Friends/Family,

Tomorrow morning on KUAZ/NPR Arizona Spotlight I will be on the radio. You will be able to hear it online if you go to this link. http://radio.azpm.org/kuaz/ — “Interview with poet Ann Fine”.

I don’t know what it will sound like. I am terrified that I made a mistake and said that Emily Dickinson wrote A Room of One’s Own…which I apologize for. I know very well who wrote A Room of One’s Own, but for some reason in my head I keep hearing myself saying Emily Dickinson. I hope I didn’t. But I may have. Yikes. (p.s. for who doesn’t know, it’s Virginia Woolf).

Thank you.

p.s., my book, A Nest This Size, is off to the printers. Should be out late this month. You can go to www.shearsman.com, click on authors, find my name, and when you arrive on the author page click on the title of the book for ordering information. you can also now go to amazon.com and preorder your copy. just search for a nest this size.

Progress is slow but sure on the new book, which should be out late October. You will be able to order it from Amazon, and Small Press Distribution, but I’ll let you know when that day comes. The entire third section of A Nest This Size can be found in the online journal Moria, here. Look for more poems from the book to be published by Action, Yes! in December.

In the meantime, I’ll be teaching a poetry class at the University of Arizona Poetry Center in October and you should check it out. That’s the flyer over there–the Good Poem/Bad Poem class. Heh. Wish you could come!!

“Ann Fine dreams two dreams here, a short one and a very long one, and like the good doctor said they can be read as cause and effect.  “A pillow inquiry” is buoyant and airy, still intensely tinged by eros (or its ghost), and like good pillow talk its tautologies recall the jokes pleasure told the lover about how superfluous mere logic might be.  The long aftermath is prose, mulling its way down the page of that past, dear diary, haunted by the memory and possible return of a you not merely shadow.  Meanwhile, logic’s sadly become as necessary as it is unavailing—“pain,” Frank O’Hara said, “always produces logic, which is very bad for you.”  Here tautology becomes the rueful mark of that restless knowledge, a joke on the self; but also a hint or hope that as thinking exhausts itself something else might return. Which it does, though it’s not the longed for past, but what lay under it, finally glimpsed: “There is also a small door in the air, almost invisible, oh much less; pine breathing. I do not have the power or desire to shut such a door. I awake in its opening. In the last moments, the sun leaves me alone, to say it is so.”  Ann Fine’s self-erasing project here is canny and funny, lovely and brave, wise and hard-won.  This is a beautiful book.” — Tenney Nathanson

Huffpost – Gambia Rounds Up 1,000 ‘Witches’: Rights Group stumble reddit del.ico.us ShareThis RSS AP | TODD PITMAN | March 18, 2009 02:26 PM

Comments DAKAR, Senegal — Authorities in Gambia have rounded up about 1,000 people and forced them to drink hallucinogens in a witch-hunting campaign that is terrorizing the tiny West African nation, an international rights group said Wednesday. Amnesty International called on the government of President Yahya Jammeh, who seized power in a 1994 coup and has claimed he can cure AIDS, to halt the campaign and bring those responsible to justice. Gambian officials could not immediately be reached for comment and the government has issued no statements in reaction to the report. Authorities began inviting “witch doctors,” who combat witches, to come from nearby Guinea soon after the death earlier this year of the president’s aunt. Jammeh “reportedly believes that witchcraft was used in her death,” the London-based rights group said. Since then, “witch doctors” _ accompanied by police, soldiers, intelligence agents and Jammeh’s personal guards _ have forcibly taken about 1,000 alleged witches from their villages and spirited them to secret locations, Amnesty said. About 300 of them were taken to Jammeh’s personal farm in his native Kanilai, east of the capital, the group said. Most victims were held for three to five days and all are believed to have been released, Amnesty spokeswoman Eliane Drakopoulos told The Associated Press. But many have been terrorized by the campaign and fear it could spread, she said. Victims are being “forced to drink unknown substances that cause them to hallucinate and behave erratically,” the rights group said in a statement. “Many are then forced to confess to being a witch. In some cases, they are also severely beaten, almost to the point of death.” The mysterious liquid prompted serious kidney problems among many, and two people are known to have died after being subjected to the ordeal, Amnesty said. Story continues below The most recent incident, on March 9, took place in a village called Sintet, which was surrounded by paramilitary police armed with guns and shovels before dawn. Amnesty quoted a witness as saying that security forces vowed “that anyone who tries to escape will be buried six feet under.” About 300 men and women were forced at gunpoint into buses that took them to Jammeh’s farm at Kanilai. “Once there, they were stripped and forced to drink ‘dirty water’ from herbs and were also bathed with these dirty herbs” that caused diarrhea and vomiting, the witness said. “I stayed there for five days … I cannot believe that this type of treatment is taking place in Gambia. It is from the dark ages.” Hundreds fled to neighboring Senegal after their villages were attacked, Amnesty said. In 2007, Jammeh declared he had discovered a cure for AIDS and began treating patients inside the presidential palace, using herbs and incantations. His dictatorial regime has cracked down harshly on critics, especially the press. On March 8, authorities arrested Halifa Sallah, who has written about the “witch doctors” for the main opposition newspaper, Foroyya. Sallah, who was a presidential candidate in 2006, has since been charged with sedition and spying, Amnesty said.

