The joke

A joke can work through getting you to accept a false premise. If you have a pool boy, then you probably have pool.  

Ronald Reagan brags to the Soviet about how free America is: A protester can stand at the White House with a sign saying Reagan is corrupt and senile. The Soviet leader responds: we have the same freedoms here: A protester can stand in front of the Kremlin with a sign saying Reagan is corrupt and senile.  

There's a joke when a doctor prescribes an aphrodisiac. One sip right before sitting down to dinner and the couple goes at it, ripping each other's clothes off. The only problem... is that they are now banned from the restaurant for life. 

Or the person who has been married 35 years, reflects on that on the death of their spouse. "I enjoyed 35 years of perfect happiness... and then I met my spouse."  

Or the kangaroo joke some of my friends like. the kangaroo sits down at the bar, and orders a martini. Hands the bartender a 20, and gets a dollar back in change. When he is about to leave, the bartender says, "We don't get many kangaroos in here" and the reply is "Maybe you shouldn't charge $19 for a martini, then."   

Joke

 A man and his wife are arguing about whether to fire the pool boy.  The wife says, he is insecure and nothing is going on. etc..  The husband thinks a bit and says. "But we don't have a pool."

Route 66

We did Route 66 from St. Louie to Oklahoma City last week. 

 Here's an image form the Woody Guthrie center in Tulsa. Woody was a talented visual artist as well as songwriter and singer. 

Here is a banjo of Woody's:

with a slogan about how the banjo fights hate. 

Another joke

" My wife and I decided we don't want kids, but we're still arguing about who has to tell them when they get home from school."

Notley

 One of my favorite poets, Alice Notley, has died. I could probably do a search through my blogs and find what I wrote about her.  Back in a minute.

***

https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/1055932257464975902?blogID=1055932257464975902&q=Notley

 Alice Notley, writing about Frank O'Hara, says that poetry "exists to communicate with this entity" [a secret self]. "Its thoughts have the shape of speaking, but it doesn't have to explain to itself as much as one does to another person: it doesn't, e.g., think in prose fiction sentences at all. It sees while it thinks, self-observes often, constructs scenarios of triumph out of vulnerability, etc... etc... that it melts in and out of."

Now this surprises me because it is what I think too, but I don't think my (our) conception of poetry is widely held, necessarily. It is specific to New York School poetics. Not that other poetries don't do this in their own way, get in touch with a secret self and channel a kind of stream of consciousness.  It is odd that people misname O'Hara's poetics as a kind of casualness, something easy to achieve even though it is not. Look at how Notley's own prose imitates that tentative search for a definition.  She isn't writing those "prose fiction sentences.'  

The phrase "prose fiction sentences" is hilarious, because I can picture exactly those kind of sentences. Sometimes I narrate my life to myself in those sentences, imitating the cadence of a New Yorker short story, and they could make up an ironical poem.    

I don't know how other people see poetry. Maybe it's a kind of object to be crafted, or a serious message dressed up in poetical garb. Often, people write trying to make something sound like a poem, which is what you have to do, of course, but they go about it in the opposite way.  In other words, it should sound like a poem (not just prose!), but not in a "poetic" way as conventionally conceived, with the shimmering shards of light. Prosaic and colloquial elements enter for their oddness or jarring quality, not just as a default because the writer doesn't know any better.  

***

 I was looking at some poetry by Alice Notley; I was trying to find something like that as fearless and honest in Spanish poetry, so I thought of Isla Correyero.  I had seen a book by her on my shelf the day before so I took it down. I found that the intro quotes me:

"Está en vanguardia cuando no queda nada de las vanguardias; así lo ve Jonathan Mayhew, quien la cuenta 'entre los que se mantienen, todavía, fieles a las premisas de la modernidad cultural.'"  

The book came out in 2018; I don't know when I bought it, but it looks like it is from La Central (Madrid or Barcelona).  I don't remember if I read the intro and saw my name before now, but it is a weird sensation. It sounds like something I would have written, but I'm not sure where, probably in The Twilight of the Avant-Garde.  

***

 I was in some kind of literary gathering. A person there, though supposedly connected somehow to NY School poetry, had never heard of Alice Notley's Descent of Alette. I approached this person and was mock-indignant. I happened to have my copy of it in my backpack and I brought it out and began to pontificate in a kind of obnoxious way about it. I pointed out that many people didn't like the quotation marks around every phrase, but that these had a prosodic effect, etc....  [A dream]

***

 I'd like to learn the trick of going on, 

Not ending the poem too soon in a fit of impatience

or fear, like I always do. But what am I afraid of 

anyway?  Making a mistake? Too late for that.

"Outwearing my welcome"? But we're all on borrowed time. 

Alice Notley say fearlessness is the key to the poetic voice.

That and a sense of the live presence of the person on the page,

a rare thing almost nobody gets or even thinks about. 

***

Alice Notley's poem "The Prophet" seems to be an imitation/parody of Koch's "Some General Instructions." She has advice like "I'ts not a good idea to be a taxi driver if you don't drive at all well. However / You can probably manage to so so for some months, before you finally quit, / Without killing yourself or anyone else." How do you parody an already parodic style? Notley manages it by exaggerating the ridiculousness of the advice while introducing a darker tonality. It's brilliant!

Rescuing this post from another blog...

 I've never smoked, and I've always hated the smell of cigarette smoke. 

When I was 14 or 15, however, I once stood at some kind of outdoor event at a park, on a summer evening. (A musical performance or a play, I don't remember what.) A few feet away from me stood a woman in her late 20s or early 30s. She was fairly short and wore little make-up, and seemed quite absorbed in the performance, whatever it was. She was smoking cigarette after cigarette, and I made no attempt to move away. When I got home, of course, my shirt smelled strongly of smoke, which would have ordinarily been repulsive to me, but I slept in that shirt that night. Its repulsiveness, in fact, contributed to the erotic charge I felt all night long, associated as it was with this particular woman I had been standing next to for maybe an hour, and who probably was not even aware of my presence.  

Eroticism, for me, has often had that double movement of presence and absence, of attraction and repulsion, and of metonymic displacement. Without that smell there would have been no experience to be remembered now. I haven't thought of it for years.

Message from the Dean

 Dear Colleagues,

It is with profound sadness that I share the news of the tragic loss of Sarah Milgrim, killed in last night’s attack at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. 

Sarah, a cherished alumna of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and a bright light in our Environmental Studies and Honors programs, was a thoughtful, passionate student who embodied the very spirit of inquiry and compassion that defines The College. 

As Chancellor Girod said earlier today, “In the face of such senseless violence, I know our KU community will come together to support each other and honor Sarah’s memory.” We must lean on one another in this difficult time and carry forward the values we all stand for.

Today, the heart of KU is broken. But, together, we will remember Sarah and uphold the legacy of kindness, courage, and care she leaves behind.

With deepest sympathy,

Arash Mafi

Executive Dean, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences