Jacob's Ladder: Intake Archives

A moving object
September 14, 2007 File under: Intake

Even in prose, sound has to be able to stand up to meaning. You cannot be a writer without a sense that sound, in words, comes to ballast meaning, and that the weight it is then endowed with can lead it legitimately at times into strange centrifugal excursions. Writing, like reading, is movement, and as a result the word behaves like a moving object whose mass, however reduced, can never be taken for granted, and can noticeably inflect the direction.

—Julien Gracq, Reading, Writing

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Diode
September 13, 2007 File under: Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion

Diode, a new electronic journal edited by Patty Paine and Jeff Logde of Virginia Commonwealth University and transmitting from the VCU-Qatar campus, is officially charged. I'm excited to see some collaborative work by Julie Doxsee and Mathias Svalina as well as from Allison Titus and Rob Schlegel, and poems by Suzanne Frischkorn and Susan Settlemyre Williams, two more of my favorite poets in this world.

There are also poems by Chris Abani, Laura McCullough, Rick Barot, Amy King, Bob Hicok, Frankie Drayus, Eve Rifkah, Peter Jay Shippy, Tara Moyle, Matthew Wills, Karen Schubert, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Joshua Ware, Rich Murphy, Didi Menendez, and me.

The VCU group does such a nice job, with Blackbird and they're continuing that work with Diode, which promises to be a fine addition to the reading list.

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Upcoming
August 26, 2007 File under: Denver , Intake , Labwork

I've been quiet, I know.

Here's what's in the works that's been keeping me quiet:

Working with colleagues to complete the launch of the Colorado Center for Public Humanities. We're hosting heavy-weights Michael Berube (9/6), Stephen Prothero (10/4), and Patricia Limerick (11/1) to start it off.
Copper Nickel 8 is almost done and will be released on Friday, September 28th at Matter Studio here in Denver (2132 Market Street). Party begins at 7pm.
Same night (9/28) Copper Nickel will publish a book, in addition to its eighth issue. It's called & (that's right) and it features scads of double-exposure super-saturated Lomotography and double-exposure poems by Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson and by Jules Cohen & Mathias Svalina. In publishing this book, Copper Nickel will found Counterfeit Press, on which more soon.
Copper Nickel/Counterfeit Press and friends will present the Denver Mint Poetry Festival, October 18-19, featuring readings by Hadara Bar-Nadav, Adam Clay, John Gallaher, Kate Greenstreet, Janet Holmes, Joshua Kryah, Alex Lemon, Wayne Miller, Kevin Prufer, Zachary Schomburg, Mathias Svalina, and Eliot Khalil Wilson, and the opening of an exhibition of artifacts and poetry at The Lab.

I'll check in with you all very very soon.

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Whole Hog...
July 14, 2007 File under: America , Denver , Food , Information Technology , Intake , Self-promotion

July 10, 2007 File under: America , Denver , Information Technology , Intake

And again...

July 5, 2007 File under: Intake

Today Poetry Daily features a poem from Hadara Bar-Nadav's A Glass Of Milk To Kiss Goodnight, which you should already have. Capacious and fine.

While you're picking up an extra copy for a friend, be sure to notice that another of the smartest, sharpest, most beguiling poets in America, has a new book that is already showing up at Amazon. I cannot wait.

Hot Chicken
May 26, 2007 File under: Intake

My brother made this short introduction to one of Nashville's unique culinary contributions. Try it, then try it.

Migration
May 16, 2007 File under: Alabama , America , Denver , Editing , Information Technology , Intake , Interior Monologue , Language , Lomography / Photography , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Postcards , Self-promotion , Steganography , Tapeworm , Teaching , The South

This is for those of you who read my blog via RSS...

I am considering, very strongly, moving to WordPress in the very near future. I've already arranged a version of the Ladder at http://www.jakeadamyork.com/wp/, and I'm leaning heavily toward switching, in which case the feed addresses will certainly change. I will broadcast a warning before it happens however.

If you're reading via RSS, you probably aren't much concerned with the way the site looks, but if you're at all interested, please take a look and let me know what you think.

Ambrosia / hides murder in its chest
May 11, 2007 File under: Intake

This morning, I like this.

I'll have two please
May 2, 2007 File under: America , Intake

Make that three....

I'll Have A Starling
April 23, 2007 File under: Intake

And then there's this:

Source.

Soundtrack
File under: America , Information Technology , Intake

For a Monday morning, my "War on Terror" mix-in-progress:

"The Gloaming," Radiohead/DJ Shadow
"As We Go Up, We Go Down," Guided By Voices
"Welcome To The Terrordome," Public Enemy
"Nuclear War (version 4)," Yo La Tengo
"The Horror," RJD2
"Sneak Attack," DJ Qbert
"Send Your Man To War," Johnny Shines & Snooky Pryor
"War Begun," My Morning Jacket
"March of the Pigs," Nine Inch Nails
"War Pigs/Luke's Wall," Black Sabbath
"War at 33 1/3," Public Enemy
"War on War," Wilco
"Spanish Bombs," The Clash
"Oh Lord Don't Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me," Charles Mingus
"Calm Like A Bomb," Rage Against the Machine
"The Empty Threats of Little Lord," Sunset Rubdown
"Bomb Yourself," TV On The Radio
"Atoms for Peace," Thom Yorke
"Great Atomic Power," Charlie Louvin
"Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb," Pilgrim Travelers
"There Is the Bomb," Don Cherry
"Nuclear War," Sun Ra
"Warm Canto," Mal Waldron & Eric Dolphy

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Tryin' Hard Not To Lose My Head
April 17, 2007 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Lomography / Photography

We finished installing the 15,000 heads that are part of the Fang Lijun exhibition that will open tomorrow at The Lab

I've got a brace of photos up here.

