Good morning from Kearney, Nebraska! About to hit the road again.

Dog barking at an empty apartment. Have slept three hours the past two days. Chicago, here we come!

For the curious, here's our itinerary:

Wednesday: to Reno
Thursday: Reno to Salt Lake City
Friday: Salt Lake to Cheyenne, Wyoming
Saturday: Cheyenne to Omaha, Nebraska
Sunday: Omaha to Chicago

I hear a rumor that Jim and I may cross paths in Nebraska...there he is, an amber wave of grain.

Another sweaty moving day, boxes piled to the ceiling and blocking out the sun. The dog barometer says let's go out all the time and then go out again.

Still one last library book that I can't find, damn it. Need to settle my earthly accounts.

They're coming at 8 am tomorrow to clean us out. Then it's Reno, here we come.

I must admit that I have become a black-binder user at readings as well. I think this may have something to do with choral singing, which I also do. In fact, what I've always coveted is one of those choral-singing folders that actually has a strap on the back to hold it to your hand, which allows you to stand there grandly without benefit of lectern or stand and emote to the open air.

I am also thinking that the binder is a good substitute when, like me, you don't actually have a book to read out of...

Today I too know the pleasures of being a walking tower of sweat.

Silicon Valley
or, An Essay on the "New Brutalism"

That hooligan
crew’s half-
off, strong
calves and
burning down.
She’s a good
student of talent,
like sunshine
states in the
thick of rain.
The brutal curve
of fountain water
can’t hide the soft edge.

Kasey, is it okay if I didn't pay full price for your book? I was reading it (at home, not in the store) and turned it over, and though the cover price said $12 there was a yellow tag on the back that said $10.80. I really didn't see it before I bought the book, honest.

I look up from packing and find that I am missing Kasey's reading at this very moment. I do wish I could be there. I will have to be satisfied with spelunking in the far reaches of my closets.

Went into Moe's for a valedictory visit and struck gold: my own copy of Deer Head Nation. I am only a few pages in but it is already kicking my ass all over the room with its texture of sex and terror and disembodied Republican heads...Kasey, I shall read your book in Omaha and weep.

Wiped out from packing, surrounded by towers of boxes. The last of the books in this room have been packed; remaining forlornly on one shelf are Robert Creeley's Collected, that darn new Dave Eggers novel which I keep trying to force myself to finish, Borges's Collected Fictions and Charles North's New and Selected Poems, which I just picked up a few days ago and haven't been able to bring myself to hide away yet. There is also a fresh new copy of the Rough Guide to USA sitting in front of me--even for a straight shot down I-80 I can't bring myself to travel without a guidebook. The cover of the book is a neon diner sign that says "Open 24 Hours," which is funny because I hardly think the U.S. is particularly good at being open late.

The poor dog is very confused by the rapidly shrinking floorspace and has mostly taken to lying around in the few open spaces looking sad.

Hey, when's that new Hubert Schma album coming out?

Actually, ever since I found out about the Poetry Espresso list from Cassie I've been a big admirer of it. It's sort of what I imagined the Poetics list might have been like back in the day, before all the grandstanding and core-dumping, though it probably wasn't. Espresso seems to have a scale that's compatible with a real community, but in a supportive and not exclusionary way--heck, I actually see folks posting poems there and asking for suggestions and then actually getting them and then incorporating them into the poem. Plus it's had impressive longevity.

...and those espressoistes are even quoting me.

...the whole first name/last name thing. I ran into this in my post on Combo when I found myself having to refer to--er--K. Silem Mohammad, Katie Degentesh, and Michael Magee all in a single sentence. Now I don't know Katie Degentesh or Michael Magee, so I referred to them with their last names. But I do know, um, Mr. Mohammad, so it would have seemed weird to refer to him as "Mohammad" and not as "Kasey."

Then there's the whole "bloggers are one big family" effect--I notice that any time bloggers have an exchange or link to one another last names are almost immediately dropped, so that, for example, Jordan Davis (who I've never met) links to me (when he does) as "Tim." I like this; it seems warm, fuzzy, caring-heart, even; it punctures the idea that this is just a ramped-up version of impersonal print culture.

But--the point Cassie makes is a good one--someone coming to a blog for the first time is going to get the impression of a whole social world of "Stephanie"s and "Jim"s and "Jordan"s and wonder, maybe, what soap opera they stepped into and who all these people are who seem to know each other and could this new reader ever be on a first-name basis with them, too?

I think the recent discussions of New Brutalism on Poetry Espresso have made me think a bit more about this. First-naming is fine if no one else is listening; but what happens in those weird moments when you become aware that someone is.

...but a new Del poem lifts the gloom...

