Notes for 02/10/2018 reading in Amherst revised

NOTES :

new year

short for triumph? truncation of triumph? realization of the deficient, ingrown, self-cancelling nature of triumph?

time stops, backslides, craps out, resorts at random
we do need to learn to live with it while also wondering whether and how we can

‘make time’ do its more practical thing of orienting us to steps and process toward goals we sincerely and energetically choose, hope to pursue, doubt, recast . . .

once he became known as the President, the scale of time became of paramount significance

The meaning of a year’s time got redefined again and again

whereas time has traditionally been useful for regulating services, including labor, oppression, rationing, limiting, coercing – time has not been designed, when standardized, in order to adjust and correct the status quo but rather to secure it

hence listing, leaning, listening to myself speak today, I must wonder how I can accept and admit both development, as possible, and recursiveness, as inevitable.
recursiveness a word I never used before.
• self repeating
o repeating itself, either indefinitely or until a specific point is reached
• repeatedly applying function to itself
o involving the repeated application of a function to its own values

I can’t go on I go on.
The impossible indicates the direction of possibility by negating it.

I thought about not shaving for this poetry reading. I thought about shaving only one side of my face, so I could demonstrate my split personality, as a Gemini. I forgot about these ideas until now, reading it aloud. I thought about rehearsing and practicing this mélange of gestures and attitudes and improvisations and readalouds. I wondered if I would sound better, look better, become more appreciated or celebrated, if I rehearsed assiduously. If I used bigger words. If I hired a director, to work out more of the tone, pacing, choreography, mannerisms, timing, persona, presentation. A director might contribute to a better coordinated, more harmonicaly alive and complex and compelling poetry reading. I wondered whether that would improve the reading in relation to my own aesthetics, compared to what I might presume and expect the aesthetics of most poetry reading audiences might be. I wondered whether I would be asked to read at the New York City YMCA if my director is good enough. I wondered whether if I had a good director I would be invited to international arts festivals as a poet or as a performance artist and paid by the festivals for my airfare and expenses for the trip as well as an honorarium to take home with me, and I wondered whether my director’s airfare, expenses and bonus pay would be included. I wondered how long the director could make do on a salary composed of my retirement funds before they are exhausted. I couldn’t quite think of whom to ask to takevolunteer to direct my performances so I continued shaving and splashed aftershave across my neck and chin and cheeks and upper lip and went into the other room to type.

read the lines backwards from bottom to top of the page,
one at a time.
alternate this with pages where I read the lines in order from top to bottom
but I read the words in reverse order from right to left.

Uncertainty on the Move
The Instability of Knowing
The Mutability of Being
What I think I don’t know
What I don’t know I think

Explaining is not Poetry – . . . Right?

I do not insist that I will not speak without reading

If I read more
I would have a bigger
vocabulary

Documentation
(isn’t?)
the work itself

Does its being on the website make it questionable?

It’s come to be that it’s painful to have an idea

When I am all
alone
I am my own best
company

Is the way it sounds at an author’s poetry reading the way it is supposed to sound in you when you read it?

hypnotically induced boredom

You’re sitting
I’m standing
Making faces and
striking poses
adds a degree of
difficulty that
arrests your attention
to how deficient
the poetry may be

Poetry reading :
I have never been to one I have no preconceptions

We compulsively answer our own Questions, once we speak them,
thus turning them from genuine questions into rhetorical quesitons
that we already pretend to know answers to

Name your feelings is a
truism of contepmorary psychotherapy
I feel like
a word

In effect, I invite you into my zone state
my would-be zone state
trance
as would a movie
Is this
self-absorption?
Collective agency?
Co-optation?
pause to reflect –
to reflect

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