The following 25 Questions for Hollis’s Radio Show Just Us were written for J.W., and because J.W. asked me to write a 25 page poem, which I promised to share with just us, meaning J.W. and I (which includes my blog), with the caveat that, all the answers are already known to the following 25 questions so it don’t matter no how. So really, there isn’t a title here, it’s just what I used to jump off of cuz Hollis did ask me to make up questions for her radio show Just Us. (that sentence reminds me of a bit from Laurie Anderson’s Language is a Virus: “and he said…”are you talking to me? or are you just practicing for one of those performances of yours, ha!” No, really. These somber bits might be so funny sometimes.

. ..

.

Page I

.. ..

When you open a door to a room
You have never been in before
Unless you are blind,
Why do you do the first thing you do?

.. ..

Page II

When you hold your friend’s heart
In the palm of your hand, if you could, will
You please remember the word
Thump is both a noun and a verb? Yes or no.

.. ..

Page III

I am going to see you so hard the next time I hit you.
I really think this is for the best: agree?

…

Page IV

Thought to abjure:
For the case at hand, are we trying to obtain a moral value
Equal to the sum of all our rejected hypotheses on corrected averages?

…

Page V

What “mechanical” value,
As long as we are longing for value,
Does the arm that heaves a hearty
hug have?

…

Page VI

Ours is a sensible while unnatural position, to be
Part of us Milky Way and wise to our whatnot,
And part of us part of each other; so how
can we justify our consanguinity so we can start
planting new plants we probably need?

…

….Page VII

Under your left breast is a hot star burning to root.

Not everyone has a breast!

…

Page VIII

Do you consider yourself a terrestrial super-structure
And remember, with sorrow, the tremendous speed
With which you tend to forget love?
If so, I so loyally dig you.

…

Page IX

I want to plant new trees around here.

Take me to your leader.

Page X

During the hiatus between visitations
By the love object, what sensations do you observe
In the fire-pit of your circular dream?

…

Page XI

I want to thank you for having me over;
How clean is your fuel-shed?

…

Page XII

In a recent letter I was informed the beloved
Is stuck at the crossroads. The letter did neither
Confirm or deny the condition of their overall impression.
What is the rational operation of a soul for?

…

Page XIII

Some questions are not vital, like
if not Eve, than who?

…

Page XIV

Is your type stable?

…

Page XV

Better than y’all is all y’all.
What’s your favorite way to say everybody?

…

Page XVI

If you will not be burned in death,
And you will be buried in the ground
And become a fossil,
What part of your body will no-one ever find?

…

Page XVII

A member of the Royal College of Surgeons once said
Nobody even scientists will ever figure out why we’re here;
He, (yes he), said the only possible solution
Is to come up with a “great unifying principle.”

…

Do you believe this guy?

…

Page XVIII

If the proper environment for being man is mystery,
Than “who’s your daddy” might not be the right question
For getting at who’s in charge; what question
Might help us get more lost?

