bruns’s The Material of Poetry notes: To write under the sign of

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1112105675460582182005-03-29T08:59:00.000-05:002005-03-29T09:21:36.056-05:00

~Brack diminuendo of dog-snore,A pillow for a head.Two is too many booksTo try reading at oneSitting, do I make myselfClear? Shenanigans of a rut,Why not try a prosePoem? —I hate prose poems.~An uncharming lot of shuffling with th’accumulated papers, null set between the two antennae I hide with human ears, little cauliflowers, though one bigger ’n th’other, ah my Golden Gloves days. Nah, I fib,

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1112021443332236552005-03-28T09:25:00.000-05:002005-03-28T09:50:43.343-05:00

~Bought (Friends of the Library):The Great Dismal: A Swamp Memoir, by Bland Simpson (Henry Holt, 1993)Call me a bimbo for books like this—a pleasing clutter of history, natural and human, about a place that’s swell’d big in my image system for years, not unlike the sand hills of Nebraska, the desert near Twenty-Nine Palms, or the Canadian prairies.Much of the dark water that flows into the Great

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1111760992006081292005-03-25T09:21:00.000-05:002005-03-25T09:29:52.010-05:00

~Bought:The Factory of Facts, by Luc Sante (Pantheon, 1998)Drop’d G. at Swing City (tap-dancing) and hoof’d it “out” the corner of that strip mall—passing a miniature indent’d marsh-hollow fed by parking lot runoff where I heard the chork and rough-burr of a red-wing’d blackbird (harbinge-ing spring)—and “into” an adjacent one, the hijack’d book truckers dump and emporium. Wherein I glanced at

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1111675853692846632005-03-24T09:36:00.000-05:002005-03-24T09:50:53.696-05:00

~Received:Book Forum (April / May 2005), edited by Eric Banks, et alia. John Banville on Michel Houellebecq and H. P. Lovecraft, Gary Indiana on Emmanuel Carrère’s I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick, (and others), James Gibbons on Uwe Timm’s In My Brother’s Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS, (Timm’s Morenga is terrific, German colonials in Africa, in what is

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1111589203523854032005-03-23T09:38:00.000-05:002005-03-23T09:57:44.143-05:00

~“A” comes off the bookshelf. I scoot’d through it without pause in 1996, in the big white house. Knew I’d get bogged down if I tarry’d “considerably.” Here, in the partita of 13: “What do you want to know / What do you want to do, / In a trice me the gist us . . .” Rule of thumb: in a syntactical ball-up, look for a pun: Trismegistos. First name, Hermes. Meaning alchemickal slow grinder. Greek (

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1111502503440523572005-03-22T09:35:00.000-05:002005-03-22T09:42:29.080-05:00

~In a letter purportedly responding to (poetic!) letters received by that inessential and mediocre cyber-rag, The American Thinker, Thomas Lifson, identify’d (with laughable completeness for one who’s just mock’d the timid “credentializing” of the letter-writers) as “the editor and publisher of The American Thinker,” writes:Now there is nothing at all wrong with launching a letter-writing

John Lattahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01215219604418390000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888367.post-1111497502078472992005-03-22T08:15:00.000-05:002005-03-22T08:18:22.080-05:00

~My one allow’d beer’s drunk before I finish’d my country-mouse rustling, and no notion’s enter’d my cranial cavity—“no fly, no flea, no louse.” No bumptious doodah. So I rattle the chains, and the cabin boy pops up looking like a gopher. What about a sixty-thousand word novel that is (merely) the finger-exercises of somebody trying to get a poem “launch’d”? All that rubbishy whatever, dog

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