Practically: Here Comes Everybody

The link above is one of the more vigorous, practical, and useful pages on the web for QUICK reference to relief agencies; information on :WHERE TO MAIL NON-PERISHABLE ITEMS;ALTERNATIVE MEDIA OUTLETS; 5 THINGS YOU CAN DO TO HELP IMMEDIATELY; critical contact numbers for agencies and more.

Not to mention the agency of friendship, familiarity, and sustaining encouragement this site offers to poets and readers.

Thanks to Lance Phillips for his good work and exemplary maintenance of this website.

Also, posting there is the singular perspective offered by correspondent Jordan Flaherty and "Notes From Inside New Orleans"

from "Katrina, the Perfect Storm" by Leon Wynter

"There is this one, fat, black, woman who keeps wading across my TV screen. Or maybe there’s a hundred of her. She drags her belongings in a gym bag through chest- deep oily water. Her arms are as fat as thighs. Her THIGHS are churning all that’s foul beneath the surface.
And then there’s the brother. He’s a do-ragged, unshaven gangsta from central casting with a case of beer on his shoulder. Maybe he’s her nephew. He doesn’t have a record deal—yet— but he does have a nasty hard core rapin’ and robbin’ video out on cable news right now.
Auntie and nephew are the worst possible sterotypes of black America. America sees them playing on an endless loop on TV this week. We haven’t seen this many black folks acting out this much pain since the rebranded Rodney King uprising in L.A..."

to read more click on the link above or go to my "Other Links Since" & "The American Race" blog by Leon Wynter

Battlefield Circulation: To break over. To know

To be---

future tense present past
to have been between that

or its

eye-light's haven

To be as such a trajectory
(active voice use ghostly "I")

retroactive

to find this

then of this
to trans-act such a re-

per-cussion
've been redistributed as light's practice

Charles Reznikoff standing on a bus in Brooklyn.

Battlefield Circulation: A poem / To go with A picture/ Then back to Lisa Robertson

The Supreme Courts

I'm going to go outside
where there now is

snow.

These place
where the heels have pressed

the sidewalk moves
the stares of suns.



And I will leave
farther that way left

from the apartment
where I see

(and receive)
notches

and nocturnes:
the visible snows

of between



And you will list me in your plans

dear Lord
I have you left.

These are how
the houses so;

these are
tricks the mind

learns shuts freezes become.



I move out;

I barely knew,
now to left.

I went that way.


I walked.

[Un-published poem, composed in Washington,DC January 2000, a month after first meeting Daniel Martino, Pro-Life Activist. I first met Daniel a year before this picture was taken. Dedicated to him]

Daniel Martino of Washington expresses his views in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.[from The Chicago Tribune,Tuesday, December 5, 2000]

And you did not die outside of love/And you do not judge

Lisa Robertson

and now today in memory of my grandmother

03 June 1904-31 May 2005

Or maybe I should have used this picture instead:

Night Gardening, 2005
Mixed media (double-sided encaustic) 13" x 9"
Augusta Talbot

(see Palmer's poem "Night Gardening" from Company of Moths)

**

"In German, Celan is the poet to whom I feel closest. There's something about his psychology, the way he exposes himself in the act of hiding, that feels familiar and keeps me reading."

Benjamin Friedlander

*
Friedlander's remark brings to mind Michael Palmer. Perhaps to word it this way, or propose such an amending:

"...the way he hides himself in the act of exposing, that feels familiar and keeps me reading..."

*

*
"Poetry allowed me to control my prison and not vice versa" ---Faraj Bayraqdar

*

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Your Linguistic Profile:

65% General American English

15% Yankee

10% Dixie

10% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

Re-vision

Continuing to revise a poem posted earlier ~>here

YOURS IS A BREATH OF INTERPRETATIVE ALLIANCE(s),or;

BREATHING AS AN INTERPRETATIVE ALLIANCE(played over, nourished, extant)

An envelope to straddle
by im-position a wage

light sounds instrumental

feverish not ordering
restive not in-solvent

corrosive and a backing

sutured less foreground less
adhesive, salient 'if' by that nerve

to train accent

*

From this depth light's conclave
elsewhere not spacing

restless not sortilege

assertion lest a
'narcissistic' detour post-

pone writing now

become through this dark
lifting, trans-active in its inquiry;

fill to an immersion now ?

[revising 15-18, &23,25,26 april05]

Q: What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

A: I can never get over the miracle that speech is a product of the body, and all the eros of language, how it feels in the mouth, how it impacts the ears. I love that language is abstract and yet so embodied, that a person says something and the words are made of breath and spit, and then the sound of the thing made dissolves into the atmosphere. The base of my 'religiosity,' if one wants to call it that, is the idea of word made flesh. Poetry is an ideal site for exploring and challenging mind-body dualism.---Elizabeth Robinson

From left to right: my sister, brother-in-law, their son Thomas (born 24March05), and my grandmother (born in 1904, turns 101 years old on 03 June this year)

"Bruce Springsteen's new album, Devils & Dust - his first for three years -is his darkest and most intimate to date and shows America's greatest rock performer moving into an ever deeper artistic maturity"

from a fine review of the new Bruce Springsteen album by Sean O'Hagan~> here