Yearbook (10.5)

This is the way to live in fall: / ride bicycles, play basketball, / make mushroom gravy every night, / and tactfully fade out of sight. The poets’ pronoun anxiety. “The one thing language can’t do is express private, personal experience”; “A praise poet has to construct fast, in the course of each song, the community that will receive the song.” The poet’s vowel lust. “Sweet house with no style, made / with a single blow and a single piece / of sunflower wax.” Keep saying sea and meaning ocean and eating nettles, no, kelp, no, knowledge Halloween hollows into the head: first frost, next frost.

Yesterday I made this easy and excellent soup. You cook up some onions and garlic, add some bacon, add some diced beets, beet stalks and chard stalks, cook it for a while, then add a 16-oz box of butternut squash soup from the grocery store, and simmer until the beets are soft.

Serving suggestion (shown here): Sour cream, steamed greens and Tapatio sauce on top. Matthew Stadler's Where We Live Now: An Annotated Reader and John Hejduk's Such Places as Memory on the side. This soup also goes well with beer. 

Yearbook (10.4)

Box around everything about looking or being looked at. They scribble with oil pastels all over the pumpkin, then decide to paint over it with green, red, orange and purple poster paints until it is sublimely black. Too much sun and coffee. “A hand leafs through autumn with a logic that shines like oxblood.” And he glued the book shut and called it a sequel. A Comfort Fort. The limits of your language are the roofbeams of your house, and you can hear crows and rain outside.

Spare Room presents
a poetry reading by :::::::
DOUG NUFER &
ZACHARY SCHOMBURG

Sunday, November 9, 7:30.
Concordia Coffee House
2909 SE Alberta Street
$5 suggested donation

Yearbook (10.3)

I later laminated these frames in wax and projected them by jack-o’-lantern light onto the wall, in an attempt to cheer up the king. The incense smells good and the garden is beautiful even in October, with lots of big dahlias, and not overly neat or fancy or spectacular—brooms leaning against the walls, a traffic cone sitting in the gravel, a smallish dented pumpkin at the Kuanyin’s feet. Not “surrealism,” but people may walk up to the screen and enter the movie. Read the sheet of blank vellum between the original and the translation. Scarequotedness is on us like fog. “Should” and “agree,” what dreary notions. So listen to the music of: “39¢.”

Yearbook (10.2)

Best moment of the day so far was just now, watching a barge go by slowly down the river, pushed not pulled by a yellow tug name of “Rossisle,” loaded with three shapely mountains of Ross Island earth: first a very conical dark brown dirt mound, then a pale gray ridge or fell of gravel, and a darker gray range of sand—all of about the same height, like an ideal landscape, three mountains like three kings changing aspects as they passed, and seeming of their own mysterious wills to move as one and pull their golden caboose behind them. My ear itches and my toe hurts and I drank too much coffee and I have a Tennyson poem stuck in my head and also a Nirvana song. It is immense. Low broad tree full of yellow apples getting rained on. It is a fine tangled knot of interconnected ideas, bits of history, but too much is vague and built on equations that don’t add up. “Arts and Entertainment” in a newspaper or “Art Saves Lives” on a bumper sticker. It’s three movies’ worth of nonstop action and amnesia!

Spare Room presents
a poetry reading by:
Chris Vitiello &
Jeanne Heuving

Saturday, Oct. 11 7:30pm
Concordia Coffee House
2909 NE Alberta Street
$5 suggested donation
www.flim.com/spareroom

Yearbook (10.1)

The sunflower out the window looks quite bleak now, saggy and rotten, with some yellow wrinkled petals hanging down from the lower flower heads. In the bathroom you can hear rain jawharping on the metal fan in the ceiling. The electrician is in the kitchen. Snotty hearts make the city work.