Want to go to readings...and parties...but must pack...it's like being in Chicago already...

James Meetze tells Australia what this New Brutalism business is all about. (Believe it or not, they want to know.)

I'm glad to see that Arnold opposes the toilet-flushing tax.

What cheered me up last night was Stephanie's copy of Combo 12, which Stephanie pulled out of her bag and let me read at dinner and then just let me keep--I tried to give it back but she insisted, the logic being, I think, that the Bay Area had plenty of Combos and maybe I needed to spread the gospel to Chicago.

Well, it was just what I needed. Even though I was really tired and a little gloomy I decided to leaf through it when I got home and shortly I was laughing out loud (which I'm sure sleeping Robin really appreciated) and would have rolled on the floor if there were room amongst the boxes. It's been a while since I've read a collection of poetry that was so energetic and gleeful and surprising from page to page.

But what was so totally stunning was: I'm sitting there at David's with my potato pancakes waiting and flipping through the mag and something's coming together, there is really honestly an aesthetic here, and I look up and I say something stupid like, "Whoa, now I know what flarf is!"

Now obviously Gary and Kasey and others have offered up their (anti-)definitions before and I've tried to follow their lead and not reify the label into some kind of Mode. But looking at this Combo I did feel something distinctive going on, something that other kinds of writing--even writing that shares some of the same tools, like the "Google poem"--hasn't been able to accomplish. So I'm just going to risk sounding like an ass and try to explain what I mean.

I remember at some point a while back Kasey declared that he wasn't going to write Google poems anymore. Stephanie speculated last night that after a while of writing using Google you start to feel, well, guilty about the whole endeavor, because sometimes it just seems too easy. When I tried it myself at first I thought that too, but I realized that it wasn't so, that my own efforts at the form just weren't coming out right. Looking at what I'm seeing in Combo I realize what I was doing wrong: I was trying too hard to filter, shape, make it pretty--worst of all, to try for some kind of lyric closure, which was just disastrous. I don't think I previously understood what it really meant that flarf meant to embrace the "bad" or "tasteless"--this turns out, in what you see Kasey or Michael Magee doing, to be a very particular kind of tastelessness, that which seeks out and embraces what is degraded and offensive but energetically so, like the kind of pleasure you get from quoting a tagline from a bad movie--no, that isn't quite right, but "Awwww yeah" seems like the perfect slogan for flarf, its reveling in the nasty.

I guess to my mind the work in Combo by Kasey, Katie Degentesh, and Michael Magee best captures what I'm talking about, best hangs together into a distinctive aesthetic (not to say anything against the other fine work in there). It's no accident that the placeholder objects in Degentesh's poems are sausages and popsicles, two of the most grossly overprocessed consumer foods known to man--and yet so tasty. Stephanie pointed out to me the brilliant way in which the ground keeps shifting, so that you're thinking at one point "oh, well, obviously 'sausage' is 'dog'" but then a few lines later it's definitely a tumor, and so on, just hanging together enough to keep you going but off balance the whole time. And the poems don't wrap themselves up neatly; it's like they could just keep going but that they simply stop at some point.

What I like most in Magee's poems, as well as Kasey's [oy--this first name/last name thing requires another post on another night] is how they preserve the texture of the language you find online--typos, all caps, nonstandard spellings, rhythms ("similarity between Little / Miss Muffet and Sadam Hussein?!")--unfiltered, but brilliantly concentrated. The repetition of "ass," "fuck," and "dumbshit" in Kasey's poems are like a kid's pleasure in saying swear words to himself for the first time or two his friends on the playground--and the energy of playground insult--but somehow use that to portray totally wild mood swings: in "Abstract Poetics," from aggressive hostility ("ur nothing but a stupid dumbshit goddam motherfucker") to self-flagellating exhibitionism ("now that my ass has reached a new audience / with my MA in dumbshit studies"). Most important is that there is no effort to "redeem" this material or take a position above or outside it: the poem just gets down in there and stays there.

And yet: there's obviously some desire to make an (ahem) serious point: you don't call poems like this "Abstract Poetics" and "Mainstream Poetry" if you don't want to whip somebody's head around. Magee: "Poems are, like, total bullshit unless they are / squid or popsicles or deer piled / on elk in the trunk of David Hasselhoff's / Cutlass Sierra." Flarf's hardly the first poetry to revel in the pop-culture reference--actually, hardly anybody doesn't--but I think the key is (am I wrong here, folks?) that there no irony in that reference, in fact a pointed refusal of irony, a refusal to make the poem superior to its material (unlike the wounded and guilty attachment a lot of young, intelligent writers have to pop culture). Squid? Popsicles? Deer? Eat up.