Little Red's Recovery Room

Yeah, yeah, belatedness, bleat, bleat. I'm thinking that Jordan is probably right that anxiety is a byproduct of privilege, fear submerged to become that reef upon which our little bark founders. For me, the only answer is the cultivation of humility as opposed to humiliation (fr. humus, earth, i.e., to be down to earth or ground down to earth), not easy for me, let alone I. I get to read the books, to take part in all this gorgeousness and stumblewonder, regardless of whether or not I actually wrote the book. Reading Noah Eli Gordon's The Frequencies, a poem whose thematics and subject-matter are a great deal like the title poem from The-Manuscript-Formerly-Known-as-Interference. Chalk it up to zeitgeist, to Radiohead, radio in all its anachronism a perfect metaphor for the informatic surge in the air, the spammy, occasionally lovely (hello, bloggers) dissemination which produces both alienation, fragmentation and the hope that one can cobble together from the self-scraps some new, rhizomatic place to stand and sing. If I get honest, his poem's better, and I'm glad that I can read it both from the inside and the outside.

I've ordered Sikelianos' The California Poem and Keving Young's Black Maria through InterLibrary Loan, and I look forward to finding out how much of my Los Angeles Poem they obviate. Large chunks of it (mine) play at noir, strain the frame and its fatals, as the Young poems I've seen in journals so deftly do, and although Sikelianos seems to have a pastoral strain in her poem, indubitably she's engaging in some kind of critique of Californian dreamin' of the urban sort, the pastoral as counterpoint to the hyperreal and hyporeal of The Angles. I'll have more to say later. I do wonder how Knopf can charge $25.00 for the Young book. Assignment: use Knopf as a verb. To Knopf (yiddish):__________.

It's not easy to get down to the city these days, parenthood and all, but I absolutely must, must, must see the Cy Twombly show at The Whitney, as well as Tim Hawkinson (whose piece I remember as basically the only interesting thing at the Biennial of four years back; this last one was much better). I plan to write on Twombly during my coming years in The Poet Protection Program. Many years back, during daydreams, I imagined a piece from his Letter of Resignation as the cover for Interference. Maybe it would still work.

I leave for the Californias North and South on Wednesday. A busy trip but I should get the opportunity to sit down somewhere with free internet and good coffee and fill you in on the various occasions for wine, cheese and social anxiety.