exhausted

a lot has happened the past month. does it sound like a cliche to say that i have sufficiently fallen in love with new york. i leave for alabama in a week. a part of me is looking forward to it. a part of me is dreading it.

discovered: hannah weiner. it's wonderful to go back to a writer whom you felt indifferent about and seeing the work and understanding it in a different way. (http://www.ubu.com/ubu/pdf/weiner_indians.pdf)

wrote a poem. im pretty exhausted. little sleep the past month, but still loving the studio program here.



* * *

(from "some firsts" series)

sunset 1

uberlyptic, utter -
dance, in quiet
reckoned, view(s)
a trip of deep plains
unssized, the tires,
kut inside, it feel,
please feel
you dunce. eroded.
what's in my pockets,
what's luck tangential, what's
insight, err
and roof-top
indepedence, or
just busy, the light
thru ropes and branches,
like life at some west-end
but broken,
but conform or fight,
no tiny numbers, what
meaning, right(s)
whats left
whats me, into?

shadows, 1 Uptown, the weather

blogging mite be sporadic this next month. im currently in nyc, participating in a studio architecture program @ columbia.

update on spahr's chapbook: the folios were boxed. val at one heart will ship in late july, so i'll have time to finish up the folios (hopefully) before orientation (boot camp) back in alabama.

currently reading: sporadically, a book on the objectivists. i need a small break from poetic theory.

michael ondaatje's _running in the family_. his one-worded sentences and sense of timing is impeccable.

peter eisenman (for those of you who don't know, he's an established architect, known more for his conceptual theories than his work) said last week: "all sustainable development architects are bad architects." mark wigley said (another architect taking part in an ongoing discussion series between himself and eisenman): "sustainable development architects are irresponsible, because they're not pushing the boundaries of beauty and structure." what world do these architects live in? do we even have a choice these days in not taking a somewhat sustainable route??? it clearly established that both are working within very specific parameters of "beauty" and "architecture."

we finished posting up broadsides for the RAT project. unfortunately, the NYPD caught on and was on the brink of charging the folks who started the cool project thousands of buckaroos for illegally posting up fliers. the trouble was really posting up the broadsides in certain parts of manhattan ( = $$$$ + prissy).

our first studio project was to construct a 3-dimensional object that expressed the relationships between light, time, and a specific site. part of my studio critic's assignment was for each of us to build a tool to make the 3-dimensional object, and we could only use this tool to construct the object. the 3-dimensional object then also became a drawing tool - the shadow patterns was supposed to reflect our observations.

i realized at the end of the project, my model was really about a dead track on the 1. the center track at 116th isn't in use. yet, it's a track. the only time when one realizes that it's day underneath is seeing the reflection of the light around the pools of water on the dead track.

simulations

happy independence day - whatever that truly means ( i.e. the celebratory what in indepedence??)

it's about to rain in the city. i ran into an old high school friend in prospect park, out of all places! ivan is finishing up his phD in philosophy at univ of michigan. i see him sporadically, but he is honestly and truly one of the nicest, good-hearted human beings i know. im headed out in a bit to catch up and eat some veggie burgers (im guessing) with him and some of his friends.

anyhow. a poem.


* * *

simulations


i. first dream

A clear blue day, height of a wood-post fence. A fist, a riff, waking
to remember, at a slower speed of auditory. Hissssss, split, riff.
Listening, if patiently. If it was another time, another prevailing
weather. A clear blue day, spray-paint inscriptions of names and
holidays, territorial to laid thick. Fade like the fate of a letter
written by a skywriting plane, fog, a crowd. A smoke machine, as well
as a visual recording machine. A balcony, a boulevard, open, arrivals.
A small room with portraits of icicles. Desolate and sculpture, a
feel of incidental, the panhandle of Texas, Nevada. A clear blue day,
the sight of telegraphic poles, when it rains, a stir of adolescent
angst.

philadelphia

peeps. things are happening in philadelphia...