Check them & it out.

Dear Allison, Dear Joshua,
March 29, 2007 File under: Denver , Editing , Information Technology , Intake , Language , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics

You left just in time. This morning we woke to five, maybe six inches of snow. I am told the Farmers Almanac predicted this, but this is the first I've heard of it. Its almanac size to quote Allison.

Perhaps this is the appropriate afterward. Your visit was one of the best I can remember. The time you spent talking to our students was wonderfully instructive, even inspiring, if I may pull the raggedy term from the cedar chest again. Your readings were captivating, and the balance was perfect. What more is there to say? This silence, enforced in ice and water, seems right.

I wasn't as aggressive as Mathias in capturing your visit photographically, but I got a few shots for the record.

Joshua listening:

And Allison, I made the mistake of shooting you in digital. I think analog, or analogue, would have been better.

I'm told the control booth sustained a power failure about 3/4 of the way through your reading, Allison, and so much of the sound recording was lost, though we're combing the computer caches to discover what we can. I'm going to tell those who were hoping to hear it as a podcast that this is testament to the power of the reading. Josh, I've got most of your reading, and I'll be working on a broadcast version in the coming weeks.

Please tell everyone about the broadside. We'll have it up for sell next week on the Copper Nickel site.

And, in the meantime, please rest. I hope your memories of Denver are good ones, and I hope we'll see you both again before too long.

All my best,

Jake

You Should Already Know
March 26, 2007 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion

Joshua Poteat and Allison Titus are reading tomorrow (Tuesday) on campus (7pm King Center). Think what it would be like it Whitman and Dickinson were married and wrote poems in the same house.

Quit your job and be there.

A special surprise for those with loose bills: Copper Nickel will publish a limited-edition broadside of Allison Titus's poem "The Nineteenth Century" as part of this event. Only 57 copies. A free one to the first person who can tell me why only 57.

Noah Eli Gordon reads from A Fiddle Pulled From the Throat of A Sparrow and a selection of his other 24 books this Saturday, 4pm, Cameron Church, corner of S. Pearl and Iowa. Reception to follow.

Renounce all other gods.

Next week in Denver: Danielle Dutton + Stephanie Young on Monday; Daniel Alarcón on Wednesday.

&&&

And I'm told I can say it now, Southern Illinois University Press will publish A Murmuration of Starlings next Spring as part of its Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. My manuscript was chosen for the second prize in this year's Open Competition. More details to come.

Under the Weather
October 17, 2006 File under: Denver , Intake

I drizzle through the hardwood rooms and drift from kitchen to study, stand in the shower and melt. Then I'm mixed—I'll go in today, I won't go in today—drifting once again. I am the cloudy brood behind the mailslot door, just waiting for something to fall. I am the piling light shaped by wind and pressure and cold. I am a tube slowly filling with disconnection's snow.

il miglior
October 16, 2006 File under: Intake , Lomography / Photography

Tuscon, Scale Models
October 14, 2006 File under: Intake

A little weary of the conference, the categorical conference and the actual one, as busloads of conferees began to pack busses for some supervised excursion, I go downtown where today, as last night, traffic knots and creeps, due, at least in part, to the "Meet Tucson" festival packing Sunset Park, a food-and-music extravaganza that brings out the claustrophobe, the agoraphobe in me.

Once downtown, I duck instead into the Tucson Museum of Art where I enjoyed intersections of classical and contemporary art, each work responding somehow to the Grand Canyon, perfect for the spiraling interior that somewhat resembles the ramped Gugenheim except this spiral cuts downward, into the earth. Though at first I am more taken with Jack Balas's Rumor, Tom Strich's Homage To Glen Canyon—in which a sink filled with red desert sand is carved out by the slow drip from a bathroom faucet while overhead a lavatory light pulses irregularly—screwworms into my mind.

***

Outside, two men argue. One's upset and accusatory and demanding. The other: calmer, but concerned by potential witnesses, worried about who's catching the show. The bleat of the first's voice cuts his attempts to placate. At first, I think they are father and son. The first so much younger than the second. But when the second tells the first they're going to cross the street back into the park that's starting to thump more vigorously with Meet-Tucson-festival Mariachi and the first says to the second, child-at-fast-food-restaurant-or-amusement-park demandingly, Let's get an APARTMENT, I see this is a lovers' quarrel.

I walk away, away from them and Sunset Park. Earlier, I promised myself some Carne Seca at El Charro, and now, after eyesful in the museum and earsful outside, I need to cut myself off, cloy another sense. I'm walking away through the Old-Town adobes, but I keep thinking of the demand, Let's get an APARTMENT, wondering what's involved and wondering if—however large or small the demands or provisions of the fearful—the fight is always the same. Where does the hope of acceptance become the drive to control?

***

At El Charro, a woman's kvetching at a nearby table about real-estate and trust.

Old Town is, apparently, more crowded than usual. At another table, a loud complaint at traffic begins to interview the waiter.

Traffic creeps. So much in such inflexible veins.