…

Page XIX

Here are twin marks between which I
Is sandwiched like a pause.
Did you know that the symbol for caesura
Is the same as the one for pause on your media hardware?

….

Page XX

Who (or what) do you miss most when you are missing?

…

Page XXI

When two are gathered together do they need
One more thing and (who) what?

Need meaning need.

…

Page XXII

It’s another day; sleet, snow, or singing?

…

Page XXIII

That reminds me,
If a hen can hatch duck’s eggs
And a child can nurse a man,
Than how come you lock your house at night?

…

Page XXIV

Why do we disdain unfamiliar data
When we know damn well?

…

Page XXV

If you come to my house in the middle of the night

and I come to my door sleepily, what will you have,

half-smiling in the porch light, hidden in one of your two bunched fists,

you’ll be holding tightly to your back?

…

Then let us again examine whether that is a sound statement, or do we let it pass, and if one of us, or someone else, merely says that something is so, do we accept that it is so? Or should we examine what the speaker means? – Socrates, Euthryphro, Plato, Five Dialogues, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo

∞

The professor of philosophy who forgets that philosophy is about wisdom may still be a real lover of knowledge, may still be a great creative scholar, and may even still be a very good person, but he will not really be a philosopher. When he speaks, especially on moral, practical, or political matters, his words may represent nothing but the most dangerous folly, without the Socratic perspective and drive to correct it. All too often, brilliant fools seem to be the stock-in-trade of academia and the intelligentsia. – Aegyptophilus

§

Beware of not-axioms and distinct derivations — they are business. What do you do with business? You FAX it. FAX is business. Garbage (on the other hand) = resource. Repair memory. Do not use only as directed unless you want to find out what you already know – again.

Do you want to dress to kill? Fine, then strip down to your bones.

Ohh how lovely that reminds me — How famous everything is!

Am I also?

¥

We are in public places because the private places are filled up with the hearts of the easily offended. They are always invited but don’t want to come. This makes some of us sad, and (publicly) long.

No more hazards, dirges, consignments – please. I beleive in everything.

Even the nailbiting excuses.

[drifting meter, lagging ring, obedient fingers that follow the circles in the dark, slip from the lips and teeth and tongue, alight from the lover's mouth, legs and limbs gone rag, not gone, begotten, smokey mountain heart, wet wound breath, one phrase always - i love i love i love...]

There are bird tracks and nothing in the sky; something lived, left, and left something…

You really get scared in a haunted house sometimes when it really is haunted.

Gideon is in the drawer next to the bed next to the coinslot for the vibration machine. The snow is thinking when it falls. The heater hissing.

All is on the whole’s behalf.

[His eyes so black they looked pretend, and that's what scared me.]

Here’s one: pocketknife. Here’s one: divine surface. There is a smooth black stone beneath the skin of each of my upper arms, and these stones are important.

I heard a lady say, “that stuff is wet,” about the snow. I wanted to suck on her nipples and kiss her breast immediately.

I live for her now as I have always lived for her. I owe this concentration the indefatigable right to be life with eyes.  It is almost March.

There. Now I may watch my credulous breath.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/02/090218-extinct-bird-photo.html

Please read this genuinely interesting article about one of my favorite structures which also happened to be used for the 2008 Olympic stadium in China. Really, it’s good. I enjoy knowing the father of the architect was a poet. I enjoy knowing the architect was disgusted with the Olympic use of the nest and called it, “a pretend smile.” Big big words.

Just heard (by bird by bird) this news yesterday: Unless something catastrophic ish happens between now and then, it appears Shearsman Books in Essex, England is going to publish my manuscript, A Nest This Size. The book, did I say book? The book. The book. The book. Anyway….the book is slated for slippage November of this year.  Here’s a link to their website which is in the air rather than in Essex England: http://www.shearsman.com/

This is a very nice way to turn 41 years old. I recommend it.

I found the pictures and I’m keeping it.

Don’t stand trembling in front of the terrible scale yet. NOone.

That is a nickname. That meaning that.

That one.

I can’t beleive there are so many signals left

lying around, dormant-eyed, bursting with purpose

and NOone cares.

And NOone cares what the name of your book is.

