You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2009.
- A caribbean cloud by Jason Scott Jones
Releases #34, #37, #54 in an area of razor-wire topped buildings perforated by high velocity projectiles indexes the clammy aluminum clench of teeth against the downcast faces of women, when their hearts are in the ground, black vortex sees spots around full sun. Release #318 results suggest indomitable features of the terrain corresponding to "soft tolerances" amongst "humans," amongst "neighbors," amongst "the few" who come to mind. Indexed in this inference are my brother, myself, my father, wet cruxiform of testosterone fluttering in the early breeze. Releases #13 and #28 in proximity in an area of sighs and conversation indicate political nadir correlating to potential zeniths to come, oscillations in these air currents suggesting the wave is rising, rising overhead. Releases #5, #288 and #343 respectively, collated as it were, upon the principle that passersby speeding along the parameters of logical destiny, guitar playing (a digital file), "numbers reading numbers," Reyes called it. Nice day, a few clouds above the wide horizon, I'm telling you. Release #1266 elicits the "tips of the water" (as a student put it), indexed to oscillations in the general dreaming, and what else, Sky City turbid in gale force upper atmospheres, what else, Greater Pacific Trash Vortex? Whimsical delivery of utter solemnity. Release #33 and re-release #8 (we recycle) correlate in fluidity as of coursing blood, as of spattering urine, as of open faucets, indexed through regret, gravity, fatigue margins, where I waited for you. Releases #6903, # 355, # 19, and # 8456 converge at this location of migrant corridor where an angel turns her face away, indexed to groin injury, unspoken terrors, beyond exhaustion---there you notice how many believe this juncture to be somehow accidental. Or that they themselves are not there. Release # 991 indexed to whiff of alcohol, urine reek, dessicated or flaccid flesh, skin blackening or gray with dessication above a swollen bruising, amid wide horrors, puffy bobbling bubbly forms. Release #16 indexed to border-crossing rates on the Tohono O'odham lands, Rembrandt's lingering gaze or anyone's in a picture, a fence line as symbolic sweat element. Release #381 indicates the limits of happiness in a given locale, the child asking you for the half empty bottle in your hand not for the liquid but for the bottle, the shoreline delivering a repetitive sound sometimes you hear. Release #80 while the police in the parking lot ask passersby if anyone knows this man, apparently deceased, who has crawled into the backseat of someone's car to lie down, forever by the looks of him, and the evening is young. The sun is not yet low and the wind is picking up. Release #32 indexed to de-sedimentation and erosion, the building of ugly stucco McMansions on the hills, some in fire-prone chaparral, like lost leaves of a fossilized fern tree of the Jurassic, indications of the forthcoming rain of mud. Releases #310 and # 6901 cross-indexed to homeless sorrow, hopeless boldness, lives swept into the brush by the flood, deposited in the concrete embankments of the Los Angeles River, as you can see here. Separated one reality from another by the membrane of the eyelid. Release #220 aboard the USS Industrial Citizen indexed to flow charts, computer models, corporate ladders, Farenheit versus Celsius on a scale of 1 to 10, how long can you hold that pose? Looking down, you note the froth churning in Vs in the wake. Releases #2098, #70, #210, and #41 correlate in this site along Interstate 5 indexed to the Fort Tejon Corporation environmental study for a condominium city to be build adjacent as soon as the financial sector finds its footing in the future, suggesting its foot may be bolted down upon you or yours. Release #4800 indexed to the howling curses of the driver who felt he was cut off (he was speeding) speeding alongside in his small car, almost bawling out of his window shrieking and swerving in outrage, while the little star (actually Venus or Mars) is winking. Indicating the fall of dusk. Release #21 upon this shore indicates the wide, wide world round, indexing a wind that carries death fragrance of the rotting elephant seal (young female) with a solitary gull eating inside the face cavity---"funny, none of the other seagulls want any of it," Paul said. Indicating I was listening and the waves were massive from the storm that had passed. Releases # 3002 and #3459 indexing bricolage of kindness, beer and a squeeze of lime, friends far away walking through hilly slopes of memory in vertical altitudes. Indicating seasonal variations of loneliness biting my shoulder and my ass. Release #93 at the edge of a field indicating the parameters of our paltry universe through which courses some great winds, carrying us across the sky. Indicating we were worried but the wind dies down, the wind picks