For my friend Martin from Lima, Peru, who quizzed me on this mention of his city:

Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas: nor the tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope- stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards; - it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.

--Moby Dick, Herman Melville

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Received recently two enjoyable books from Noah Eli Gordon:

The Area of Sound Called the Subtone
The Frequencies

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I will be publishing interviews with various people in the near future. First up: Steve Timm.

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Also recently received two exquisite books from Lissa Wolsak:

Pen Chants or nth or 12th spirit-like impermanences
An Heuristic Prolusion

The ever cantankerously sensitive, Mr. Latta, mucho paranthetically.

I am working with Lissa Wolsak on a ring. Lissa's a natural wonder, a kindhearted soul. As she said to me the other day, "Go smilingly!"

!

Ron's recent entry about his father's death and his own birthday made me think once again of how strange it is that one doesn't often encounter this type of information in much avant-garde work. It's written about in other ways, like on his blog, or through private letters, no doubt, but when it's included in poetry it becomes "confessionalism", and is branded to death with all the horrors that that words entails. Yet, why? The writing is there, albeit in more well-heeled forms--the blog/diary, the private letter, perhaps in essays. When this information appears in poetry, it makes one queasy, or uncomfortable--but, again, why? Does one get "queasy" when one says this kind of thing elsewhere--to a therapist, to a friend, etc.? And, yet, this private information is perhaps the most unique, the most interesting, because one can certainly bet that no other son in the history of the world had a father who crashed a Cessna and lived to talk about it AND was also an electrician AND who died from burns to his body. Needless to say, as well, that one's reactions and confusions and identities are so fully/badly constructed by one's early living environment. If there is going to be a place for distinctive writing, it would seem a great place to go to would be one's own very weird world.

I think there needs to be some distinctions made about what is sentimentality--the exaggeration of emotion--and personal confession--for when I read essays and criticism and blog entries by avant-garde writers, one of the most conspicuous things is this fear of including "private" information in the poetry. The avoidance of it is unbelievable. To me, this avoidance makes things worse, actually, because it advocates a separate box for poetry, one that feels to me, and ironically, like a precious place, even if that box is filled with any and all form changes and disruptions, replete with the common fetishizing of the abstract. The "preciousness" is implicit, in that it slices things into forms that are more digestible.

I think all of this explains my interest in Fassbinder's work, as he was able to include deeply personal information in an art that was wonderfully complex, with humor and cynicism and vulnerability, and pain, and nonsense, and dance numbers (In a Year of Thirteen Moons).