Cover art

 I am in a Facebook group of jazz album cover art. The graphic design on some of them is superb, with a youthful Andy Warhol represented (for example). Often I see an album cover and want to download the music immediately, which I do—but as a consequence I have music downloaded I haven’t been able to listen to yet. The visual spicing complements the music, the way the presentation of food makes it more appetizing, or disgusting. I also discovered a channel on my smart tv of vintage jazz videos. Monk, Miles, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah, Art Blakey. It is an internet channel I didn’t even know I had.  

Prologue to Poems of Doubt

I don’t even know enough to know what I don’t know 

yet this uncertainty is oddly comforting (Bronk style). Extreme skepticism

is itself a form of dogmatism, equally perilous, so that’s not it

either, more like a technique of not attaching oneself too hard to

one’s own beliefs, one’s “likes and dislikes,” to quote Wallace 

Stevens. I’ve learned that from Zen, of which I am not too 

serious a practitioner: I lack that element of giving myself

over to a system of thought, even one that leads to a mind of

unknowing. Still, that is the closest set of “beliefs” for my own particular 

temperament. What more is there to say?   

Greek

 Words in English beginning with ph, rh, ps, and ch (when these letters are pronounced as in chasm) are of Greek origin. Some words beginning with th as well. This etymology becomes invisible in Spanish, with its phonetic spelling, so photophobia becomes fotofobia, chaos is caos. I tell my students, many of them premeds, that they can tell the words in Spanish of Greek origin by thinking of the English cognate of filosofía or seudónimo. For medical professions or just to be an educated person it is useful to have a basic Greek lexicon of prefixes and suffixes like phobia, photo, pseudo, phono, psycho, neuro, algia,  bio, gyno, optho, geria, pedi. 

non sequitur

 One thing following another, but without any real feeling of continuity. Yesterday it was rainy; today, foggy. I sing of walking bass lines, or at least I try to sing along with them. Ashes. My insomnia routine is complex, too detailed to outline here, and with the risk of you falling asleep. The theory comes when it is needed, as the result of trying to solve purely practical problems: how to make the dishes come out at the same time in a cohesive presentation. One is seldom aware of sensation in individual toes. It is difficult, at times, not to make sense: the mind supplies connections where none were actually intended. 

 The 111 word technique has multiple possibilities. It can be a productivity or creativity technique. I can try to write paragraphs as different from one another as possible, or settle into a comfortable routine. They can be prose poems or random reflections that don’t rise to that “poetic” level. I was thinking about variability while hearing some Monk in my car, in fact a version of “Bemsha Swing” with Sonny Rollins. Not only is the music improvised, but each hearing of the music is different, whether it is because it is a different listener, or me myself at a different moment, noticing drums, bass, piano, or shifting layers of these combinations.

A bookshelf of imaginary titles: Can you spot the actual book title here?

 Dictionary of Atrocious Puns. The Rampage of the Maidens. Jeepers & Creepers. Queering the Straight. Minerals of New Mexico. Lives of the Non Saints. Towards an Imaginary Bookshelf. My Life as a Spelunker. How Not To. Epistemologies Without Apology. Mysteries of the Known. Recipes for Disaster. Insults for the Unwitty. Implied Threats. Starvation Diets and their Discontents. Taboos and Tributaries. Rotary Phones: A Coffee Table Book. Gridiron Scars. Palliatives. Explosive Egos and how to Ignore Them. Poems of Doubt. How to Cook Oranges and other Orange Foods. Surrealist Coffee Pots: An Annotated Catalog. Bibliography of Lost Tomes. How I wrote Certain of my Books. Bodybuilding for the Unwilling. Marks of Cain.   

Nighttime ritual

 I go through some poems in my head as I wait to fall asleep. I started last night with “The Red Wheelbarrow” and other short WCW poems (“Flowers by the Sea,” “The Jungle,” “This is Just to Say,” “Complete Destruction,” “As the Cat,” “A Burst of Violet”). Usually then I go to Yeats (“When you are old and gray and full of sleep,” “Why should I blame her..”). I was trying to reconstruct “The Wild Swans at Coole” when I finally fell asleep. The last I remember I had gone once through the poem and got most of it, and was trying to make sure of the second stanza: “I have …”