Total number of books owned?
at least 750-1000.

The last book I bought:
Two books–
Lay Back the Darkness, poems by Edward Hirsch
Strike Sparks, selected poems of Sharon Olds

The last book I read?
the Edward Hirsch listed above.

5 books that mean a lot to me?
wow.

News of The Universe, an anthology of poems edited by Robert Bly. Unique collection of poems that attempts to highlight the broad range of mythopoetic exploration of the larger intelligence of the world (this book is impossible to describe — just go get it).

Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco. The book the DaVinci Code was stolen from. If it wasn’t so patently obvious what a shitty job Dan Brown did, I think Eco would have a case for a plagiarism suit — that, and the fact that Eco’s novel/meditation/essay on the creation of meaning and the insane power of belief is so much more than a simple conspiracy theory book.

1 Spark, by Tony Brown. Don’t laugh — I mean it. I think this chapbook from 2000 was the best single coherent piece of work I’ve created to date. I chose poems that I thought best represented a theme, and i think that even though the poems were from several years’ worth of writing, they really connected together well. That chap’s been my benchmark for what constitutes a well-done collection of work ever since. I will exceed it someday, but that will always remain the place i did it first.

Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. Oh, the faces of a city. I have no idea of how to best explain this small book of short prose pieces — interchanges between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in which Polo describes cities he has seen on his travels. That tells you everything and nothing.

Gyn/Ecology, by Mary Daly. This is the most important book for me on this list. A discussion and ruthless dissection/damning of the destructive legacy of patriarchy — and the single greatest work on the power of language to carry meaning that I have ever read. You’ll never read the same way again after reading this book. I mean that. (As a corollary? Let me also add Daly’s Wickedary for further reading on the topic. Matter of fact, let’s toss Beyond God The Father in too…but Gyn/Ecology hit me at a critical moment in my life, and I was never the same after that.)

Quaker Meeting tag — respond if you are moved to do so.

a blank slate
fell from the roof
and struck me
in the back of the head.

i woke up after being dead
for a long while
and pulled myself up,
first one knee, then the other,

and then keeled over and
staggered up again,
then reeled over
to a convenient stump.

sitting there,
i had the irresistable desire
to write something about
my shattered head

but i found that after all
i felt too good to bother with anything
right then, other than to say
OW, and rub my wounds, and look around

for a stick or something i could use
to scratch on the slate later
when the pain was a memory and i needed
to make something out of it.

so don’t give me a hard time…woke up to pee, now headed back to sleep.

first off: give imsonshyne a hearty happy birthday!!!!

then, just wanted to do a quick update…

sunday:
boston show at the rack: nonexistent. no promo, no crowd. passed out flyers with thisrabbit and allan_inc and still no crowd.

ah well. it was in a bar that features ersatz amateur yuppie pole dancing, so whattya want anyway?

middleboro show: this was great. a lot of older folks and a lot of kids at an all weekend arts festival in a little almost Cape Cod town. a group of older poets, including me, did a group feature on themes of remembrance and healing. lots of fun, and nice to get out and see a lot of the not at all usual faces.

the asylum. what can i say? this is the home plate for me; if i miss here it hurts a lot. the home venue is always the hardest to play, and i wanted to do it justice…i think i did, and i did it with almost entirely a new set — the oldest poems i did went back only 18 months or so. my previous post give the set list.

it’s time for great changes. this sealed it for me…

it was also time to say goodbye to Debbie Middleton, who will be in her new house outside of Albuquerque in less than two weeks! Bye Deb…hope to see you sooner rather than later.

today: long day at the office. tomorrow: the same. i won’t be updating much if at all…so if you’re in the area i remind you AGAIN that buddy wakefield will be reading in Uxbridge on Wednesday. dammit, come support our efforts to bring art to the small towns…

over and out. thanks again to the people who turned out everywhere to support me and all the others who were out doing it to it yesterday…

oh, that was fun.

the set tonight:

Moved*
Scent (newish 9/11 poem)*
Interrogation*
Kirsten Dunst*
Do You Know What It Means (new orleans poem)*
1978*
Cindy Moses
High School Confidential
Mythology For Cats
Trust In The Light
Prayer For The Eyes*

*These got their performance premiere tonight.

No Punk, No Mission Statement, No DIY, No Radioactive Artist … none of the chestnuts. Yeah!

I’ll do a full scale update on the whole day (including the other features) tomorrow night — crazy times the next couple of days…

thanks to all who came out. you do not know how much this meant to me.

love,
T

ok…here we go.

i would just like to go on record as saying that i’m SO pleased to be wide awake at 2:30 in the AM on a day* when i have about 100 miles and three features in front of me.

you cannot imagine how thrilled i am.

