project

Andrew rode his bike to grand street; he wore a yellow Strand tshirt. Started Abhorrences by Edward Dorn, The Messenger by Jean Valentine, Just Space: Poems 1979 to 1989 by Joanne Kyger, Footprints by Denise Levertov, The Annotated "Here" and Selected Poems by Marjorie Welish, The Bad Infinity by Mac Wellman, and The Evening Sun by David Lehman. I kind of borrowed these books. There was also the homeless counselor's doppelganger; he also arrived on a bike; and how random. I just left a gallery two hours ago, standing in front of a painting by Larry Rivers. Somewhere below my current position

Three artists heading to japan? Cash bar, enough money for one can of Schaefer beer. A painting with dots on it. The place names always bother me. A chunk of black matter under his right big toe; he wore a sign that said "carpe diem." If I had a chance to see all of their work I'd say under the Kingsthorough Bridge in New York City.

Lust when you bought it was clover, I believe a throne call. An art widening in Rooklyn tomorrow night. Who else, the homeless counselor.

started Moby Dick or The Whale by Herman Melville

There is a cruel, messianic, dim, tribal intransigence / that gains you nothing / There's a bull-headed childish baby-tantrum / that can unleash untold consequences / I am appalled by the darkening of the sky / I watch my love / It is always my love that I watch.

--Simon Pettet

. . .I hope you get around to seeing this letter before I set off for Switzerland. Anyway, I sat at that French restaurant the other night, at the very same table where we sat a little over a year ago. Had the very same bottle of Sancerre wine from the Loire Valley that we had last time. Nothing had changed. I even stared at the peonies on the wall. Do you remember those white peonies? After dinner I braved the rain in order to hear some poetry at the Medicine Show, got off the 1 train at 50th and walked past tenth getting soaked because I had forgotten my umbrella. The Medicine Show is in the middle of a reading series put on by Barbara Vann, and last night Jack Collom and Simon Pettet read. They were introduced by Suzi Winson (Fish Drum Magazine), who apparently just finished working on a book with Collom. I assume this was the same stage where Kostelanetz’s Minimal Audio Plays were performed. You know, the ones we’re putting in number two. I think there’s just one stage, a couple ladders, cushioned chairs, folding chairs. It was the first place I’d heard poetry in New York where I felt like I could blank blank blank and nobody would care. Usually these damn things are so pretentious and anti-common. So Pettet went first; he had an unusual style of reading untitled poems twice. He would read them one way and then read them again with different emphasis, “there is a cruel, messianic, dim, tribal intransigence that gains you nothing--there’s a bull-headed childish baby-tantrum that can unleash untold consequences.” He ended with two translations, Baudelaire and one from a Turkish poet that appears in Murat Nemet-Nejat’s recent anthology. Then came Collom, thank gods for rural truth in unusual places, reading a poem in the shape of a slice about Derrida, and something about roots music and temerity. The tattoo in the shape of a star on the forearm connected to the wrist, connected to the fingers that held the page and work and birds on his t-shirt. There was also something about birds and Rilke and MeisterEckhard. I’m off to drink some whiskey now, and think how I need to start driving down the road when I get back from my trip, go somewhere, see some people, get away from the rats and smoke for a while. . .

yours,

John Most

started David Meltzer's Arrows: Selected Poetry 1957-1992, Philip Whalen's Canoeing Up Cabarga Creek: Buddhist Poems 1955-1986, Rosmarie Waldrop's Reluctant Gravities, Philip Whalen's Scenes of Life at the Capital, Anne Waldman's Giant Night, Diane Wakoski's Inside the Blood Factory.

Put something like homeostasis down. Jack Spicer writes about Merlin, "There was a Grail but he did not know that / Jailed." Predictable behavior is corrupt, get rid of it. Kill it somehow. Do something that usually abuses unusual. Stuart writes that some anonymous group "is not the mind though, / and its leaders are not the mindless. / it is the evening" and a jot of mother abstract guffs. Is that all that's left, I keep asking this question over and over again. I told him we'll keep to-be-named in front of collective, but he'll have to figure out a name for the series itself, to distinguish it from other projects. And the rising tide killed the dogfish. And I'm also crying to eviscerate someone smarter than pee that this is literature.

I think you have to be braver than that--look at the points where an ideology doesn't ranks. Ubiquitace does not fuchsia importance. It tooks a rare craziness, an eccentricity not seen before to handle this kind of load. Steady.

Attempt.

I stands in front of Cy Twombly's The Four Seasons in Queens: poet, looks, ray, winter, sun, primavera. A clown on the train ride home says sex, repent. Thinks the pawn plays with Ernst's rook or Giacometti's bishop or where's the feminine.

Plastic. Tongue. Bound.

I sacrificed myself to history, as a poet. Questions. Exile.