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Lee-S/Lee-Sueyeun-Juliette_Complete-Recording_UPenn_1-16-07.mp3

nyc, ahhh

just arrived about a couple of hours ago. nyc has this expansive feel to it. so different from sf.

currently reading:::

_the objectivist nexus_ edited by rachel blau duplessis and peter quartermain.
press: university of alabama press (hank lazer and charles bernstein edit some pretty amazing books - check out the series sometime).

reading about louis zukofksy, in general, makes me very happy.

what was objectivism - i havent read too much of the historical proponent of it. zukofsky is fucking amazing. i like some niedecker stuff ("i'm going off the page..."). george oppen is ok. i am into basil bunting, or what ive read so far of his work.

objectivism was a movement of poetics (and yes, objectivism was a kind of lyric, for those who disagree...) that was distinct from modernism (pound, eliot, altho those two poets were also very different), with much of the nexus formulated between 1927-1935. the poets most often recognized as the main core are basil bunting, lorine niedecker, george oppen, carl rakosi, charles reznikoff, and louis zukofsky. objectivism suggests exactly what it implies - objectivist poetics wrote and saw a poem as an object. most of the time, they were suspicious of metaphysical, metaphorical writing, and rejected symbols. the literal sufficed.

apologies if that was dry. i often have to re-articulate and re-define things to prove that ive digested it.

a warm and lovely night in brooklyn...

heading for nyc

my last day at one heart is tomorrow...then it is time to say goodbye to san francisco and head out to nyc.

picture above: proof run of the title page to _inticate systems_. the good news is: i got most of the runs in today (da-da-da-dum!). bad news: two poems are flipped in order, and that is bad because one of them is part of a sonnet series. so...i had to dampen paper today and am waiting to print two runs tomorrow.

dude, printing is super expensive. if you want to be anal and have a really beautiful object for people to read, you'll have to shell out quite a bit of money...

lastly a poem...


What I’ll remember of June is
walks I took. Once, I got lost
in Golden Gate Park, after my
sister had parked her car at 39th
and Fulton, or so. The park is
some 170-acres larger than
Central Park. The de Young is
there. I remember because when
it reopened in 2005, for the first
week or so, the Museum was
opened all the time so that if
someone drove past a certain
part of the Park, say, around 2
a.m., there was a curved line of
people disappearing into the
entryway of a building that
seemed to landscape, rising and
falling at familiar places. It was
a beautiful day, unusually warm
and as I walked back to my sister’s
apartment, I noticed how light went
into everything, even the cement
seemed to glow. Later, angry, my
sister asked, “How could you just
leave like that?” I didn’t know what
to tell her except I had searched for
a long time and still could not find
the place I begun. On a map, Golden
Gate Park panhandles the Pacific. A
month ago, I fell asleep near another
body of water, the Gulf of Mexico.
When I woke the tide was quickly
pulling in, which somehow empha-
sized the sensation of my sunburn
on my shoulders, as my shoulders
and only my shoulders were grazed,
burnt by the sun. On a walk that
same afternoon, I saw several
license plates from Quintana Roo,
a state that borders the Yucatan.
When I awoke, I went to swim
into the Gulf. What I’ll remember of
June is when waking, the tide was
high, carrying - maybe
three or four - young boys, who
were shouting, trying without much
luck to stay put on their body boards.
A month later I was lost in Golden
Gate Park.

new british prime minister

gordon brown.

party: labour

the UK Times says he is a smarty-pants and is profoundly "bookish." let's see how smart he really is.

not much to say tonite. had sushi at kiji, down the street. what was for dinner: a dynamite, spicy tuna, rainbow roll. (not all by myself, mind you).

appetizers: gyozas (fried dumplings) and sweet fried prawns. drinks: 2 carafes of warm sake. the owner gave us free mango and strawberry mochi ice cream. yum.

last nite, crystal's college mate, shilpa (lovely shilpa), cooked us chicken biryani, salad, some kind of rice dish that tasted a little bit like cous cous.

shilpa and crystal both love food and have sworn that east oakland has excellent food. the pizza joint they want to try:

cheeseboard pizza, in berkeley. supposedly it is unbelievably scrumptious.

the title page to juliana spahr's chapbook is done. now, the real test is: can i finish all the printing before i leave for ny (this sunday)?

what i have left:

- run of titles/subtitles, page #s (for a total of: 14 runs)
- cover: 4 runs

* * *

later gators.