up. Here we go. Release # 36 tends to the urban corner where capitalism decays and socialism festers, indexed to wars, murder, genocide, big ticket issues, I passed by wondering if you noticed. Items collated in a million corners indicating our direction. The East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines is here to make sure your trip is one you can take with safety and confidence, in comfort and in consolation. We imagine everything you have given up to live this sort of life. As part of service and maintenance, we conduct regular cloud studies and wind studies in the layers of atmosphere which you can expect to transit in our air ships, which aim to provide you with the highest ideas of comfort, with a new 24 hour posole soup and salad bar open in the dining room, and clay Jolina dogs watching you at all times from small niches in every wall. The results of our most recent wind and cloud studies will continue to be posted here so that you may examine the results for yourself. Rest easy in the assurance that our aerodynamic experts are conducting research to ensure your health, safety and covenience remains one of our highest aims at 10,000 to 20,000 feet. Speak to any of our stewards or stewardesses if you have questions in this regard. Fame, jobs, romance, family, money. All questions will be answered. The East L.A. Dirigible Transport Lines is one of the most professional dirigible transport lines operating throughout the greater Los Angeles basin precisely because of this level of scientific and technical prowess, shown by our extensive ground crew. Whilst singing the Anthem of the Ground Crew (“Eo,” by Cafe Tacuba) our highly trained technicians released thousands of test balloons to delineate the wind currents described below.
sixteen hundred dol-
lar tune-up timing belt one
grand driving night streets
1. What poet should be in Obama’s cabinet, and in what role?
Let’s replace his whole boring cabinet with poets of vision and energy:
1. Replace token old white guy VP Joe Biden with the visionary energy of Anne Waldman.
2. Replace Secretary of State Hillary C. with Amiri Baraka, real poet laureate of New Jersey.
3. Replace Defense Secretary Gates with Buddhist Sam Hamill, Attorney General Holder with lawyer Martin Espada, Interior Secretary Salazar with naturalist Gary Snyder, Agriculture Secretary Vilsack with farmer Wendell Berry, Commerce Secretary Gregg with publisher and bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis with activist Luis Rodriguez, Health & Human Services whoever it may be with Doctor Rafael Campo, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Donovan with compassionate Fanny Howe, Transportation Secretary LaHood with me (VP of Sales for the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines), Energy Secretary Chu replaced with the energy of Jayne Cortez (and her band the Firespitters), Education Secretary Duncan with the instructive Eleni Sikelianos, Veterans Affairs Secretary Shinseki with veteran Yusef Komunyakaa, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano with Paiute Adrian C. Louis. I won’t say who should be drug tsar.
2. If you could send Obama one poem or book of poems (not your own), what would it be and why?
I’d send him The Fall of America by Allen Ginsberg—in particular the poem, “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” Come on politicians—so fatally serious about greed and money and so casually flippant about arts and culture (that’s the basic materialistic spiritual flaw of the nation); even at this date, it’s not too late for them to catch up to mid-20th century American poetry. That’s a start.
3. What other poetry-related blog or website should I check out?
See Burro of Information & Culture by poet Lisa Chen (author of Mouth), http://burroofinformationandculture.blogspot.com/
4. Who is the most exciting young/new poet I’ve never heard of, but whose work I ought to find and read?
Noah Eli Gordon.
5. What’s the funniest poem you’ve read lately? What was the last poem that made you cry?
The funniest poems were in Peeping Tom Tom Girl, poignant pieces about riding buses through downtown Los Angeles, by Marisela Norte. The poems that made me weep with frustration and sorrow were in Poets Against War edited by Sally Anderson and Sam Hamill; I don’t know if it was the poems or just decades and lifetimes of pent up sorrow and frustrations at neverending American injustice and imperialism.
6. William or Dorothy? Robert or Elizabeth Barrett? Moore or Bishop? Dunbar or Cullen? “Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully” or “No ideas but in things”? Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or Tender Buttons?
Imaginations and Collected Stories and Paterson and Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems and Selected Essays.
7. Robert Lowell wrote a poem called “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid.” What supposedly immortal poem puts you to sleep?