*any connection between my sleeplessness and the number 9, the number 11, airplanes, towers, flames, death, and the names Neilie, Tara, Susan, Lisa, Linda, Robin, and Christine is, of course, surely totally coincidental.

i keep all my poems in a variety of word files obsessively stored in a number of places and constantly updated and recopied to new media. palm pilot, CDs, zipdrives, web storage, hard copies, you name it.

i have been extraordinarly lax, however, in moving the LJ poems (most of which are written in the posting field and then edited publicly over time before final edits offline in word) from here to the storage media.

i just did that for the first time since late april.

i pulled off 72 poems. and i didn’t even pull them all off…

scary number of poems to have written and not saved. i had a lot on paper, of course, but mostly when i would drop the text into wordpad prior to a reading so i could have a copy.

nothing permanent beyond here.

jeez.

i’m still sick and in midst of school work, so i’ll be briefer than i should be — plenty to fill in, but want to capture this early before i forget.

1. i don’t think of a lot of the work you are doing in these poems as surrealist.

2. i think a lot of poems labeled as surrealist are not truly surrealist.

3. what i believe is that our own poetic traditions limit our willingness to look deeper for connections between/among the images we use in our work.

4. i think a lot of supposed surrealist metaphors make illogical sense if you assume that the brain knows what it’s doing. in other words, raw chicken does relate to NASCAR to immortality to walnut furniture. something connected those things for me, therefore there’s a connection. see?

5. now: in relationship to the reader of our work, we have to walk the fine line between staying so obscurely personal in our connections that no one can understand the work, to being so accessible that we just hop or step between our metaphors and provide no chance for the reader’s own sense of metaphor to get a workout.

6. this last is part of the reason i’ve grown so irritated with slam over the years, but i digress.

7. i let the metaphors and images and associations i receive in my meditations dictate the poem’s structure and process — NOT the other way around.

8. I work in service to the metaphors.

9. I work to make the connections apparent without creating billboards.

10. I work to let the associative processes of my mind/soul/unconscious display themselves in such a a way that they trigger the same process in my readers/listeners; they may not go to where i intended, but the journey should be similar.

I have no idea how coherent that is. I have no idea how it helps.

I just think you should read more of the alleged Spanish “surrealists” and see if what i’m saying makes sense.

Dive in folks — and remember, i have a fever.

happy birthday to Final Girl herself, final_girl, Ms. Daphne G!!!!!

I hear she loves trash. Call her up and sing it to her.

T

I have a sore throat and body aches.

Considering this weekend’s schedule…uh-oh.

Tonight: Um, I dunno. Maybe sleep?

Tomorrow: Work on a paper and a presentation for next weekend.

Sunday:

12-1:30 or thereabouts: performing 2 15 minute sets as part of a day long commemoration for 9/11 at The Rack, downtown Boston. I know thisrabbit is playing too.

3:30-6:00 or thereabouts: performing as part of a group feature on grief/healing in Middleboro, MA at the Herring Run Arts Fest. Also judging their performance poetry competition (not a slam).

7:30-9:30 or so: Worcester MA — The Java Hut. Featuring, the usual half hour.

I am not going to repeat any poems from one set to another.

Wheee…

I really am looking forward to this, by the way — just gotta stay healthy.

Apes-Ma, Apes-Ma
Remember when you were young Apes-Ma?
And you used to break out of your cage?
Well you know that you’re not
Strong enough to do that anymore now
And Apes-Ma… The little girl that
Named you years ago died now
And you’re older Apes-Ma
Remember when she named you
And it was in the paper Apes-Ma?
Apes-Ma, Apes-Ma
You’re eating too much
And going to the bathroom too much Apes-Ma
And Apes-Ma, your cage isn’t getting any bigger Apes-Ma

In place of the regularly scheduled SPEAK reading, SPEAK and The Center For Peaceful Living present, live in Uxbridge MA:

BUDDY WAKEFIELD!!!

2 Time Individual World Poetry Slam Champ

Poetic and performance genius, and all around lunatic (but a nice one)

NEXT WEDNESDAY, Sept. 14, at 7:30 at

(drumroll, please)

The Uxbridge High School Auditorium, Capron St., Uxbridge, MA.

There will be a five dollar cover, but hey, you know he’s worth it.

ASIDE:
This is the high school drgeorge and I graduated from. Having someone like Buddy there is a gas to both of us, and it would mean a lot to me to have you show up. I know he’s everywhere that week, but this is part of an ongoing effort to bring big city art to a small town.

Please come. When have you ever had enough Buddy, anyway?

does anybody remember laughter?

BY THE WAY: Anybody recognize these, and the source for each? They are all spoken word bits from classic rock songs.

Well, three of them are from classic rock — the other one is from a song that is a classic.