it just keeps snowing

more and more and more snow. here is what it's like. matthew took most of these.

 

 

and here is my favorite line from the difficult farm by heather christle:

                                 i read once
of a man who suffered from what
they dubbed "phantom antlers"--he'd go
to groom them and instead he'd groom the air.

 

 

these pictures are from a corn maze last weekend. it only took sixteen minutes to complete. and at the end was this girl in a dinosaur costume. 

this week

 

selah asked us to fill up five pages using one sentence. here is my sentence. eleni's suggestion for this week was to write a poem whose knowledge is contained entirely within itself. and then an addendum: write a poem whose knowledge of itself is contained outside of the poem. i think this comes from ed dorn's 1977 chat where he talks about external poems: " i'm talking about the lattice of reality operating on you completely. in other words, you're to have as little to do with the poem as possible."

other than these things, i've been reading nietzsche and taking notes about him: "there is nothing internal to which something external would not correspond," and so on. i've been writing very little.

a day

i saw where the wild things are. it was magical.

and then toured hammond's candy factory. except it was more like go in this room and watch candy being made rather than a tour.

there was this one machine that was the best machine. it tossed the candy about but too many people were standing in front of it, so here is a picture of some candy on a table.

and then i kept finding all of these animals in bags. this is a rabbit.

this is a new exhibit at the denver museum of outdoor art called cabinet of curiosities.

 

the moa also has a statue garden that tells the story of alice in wonderland

 

and at the end of the day there was a labyrinth. apparently it is one of only seven in the world and a replica  from a cathedral in france. there is a lot involved in walking the labyrinth. you have to breathe and think about something in your life. when you get to the center, you contemplate your journey and then turn back and walk out the way you came in. on the way out, you will have answers to the question you've been pondering. there was even a labyrinth keeper, but he didn't say anything. he just sat there not wathcing.

sick, sick, tv-buying sick

i put the inexperience of dying on leaves under this tree. are leaves considered dead the moment they leave trees?

yesterday, i threw the inexperience of dying away. i've been wanting to bury it, but i haven't gotten to it yet.

i'm not going to the blanchot tutorial tonight because i'm sick. i've been sick for days. maybe the inexperience of dying is making me sick. i think i'll go on installing it.

 

and look what being sick made me do! i got a television. i'm so sick that all i want to do is watch tv! i can't believe it. but it doubles as a monitor so i can just use it for that. i guess at least i can watch democracy now. this woman was talking about the dangers of positivism. basically things like the secret and such that enforce how you can have anything you want just by thinking about it. i think she was mostly refering to the corporate take on this idea.

look what came. it's brian evenson's fugue state. this is the story about the woman who slept with the mime. i'm going to read it now. and then sleep. maybe i can get m to read it.

"it beats me how you mortals can think something is."

i have now put the inexperience of dying into greeting cards and at  houses. when the snow goes away, i'm going to plant it near a tree that still has most of its leaves. it's very cold today. i'm having a problem with the sweedish styles gingersnaps. i just keep eating and eating them. and i keep eating the mango. i'm beginning to feel like the inexperience of dying is just like troutfishing in america. it's losing all of the possibility of being a sentence.

reading: ed dorn's gunslinger:

what does the foregoing mean?
i asked. mean?
my gunslinger laughed
mean?
questioner, you got some strange
obsessions, you want to know
what something means afetr you've
seen it, after you've been there
or were you out during
that time? no.

installation update

i put the inexperience of dying in place of produce i was gathering for soup. if someone wants to buy the exact same ingredients, they can collect all of the inexperience of dying and make a meal from it. after i put it in place of the celery, there was an old woman in a wheelchair sleeping before it while her husband was trying to get a better deal on the oranges. i thought she looked so nice sleeping by that sentence. the next day i put the inexperience of dying in all of the bathrooms.

kate greenstreet read last night. she showed us beautiful movies. a lot of the movies had the sky in them. i loved these ones. one movie was even just the sky with some words on it. i can't remember the words. after the reading, we went for a drink and her husband, max, asked us questions that made us remember things. i remembered getting an eraser stuck in my nose (which made max remember kate getting a marker stuck in her nose. twice.). jen remembered a reflection of touching dust. max rememvered painting when he was very young and being so confused when the teacher said to stop. he wanted to go on painting. it was such a nice night. they are both so lovely.

here is one of kate's poems from the new issue of dq:

"the little house where you'd rather be"

i was born here. the little house, the sea. the sea

was pushing us away. the gravestones
shaking in the dark (they're in love now).
we've seen it all before.

make a strong, permanent suggestion.
she dives in. the man in front of me goes straight
to the edge.

am i saying this in french yet? "until i will arrive."

the inexperience of dying

our exercise for the next two weeks is to pick a sentence from blanchot and perform textual installations. at least five a day. i picked this sentence:

the inexperience of dying

which reminds me of this poem i love by franz wright:

on earth

resurrection of the little apple tree outside
my window, leaf-
light of late
in the april
called her eyes, forget
forget--
but how
how does one go
about dying?
who on earth
is going to teach me--
the world
is filled with people
who have never died

and then i was thinking about this article i read over the weekend about a man who died for twenty minutes. he talked about his experience and at one point said, in regards to the end of his relationship, "my death put immeasurable strain on my relationship."

it also made me think about how much of an embarrassment death is. i remember my mom telling me that when she was young, she and her friend would be getting high and he would insist on her not dying because, he said, if she did, he'd be too embarrassed to tell everyone.

selah also told us a beautiful dream she had about a room of thrones and roger told us words for pray, which, from what i gathered, i was one of the words. we talked about bilocation and the essay, bewilderment, by fanny howe, which i am going to read now.

bishop castle

yesterday, we went to a castle. it's a castle made by one man. he's been building it for forty years. it feels flimsy during parts of it. i didn't go to the very top of the castle because of it feeling flimsy. it was a really perfect day to see such a castle. here are some pictures.

 

 

 

 

after the castle, there was a reading at du with brian evenson. he read a story about a mime. it was my favorite story. it wasn't actually about a mime, but more about a person who slept with a mime and couldn't sleep anymore because of it. the mime's box trapped her and she couldn't do anything about it. she wanted to kill the mime for this.

beets beetsbeets

 

last night, i made my favorite meal: a beet salad and lentil soup (recipes courtesy of jen). it was so delicious. sometimes i love beets so much i can't believe it. the only thing is, i can't figure out a good way to peel them. it takes me so long because the skins don't slide off, but rather tear and get stuck in small pieces everywhere so it's like trying to remove a sticker from something. i should look for ideas about that. the other picture i have here (the sideways one--because i can't figure out how to flip it) is from a book called wild california--the picture is by tupper ansel blake. it's of snow geese.

in ws this week, bin filled in for e and we talked a lot about the poems being workshopped, and very little about vicente huidobro's book, altazor, which is very beautiful and dreamy (heave skylarks like sighs and draw lambs like smiles, and such). b also showed us a book of anselm kiefer's work. oh yes, and there was some discussion about nostalgia being a disease of plants.