christmas day 2011

Spicy frozen pizza for Christmas dinner. A 4AM taxi pickup to Heathrow on Boxing Day. London-Paris-Salt Lake City. Drinking Melissa Tea. It was my favourite tea when I lived in Poland. I have finished The Fertility Show (formally Nerve Movie). Sent it off to a publisher or two. Will have to wait a few months.

The Fertility Show takes it cue from Phillip Whalen's idea of a nerve movie and Bernadette Mayer (esp Midwinters Day). Written during my daily 3 hour commute on the London underground. It is a poetics of everything. Inside and outside. Biographical, narrative, expansive poetics, compact lyrics, NY School send offs, homophonic translations of Polish and German from overheard conversations on the Piccadilly Line etc. etc.

A poetics that attempts to narrow the gap between art and life. I don't see any other point.

Another Godzenie (with many many more strategies, modes, attempts to reconcile). A practice in mindfulness.

The poems are written on the tube in London but "take place" in Poland, Turkey, London, Milton Keynes, Las Vegas, North Carolina, Bellingham/Seattle.

A continuous nerve movie.

The other manuscript Smashing Time is also finished.

Now I will continue part two of a manuscript I started last time I was in America. It is called Spanish Fork.

My poetics is a travel poetics. But not in any narrow sense of the genre of travel writing. Orally based But not bardic.

It lives much more off the page than on (methinks). The rhythm of everyday speech is very central.

hm . . . . and the slippery mind . . . quicksilver . . .

I dabbled heavily in flarf in 2004. I dabbled heavily in conceptual poetics as well. Surrealism and political poetry were the entry points into writing poetry.

Now it is many many things. But mindfulness is especially central. And an expansive (rather than constricted) sense of the self and the world.

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