***

The Carne Seca, which I've had here before, satisfies.

On my last trip, my friend Eric Hayot took me to El Charro because it was close to his place, because it was recommended, and because he wanted to show me, he said, what might be another kind of barbecue.

Now I understand it better. I know more of the back-story.

I don't know what the folks at El Charro would say about their history with Carne Seca, how they came to make it, but once I listened to a Bolivian restaurateur in Denver wax at the mention of the dish, a faraway La Pazian sky coalescing in the sclera of his eyes, a face of pleasure that made me wonder if Carne Seca isn't some version or descendant of the Incan charqui from which descends jerky.

Americans might think that jerky was a hidden weed that grew near roadside stands, picked and sold to those rising through altitude, or cultivated by Boy Scouts, but the practice of dry-curing spiced strips of meat is as old as the Incan empire and perhaps older, as early contact-era accounts of Caribbean barbacoa describe a similar preparation, though the Caribs used smoke to cure, while the Incas used the high, dry, mountain air and the sun.

I am told here the Carne Seca is prepared on the roof of the building. The spices are, they say, secret. But here I can taste the salt used to draw the moisture out of the meat, partner to the sun, the signatures of the separations that create this tangle of beef fiber fried with onions and tomatoes, laved with lime, a sharp and fulsome taste.

***

Outside, the festival's breaking.

Above, Carne Seca dries to pieces.

The sky is broken and spectacular.

Something happens in between.

August 18, 2006 File under: Intake

August 17, 2006 File under: Intake

Best Ever
August 14, 2006 File under: America , Intake

I'll say it again, the sliced-brisket sandwich with home-cut fries fried in beef fat they serve at Arthur Bryant's in Kansas City, MO, may be the best lunch in these United States. If not, then it must be one of the top five, my other candidates being:

Wayne Monk's Lexington #1 Barbecue in Lexington, North Carolina: coarse outside brown with exra dip, with the German-style slaw, per house preference
sliced pork sandwiches at Byron's Barbecue in Auburn, Alabama (last I was there, they were still $1.60 each)
Dreamland Barbecue in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, after a long plane ride ("No potato salad, no cole slaw, don't ask.")
Galatoire's, New Orleans (is it? will it?)

...

This was a wonderful birthday celebration, a hot, sweaty, heat-indexy day in Kansas City, early fog followed by continuous sweat.

A roll through the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art with a Bourgeois, a de Kooning, a Marsden Hartley, a Lesley Dill, and an Anne-Boyer-esque exhibition of Elissa Armstrong's little creatures. I was asked if I would like to use a pencil rather than a pen, to which the answer is, in general, no, though I thought it best to oblige.

Then sweating at the Liberty Memorial.

Dinner at Fiorella's Jack Stack at the Freighthouse. Best beans in the world. Ever. No contest.

Sleep in. Late breakfast at the Classic Cup: grillades and grits.

Then back to Denver. Nice rain, and it is cool.

Thank you.

Kansas City has a lot on Denver — I admire the scale of the buildings downtown, the old lading houses and the newer highrises, and the density of the development there. I think their new Kansas City Star building kicks our new Denver Newspaper Agency building twenty ways to the Sunday circulars. The barbecue is most certainly better. Their river is real river. With water.

Kansas City also wins the Most Ludicrous Driving Award, with special mention in the rapid-lane-changing, three-lane-left-turn, negative-angle-left-turn, unpredictable-stopping-in-the-middle-of-a-traffic-lane, pedestrian-interface-difficulty, jaywalking, and walking-against-the-light categories.

Sorry, folks, but you know it's true.

And it's strange. Bad, aggressive, and careless driving back home always seemed an index of the hopelessness of the situation, an expression of the knowledge that there's nowhere to go. Speed wasn't necessarily about getting there faster but about spicing up a dead-end trip.

Is this the way it is in Kansas City?

I'm even more perplexed by the fact that, besides a generalized dislike of the Broncos, many Kansas Citizens seem to admire Denver and want to go to Denver and even to turn parts of KC into parts of Denver. Or maybe that's just a qualification for any bartender job in KC.

...

Now it's back to work. Some new poems, some work on the starlings manuscript, two essays to complete, syllabi, classes next week, and soon a new issue of Copper Nickel, for which stay tuned.

Until then—

Everybody's Got Something to Hide...
August 11, 2006 File under: Intake

Yesterday was my birthday, and it was full of surprises.

My friends at The Lab singled me out at the conclusion of the evening's Mixed Taste Lecture Series (Chicano Rights Movement and the History of Pornography) with a special birthday wish and, yes, my own personal monkey, complete with belly-button tattoo and a lanyard with a card that says "Drink When Jake Tells You To," an artifact from my talk on American Whiskey (with Wonder Cabinets).

After our traditional dinner ("Aftertaste") at The Oven, we took the monkey out for a drink.

And then the biggest surprise: a weekend trip to Kansas City to eat barbecue.

Is barbecue sauce covered by the new TSA ban?

Later—

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August 10, 2006 File under: Intake

Good news.

Climb
August 8, 2006 File under: Intake , Poetry & Poetics

Almost the summer's gone, gone too quickly, and in less than two weeks the semester will have begun.

I have finished, but for the small tightenings, a manuscript. I am working on another now. I am staying from the office as much as I can.

Read lately Peter Markus's The Singing Fish, Julianna Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs and Alex Lemon's Mosquito, Mary Burger's Sonny.