I reread everything at bedtime. It all puts me to sleep.
8. Even for poetry books, the contract has a provision for movie rights. What poetry book should they make into a movie? Who should direct it, and why? Who should star in it?
Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York should be directed by Danny Boyle (Transpotting, Slumdog Millionaire), because he could do it and should accept the challenge. I don’t know who should star in it. Javier Bardem? Gael Garcia Bernal? Little Antony and the Johnsons?
9. What lines from a poem you first read years ago still haunt you now?
Williams’ “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Those lines come to me now and then, always striking me as reminders of the usefulness of poetry, of the purpose of poetics, of the vocation of the poet. Poetry fulfills larger purpose than Scrabble or crossword puzzles or journal entries, and those who say it doesn’t do not get it, and those poets in denial of a broader view are being churlish.
10. What poem do you love, love, love, but don’t understand?
We love all those poems in translation but we don’t understand the originals. What about “The Mental Traveller” by William Blake? What’s that about? “She nails him down upon the Rock,” etc.?
11. If the official organ of the AWP were not the Chronicle but were the Enquirer, what would some of the headlines be?
DICK CHENEY SECRET EDITOR-IN-CHIEF POETRY MAGAZINE
POETS HATE GARRISON KEILLOR—SHOCKING REASONS WHY
AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW: FOR YEARS WE’VE ONLY BEEN SOFTWARE
SECRETS OF ASTOUNDING LOVE POEMS BY WEASELS!
12. If you were making a scandal rag for poetry in the grocery store checkout stands, what fictitious poetry love triangle would you make up to outsell that tired Hollywood story of Angelina and Brad and Jen?
Helen Vendler + Saul Williams + figures of speech still alive in the poetry of Cesar Vallejo
13. This is the Best American Poetry blog. What’s the best non-American poetry you’ve read lately?
Another Spring, Darkness: Selected Poems of Anuradha Mahapatra, translated from the Bengali by Carolyne Wright.
14. We read poems in journals and books, we hear them in readings and on audio files. Sometimes we get them in unusual ways: on buses or in subway cars. How would you like to encounter your next poem?
In a fortune cookie. Someone once posted billboards around L.A. featuring lines by Bukowski and others, which is fine and dandy to see as you drive by, but the fortune cookie is more personal.
15. What poem would you like to hear the main character bust out singing in a Bollywood film? What would be the name of the movie? What would be the scene in which it was sung?
I want to hear a main character bust out singing Whitman’s “This Compost.”
The name of the movie would be “Epiphytes and Dirigibles Over the Sea.”
The scene would revise weird scary music they have in the Japanese No play, “Sotoba Komachi:
The legend of [Ono no] Komachi is that she had many lovers when she was young, but was cruel and mocked at their pain. Among them was one, Shii no Shōshō, who came a long way to court her. She told him that she would not listen to him till he had come on a hundred nights from his house to hers and cut a hundred notches on the shaft-bench of his chariot. And so he came a hundred nights all but one, through rain, hail, snow, and wind. But on the last night he died.
Once, when she was growing old, the poet Yasuhide asked her to go with him to Mikawa. She answered with the poem:
“I that am lonely,
Like a reed root-cut,
Should a stream entice me,
Would go, I think.”
When she grew quite old, both her friends and her wits forsook her. She wandered about in destitution, a tattered, crazy beggar-woman. She appears out of the fog on Santa Monica beach on chilly winter day, only a few lonely souls wandering by, stumbles over a dead seal or a dead seagull or something and bursts out singing Walt Whitman’s “This Compost.”
16. Do you have a (clean) joke involving poetry you’d like to share?
The joke is that when it all comes down to it, you get paid with two copies. Why aren’t you laughing?
17. Tell the truth: is it a poetry book you keep in the john, or some other genre (john-re)?
Various genres, but at the moment: Poets Against War, to remind me to weep with rage, and Barry Gifford’s Ghosts No Horse Can Carry: Poems 1967 – 1987, because I hadn’t read his work for thirty years.
18. Can you name every teacher you had in elementary school? Did any of them make you memorize a poem? What poem(s)? No to the first two questions.
