D I U 3 7-18-94 It is, I fear, the presumption of the living that the dead waive all rights to self-defense, but here in the realm of ghosts--what you young people so quaintly call "virtual reality"--I see only the teething of ghouls, the visages of men and women who profess to live but whose words are incapable of fogging a mirror, and so I beg leave to respond to the misrepresentations of one of your professors. (Not that I feel at home in these environs. I, too, dislike "virtual reality." Participating, however, with perfect contempt, one discovers after all a place for the genuine. But I stray from the point.) Black Hole Sun badly misunderstands the morality of vision which my poetry insists on when he (or she, but no doubt he) confuses my "imperial eye" for the "intellectual grandeur of the I." (In my day it was not "I" but "we" which poets approvingly or disapprovingly considered imperial, but no matter.) 'Tis the weakness of young minds to believe a pun or homonym or weak rhyme could ever replace the vigorous pleasures of a well- crafted thought. Or to put myself more plainly, "I" is not "eye," though the Individual may indeed stand in awe of the world. Awe, in any case, is what I care about. The "grandeur" Black Hole Sun speaks of is thus not mine (whoever I may be), but the _world's_. (And perhaps you children should _play_ in the sun instead of naming yourselves after it.) --Marianne Moore Read Horace, and Virgil, and Ovid, and Catullus. Read Rimbaut d'orange, & Guillaume d'Aquitaine. Track Pound backwards with post- whatever mind. Dear God, read Horace, but learn Latin or get someone to show you how very remarkably he built his lyrics. Wasn't that a time--the empire throwing itself up everywhere one turned, and the end of the world as we know it, and nothing the way it was when one was oneself a child. Holding onto the small things in lyrics, and railing in satires against the super nova. Dulc'et decor'est pro patria mori. Building, always building the walls of sandbags against flooding, grasping chaos. And finding in strong, costly wine, when one could get it, and a letter from a friend, a letter from home, a verse of one's own, a slender spear to fight or walk with. Read Sidney, Spenser, Herrick. (Jamie Brockett: I owe my life to the ones who have come before me.) Shut me up before I embarrass us. ...The sonnet, the sestina, the demands of classical meters, all gave poets a high-octane punch not touched by much these days. Not that the subjectivity of the poet could ever be unimportant, and not that subjectivity is not essentially chaos--but it is also not chaos in a fundamental way, and the requirements of ancient poetry show that dance so beautifully. --XXXX OOOO EH "Albert or Hubert" assumes at the end of his piece a homology between a set of binary terms that it isn't clear to me _are_ homologous. consciousness the unconscious order chaos construction deconstruction There are some who say the unconscious _is_ ordered--"like a language" I believe is how the saying goes, though Lyotard has done his best to sink this conceit--and there are some who say humankind's propensity for destruction is precisely what is leading us to (ecological) crisis. Of course, there are some who say that crises are only moments of reorder. It's not far from this position to one that would maintain order is chaos and chaos order; that consciousness can never know itself and that the unconscious is not the "un" of anything, but simply (but of course, _not_ simply) another register of being; that constructions always fall and that deconstruction always makes another thing... But then, perhaps I am too much the deconstructionist to believe in the possibility of a choice unencumbered by the possibility that the choice is not _between_ two terms, but of how to exist in this very space of "between." Between sleep and waking, a slowly forgotten dream stretches the distance of the quickly brightening sky. Our lives rebegin in this light, in this moment of forgetting. --Patriarchal Poetry Playlist, Conference