NO NEW IMAGES TODAY, JUST AN ANNOUNCEMENT:

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

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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.

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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.

GEOGRAPHY triptych.

PACK.

Dream Sequence from SWIMMING.

And another: THE CONFINES. The text, a prose poem of the same name, will be in Alice Blue magazine, www.alicebluereview.org/, next month.

Painting featuring my own poem, SCENT, (with detail photo).

These paintings incorporate text from Jorge Melícias' THE LIGHT IN THE LUNGS. The translation Elisa and I did of his book should be up soon at Projected Letters, www.projectedletters.com. And one of these images will be on the cover of 26: A JOURNAL OF POETRY AND POETICS, due April, 2006.

Welcome. I created this site as an archive of the poem/paintings I've been doing lately. Albert Hoffman, the scientist who discovered LSD, turns 100 on Wednesday. Hoffman's comments on our relationship to the natural world (from "Nearly 100, LSD's Father Ponders His 'Problem Child,'" Craig Smith, NY Times) are, I think, a good introduction to this blog:

Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a
symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered
and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering
consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him,
Mr. Hofmann's conversation turns ever more insistently around one
theme: man's oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing
inattention to that fact.

"It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature," he
said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over
frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a
bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. "In the big cities,
there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are
products of humans," he said. "The bigger the town, the less they see
and understand nature." And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his
"problem child," could help reconnect people to the universe.

Rounding a century, Mr. Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally
clear. He is prone to digressions, ambling with pleasure through
memories of his boyhood, but his bright eyes flash with the
recollection of a mystical experience he had on a forest path more than
90 years ago in the hills above Baden, Switzerland. The experience left
him longing for a similar glimpse of what he calls "a miraculous,
powerful, unfathomable reality."

"I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature," he said, laying
a slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair
swept back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any
natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural
scientist. "Outside is pure energy and colorless substance," he said.
"All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes
see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to
make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings."

He became particularly fascinated by the mechanisms through which
plants turn sunlight into the building blocks for our own bodies.
"Everything comes from the sun via the plant kingdom," he said.


B.