Smart Energy

poem by Robin H. Pugh Yi

Ralphie and I bring flowers to ghosts
we conjure in graveyards.

He likes the ones with
famous dead people:

Didi Ramone and Carl Wilson,
Thomas Wolfe and Washington Irving.

I like little
anonymous ones-

behind country churches,
awkward grassy triangles next to strip malls,

on the edges of towns where Chinese food
is considered exotic,

borders of industrial tracts
strewn with litter.

We read each other the stories
told in names and dates

and a few words carved in stone.
We wonder how survivors

chose the words. And what they left out.
Ralphie sings until the ghosts dance.

I bring food.
On windy days, pinwheels.

poem by Robin Pugh Yi

The first people
invented flutes
before combs.
Music
penetrates
through
flesh and scent
deep into
the new brain,
stripping us
naked
like no other
animal can be,
inviting
uniquely
human
intimacy.

I am a traveler.

I am a man
of the Goddess. I say:
We are entwined.

We seek, each
some others.

Soul makes images:
my soul is a mare;
my librarian is an owl,
catalogs eels of words.
A four-year-old boy
captains my ship.
My bear is warder of dark places.

My wolf
wants into your temple.

My bag of water bones
is subject to the dialogue
of the world. The wind
knows our fates.

Andrew Macrae, an Australian writer and artist, wrote to say that although he lives

a long way from the centres of cultural production in the northern hemisphere… maybe there’s something of interest in an antipodean perspective.

Oh my. The man knows how to write a pitch to snare an Irrepressible, no?

Chairman Sanders

So check out his typewriter art (I suspect Photoshop or Illustrator, not an “actual” [or "Real," as Andrew says below] typewriter, but I could easily be wrong; and don’t get me wrong: I respect and admire mimicry): Acid Head War. The thing that grabs me about Macrae’s pieces is the bridge between the dot matrix and the typewriter. All you can see here is the dot matrix; to get the typewriter detail, you need to visit Acid Head War.

What we’ve got here is the translation of photographs into typewriter art-via an algorithm which offers, I can only imagine, a good deal of user control. (Indeed, I suspect that each character is handpecked, but I’m a Romantic.) I have no idea of how many languages Andrew speaks (other than an obvious fluency with English, that is), but translation–or anyway, the engineer’s strategy of bridging–is clearly a forte. In that regard, check out Ordinary Magic, “the ecstasy of everyday things,” a minimalist WordPress blog in action. Read the rest of this entry »

I just got mail from a fella in Spain name of Abel. He writes that he’s working on a dissertation on the great (if that’s where your boat floats) American writer, Charles Bukowski.

Abel wrote to ask if I, in the persona of Puck et alia, had ever published Buk.

Nay, says I, tho I was once published on a facing page with a poem in a short-lived zine called 10,000 Flies Can’t Be Wrong. Shall I send you a copy of the Bukowski poem? I asked.

Please, replied Abel, and supplied further needs that convince me he’s for real. (There wasn’t any real doubt anyway; who the hell is going to put Puck and Bukowski together and think, What a perfect mind fuck I could play on this guy!?) Here’s part of Abel’s slightly less than colloquial but perfectly rendered reply:

For bibliographical reasons, I would need copies of the Bukowski content as well as copies of the cover and masthead pages. Of course, if you have any spare issue that you can send or sell to me, I would appreciate it. I have to wade through tons of paper to find things here, while mags and books are tidily kept in the bookcase. If that’s not possible, then scan/xeroxes will do.

Actually, most of my books and zines from that era are untidily shoved in boxes hiding under other boxes in the back of a closet, but I get Abel’s point.

Which is, help me out if you can. I’m going to go rooting through old zines and have myself a walk down memory lane, digging for that brief brush with fame when I, your humble blogger, was published not just between the same covers but on the facing page from the bodacious Buk.

So I thought I’d throw the word out to you, the old contributors to my various literary outings, and others: let’s help this guy out. He’s working on a detailed bibliography of Buk’s zine publications, among other things, and that shit is ephemeral as hell. Hard to find, hard to pin down. (Abel said my explanation of my publishing history was “confusing.” Yeah. Well. How many librarians have said that to me? Let me count the leaves.)

