hypergraphic needling

Lewis Carroll's "Jabbewocky" translated from English to French to English to Greek to English using Yahoo BabelFish

2010-12-16T17:17:00.000-08:00

Take the guard Jabberwock, my son!
The chins that bite, the nails that they touch!
Take the guard l'bird Jubjub, and
l'avoid Bandersnatch frumious!

It took the sword vorpal in the disposal:
Long-term l'enemy manxome qu'seek –
Accordingly supported from l'tree Tumtum,
and kept at the duration of some time in the thought.

And, as in l'uffish thinking
qu' this s' it is kept,
Jabberwock, with the eyes of flame, emanated whiffling
from the timber from tulgey, and as it came!

Two! , Two! And straight and
vorpal snicker-fracture of blades went!
This l' left winger it died,
and with his head that went behind. "

And, thousand [katasfaxan] Jabberwock?
Comes in my arms, my boy beamish!
Day frabjous d'Callooh! Callay! It cackled in his joy.

Brillig de Twas and toves slithy
they made gyre and gimble in wabe
All mimsy they were borogoves,
and l'outgrabe raths the child.

Excerpt from a conversation with Ken Irby, Kyle Waugh and Cyrus Console

2010-10-22T21:25:00.001-07:00

Bob Hicok poem

2010-06-15T19:02:00.000-07:00

Poem: "Calling him back from layoff," by Bob Hicok, from Insomnia Diary. © University of Pittsburgh Press.

Calling him back from layoff

I called a man today. After he said
hello and I said hello came a pause
during which it would have been

confusing to say hello again so I said
how are you doing and guess what, he said
fine and wondered aloud how I was

and it turns out I'm OK. He
was on the couch watching cars
painted with ads for Budweiser follow cars

painted with ads for Tide around an oval
that's a metaphor for life because
most of us run out of gas and settle

for getting drunk in the stands
and shouting at someone in a t-shirt
we want kraut on our dog. I said

he could have his job back and during
the pause that followed his whiskers
scrubbed the mouthpiece clean

and his breath passed in and out
in the tidal fashion popular
with mammals until he broke through

with the words how soon thank you
ohmyGod which crossed his lips and drove
through the wires on the backs of ions

as one long word as one hard prayer
of relief meant to be heard
by the sky. When he began to cry I tried

with the shape of my silence to say
I understood but each confession
of fear and poverty was more awkward

than what you learn in the shower.
After he hung up I went outside and sat
with one hand in the bower of the other

and thought if I turn my head to the left
it changes the song of the oriole
and if I give a job to one stomach other

forks are naked and if tonight a steak
sizzles in his kitchen do the seven
other people staring at their phones

hear?

The poem with the incisors that wouldn't let go

2010-05-11T04:08:00.000-07:00

There was this weird day in December where I was waiting for Erin to finish studying in the Lawrence Public Library, and I was sitting around in the periodicals area thumbing through an issue of Poetry, and I found THIS poem.

After reading the poem, I immediately wrote a note in my little notebook. This morning I've been sifting through a stack of those little notebooks, looking for the story ideas I collected all semester long and haven't had time to write, and found my note. It reads: "Jill Alexander Essbaum--BOMBASS POEM IN DECEMBER POETRY!!!" Obviously, when you find a note like that, you look for the poem, read it again, and then post it to the interweb.

Here's a link to some more information about the enigmatic Jill Alexander Essbaum and her bombass Essbaum poems.

possible vagabond post-finals travel route

2010-04-20T18:40:00.001-07:00

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Kansas Professional Communicators conference

2010-04-18T06:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I drove out to Council Grove to speak at a conference. The drive from Lawrence was amazing. I want to make a day trip out there again once the next few weeks of frenetic, end-of-the-semester activity are over. There was some field burning, and as you approach Council Grove there are a few metal sculptures on a hill that look like Native Americans on horseback. The sculpture really reminded me of Grandfather Cuts Loose the Ponies in Washington State close to the Columbia River Gorge. I can't seem to track down a picture of the sculpture in Council Grove, but that's okay. Looking for it led me to Frank Jensen's web page, and now I have ANOTHER trip I want to make, to see Jensen's sculpture garden, once the semester is finished. Way to go, internet. You score an extra point. The Madonna of the Trail sculpture is also really interesting. I pulled over to check it out and walk around for a bit before returning to Lawrence and confining myself to the bowels of the Watson library. The conference was at the Hays House. One of the more amusing moments for me, since I was already a bit nervous before the talk, was when I mentioned a number of Kansas writers, including Thomas Fox Averill, a.k.a., William Jennings Bryan Oleander and learned that his wife was in the audience. I love Kansas.

SF novel workshop

2010-03-23T03:52:00.000-07:00

I just found out that I've been accepted to attend the 2010 SF novel writing workshop with Kij Johnson. I'm absolutely thrilled. Kij is a phenomenal writer. I particularly suggest checking out these stories of hers:

26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss

Spar

"Spar" has been nominated for this year's Nebula Award.

