The look of the post-avant, today

Silliman, Armantrout & radical poets everywhere

Time was when the radical poet looked like one: angry, lean and virulently au contraire. S/he certainly wouldn't be caught dead seated in comfy corner tables in La Jolla (on this kind of perpetual whirlwind tour through the good ol' days), sweaters stylishly draped, necks stiff from looking to one side and then other to see who's passing by& who cares. Only greys reflect sagaciously against pasty white brows & betoken pure open-endedness : look! well-fed beauracrat-poets to a person (Samperi was so right!), who lean heavily into their wicker seats, water glass in front, & who most likely sparkle with perfect SFU-speak .

A veritable rondure of the well-heeled l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poet here, but with none of the rough jaggedness of truth or youth, none of the unadorned ressentiment (as if they'd ever had any). How dare the comfy static & utterly satisfied baby boomer-bard still hang on a name like 'avant'. But, who knows, a book of poetry may arise out of this collocation of slouching paradoxes, one last time, one final kick at the radical can: perhaps another anthology of verse to be called the Patio Table (a more airy complement to their first august Grand Piano, perhaps).

How this roundtable (but without Siege Perilous!) could ever have once bemoaned the commodity of art and tested boundaries, is beyond me (I'm open to suggestions). To look at them, huddled in each other's birthdays, agog with prizes: well, you'd think they had just enough energy left to pat each other's cheek and coax out one more syllable, one more letter...Oh yes, they are meeting again, these radical poets,& waiting for their orders. Smoking exotic bidis and leering contemplatively through their own smoke would certainly have been preferable to this feeble lurching to water glasses. How the redoubtable have crumpled.

C'mon guys: where's the 'ol "no reference", "no image", "no meaning" mantra! Let's hear the old school motto, one more time: "Stick signifieds up your ass. Give us the evitable, arbitrary and airy Sentence instead. Bitte wiederholen Sie das!" Inject a little lividness into this fading colloquy, please. I thought l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e was supposed to be the enemy of the State: but alas, like Silliman's chic cardigan, I think it's been googled and namebranded to death, & having reached saturation, will lie discarded like bleached jawbones in New Mexico. Or set up as subway installation art. I think Silliman, Armantrout et al. forgot about Capital.

But enough of that.  It's nice outside: patio chairs & floor tiles are even interestingly mismated enough for an incongruous verse or two, to be written on napkins. Faces, gestures, and delicious pasty white of the poet's brow--all you need to kick start another "approximation of the poem".

On seeing a self-portrait, with poem

                              (for KK)


For instance, if not to see and yet so especial be is to  irradiate oneself through each lens,   momentous & poetical and found everywhere in more than one State, in dry or wet,
  among the recluse & holly--
                             well, then let's be like her


Quel drame! year after year And you know, with haiku   and always a picture (a frame of the cutest brune  and oval!), and always the lips and stylish hat,  after all this time,
                             the blind will still do it

I'm still a sucker for sad complex directions to her, who's  oracular in dark-rims, making copies one in each eye  And, of course, gotten this far with heart light as a rising sun-ha!-
  in her hat,  I-we- might as well     be like her,

                             wracked and poetical, too
                        

"Morning prayers" (2): (bothered by the young, this time)

It burns, god! like winds in or through the leaves  (hard even to look)  Stalks slope & redden
  but only in my   heart  First nations, lying below my feet, are an only offertory
    to grainy wing-shivered sky,      are still a relief to me
                                                                                         (floreat canada!)

I'll probably die angry, seared under all this milky sky  I'll try looking roseate to the eye, too'
  & oppose myself to the gamy stench of a whole world  Directing, controlling,
     no bigger than my fist (under so much sky) it goes, I go, my prayer,
                                                                                         scalding

I am kind, generous, big-winged, too writing with speed but incapable now of seeing beyond
   the people tree and  street    Scorpion bearing babies on its back, and milk, god!
                                                                                         it burns

There's something I wish to unsay

In a word, I was wrong about Occupy. And I was wrong because I'd failed to see what was staring me in the face, everyday: the most egregious example of corporate takeover of the minds and psyches of an entire generation of the young  and impressionable. The young walking, alone or in groups, texting, face stupidly glued to a screen too small to read properly, almost oblivious to the surrounding dangers of pedestrian and car traffic, engaged in communication that consists of nothing more than digitized grunts and groans. I wish to say that the makers of Android, iPhone, BlackBerry handhelds have perpetrated the greatest business hoax probably in business history. The 1% do indeed get richer and more technically savvy and more influential almost daily, and the result is the manufacture of a generation of zombie youth. It does trouble me to see it.