Listening to Midlake, Orchestra Baobab, Carla Bozulich, the Black Keys, the construction next door.

Sleepy now. Time for a shower.

Tomorrow is writing. Thursday is photos and barbecue and cake.

Prayers for Gina on her way home. Thanks for a few hours' conversation, a meal, a shutter's allow.

Soon, the hand-sown books. My Legba rightly crossed.

Almost another year. I continue...

August 7, 2006 File under: Intake

A poem I like.

Imitates Art
July 11, 2006 File under: Intake

I've just spent the last two days working on a longish poem that begins with a bird flying into a (closed) window and killing itself. Not five minutes ago, a flicker crashed into the window above my desk.

Happily, after a frantic call to the wild bird rehab, when I tried to gather the bird for emergency transport, he gathered himself, flew.

Linger
June 30, 2006 File under: Denver , Intake , Self-promotion

Last night's Mixed Taste was a success, I think. Certainly it was a lot of fun.

Again, I found myself mesmerized by Janie Geiser's images as Melinda Barlow showed them against some Joseph Cornell boxes as modern examples of wonder cabinets. Now I have to plot a trip to the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

My talk on American whiskey seemed to be well-received, though, sadly, not all the samples were consumed. I stayed on afterward to take some of it in. To my own surprise, I found that after some Knob Creek and Wild Turkey rye Jack Daniel's was actually enjoyable, almost peachy, though I suspect if I address it directly again I'll find it brutal, as I usual do. I had, too, some shine received through several hands from Tennessee/Mississippi borderlands, but not too many takers on that one.

It was good to see so many friends and students and colleagues there and to make some new acquaintances, including one Kentuckian whose appreciation for rye has fostered a salivating catalogue of favorites.

To those of you who missed it, we'll make up for it somewhere. Matt, I am looking forward to the bourbon bar. Come September, we'll all be happy folks.

Now it's back to work on my own murmuration. I've got about 40 solid pages, and I'm working steadily. The book's structure shifts slightly every day as I think about it, which I think is a good sign. I'm looking forward to the next month of writing and hope to have a MS completed by the middle of August.

Meanwhile, many good books are keeping me company, including Adam Clay's Canoe and Nate Pritts's Winter Constellations and (a tardy discovery for me) Nicole Cuddeback's The Saint of Burning Down.

And there's tons of Sun Ra on pod.

See you out there a minute.

On Location
May 11, 2006 File under: Alabama , Intake

The Personality Shop, Dothan, Alabama. Closed due to lack of business. For sale.

...

Back from a week in Alabama, two readings, a lot of driving.

Now grading finals. Will report in slowly over the coming days.

I am addicted / to places.
May 2, 2006 File under: Intake

... Places are where things happen. And things
are what I say instead of apologies, they ricochet
like wishes off the surface of a river, as you predicted.

—Wendy S. Walters, Birds of Los Angeles

Reading
May 1, 2006 File under: Intake

Last week into this week:
Daniel Alarcon, War By Candlelight; Joshua Clover, The Totality for Kids; Katie Ford, Deposition; Roger Gastman, Freight Train Graffiti; Jack Pendarvis, The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure; Joshua Poteat, Ornithologies; Peter Streckfus, The Cuckoo; Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard; Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk.

Listening to:
Editors, The Back Room; The Hives, Vini Vidi Vicious and Tyrannosaurus Hives; Pretty Girls Make Graves, Elan Vital and The New Romance; Martha Wainwright, Martha Wainwright.

Dear Reader
File under: Intake

Thank you

Dear Reader
April 30, 2006 File under: Intake

Thank you.

Listening
March 6, 2006 File under: Intake

When the music quiets, I hear a flicker high in the trees overhead. In the distance a shovel coughing into lawn. The two rhythms merging.

I have been listening to a lot of Coltrane, that flying and fluttering and fluency, and it repairs me, repairs all muscles of my throat and hands and there is music here, too.

Reader, there is much to say, perhaps too much, and to say it well requires some time. So I beg your patience.

Reader, everything in my life is in motion, and each time I sit a poem arrives, a wren, preternaturally aware and as clear and lensing as that one in Levis's poem, and through it I see everything more sharply.

And then there is this language that arrives, a whisper at the cusp of my ear. I am writing everything down.

Everything is in motion, and in that motion are many wonderful motions, motions I have known before, but not in such abundance, and never so finely.

There is much to say and to say it well will take some time. How much, I do not know.

I would say to you this Monday, if you did not sit yesterday in the slow approach of morning light and feel your body, your whole body, and your heart within it reach toward that light as if answering a question, and if you did not sit in silence and listen to A Love Supreme, and if you did not forget for a moment even your breathing and the beating of your heart so you could feel them more clearly when they came back into time, a partner in that polyrhythm, and if you do not own a copy of Crescent for this morning, then you have some planning to do.

...

I would also say to you that, through the generosity of several wonderful persons in Lincoln, Nebraska, I have discovered a book I don't want to finish because I don't want it to end, Ornithologies, by Joshua Poteat. This is one of the best books I have ever read, and though I don't want it to end, I will come to its end, and I will begin it again. I wish I'd written much of what's in it and want to know the poetry there.

...

Reader, there is much to say, and I will say it slowly to say it well and obliquely so it will be able to say itself in some measure.

