Winter glow.

NEW PAINTINGS. These will be on display at my reading on August 20th--email me if you want directions to or details about the event.

IN THE MIDST OF SOMETHING HOLLOW



Text from "the confines":

"In a public toilet, a man with marks on his temples stands naked from the waist down. He scrapes at his legs with a razor, shaving away the insect hair and cutting himself badly. Inky rivulets run behind his knees.

Disposition is not a natural fact. You think that you are still in the midst of something hollow, associated with the grasping hand. Without end, you work in a field with nothing overhead."

"the confines" can be read at the ALICE BLUE website (link on right). Go to "archives" and see issue 2.

DARK ADAPT

THE METHOD

from "swimming."

"IT IS ALL THE SAME," 2nd half of the "blood motel" diptych. The poem "blood motel" can be read at ALICE BLUE (link on the right).

"OF WHAT ARE YOU A COPY?" excerpt from "blood motel"

NO NEW IMAGES TODAY, JUST AN ANNOUNCEMENT:

Two readings hosted by The Poetry Center.
Both are Thursday, April 27th. 

*******************
Andrew Joron and Brian Strang
at The Poetry Center,
Humanities 512, San Francisco State University,
Thursday, April 27th, at 3:30pm,
free

Andrew Joron is author of several books of poetry, including Fathom (selected by the Village Voice as one of the "Top Books of 2003") and The Removes. Born and raised in Germany, he has translated a number of German poets and the Literary Essays of Utopian cultural critic Ernst Block (Stanford U. Press), and recently edited a festschrift for U.S. expatriate poet Gustav Sobin (for Talisman). He lives in Berkeley.

Brian Strang is the author of Incretion and i n v i s i b i l i t y (both Spuyten Duyvil), machinations (a free Duration ebook), normal school: hommage a beckett and A Draft of L Cavatinas: Letters to Ez (Potes and Poets). A coeditor of 26: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics, he lives in Oakland and teaches English composition at SFSU.

*******************************
26, a reading with editors Avery E.D. Burns, Rusty Morrison, Joseph Noble, Elizabeth Robinson and Brian Strang
at The Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin, San Francisco,
Thursday, April 27th, at 7:30pm,
$5.

26: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics has been appearing out of the Bay Area over the past several years, a dense amalgam of poetry, essays in poetics and other writings, with its 5th issue ("E") due this April. Tonight we'll feature all of the magazine's poet/co-editors reading from their own writings, along with selections from the magazine that they've each found most generative and exceptional. This newest thick issue of 26 will feature a focus on poetry in translation and include a great deal of creative work ranging from contemporary Portuguese to Chinese poetry. On stage this evening will be Avery E.D. Burns, Joseph Noble, Elizabeth Robinson and Brian Strang.

SLEEPING SICKNESS

(also on canvas)

NOT ASKING DIPTYCH (on canvas)

SPIDER WARS DIPTYCH

spider wars


You will not come to find things. You will come to scatter, to release crowns from a hollow royalty. Ambition falls into the bins provided. And you will leave by the back gate, off to find your place in the newest war.

Working through the recipe, you develop criminal habits: think through the various arguments, resist the fall into the cup. Austerity is your only law.

On the hilltops, rockets become a gleaming test of election principles. Examinations behind the orange sky. And the tyrant arrives in the guise of protector. An imperial weight.

But you arrive at Human Meat City and there is a hanging wolf at the gates, a message that all feet will fail. Curtained machines. Recycled blood of the wasted. Drink from the floating communal heart.

*

Shining legs tie the poisoned into knots and send them home to their families as a symbol and memento. To reanimate the war dead, the campaigners suck marrow clean and spin webs back into hollow bones. They are lighter and more porous, though rearranged and stupefied. They are open to suggestion.

The imperial widowmaker, the doomsday machine, sits up on his back four. He guides their migration by magnets in their heads. Buildings here are not. They are slight projections, encoded enclosures, and vanish at the merest sign.

Destructors sink their tails and pour out malice. A custard forms on the forest floor. Frantic mesh of hands, impersonal hacking, dark mulch of soil, rotten cells heaped onto one another. Every way out is the way back in.

*

Miniature fauna chew off their legs to escape. A wasted man in a hospital tent recites the hours. Geese sprinkle themselves across the greenest lawns.

Whatever is given away comes together. In a flock at the far edge of sight. Any way will be the way out. Figures gather and the city is sewn together by its inhabitants’ hands.

An oak spreads its branches for the hundreds gathered here. From a lemon sky, abstract ideas rain. Animals lift their noses as little as possible.

The detail looks much lighter but it's from one of the two paintings here.

WEB triptych.

Three details from GEOGRAPHY triptych.