A Blur, a Deeper Blur. A Clarity I Can't Carry

• On the William Gass Digital exhibit.
• I'm trying to read Gass's Middle C. I can't.
• I wrote a monologue about neenering as kudzu then removed it from this post. Note past tense verb removed. It's not dead, just temporarily transplanted to a word document.
• Where it won't, I fear, die.
• I am the reason not to blog, tweet, or read either, at least for me.
• I can't not. Even anti-neenering is neenering.
• Still, clusterfuckless today, hoping to start a streak, knowing I can't.
• I hadn't read until last night so didn't linked to or comment on Mark Edmundson's article last week on The Decline of American Verse. First, I didn't have time when I heard about it and then forgot about it, and didn't see anyone I read respond much less respond in anger, so perhaps this is The Decline of Trolling American Poetry Readers more than anything else. Second, it's trolling.
• But here's an impassioned response to the trolling.
• I have never read poetry better. I credit the poets. There are poets working today - somebody should post a poem a day, many of the poems recent poems by contemporary poets, on some shitty blog - that make me jealous and envious think poetry is the only medium in which I hear new sounds in typed words.

THE PROCESS

Joseph Massey

Cross-stitched
outside sounds
double the day's

indoor confusion.
How to untwine
noise, to see.

There's the bay,
highway slashed
beneath; water

a weaker shade
of gray than this
momentary sky's

widening bruise.
The page turns
on the table, bare

despite all
I thought was
written there.







WHEN ECSTASY IS INCONVENIENT

Lorine Niedecker

Feign a great calm;
all gay transport soon ends.
Chant: who knows -
flight's end or flight's beginning
for the resting gull?

Heart, be still.
Say there is money but it is rusted;
say the time of moon is not right for escape.
It's the color in the lower sky
too broadly suffused,
or the wind in my tie.

Know amazedly how
often one takes his madness
into his own hands
and keeps it.







ANOTHER REHEARSAL FOR THE MORNING

Joseph Massey

         after Lorine Niedecker

Beyond a hand
held beyond itself
the mist is too thick to see.
A dream fragment (a phrase
I wanted to remember)
goes mute in this -
extinguished. Call it
consciousness. What
we lose to recover.
Acacia branched bend
the hill's edge
off-orange. A blur,
a deeper blur.
A clarity I can't carry.