And if you are listening you will hear it all, in the distances near and far.

Random
February 10, 2006 File under: Intake

For Kevin and anyone else who wonders why I often don't make sense, a random 10 from my iTunes on shuffle:

"Shoes," Atmosphere
"A Mansion on the Hill," Hank Williams
"Drunk Trumpet," Kid Koala
"Chemical, Chemical," Pretty Girls Make Graves
"Goodbye Pork Pie Hat," Charles Mingus
"Vampire/Forest Fire," Arcade Fire
"Today I Love Everybody," Johnny Hartman
"Oleo," Miles Davis Quintet
"If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day," Robert Johnson
"You're Gonna Miss Me," 13th Floor Elevators

The Prayers of Others
February 6, 2006 File under: Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Steganography

Maybe I've become too easy, but it seems that every couple of weeks I'm discovering something — a book, an album, an artist, but especially a poem, a poet — that comes home to me more powerfully than I remember anything before.

This weekend I have had the immense pleasure to read David Keplinger's The Prayers of Others, which will be published by New Issues in the fall. I'm sorry you all have to wait for it: this is one of the best books I have ever read.

Only the prayers of others can save me. Likewise, mine save only them.

Put this one on all the Christmas lists.

Five for the Coming Week
February 5, 2006 File under: Intake

The most recent top five in heavy rotation:

Correspondence
February 2, 2006 File under: Intake

Of which more soon. After the visitation of the poem this morning.

Weekly Reader
December 19, 2005 File under: Intake

Dear Reader,

As you may have guessed, I've been sick most of the past week, which has involved lots of retching, fetal-positioning, and sleeping. Consequently, I haven't read much, other than student papers and portfolios.

Except for Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms by Joshua Marie Wilkinson, which I can already say is a wonderful and wonderfully amazing book.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Wilkinson, in the company of Noah Eli Gordon, on Saturday at my local. We exchanged books and had a pleasant conversation, at first to plan our February trip to Lincoln for The Clean Part reading, and subsequently about all manner of things. A conversation wonderful because it was the first I'd had without an edge of my week's dis-ease and because it was one of those rare exchanges that has both the range of casual dialogue — moving from book stores to subways to films to photographic equipment to discussions of law and recent political events to the merits of various consumable beverages — and the depth of professional and familiar exchange.

I went home in the painful cold with a copy of Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms and went to sleep. The next morning, I began reading and emerged from these re-occupied rooms hours later.

Though I must re-visit them as well, I recommend these to you, dear reader, as rewarding of both a brief tour and a much more determined lingering.

For my part, I am determined to travel with this book, along with

I will be writing toward the next book, now without a title, though the recurring figure will be a murmuration of starlings, who may give the whole a title. I am halfway toward a complete manuscript if I finish, as I must soon, a long, loose poem dedicated to Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Reeb, and all those who marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.

These are the books that are focusing my thoughts as I work toward that.

Tomorrow, I will be in Birmingham, where I will again take a walk, thinking toward another of the poems that scattered in fragments throughout my notebooks. With luck, I will come to a draft of that one, too, and perhaps be more than half-way with the new manuscript.

My contact here will be intermittent, though I will continue to tape my progress, unrolling that here as possible.

Good luck to you, dear reader.

As Joshua Marie Wilkinson writes, "Each day you must offer yourself with words to somebody." Today it is you. Tomorrow someone unknown, anonymous, someone who's not even listening. Then I will be drifting and dislocated, then grounded again. Then you will be offering yourself to someone else.

And the things we say that no one hears will collect in the holly or the elaeagnus and fester like fruit for some lingering bird and then that will be transformed into something sudden at the window, something conversation falls to hear, though no one will know what it means. Not even we, dear reader.

So here is hoping for that continuing exchange in the coming year, however asymmetrical, however mis- or un-directed.

All my best to you,

Jake

Charon's Manifest by Dan Albergotti

Weekly Reader
December 11, 2005 File under: Intake

The Snow Poems, by A. R. Ammons

No Accident, by Aaron Anstett

The Singularity of Literature, by Derek Attridge

The Throats of Narcissus, by Bruce Bond

Parting the Waters, by Taylor Branch.
Pillar of Fire, by Taylor Branch.

Parables and Revelations, by T. Crunk

Resin, by Geri Doran

Boondoggle by Tim Earley

Whatsaid Serif, by Nethaniel Mackey

Weed Over Flower, by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

The Innocents, by Taryn Simon

Resolutions
November 21, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics

Catching

Coming back into my body now. Weeks: readings, radio spots, grading, teaching, reading, thinking.

Backwards I see in my own days where I sweated through fot with linguists and contenders...

I have witnessed and waited, but I have arguments, if few mockings.

Balance

A few weeks back, at the release reading for Murder Ballads, I began to notice things about the book's arrangement as I was reading from it, certain symmetries I can't remember intending though I'm glad are there.

I started thinking, after the reading, how your writing mind, when it's working well, does so many things you're not aware of exactly. You think the poem means a certain thing. You act to preserve that value, to value that meaning. Yet, the poem has other potentialities.

Once alienated from the moment of specific production, you re-enter the poem — again, not so much as a specific statement or a specific value (though this is important, sometimes more than others) but as a process by which meaning is made. And new meanings are made. Some of them are the same as the ones originally intended. Others are new or newly visible.