of the Birds, KZSC, Santa Cruz 7-4-94 Francisco X. Alarcon/ Letter to America/ We Magazine 14 Milton Cardona/ Ogun/ Bembe Jerry Gonzales and the Fort Apache Band/ Obatala/ Obatala (anonymous) / Amengon Horns/ Bresil- Musiques de haut Xingu ... Etoile de Dakar/ N'Guiro Na/ Absu Gueye Dueto de Comachuen/ Male Amelita/ Pure Purepecheca Orchestra Septentrional/ Belle Haiti/ Belle Haiti ... Lily White/ Mompou II/ Somewhere Between Truth and Fiction Roland Kirk/ Black Diamond/ Rip, Rig, and Panic Lily White/ Mompou/ Somewhere Between Truth and Fiction Sam Rivers/ Afflatus/ Dimensions and Extensions ... Les Musicians de Nil/ Ya Faraoule/ Egypte Khalifa Ould Eide and Dimi Mint Abba/ Hassaniya Love Poem ... Medhi hassan/ Urz-e-Nyal- Ishq- Ke-Qabil-Nahin-Raha/ New Musical heights of... ... Will Alexander/ A National Day in Bangledesh/(unreleased cassette) Hedi Habboubba/ (in arabic)/ (in arabic) Milford Graves/ Bi/ babi ... (anon.)/ Song to Orisha Chango/ Cult Music of Cuba ... Henry Threadgill Sextet/ My Rock/ Easily Slip Into Another World/ Steve Lacy/ Prayer/ Anthem ... Caetano y Gil/ Dada/ Tropical Elis Regina/ Sumbosa Maloca/ Transversal do Tempo Africando/ Sama Thiel/ Tierra Tradicional ... Youssou N' Dour/ Africa Remembers/ Eyes Open Pierre Akendengue/ Ewaka/ Mando ... Abdel Gadir Salim All-Stars/ Bassama/ The Merdoum Kings Play Songs of Love Abdel Aziz El Mubarek/ Tarimni Mulak/ Border Crossings ... CJ Chernier/ Don't Cry/ I Ain't No Playboy Revolutionary Ensemble/ Chicago/ Revolutionary Ensemble Let us say, with Wallace Stevens, emphatically: ART MUST BE ABSTRACT. HOWEVER: ABSTRACTION IS NO MORE WHAT ABSTRACTION WAS. Reenter your world. And reenter the world you have reentered. Reenter your minds(z). (This is the new abstraction.) The World Watch Foundation in 1990 estimated the earth has forty years on its present course before it does irreversible damage to the ozone. Reenter the world. There are only thirty-six years left. --Thus, Albert or Hubert *** ANNOUNCEMENT *** The Departments of Archaeology and Classical American Literature are pleased to announce a virtual symposium on the "politan" fragment. As many of you know, the "politan" fragment was unearthed last year in the rubble of old Los Angeles, a single torn page that survived for centuries under one of the keys of a prepared piano. Hecuba Whimsy, a philologist who has studied the fragment, now suggests that "politan" is the work of llen Ginsbe, author of "dish," a portion of a poem excavated 25 years ago at the site of a bombed-out public library in Kansas. Given the extreme rarity of poetic works from the period in question, the suggestion that "politan" and "dish" were composed by a single author warrants careful consideration and even debate. Was llen Ginsbe a major figure whose works were widely disseminated, or is the discovery of two separate fragments by this poet a coincidence? Brief position papers (100 words) are invited. These should be circulated prior to the symposium, which will be held at the DIU moo July 31st at midnight. Send all papers to by July 24th at midnight so that we can post them in advance of the gathering. Cartesia Jones Dept. Classic. Am. Lit. ***** [recto] politan _To Stru_ p against govern responsible. ly what we know tes are coercion. e is absolute. ry mind includes et e what's vivid. what you notice. yourself thinking. ness is self-selecting. e don't show anyone, we're mber the future. nly yourself. k yourself to death. les clanking against each me scientific data. instrument determines menal world after Einste subjective [verso] olar plexus my neck in ba waist--eyes light, uddenly! ounced er and extra e noticed t he was ajar. gent, "the first do ldn't open, are blackouts--I s go in there, second Naked trailing closed my bedroom heets blocked hem through, I strained, e and woke under East Twelfth Street, poets, Museum of Modern _May 6, 1986, 3:10_ --"politan" reconstruction by Dien Bien Phu D I U is presented weekly from cf2785@albnyvms.bitnet & the Logic of Snowflakes we welcome input to output