Aught, no. 11/12 (2003)

)ohnLowther

from Correspondences

Looks like there's no bargain matinee movie on Sunday.

Why is it raining?

I am reminded daily that I can't do dialectic, partly because my brain skips over things, and partly I dislike the contestual nature.

It's not here yet, due to our recent trip out of town.

Have a wonderful spree of independence celebration.

Heading out for truck and thought to send this on to you.

Now, your work has some narrative elements, some self-reflexivity, but also some kind of metaphysics?

That would explain all your problems.

I am looking on that as a sign that I am becoming bilingual, confusing one for the other.

I should have read this one before the other one.

So how do you open that up is the question to keep pushing at.

Sorry for the running tongue.

But I don't think there's anything wrong with it.

Well, it's hot here, so that is my excuse if this all sounds ridiculous.

And shit, I hate it when people give their heads a quick shake, look around and somehow get a real sense of the perpetual muddle.

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Now he has no underwear to wear, and I haven't called him back.

During such times, I prefer keeping silent.

Not sure what sort of threshold.

There are languages and languages. That's no sop.

No argument here, but I think it misses the point.

That the last sentence seems a non-sequitur may well be my current exhaustion from the day.

Pacifica is a song named after a town named after an ocean misnamed for a "peaceful easy feeling."

But I have no quarrel with you. That's a pretty turnstyle.

That snake was as big as fire hose wrapped around the guy's shoulders.

Most of the time lately I have nothing to say but shit.

That's the thought for the day.

Themed quotation as it were.

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Do you know any bipolar dolphins that watch Monty Python in the nude?

My mother is a minister, so I got all of that covered.

So do I, in a way.

I really restrained myself to write this, especially the ending, and edited quite a lot where I lapsed cynical; I didn't want it burgeoned into a shouting match.

I want to believe in such a thing.

I offer my comments in the utmost respect for all that you are doing.

It's true the text is the same no matter what font it's set in, but the book, in the way it is handled and dropped, passed around, sold, forgotten for a year and then picked up, manifests the actual life of the text, its political and social and discursive arc- everything, in fact, but its metaphysics...

Ugh. So lame.

I read your stupid post several times and I didn't see any received wisdom.

And you fell back on no authority but your own: do you think you're so special that you can just make up your opinions?

Are you going to finish that? Can I have a bite?

Would you believe these are the only questions I can come up with after 6 weeks of riding a wagon?

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I'm head electronic paper clip.

These days, I've taken up painting, as well.

Gave notice, and everything is a okay.

I've slept since then, and confess a teflon brainpan afflicts me in my olderage.

As for the confessions, I think I understand your situation.

Life is long, poems are short.

Maybe this is what you're encountering.

Truly, truly horrible. I don't use the world disparagingly.

Thought you might have some helpful commentary.

Of course, that always bodes well for the future; silence.

Sometimes I think it is inevitable that she will break my heart but then I remind myself that I don't have a heart to break anymore.

I stay out of prison, numb my soul and enjoy the day. Very alive.

Would you ever make me peanut brittle?

I'm a little stunned by this statement, to tell you the truth.

Thanks for being there for me.

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A question occurs to me that I'd like to ask you. Can I have one?

Sorry to hear about that. Can you make the trip?

I think tactics are by nature subversive.

Didn't mean to imply that you were.

Hope not, as that would be rather crushing to me, though don't tell him that.

Language and the recent vogue of chance operations is just one prong of it.

I was sort of hoping to keep that cat in the bag as long as I could.

I want to examine it without the concept of "changing your mind" being available.

Can you believe that I am wearing this shirt?

You're tickling the gab in me though.

That's the only rule.

I will be in and out. A little like charades.

She seems to work best for me when I'm tired (when defenses are down), and something strange arises.

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Author's Note

Correspondences is derivative work, but it's mine. Eleven hours start to finish, but spread over a week or so in increments. That job was on its last legs, though I didn't know that as I assembled the book. All these emails from all these people. Later I was laid off and all the sources are in some unreadable format. So I gold-bricked away the afternoons reading this or that list. Not the folks local to me though, those fellow traveling in the APG. Lots of back-channel this or that, discourse, thinking, posturing probably. I would get irritated sometimes when I had to actually do something I was getting paid for. Maybe somebody else will want to publish some more? But because of the friendships and listservs they spun off of many of them have poetry as, if not the central issue then as stalking shadow. Try here for something else: www.atlantapoetsgroup.net. Four years of accumulated stuff. But not with any thought, I just read through sequentially, taking lines as I went. With the known poets I often went for a line rather empty without its context. The wackier lines, the ones allowed to carry more traditional poetic charge were ripped from folks like TO, ETG, SN, JJ, AB or MK. I had no length in mind and simply worked through all the saved messages keeping rough count of how long I spent doing so. It would be a sort of pile that would then be cut & pasted to make them. Sometimes I was probably a jerk but arguments are made of sentences just as much. None of those are mine, all came, where given to me. Already I found the positions argued strange, hard to re-enter. Coming as they do embedded in contexts that scan like obsessions — when fragmented, realigned, grafted they seemed to dodge the cold, even remote surfaces that assembled works sometimes have for me. There is always time to blurb anew.