And Thseng-sie desired to know:
"Which had answered correctly?''
And Kung said, "They have all answered correctly,
"That is to say, each in his nature.''
Ezra Pound, Canto XIII

I love the explosion of reports on Sunday night's 21 Grand reading--it's like cubist literary journalism, all perspectives at once. I have eight windows open trying to keep track of them all.

And also weird to watch myself being reported on--as when Eileen looked over at our row and saw us "UTTERLY ENTHRALLED"--like seeing yourself on a surveillance camera. Or maybe more like an out-of-body experience.

Kasey recognized and identified more people than I even knew were there--he was totally right about the noticeable presence of generations--"long-time luminaries and fledgling celebs"--as well as the fact that the bloggers had grown to enough of a critical mass to be visible and noticeable. I guess he was a bit more taken with Mary Burger's "precise, anaphoric dissections of social and ecological objectifications" than I was, but I think we were both engaged by Ron Silliman's style of "putting the meaning squarely between one sentence and the next, Lucky Pierre style." He understood the "ordinary poem" to mean "No fixed procedural schema or anything," more on which later. He also knows the shame of the notebook.

For Stephanie the reading humanized Ron Silliman, but she's still wondering what the "ordinary" poem is. I thought it meant "conventional," but Stephanie says maybe it's the "ordinary" of ordinary life, "a repeated combination of pop culture references and the voice of 'personal' experience, familial relationships, epiphanies experienced in the rush of daily life: the 'new ordinary' poem of daily experience." The New Ordinaries! Move over, New Brutalists.

Catherine also interprets "ordinary" as "about the ordinary," but wonders whether "poems about the ordinary when done well are, well, ordinary?" She also wonders: " Where did my socks go?!!?!? Oh, it seems that Mary Burger blew them off." Now she has to wash them.

Eileen's got it down: "BEGIN WITH CLEAVAGE AND END WITH THE PRESIDENCY." I'm scrolling like mad between her fashion report and her word-clouds and reading her you almost didn't even need to be there but it's even better if you were! "This image of Ron singing 'limbo limbo limbo' shall never fall through the sieves of my memory." CorpsePoetics '04!

Finally, crazy all-night-driving Alli Warren fingers "bloggers row," a dangerous bunch, "Mary Burger drawing me in in in w/ repetition play" and "eyes bulging as Silliman reads, wringing my hands, laughing out loud a lot," at last "on the road again, 95 mph steady, moon silvers the sea, sun rising," like Allen Ginsberg on a good day.