Or for the neighbor recently moved away.

NOone knew him very well.

He was not loud but each remember one time

that.

Not to be a hero, but to save the world.

Not to be proud, but to protect the beautiful.

Dearada Typepad (source unknown)

i dedicate this song to sap. (who yesterday was a weirdo but today is crazy).
to be perfectly clear. // grin faultfinder your fire is on fetch.

i know this because my handicap has a scenic problem that wants to sentence
it’s way to the brink of a sleepy reprise. // fine then, let us pray.

to say that he has a familial inferiority, advancing by the contrary
through an apparition of misplaced credit, revealed by opinions of bees

say that modern is a mode, intractable nonsense, frustrating the glib
unhappier members who stood in a paragraph of rain

to guarantee a self-enforced flux, samplings of a crucial discomfort
parsed by nightly condition, weatherly, sober and dependent

upon hand in hand, made absurd by a slow diminishment of mouths posed to rid,
then, manifestations of caress sloughed for slur and slang

where a frothy gab scruples a foolhardy theme, exalt and play defend
then courage calm // not courage // uncalm them

let more spiritual math amend staged integrity // arches
of liquid, dispersal’s of banal, dazzle of suds, mindful of our judgment // draft

proof. reader of small stones // meet at dream’s open vein

a trifle gathering // acknowledgments of sensual
dues unpaid // polish polish.

meant to operate via a promising way / drill the glee

ah, squirming with probably // ah to lift the palm’s clock.

Have or navigate via polyvocal swaths…
more threat than a quality sum.
gentles. Do not…

““““““““““`collapsible is unforbiddable

said sundry a river to entire boats brought

edge wise. forgetting what star.

Really what happened // so many cried down canonical cliffs (didn’t they?)

amiable/biblical/rhetorical/     stuttering

remarkable hellhole bless our cage.

// birthday greetings
to the palpable. We are secretly ignited

up the wazoo. // shook hard, often to the spot.
let us love immediate raven and why not?

not a curse, nor a jumping conclusion, but a disciplined retort-
form for portentous height. behold
a giant lemony ring / a la

shrimp flooded clouds // view-debris monsieur // collision
chief / heart’s of rewarding / weighted
a passport of irascible consolation

we forthcome to get home and on

the way doze.

opened with a fob set to fog. // all that was expected / gender of articles, a-chronic.

he(at). she(et). / leg of connection (hand) off: ineligible. indelible. illegible. the soft
group dynamism of significant drifts…

bang bang bang.

here, put this up.  like how her hang permanent misjudgment // exquisite comedian.
requisite sleep language // bang. // pairs of noise vs. sinking feeling.

smaller inevitable. smaller negotiation. before schedules are blown.

all analogue between ewe and meet refracts like like. in a moment
what was written animal/life/death and triangle.

Oh snow…

a fence made of photons colludes with the head door. // anymore
deeper than arrogant / flanking what elegant cheeks.

something musty about this menacing // who unman’d thee?

who pressed climate of constancy to a forehead
fording daggerously on sheen simpling afar?

tiptoed suitor // your holey graze // your whole foodie eye
on the odyssian repast // glob glob gob.

the material sneaks in and that isn’t fragment enough.

practice comrades // building gates of stretching wire.

and stretching // the wire.

Venus and the Rabbits by David M Bowers

I don’t have anything to write, but needed image to meditate on anyway. While I practice a self-inflicted exile in my own house, or temporary house. I made a rabbit soundtrack, and searched the web for rabbit imagary. I didn’t have a lot of success finding compelling images, but this one certainly is strange enough to suit my purposes. I like that the artist is alive. I like the dangling bundle of carrots and the stream of milk from the breast to the rabbits lips. I like that there is no civilization. Now I have tired myself with all the rabbit research. Goodnight.

because there are no late night diners this is where we begin.
without coffee. without radiant heat. the moon stuck to a cold black sky.

the window has been open all night. the window is wide open.

the hero is fully dressed down to stocking feet. the hero’s breast aches.
the hero thinks of the word longing and realizes it has little meaning.
(this part will later be cut, but is necessesary now, as are the midnight cigarettes).

