NINEs 51 to 56 (in response to a symposium on 1960 poetry)
51 (for K.G.)
So Kenneth Goldsmith picks up a book, any book.
And yes, I’m guilty of the same problem.
An exquisitely personal writing machine for one’s own genius.
With minutes to go, he will have killed genius.
Brion Gysin couldn’t escape this nutritionlessness and valuelessness.
Mac Low made personal choices, it’s just the opposite.
Poetry for inhuman readers who do not yet exist.
I am an original genius with tragically bad timing.
Genius genius genius genius genius genius genius genius genius.
52 (for C.B.)
Charles Bernstein, the final speaker at this phenomenological intersection.
Yet whenever he does that, he gets that silence.
Those excruciatingly long fifteen seconds, I mean, as if …
He chose Larry Eigner, finally an incompetent, after all.
There was just one earlier book, very small, 1953.
The typewriter he got for a Bar Mitzvah present.
Being the least cosmopolitan of people in the 1950s.
He writes a dead-dog poem: “The Dead Dog.”
Finally meeting Creeley, the end of a beautiful poem.
53 (for R.B.D.)
Rachel Blau DuPlessis spent 5 francs and 25 centimes.
Her door opened to a masculinist referentiality transforming reality.
Second Avenue’s visceral erotic pulse simply charming Frank O’Hara.
The name of a street for a traveling poem.
Comedy and insouciance in contrast to the heroine’s aboutness.
Pink and speedy Larry Rivers, happening all at once.
Had a real nice party going on next door.
A message to the Self, a totally other zone.
John Ashbery’s most important deck-clearing move was made.
54 (for C.F.)
Crotchety old Chris Funkhouser concentrates on manifest hedonistic sexuality.
Buddhism urges me to find compassion for this man.
I was indeed not referencing Keats, and said so.
Jackson Mac Low’s rainy life, the outside, the void.
His identity normally associated with this or that movement.
Connective tissues to the Beats found weirdly and amusingly.
Seeing Mac Low’s efforts as a rejection of materialism.
A copy of the book in your precious hands.
A reading, commemorating an observation, an homage, a silence.
55 (for E.K.)
Erica Kaufman welcomes Guest to her Location of Things.
Architecture, the defining element in an otherwise diffuse space.
Illusions of stability, Barbara’s female text, genderedness of humanity.
Language without transcendence participates in a domestically divergent reality.
Am I to understand change, whether remarkable or hidden.
The binary realities of our male contemporaries’ dominant masculinity.
Anachronistic reminders by Yi-Fu Tuan: “page as pictorial space.”
Love, romance, and a man’s protection cannot possibly suffice.
Writing as an act of differentiation and of participation.
56 (for R.S.)
The Duncan Ron first met in 1966 argued adamantly.
Poems Opening the Field, the lover Jess, re opening.
I have no good prospects for finding a publisher.
I propose a writing as continuous as the Cantos.
To set the stage for the best possible reception.
Duncan found the need to break down parts within.
“Often” he was “permitted to return to a meadow.”
At the Museum of Modern Art in the 1980s.
Enraged by video cameras at his reading he explodes.
Edited by Al Filreis