Kij also maintains a blog here. I really feel like Kij is one of those writers, along with Brian Evenson, who defy any kind of categorization people try to pin on them.

After a long hiatus, an OULIPO N+7 stanza of a Richard Hugo poem

2010-03-02T20:14:00.000-08:00

Deicers of Greaves in Philipsburg

Youth hostels might come here sundown on a whine.
Say your ligature broke down. The last good kitchenette
Yom Kippur had was yellow birches ago. Yolk sacks walk these stresses
laid out by the insensate, past hot peppers
that didn't last, barbarism that did, the tortured try
of local drogue parachutes to accelerate their living wills.
Only churls are kept up. The jalopy
turned 70 this year. The only privateer
is always in, not knowing what he's done.

interviewing

2009-10-25T20:38:00.001-07:00

I came across this thoughtful Nick Flynn interview today. At first I thought the interviewer was being brutally confrontational with Flynn, but by the end of the interview, I decided that I liked the kinds of questions being asked. Flynn is a poet whose poems I find myself going back to and re-reading, at least once a year. Some Ether is one of my favorite books of poems of the last 10 years.

I've been reading a number of different interviews with writers and poets, in order to get ideas for my own interview questions. I'm working on a project that I hope will turn out to be something really useful--some kind of permanent resource--that involves interviewing a variety of writers and artists in my community. So, if you're a writer living in or near Lawrence, I may be darkening your door, or at least your inbox, in the next few weeks.

I set up a time to interview Cote Smith this week, and I also asked Chloe Jones, a.k.a., Lil' Mumbles if she'd be willing to let me interview her some time soon. I'm amazed at how much I feel like I've been learning through reading these interviews. I've been a fan of reading interviews with writers for a long time, but this recent, concentrated dose has been motivating me to finish a number of projects, writing and otherwise. Doing all this research has also made me think a lot about the rhetorical act of interviewing. There are such a variety of approaches. In some of my readings for a course that deals with Everyday Life theory, we've been studying different interview techniques employed by The Mass Observation Movement and several Surrealists. I like the idea of juxtaposition, in terms of question types/moods, in the interview process. Interview really strikes me as a form of collage, at its heart. In order to prepare for my Lil' Mumbles interview, I spent about four hours going through iconic interviews conducted with other famous rappers. I've been collaging questions from these interviews into a kind of UR-document that I'll use for the Lil' Mumbles interview, usually using the phrase "contemporary fiction" to replace the word "hip-hop" or "rap" in the source material I'm sampling from.

This post is free of hyperbole, and that's hard for me to do.

2009-10-14T04:06:00.001-07:00

Well Meaning White Girl by Alli Warren is now available from Mitzvah Chaps. Robert Baumann works as hard as anyone I know to build communities of writers, and to publish interesting poetry publications. Two of Mitzvah Chaps' books are on a shelf in a public school in Tianjin, China, along with a complete set of the Chronicle of Narnia, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and a bunch of other books I bought for my students, to go in the makeshift library some of the teachers at my school made for them. I think my taste in poetry sometimes runs in a different direction than Rob's, which is why I enjoy going to the Actual Kansas reading series he organizes with Anne Boyer, because I always hear new things and think about poetry differently after I listen to the poets. I once did a lot of research in order to make a baseball joke in an e-mail that referenced Rob. I really don't like baseball or any sports. I did all of this research into the Milwaukee Brewers because I love Rob and Rob loves baseball more than is appropriate. In the end, it wasn't a very good joke, but Rob is a very good Rob.

Goodbye blank space

2009-10-12T06:17:00.000-07:00

I've never posted to this blog, even though I've had it for awhile now. I wanted to post an excerpt from something Geoffrey Dyer wrote about prose poems on the website for the journal Double Room:

Ultimately, operating in one primary form is a choice, and that choice reflects for the artist a suitability of purpose.  Prose poems are willfully beautiful from their content, the shapes of the objects they evoke, the places that the reader sets those objects on their own mental canvas.  The easy casting off of line breaks allows for a smooth transaction/reversal between builder, material, and user.  The fact that the essential formal material itself—words, punctuation marks, the occasional paragraph—are as rudimentary as writing, only makes the non-architecture of the prose poem more inhabitable, familiar, interchangeable, and functional. John Cage examined Jasper Johns’ Flag using the metaphor of a table.  The table’s surface, he says, “stimulates the tendency to do something. . .. The result is nothing special.  It looks as though something had been tried and had been found to work: to have many uses, not focusing attention but letting attention focus itself” (1).

1.  From the catalog of the Jasper Johns exhibition, The Jewish Museum, New York, 1964.

I like this prose poem by Geoffrey Dyer. I've been thinking a lot about prose poems lately.