July 10, 2007 to February 22, 2008

July 10, 2007

My Personality

I took an online personality disorder test, and won!
Here's the results:

Disorder Rating Information

Paranoid: Very High

Schizoid: High

Schizotypal: Very High

Antisocial: High

Borderline: Very High

Histrionic: Very High

Narcissistic: Very High

Avoidant: High

Dependent: Moderate

Obsessive-Compulsive: High

Pretty cool!

July 19, 2007

The Little Essays

Current mood:loved

Is Destiny Desirable? Fortunately an answer to this question will depend entirely on each individual's own presentiment. Some will endeavor to sidestep; others to deck themselves out in vague discretions, alluding perhaps to example, foreign to any normal experience. Nobody can really blame either faction: destiny, let's face it, is either desirable -- or it is undesirable.

Kenneth Patchen, Poemscapes. 1958.

July 20, 2007

elementary particles

"Once a woman I thought I was in love with, told me I was the most selfish person she'd ever met. And she was right. I didn't love her. I just kidded myself along because I wanted her. All my life I've been kidding other people and myself into thinking I was capable of having any sincere feeling about anything. The others caught on before I did. I never had any real friends--by the time I got on to myself, I knew anybody'd be a damn fool to want to get involved with me. Not that I'm unusual. The woods are full of us--the young men born into a class where money takes the place of everything...affection, respect, love, all of it...Then if you take the money away, or if somehow you stop making judgments by it--" he made a gesture "--there's nothing left. The whole thing collapses." He lit a cigarette, blew smoke. "But even without that--call it whatever you like; apology, explanation, excuse--it doesn't really explain anything. Because nobody really believes in anything anymore."

"I believe." She said, tears filling her eyes again.

He said softly, "Don't let people like me spoil it, then."

See You In the Morning by Kenneth Patchen (NY: Padell, 1948)

July 31, 2007

Elsewhere

Distant friend who is also a rare bird:

http://sharpebait.blogspot.com/

Hot heat mudra's inverse poise:
in learning the new pirouettes,
entertainment drapes the strategems.

August 16, 2007

poetry

Stephen Vincent:
[Poetry and Reading a Poem for an Audience, 1963]
It was a declaration of space and position. The space was both the City and the country . . .And the poet's position became that of a public person. The reading put the poet back in the position of responding to the City in an actual way, letting the poetry move as the City does, responsive to the edges, to the corners, to the voices that flood our City lives. Built out of a democracy of eye and ear, the poetry would help create a culture where language would have a genuinely liberating function. . . It was the poet's community responsibility to make accurate perceptions, not false metaphor. [from The Poetry Reading, p.25]

Later in this same book we get a view from 1978, David Antin:
"issues of the Greek theory of harmony--which is fundamentally political and is conceived in terms of the competition of voices seeking to be heard and which considered democracy a form of cacophany (not harmonically ordered). . .I have never been impressed with the idea of democracy, the idea of democracy in the domain of the arts or of the mind is fundamentally preposterous. . .We are all (Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman and perhaps Mandel) all didactic artists. They [the organizers of the 80 Langton Talk series] were trying to demonstrate the productiveness of the participatory mode. . .The outsiders--"the people," so to speak--were there to hear a performance." [p. 189]

Which reminds me of a small piece I read in Roy Miki's magazine West Coast Line written by Louis Dudek, where he writes: "Democracy has yet to come to poetry"

And what would this mean, its arrival? Harmony? Cacophany? The 1970s? What are the modes of spoken language (or verbal art) that propose and effect integral, responsive poetry to us in the Noughties? Vincent, in his book, contrasts the local "healing transmitter" with the seekers of the "spiritual image," those who search the echoes of time and canon. Antin sees a conflictual baseball game of rhetoric and "tuning". I see saw.

August 29, 2007

who plus who equals for

"Being in love with you is not just something for me to know about
or to feel--
it's . . .
it's something to be--

something that goes out into everything."

"Yes," she said after a moment, "...in a funny way it's almost as if it didn't belong to us." Her eyes questioned the stars.

"It's as though our love belonged to everyone who still has faith . . .
faith in life and in all beautiful things."
...
"And now I don't know how to say this--
but . . .
but if anything should happen to either of us--

we must promise, Emily, the other can only protect our love by . . .

by letting it renew itself in someone else."