Contact Abel (cirereta AT telefonica DOT net) before he graduates, gets a tenure-track job, and has to start writing some serious bullshit.

More fun with the letter Q and the binary number of the beastbot: exQorpse, a PHP-driven dadabase from Shawn Rider. I say “more,” because Shawn has done other things–many brilliant, weird, and irrepressible things–like this before. exQorpse is premised on a sound idea shared by surrealism and new media: conversation is an art. Shawn may go wrong in leading the initial player of the Qorpse into negativity; there’s a lot of spamnet negativity. But, interestingly, the user can come back into the poetic conversation with a new nickname and find him/herself quoted (out of context and databasically; not all the words are ones you wrote): nicknames carry on with a life of their own. Interesting, and very Shawn, this persistence of memory. As some sort of expert system, the concept of the exquisite corpse game has intriguing use as a brainstorm device. This isn’t it, but it approaches proof of concept. After a few zillion more hours research and programming (and yo mamma’s gonna pay for it in taxes, guarantee), this Q of a brainstorming machine may be looked back upon as a forefeather. Read the rest of this entry »

poem by Brian Charles Clark

rip-off failure of a king —
power lies in story—
Lakoff’s frames describe the way
a dark room receives the bright focus
of its single window.
Up the Valley—
away from the house—
the view is different,
like art: alter the window,
violence is changing.
In the bush of ghosts the danger
I see is everyday talk becoming
lemon tree, very pretty, with fruit too
sour to eat.

“Unbounded Freedom by Rosemary Bechler is a new publication from Counterpoint to be launched in partnership with the London Book Fair on 29 September 2006.” The report is free, of course, because it’s under a Creative Commons license. Cool. Meanwhile, the British Library has published a Manifesto calling for the simplification of copyright and IP law in the digital age, as well as for reasonable and restrained statutory limitations.

William Blake, the original acid test impressario

review by Brian Charles Clark

Selected Poems by William Blake. Penguin. Paper. 304 pages. March, 2006. 5 stars.

William Blake wasn’t big on what we now call sound bytes, so he’s far from a widely quoted poet. For the pithy quote apropos of whatever situation is currently at hand we turn to Shakespeare, of course, but also John “for whom the bell tolls” Donne, John “soul-making” Keats, and the many others who savored the gnomic nugget. But that doesn’t mean Blake hasn’t had a lasting effect on us. It’s just been a very sneaky influence.

Without Blake the aforementioned Keats, and his big brother (in spirit) P.B. Shelley, and the rest of the Romantic posse, would not have been, or at least would not have been as high flying as they were. Away from England, that “green and pleasant land” (“Jerusalem”), there’s Walt Whitman who, like Blake, saw Mind (yes, the capital is required) as the “door of perception” (“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”) that opens on to Heaven. Between the Romantics and Whitman there’s a tremendous momentum and that exploded in a burst of cultural energy—the likes of which we now living shall likely never see again—in the person of Allen Ginsberg.

Read the rest of this entry »

Second Space by Czeslaw Milosz

review by Brian Charles Clark

Second Space: New Poems
Czeslaw Milosz
Ecco. 200

Czeslaw Milosz won the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature and was cited for giving voice to “man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts.” Milosz published his first poems in 1930 and wrote nearly until the day he died in 2004, at the age of 93. Born in Lithuania and raised in Russia and Poland, he came to the U.S. in 1960, when he accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley. His work was banned in Poland for many decades but nevertheless reached Polish readers through the underground press (samizdat, in Russian). After winning the Nobel, though, he was able to return to Lithuania and Poland; he lived in Cracow for the rest of his life.

His most famous book is probably The Captive Mind (1953), widely studied in the U.S. for its portrayal of totalitarianism and life behind the Iron Curtain. In this prose work, Milosz argues that the most effective dissent comes from those with the weakest stomachs: the mind can rationalize a great deal, but the stomach can only take so much. His most widely anthologized poem is “Campo dei Fiori” in which he responds to the Warsaw ghetto, which he saw in 1943. Read the rest of this entry »