At first I thought it was an amusing anomaly or, at worst, a self-correcting social nuisance or, even more optimistically, a product that's soon to reach saturation point and grow obsolete. But as with most things in a globalized world economy obsolescence and even potential market declines seem built into the very production processes that cause global Capital to grow even longer tentacles.Searching for potential markets if not in undeveloped economies then at least in undeveloped minds has been its post-industrial mandate at least for the past forty years or so.

That texting is even becoming a new literacy has not gone unnoticed either, especially by writing class academics eager to swell class sizes. Tweeting has even been touted recently as a legitimate source of literary output("useful media for poetry"). Where there is classroom space and an all but corporatized campus and a rich resource in the undeveloped cerebral cortex of impressionable and unsuspecting young people, there will be the zombie-teen texting in hordes or alone, the benumbed & bemused strutting aimlessly in a thick noxious 'cloud' of textspeak.

I see the need for Occupy now. I detest the corporate harpies who've battened on the fresh flesh of developing brains and pocketed profits from this absurd spectacle of walking adverts afflicted with what I see as a ghoulish societal schizophrenia that a mass-produced handheld device has brought into being. Never til now has Marx's prophecy of the "appendage to the machine" hit me with its terrors.

I walk with protesters now.

Another reason why I'd vote for Obama if I could

I'll set aside (as I do from time to time) the poetry mandate of my blog to comment on significant world events. Obama's recently stated his support for same-sex marriage. Of course, religious groups everywhere and people with virulent social conservative agendas will feel stupidly energized as they begin to thrash out what is essentially a civil rights issue along purely religious grounds. There's no doubt in my mind that same-sex marriage is the single most significant social issue in North America today. And that, in this and other areas, Canada's already taken the enlightened path.

Obama also fought tirelessly for universal health care (and managed to get some version of ObamaCare passed in the Congress), championing the still unpopular idea that government ought to ensure that everyone get equal access to medical facilities and affordable health care insurance. The fate of government-run care rests with an important Supreme Court ruling to come shortly.

Sadly, Obama may become a one-term president since he's been saddled with the consequences of a horrendous economic melt-down begun with the Bush years. And now it looks as if Romney's hellbent on turning the upcoming presidential campaign into a fundamentalist side-show. It may very well be the last time I'll see an American leader inspired solely by a sense of dignity and fairness.

I applaud the president's courage and vision, again. If I were American I'd campaign tirelessly for a president who's come closest to realizing stateside what Canadians have been led long ago (by the great Pierre Trudeau) to call the "just society". Here's to four more years of Barack Obama!

A porn star (that, of course, only jesus can like)

(for Shelley Lubben)


By girl is meant the cute one on the curb,
  and a girl  resolved into a dew:      
  with ketchup for blood, who
  tries dying to walk, a tawny

 almond-   eyed

   star maxing out in mid-teen,
   and 'a talking of sweet fields
   instead of Him-- she who left
   thru the front door

According to received text (of Kinsey's, say)
  and as it's prescribed, a waspy eye
  is prelude to wing to joy:  a mostly
  forested night to start in

  because from the start she's already
   a pure joy

Rains on the host body (to the exclusion
  of achy homes since dad was never
  ever there) are proof needing none:
  as are red ringlets worn over ears,

  lip gloss, deepening, & hips and walk
  (however sunk into the gunk of love)

She's a slew of powdery moths,
  who've adored one eye each--
  pillows turned into cheeks,
  a girl resolved into a dew
 

Ah, there's a waspy sylva of them, & they'll
  go thru the front door

Book launch of "Bridget bird"

  

My book launch of Bridget bird will take place on Sunday, June 17 at Puddicombe Estate: Farms & Winery located in Winona, ON at 1468 Hwy #8. Directions to Puddicombe Estate can be found here. The price of admission is the purchase of Bridget bird (18$). The hours are from 1:00 to 4:30 pm. I will read for about the first hour and then, after a brief intermission, audience members will be invited to read for the remaining two hours or so.

I have a feeling that the Bridget bird book title and surrounding winery region will work wonderfully together. Here's to poetry and stunningly beautiful rural Ontario!

If you are able to attend, please contact me at cdidiodato@gmail.com.