See You in The Morning by Kenneth Patchen (NY: Padell, 1948)

October 15, 2007

threadfield (abt singing) hearthistory

u dont no what u can find until

you find yourself in a

threadfieldhearthistory w/

a teer in your eye

a song which

time breaks/ is folded

w/improvised dishes (singin)

we sit see them there

but only if weare singing

do we feel them

and for you/i

"there's no gold,

i thought i'd warn 'ya..."

thistory, Rstory
mystery, lyricly

"love is a rose--

it only grows when its on the vine"

little scratch pad fully endorses and supports "Un jour" by Severine Hubard

(the little house that got up and walked away).
to see it, go here: http://severinehubard.net/travail/unjour/unjour-video.htm and click on "un jour"

it's what lsp's wanted for so long . . .

October 21, 2007

i got to meet the queen

Does anyone think i look like andrew motion (when i'm not in bee form)? Comment please, so i don't feel delusional! i'd not like to think i met a queen bee--


November 7, 2007

The Dream by Robert Herrick

Me thought, (last night) love in anger came,
And brought a rod, so whipt me with the same:
Mirtle the twigs were, meerly to imply;
Love strikes, but 'tis with gentle crueltie.
Patient I was: Love pitifull grew then,
And stroak'd the stripes, and I was whole agen.
Thus like a Bee, Love-gentle stil doth bring
Hony to salve, where he before did sting.


January 8, 2008

Two bee sightings

Richard Thompson's own webpage is called, what else? BEESWEB:

http://www.richardthompson-music.com/

As I was too worried about actually existing bees in America, I missed the whole debate over the purported Einstein quote about bees, which erupted last April during the thick of the bee crisis:
"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."
It doesn't matter who said it. Any way you cast the words, into or out of "genius mouths"--they're true. Pollination for Every Nation! Or no nation atall! Save the Bees!

February 6, 2008

found in a book

Pleasant words are as an honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.

February 8, 2008

The Rest of the Honey

I decided to include all the quotes about honey from the same book:

"For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell. Lest thou shouldest ponder the path of life, her ways are moveable, that thou canst not know them."

OR LATER ON IN THE SAME BOOK:

"My son, eat thou honey, because it is good; and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste: So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul: when thou hast found it, then there shall be a reward, and thy expectation shall not be cut off."

"Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it."

"It is not good to eat much honey: so for men to search their own glory is not glory."

"The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet."

[who is the "strange woman" spoken of here? She appears many times throughout the book. Not in a very good light, tho. Here she seems to be compared to a glass of wine: sweet at the beginning, and bitter at the end. The last quote implies that her sensuous nature is relative to how hungry one's soul really is--]

February 22, 2008

Honeycomb Vase

The Honeycomb Vase was unveiled to an American public this week at MOMA's new "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition. It was designed by Tomas Gabzdil Libertiny. It is an example of "slow prototyping" which allows for the execution of design projects by other species/phyla. The results are, in my opinion, "spatial correlatives" to design, rather than a startlingly new idea (consider how long animal husbandry has been part of human societies, not to mention long-term collaborations/symbiotic relations with species like cats, dogs, horses and oxen). It is a beautiful object, however, and is claimed to have positive benefits for the flowers that could be stored within it--also a delightful recursive relationship between the plant, the bee, and the human sense of beauty. I'm still trying to work out my ideas of symbiotic/exploitative contrasts in this use of the honeybee and its hive-building, and may in the future discuss more thoroughly my understanding of what our cultural realtionship is to any specific species.

A few items to consider about my blog: I am not a beekeeper, and not in any way an expert on bees, nor a student of apiology or melittology. I am in fact a poet in search of uncommon, imaginative links between the arts and the bees, human creativity and a real-world correlative and identification. My seeming obsession with bees in this blog came from a rather silly whim--helped along by a friend who also has a strong emotional concern for what bees mean to us, and what our use, transport, and dependence on them is. Let's just say I love bees, and I love honey. I may in the future change my topic to birds, also a field I know little about. So if you can forgive my ignorance, you may enjoy the rest of the little show I'm "dancing out" a map to here. This is an experiment, a mask, a task, a whim, and a lot of fun! My best to you out there if by some accident you've stumbled on me! I won't sting!


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