19. If you got to choose the next U.S. Poet Laureate, who (excluding of course the obvious candidates, you and me) would it be? Of former U.S. Poet Laureates, who did such a great job that he/she should get a second term? Next election cycle, what poet should run for President? Why her or him?
For U.S. Poet Laureate, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, terrific first U.S.-Tibetan poet!
Of former Poet Laureates, I don’t know, was Philip Levine one? What did they do?
As future presidential candidate, Sam Hamill. Look what he’s done for American citizens, the consciousness of America and American poetry by founding Copper Canyon Press. How did they kick him off his own press?
20. Insert your own question here.
Which is the most apt figure for desire in our time, the whale or the dirigible?
Sesshu Foster
L.A.
"This is the captain speaking. Please direct your attention to the short story, "Sky City, in the current issue of McSweeney's Quarterly, #32. Thank you. Now we shall circumnavigate."
Mojave rattlesnake, if you're yakking as much as me and walking fast, somebody else might see it slipping into the underbrush, if you're busy in your mind as I, somebody else might be saying hello and you not hear it, and if you can't pay any better attention than me, you might miss that yucca seed pod dry flickering tone against your heavy footfalls.
- Ben Ehrenreich and I read “What is the Purpose of Mystery? Interview with Oscar Zeta Acosta” from the JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PROTEST #5 at Machine Project 1200 N. Alvarado Blvd., Los Angeles, November 2007. Our Cal State L.A. Chicano Studies professor Jamie Escalante returned from the University of Houston Panamerican Conference on the post-colonial Legacy and Lingering Whereabouts of Oscar Zeta Acosta, where he said the margaritas were smashing and new theories abounded as new socio-political alliances formed every millisecond in hotel rooms around the conference. Professor Escalante ensconced in our awareness the realization that there could be no better consultant on the Mystery than Oscar Zeta Acosta, civil rights attorney and cigar aficionado, acclaimed author of the classics, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, and Revolt of the Cockroach People, though he was reported missing and presumed dead off the coast of Mazatlan in 1974. Alive or dead, who could be a more incisive and insightful spokesperson for the Mystery than someone who has peered over the edge and then disappeared? Tracking down someone whose whereabouts have been unknown for 30-plus years can be extremely difficult, not to mention discouraging, so I’d thank Liki Renteria, in particular, for heading up the search that recently located the man
Here we are, hanging out in the golden dream. We dream of communism as an aspirin the size of the sun. The window glazes with breath as you peer in from that cold dark evening, in a wind off the Golden Gate.
"Cesar? Cesar? What's the hurry? What's the rush?"
Grandma goes 84 in a paper hat by Citlali, September '09, overlooking the San Gabriel Valley.
Fall is the turning of the year, and there's so many September birthdays we can't keep up.
Lisa Chen by Richard Hahn---author of MOUTH, https://www.kaya.com/books.php?id=1, with her breakfast view of Seward Park and the Manhattan Bridge
Sesshu Foster by Richard Hahn, “I looked up once, a big redtailed hawk swooping overhead, the wind it was riding ruffling feathers along the edge of its wing. Lisa Chen’s poetry pleases and astonishes me with that display of thrilling senses---other spirits appear unexpectedly in hovering bright mid-air, ordinal forces and natural realities indexed at play in the moment, articulated in rapt intelligence of language. Flashy and eerie, ordinate and inordinate, I am grateful MOUTH startles with soulful complexity, Lisa Chen opening the verbal moment into fluent, quick gesture.”
The backup band for the New Puppy Trio, who are swirling and billowing across Highland Park, Glassell Park, Eagle Rock, Alhambra, and Little Tokyo.
Yucca stalks rattle in the fall wind. Their quartered pods release small black seeds. Each seed like a tiny flat locomotive or the flint of a determined idea.
Shiso, which you can get with the best egg rolls in Los Angeles at Golden Deli, pungent and soft as those black haired girls of the 1970s.
10 Santa Monica Freeway, shaky like Antonio Villaraigosa, like the brown princes of the tabloid ideals, according to the L.A. Weekly, according to the warm winter evening.
A little cardamom in your coffee or tea, swished through your teeth and gums, a little cardamom in your typewriter and your pickup truck, swishing through your refrigerator and your summer fan, a little cardamom intensifies that feeling that you have, that you could have.
