CD

I recorded myself at the library today. I will send you a CD for free if you want, but you must promise to donate [however much you want] to hurricane relief. Send me your address and I will get one in the mail to you.

If you've heard me play, you will know that I'm no professional. I'm highly critical of my own playing. But this CD is superior to the last, done two years ago. For one thing, I used the pedal a bit more so it's not so annoyingly staccato.  All compositions are my own, and you might put it in the category of dinner music.

You might donate to the relief effort anyway, even if my compositions hold no interest for you.

Picard

Picard in his attack on Barthes says that using the language of a discipline without practicing this discipline is reducing this critical language to a set of metaphors (with reference to psychoanalysis). Is this not the entire problem with the edifice of literary theory? Starting with structuralist linguistics as the supposed basis of a scientific structuralism applied to literature.

We find this elsewhere too: any metaphorical, non-rigorous use of the terms of another discipline...

Similarly, any reference to "zen," to "relativity" used outside the contest of actual zen practice, actual physics...

WCW

I had this idea for paper once. I'll probably never do it, but it was to collect every off-hand remark in a poetry textbook or anthology or fragment of a critical work about "The Red Wheelbarrow." I had a whole list somewhere. Some were quite dismissive, of course. I would collect all of them and that would be the paper, essentially. It would write itself based on what I actually would find.

You're welcome.

Peacock

There was a cartoon
of the Tower of Babel

furious activity and singing
bright colors, seen on our family's first color tv

I've never been able to find it as an adult
I remember too the NBC peacock

opening its multi-colored feathers
to that three-note melody

a symbol meaningless
on a black and white screen

This is just to say

The red wheel
barrow

is not
described

all we know is its
color

Humbled

People say they are "humbled" when they win a prize

Something the opposite of humbling since it should make them justly proud

of their accomplishments



I think what they are doing is hedging their bets a bit

by going for the opposite emotion

or maybe they really are "humbled" in a way I don't fully understand

Visual

A good poem should be visual

Lorca knew this and Allen Ginsberg

Pere Gimferrer thought so too

Not to mention William Carlos Williams

with the red wheelbarrow and white chickens

and the purple striped nightgowns imagined by Wallace Stevens

I think Baudelaire had a strong visual imagination too

But I do not