Walking

Kevin:

I've been thinking a lot about your earlier post, particularly in relation to some of the comments Nick Piombino left at my blog on Hart Crane and my own understanding of the poem as performative utterance, a dialogic exchange, if you will.

Performative utterance.

A performance of meaning.

The meaning of performance.

Notice that all three ideas place as much emphasis on the writer as the reader?

Require the reader to imagine a writer writing this poem, to become interested in those processes by which this text comes to arrive as a text capable of producing, of re-producing meaning, as much as recording it.

Not poems as reliquaries. Poems as prayers.

Prayers

I am praying a lot now.

I go to the reading. A room full of people I do not know.

I take my dark book from my coat pocket (right size) and begin to read. A poem about hate crimes, racist murders, lynchings. Yet, I look like and sound like the kind of person I'm condemning. I have to say the "n" word in one of the poems. Will it seem like I am the kind of person who has this in his idiom? Or the kind of person who needs to enter into certain reticulations necessary to arrive in a certain place?

Or will I be two people, occupying the same column of flesh and breath, a prism through which some intention is refracted into color, some into others. Which colors fall within the visible spectrum?

More importantly, what will they hear?

Love Letters

Roxanne:

What do you think of my current approach to such sympathetic reading--to read text as you would read a love letter?

I love a reader.

As in letters from a lover, we read closely, carefully, repeatedly, and search for clues to how s/he wants us to read it, regardless of the opacity (opaqueness?) of the language/style/form.

Text as a record of desire and what we want is the desiring, the rebirth of desire, the reaching out, the erotic.

How iron reaches out for iron.

Painful or fulfilling.

A connection.

A question asked.

A thousand answers.

Each one containing something you need to hear.

Radio Friendly
November 13, 2005 File under: Intake , Self-promotion

If you're in Fort Collins, tune in tonight at 6pm to 89.9 KRFC. I will be interviewed by Dona Stein and will read from Murder Ballads.

If you're not around, I'll have a CD of the show — and last Tuesday's "The Poets Vs." on KVCU — if you want to listen. I'm going to look into podcasting these in low-bitrate format and will update you on that as it develops.

Still cogitating/agitating over storySouth business. Hope to be back to regular blogging by the end of this next week.

Meanwhile, I am writing.

Listening to Janet Feder.

Voting Irregularities (2)
November 3, 2005 File under: America , Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Language , Teaching

Tuesday after voting, I went on a eight-mile bike ride. It was nice to clear my head and forget about how underpopulated my polling place was. I rode past rows and rows and rows of signs for Referenda C & D. But I saw barely more people on my ride than I did around the voting booths. I ventured later onto campus, from which I'd taken an election holiday, and the place was crawling, yet few people were talking about the election, and there were scant evidence that anyone cared.

Two students wrote that day — one to say that he just didn't vote, and one to say that when he asked people if they voted they got offended — and while I didn't exactly get depressed, I was again disappointed by these signs of the health, or the lack of health, of our civic discussions.

It always baffles me that people don't vote. It isn't hard. And it's one of the few ways in which the common citizen can act directly on the shape of the government. I'd never think that protest or discussion of any sort were not political acts, but voting is a special act, one that's provided for in our history, one for which many people struggled and died — and I'm not primarily thinking about our military but about the Civil Rights Martyrs, many of whom died in protests specifically designed to expand voting rights and voting practice, activists of whom I've thought often in the days following Rosa Parks' death. I think each of us has a citizenly duty to vote. But we have an even more powerful ethical obligtion to vote in order to sanctify the deaths of those who fought for this.

I made my memorial.

And then I began thinking about why people don't vote.

I've been personally frustrated by our university administration's official discouragement of our (professors') involvement in political discussion or political action. I know there's a state law that makes it illegal for state employees (of which I am supposedly one) to engage in political campaigns, electioneering, or generally to advocate any policy or political position that might benefit them directly or conflict with the performance of their duties (is this a sedition law?) so that it cannot be said that the taxpayers have been forced to finance their own opposition, but we, the university, is in the business of dialogue, and I find it ludicrous that the professors have been officially asked not to engage in this dialogue. So I can't do any thing more, they say, than encourage my students to vote. So I cannot motivate them toward action through dialogue; I can only suggest that it's a good idea. And since people generally avoid discussions of politics in their daily lives, this means that one of the few places in which one should be able to have an open and spirited discussion is now no longer one of those places. As far as the citizenly conversation about the direction and health of our polity is concerned, it's almost as deserted as my polling place.

And then I see that the opponents of Referendum C, having lost the election, are considering suing to stop expenditure of the money retained under this provision, effectively working to void the election, and I wonder how much effect this has on voter participation.

Last year, I took my LCA with me to the polling place. I had some black-and-white film in it I was planning to double over. This is one of the frames that came up, one I find very appropriate at present. It's hard to see, but my ballot, my actual ballot, is just below the sign, almost wiped out by it.

I wish for a day when I won't think of this picture, but I don't know when it's going to happen.

And in the meantime, both the willfull ignorance and the horrible silence of our political exchanges make me wish again for greater conversational sympathy, more careful listening.

Fitter, Happier, More Productive
October 28, 2005 File under: Intake , Self-promotion

I could not be happier this day. Though I had, traumatically, to report to work this morning at 9am, even that didn't dampen the excitement of actually having the book in my hands. And to amplify my joy, Steve Mueske inducted me into the Digerati.

Sleeping well,
no bad dreams,
no paranoia,
careful to all animals...

Sleep & Poetry
October 26, 2005 File under: Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion

Am sleeping again, just like that.

And writing again.

Not a coincidence, I'm sure.

. . .

Working now on a serial poem about the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson.

If this poem comes as the Emmitt Till poem came, I could be done with it by the end of November and then more than two-thirds of the way toward the completion of the next collection of poems. I'd like to have a full working MS by year's end. I don't think I'm that far off.

And then I'll get caught in an up cycle and won't sleep for a while or sleep much for several weeks while I work on the poem.

I do enjoy the rush — I can't get it any other way — I feel when I'm in the middle of working on a poem, such intense concentration it feeds itself, and I forget all manner of responsibility and action.

. . .

And then I come down.

. . .

For those who are interested, I have updated my Murder Ballads page. I'll continue to add material there over the next week or so.

I should have the book in hand by next Monday. Perhaps before.

Hiatus
October 1, 2005 File under: Intake

Mostly tired after a long week preparing for the Mingus event, which went pleasingly well. At least I didn't pass out, and I faltered only twice. Maybe three times. Have come as well to some important realizations about self and writing that require some sequestered exploration. Am frustrated with my employer's policy forbidding me to speak publicly as a recognized or recognizeable employee of that concern on matters of public import. Which has lead to aforementioned realizations. Which have me writing poems.

Therefore, I hope you will excuse a few more days of post-less-ness.

I recommend to you today:

Essential reading: Seth Abramson on Bill Bennett's unbelievable stupidity and hubris
Essential Listening: Charles Mingus at Antibes (1960)

More later. Perhaps some revelations. Some of the Mingus conversation revisisted as well.

The Brain — is wider than the Sky —
September 14, 2005 File under: Intake

September 13, 2005 File under: Intake

every pause a listening, every listening reach, a question, waiting for an answer

Listening (2)
September 12, 2005 File under: Intake

John Coltrane's "Dearly Beloved," Sun Ship, track 2.

Feed the disk to the player. Click ahead one track. And then.

Then you can go into it later.... But I think it'd be better to keep it pressing, so we we we'll keep a keep you know keep a thing happening all through. But you can go to it when you feel it later, you know.... Ready?

A shower of sound. Keep a keep you know keep a thing. Keep.

When I first bought this record, who knows when, I was looking for something — maybe Love Supreme again, maybe something better, more —l but I remember not finding it. Nevertheless, I didn't sell it, and I kept going back to it, and I soon discovered this beautiful song that I'd have had as the only music at my wedding if I had known it then.

And slowly this has become one of my favorite records, beginning with this song and extending to the opening tune, "Sun Ship" and through the disk to the end.

When I first started coming, I wasn't ready. And now I am a different person. Larger, if not multitudinous.

I've had occasion to return to my (incomplete) posts on craft (1, 2) after a Friday conversation, especially to my interest in "craft" as a concept that is more than shorthand for "qualities I admire in poems."

To add to the record and the conversation, I mean in part that one must listen to a poem, not just for the musics that come most strongly to our ears, but more importantly for its idiom, its poetic, its ethic, the proposal it makes for our living near and with it. I mean in part that one must become sympathetic to the poem. Indeed, one must make the effort to become sympathetic with a poem if one is to read it. One may then, as Whitman suggests, walk freely out of that precedent that suits one not. But you must arrive before you can depart.

Too often as readers, as listeners, we depart before we've finished arriving. We "know" how it's going to fall out. We "know" what it's about, where it's going.

I too.

I am trying to return to those incomplete arrivals, to come through sympathy to some place that is beyond me.

To adopt for a time a consumptiive aesthetic that is different from my productive aesthetic, to read something different than I would write, and thus to escape an ideologuery.

To be inside the music.

Listening
September 11, 2005 File under: Intake

James Agee:

Get a radio or a phonograph capable of the most extreme loudness possible, and sit down to listen to a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or of Schubert's C-Major Symphony. But I don't mean just sit down and listen. I mean this: Turn it on as loud as you can get it. Then get down on the floor and jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly as possible, and not moving, and neither eating nor smoking nor drinking. Concentrate everything you can into your hearing and into your body. You won't hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it. As near as you will ever get, you are inside the music; not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music.

From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

...

So, when I listen, I try to get inside the other's language.

But is anyone else trying to get inside mine?

Someone asks recently if we can be more than ourselves.

I hope so.

...

Listen here.

...

August 15, 2005 File under: Intake

Starting to get myself back together. Have jonesed for barbecue for some time. I return to work and it seems more like I work for the NTSB now. Sorting through wreckage. Press deadline tomorrow for Copper Nickel. All-day faculty meeting on Wednesday. & I am running low on whiskey.

If you are free on Thursday, come again to Mixed Taste, at 6.30pm, at Flash Gallery on Alaska near the intersection with Saulsbury in the Belmar redevelopment. This week's topics: Contemporary Opera and Murder Ballads. Yours truly takes the second half.

And mark your calendars for the Copper Nickel release, Thursday, 8 September, 5-9pm at the historic Denver Press Club at 1330 Glenarm Place downtown. I'll be bartending during happy hour, which is either from 5-6 or 6-7 or perhaps any hour thereafter. All tips will go to support the journal.

Now, for that whiskey.