Smallhouse Art Glass, http://www.smallhouseartglass.com/artglass/index.html, latticino and diachronic ribbon on transparent glass, I put some flowers there, they went purple and dry, they went right and gray, they went tomorrow and thistle-book.
Dried hibiscus which she uses to make jamaica, chilled over ice, it has that dusty smell of sunshine on plants, it has that violet savor of sour bastard hours as if they might return.
"Okay. What about now, Cesar?"
Lemongrass, like you liked to slice your hand, like your fingers learned with stitches, like Grandma Alberta (Buell) Northway spoke through the thinness of interstice, sitting on the couch in Santa Barbara.
Epazote, you add to beans and it cuts the gas, it roils and serves the coastline, it gives over the imminent swell, receding year after year from the sunny apartment in Chico where Ray Foster wrote, "Before me, what did this couch know of eternity?"
Signing books at the L.A. Times Book Festival UCLA, April, after a panel with Kim Addonizio, Chris Abani, and Douglas Kearney; Juan Felipe Herrera had just read earlier, and Alicia Portnoy said hello.
Reading Jeff and Karin's Wedding Poem in an Alhambra art gallery, with Jeff's photos on the walls, Diep Tran's hors d'oeuvres, and flocks of lives intertwining with vegetal chance.
Claire Light leads the question and answers after a reading with Australian novelist Brian Castro (http://www.kaya.com) at the Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco in May, 2009, with Jaime Cortez, Reina Prado, Patricia Wakida and Alec Dinwoodie in audience---photo by Arnoldo Garcia.
On the way south 1200 miles after breaking my ankle in the North Cascades, I was laid out in the back of the vehicle with my ankle wrapped in an ace bandage on luggage, complaining once in awhile when the roadwork got to me, writing in my journal about the clouds alive in the skies from Grants Pass around the western slope of Mount Shasta. All these skies I never noticed.
Deep Creek Massacre Site
Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hells Canyon
by R. Gregory Nokes
http://www.rgregorynokes.com/
Hells Canyon Murders Reveal Dark, Racist Past
A Review by Matt Love
Whenever a writer becomes obsessed with a long-lost or wrongly told story from history he usually ends up spending most of his free time (and money) researching it. At some point in the madness, he knows a book will result come hell, high water or divorce. When he writes the book, he must decide how much of his obsession to insert into the story because without it, the lost story would remain lost, or even worse, wrongly told.
R. Gregory Nokes is clearly obsessed with the 1887 murder of more than 30 Chinese gold miners in Hells Canyon, one of the blackest episodes in Oregon’s sordid history of race relations. Nokes spent a decade researching it and made two dozen trips to Wallowa County to discover what really happened back then and why some people apparently tried to cover it up years later.
The result of Nokes’ obsession is an informative and exciting account, Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hells Canyon. What elevates his book above a garden-variety academic treatment of the incident is how Nokes struck the right balance between his personal story of detective work and the need for objective and meticulous scholarship to arrive at the truth.
The Snake River
Never heard of the massacre? Neither had most Pacific Northwesterners until Nokes, a former reporter and editor for The Oregonian, wrote about it for the paper in 1995 after some important trial documents surfaced in an old safe in Joseph.
On May 25, 1887, a gang of rustlers and petty thieves led by Bruce Evans descended upon a group of Chinese mining for gold near Deadline (now Deep) Creek, a small tributary of the Snake River on the Oregon side of Hells Canyon. Although the exact number of murdered Chinese will never be known, Nokes suggests a final tally of 34, making the massacre “the worst crime committed by whites against the approximately 300,000 Chinese who immigrated to the United States during the latter half of the 19th century. “
A lot of people will know about the massacre now, thanks to Nokes. Nevertheless, the book ends on an unsettling note when Nokes describes how some in Wallowa County still want the story downplayed. He comes across as a little more than angry that no memorial to the Chinese Miners has been erected. He doesn’t say it directly, but you can feel on the book’s last page that he wants to scream: “What’s wrong with you people? Get this thing built! “
from http://www.powells.com/blog/?p=8961
Chinese miners on the Salmon River
ume—cuts, bruises, headache—
gets to us by phone
semi/shattered honda
wires overhead
birdshit on the window with
the San Gabriels
Recent Comments