Listening
July 23, 2005 File under: Intake

New Issue of storySouth due out this week.
July 11, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion , The South

Later this week, Jason Sanford and I will launch a new issue of storySouth after a brief hiatus. I'm very happy to announce two features, one on the poetry of Charles Wright, edited by Daniel Cross Turner, and the other on the poetry of Tom Hunley, edited by Jeff Newberry. Also, poems by Nate Pritts, Angie DeCola, Shane Allison, and many others.

Permalink | Comments (3)

Let Us Go Then
July 8, 2005 File under: America , Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics

Last night's Mixed Taste lecture — "Meat Sausage and T. S. Eliot — was wonderful. Pete Marczyk of Marczyk's Fine Foods introduced us to some wonderful fresh sausages and amazing European country wines, after which I rose to give my crash course in T. S. Eliot.

Among the questions were the inevitable: "What kind of bangers and mash would T. S. Eliot have liked?" To which we both responded that if he would condescend to such probably he wouldn't have had much taste for them. Interesting also: "As far as I know there is no mention of sausage in Eliot, or Shakespeare for that matter?" To which we responded that Eliot's Prufrock, while not necessarily biographical, had thin arms and legs and may have reflected a rather shallow draw in Eliot — there's not much food in the poems. As for Shakespeare, Pete remarked that "Big Billy had a known love for sausage" and then speculated that the omission of such from the plays was surely the result of bowdlerization.

Also asked to composed a poem to sausage spontaneously, we engaged in a quick stychomythia:

P: O sausage, O sausage, how I love thee!
J: "Let us go then, you and I
when the casings are spread out across the sky...

We came together at the end to promote slow foods and poetry at the same time. It was very fine indeed.

If anyone is interested, you can catch me lecturing (and serving) Cajun Food as part of the series on July 28th (b/w a lecture on Clifford Still) and again lecturing on the history and form of the Murder Ballad on August 18th (b/w a lecture on Contemporary Opera). This is the right kind of intellectual spectacle for Denver, I think. If you're in the area, you must come.

Today: sleeping, writing, reading, resting.

Mixed Taste
July 7, 2005 File under: Denver , Intake , Poetry & Poetics

If you're in Denver tonight (Thursday), I've just picked up a lecture on T. S. Eliot as part of Belmar's Mixed Taste leture series: 30 minutes on one topic, 30 minutes on another completely unrelated topic, then Q&A for both at the end. I'll be giving a talk on Cajun Food (distinguishing features and history) and on Murder Ballads later in the summer's series.

I haven't posted here since Monday, mostly because I've been writing and reading a lot this week. Here are some recommendations:

Pop-up
June 29, 2005 File under: America , Intake , Lomography / Photography

Very much enjoying Thomas Allen's photographs in the summer issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, the journal that may, for my money, be the best thing going these days.

Listening today to Ori Kaplan's Shaat'nez Band's Le Magus.

Sweating.

Dine and Discuss
File under: Denver , Information Technology , Intake

Old information technology: have lunch with a friend.

Today: St. Louis-style ribs at Big Papa's BBQ with Rafael Fajardo. Topics discussed: barbecue, blogs, broadsides, cinnamon, collaboration, cumin, Denver, digital art, DRM, echolalia, faceted categorization, fair use, file sharing, fine press books, 4th of July, grafitti, grants administration, Grokster Decision, Kansas City, letterpress printing, moist towelettes, molasses, Movable Type, NPR, open source, podcasting, property rights (intellectual and real), RSS Feeds, Space Invaders, teaching, today's date.

Incoming
June 28, 2005 File under: Intake

Typically smart stuff by Gina that opens further some doors that have been cracked over the last few days and that deserves a thoughtful response --- after some sleep.

Witness Relocation
File under: Intake

Thicket (blog) will remain open as a kind of archive and a way to receive comments from Blogger users in case my comment functions here get spammed, but this is the new home.

My reasons for moving, if anyone cares:

I wanted more control --- specifically I wanted to move away from a date-based system and toward an information-driven system, one that would allow me to work into faceted categorization and indexing --- so I decided to experiment with Movable Type (which I already use at denverpoetry and to install it on a server I control. — Laura Carter asks if I am using TypePad: I am using the full Movable Type, since I learned enough XML and CSS to make it do what I wanted.

I also wanted to integrate the often too-disparate parts of my life in one place. Six months ago I wanted to keep certain parts of my life and world separated, especially as the Ward Churchill scandal was beginning to erupt and I was convinced that soon all university professors' lives would be under microscopes. Since then I've realized I don't do much that's incriminating that's not already public, so why not bring it all together. Since I've also come to realize that I cannot maintain a daily blog dedicated to a single subject (or to a set of subjects whose intersection makes perfect sense) --- as, say, Josh Corey does --- it makes sense to draw together the separated parts of my internet life and integrate them in one place. Specifically, I wanted to integrate my blogging here with my photo-work in the lomosphere and to prepare a way to integrate promotional work for my book, Murder Ballads with this activity. When I decided to open http://www.jakeadamyork.com moving the blog here seemed like a no-brainer, since I knew how to run the Movable Type system.

This may prove to be a bad idea, vis-a-vis the posting of comments to my posts, but not much of that happens anyway, so why not embrace the solution that leads to a better blog?

Finally, my other Thicket is starting to work and I'm worried about name confusion, especially when I see what Google promotes after a search, so it's time to leave "Thicket" behind as a blogonym.