*

How has the least of your desires defoliated so soon?
The shutterspeed’s been set to hallaluia ever since your wish.

After all the looking closley at rare footage of nature, that short film engaged
repelantly in the feild of time in tense, with light so neatly set in opposition
with the wick of water, we’ve already come a hair’s breath too far
from a shadow’s liberation.

And yet, what have we convinced the audience?

Suicide makes the daft ideal.

Curators of grass and sex appeal, tormentors of a sibling’s goodness, flack-
fraught and infamous for engendering familiar objects:
archetypes of killzone, chandeliers of sickness, even
random correlatives (as innocent as mittens);
fit with blame.

We’re equally inexcusable below this ubiquitous moon.

remote. remote. remote. remote.

So you have brought me here to present your mountain.
Is this your mountain? Show me your ruin on it.

*

Virtue, are you listening?

The fancy rationalists are preparing to deliver you your gilded gram of terra
in a vehicle of bright idea. At very little expense to the wholecloth.

At least that’s the sale’s pitch or tale we recently pinned to the donkey.

Welcome to anima city! Says Mr. Monkey (who doesn’t exist -
so therefore is not heard). May your magnification sustain you!

You mustn’t laugh, it’s passe. It’s anti-establishment, it’s marxist.
Even if the night is so masculine it smells like a closetfull of ties.
Even if the intervention comes from something calling itself government.
(I know. Easier sad than done).

Even if you beleive in Mr. Monkey.

*

Ah, but there’s probably a problem, is often heard
in the halls of he who waits for rapture, and is adept with the list by now:
 
Too familiar with the cityscape we misunderstood like wildfire.
Spread knowlege across the culturefield of our seasonal interpretation, making harvest
our exile, and renounce. Scribbled a religion of looky looky
and scrawled peek-a-boo doctrines until we created a stalwart prototype 
which, in the end represented, in a small way
a monolithic elixer of a program.

It was originally thought that nourishment must be shadowshed to get there.
By originally, we meant capital is mystical. 

(or was it SHE who waits?)

O give us a shovel for we suspect a motif.

*

The heart is sudden and cryonic, but most forget
she entered the breast’s development secretively.

A thing of dual imagination, thought pile of intricate flake.
But she’s vituperative to loss: The very frigid, fertile, vigil of it.
Charged and cataclysmic, a bit promissory note.

How can it be?

Question, you being worded, are a glad ghost.

Do you claim a cottage industry of naught?
Do you recognize the importance of our ailment, and how lately
it’s as popular as a poppy in a picture of an empty lot?

How can you say you mean it?

Get thee to a tributary, skiff. Get you to a river
mouth and get you making. What?

Obey (flatten angry stomach), and pray (sooth the bruised knee)…
as the object of affection (we’ll tell you so), and we love how you object.

Oh wet angry bird, flagrating on your slippery shore,
you have got to be kidding us with this. Don’t you realize

everyone can see you? How quickly you make your get away.

The heart is a spoon in need of fork. The heart is a soaked paper towel.
The heart is a story that is much too long to keep our attention. The heart
is an electric blanket (dangerous to gift).

A rug. A chair. A shoe.

Does one really love walls all that much?

I would like to trade this licking memory with a lock.
It’s stinking up the place. It’s eating us out of house.
It’s unruly. Untidy. Unfriendly.

Please, take it from me.
I have not even named it yet.

A moment ago (an era discarded for light?) the hero
stepped off the plane and shuffled his way from the jungle tarmac to bed.
It was a long flight from the kingdom of now that had left him
looking stripped down to a folksy fault–left him not looking
at all–that left him here.

Who brought you down to earth my friend, asks the everything else.
What did you forget on the way? Do you still hold that

missing-person-flier in your head? We have vacated your apartment
and interviewed your belongings on their whereabouts.

Is living really that important? Why all the fuss?
Ridiculous, walking in the rain and the cold in faux-bum’s gear.
Ridiculous, what you want rattling inside.

What do you do with what you hate and how? Will it be pure?

Equal to undone. equal to finished. but burning still.
Equal to fractal. equal to diamond. equal to franchise.
Equal to catacomb. fuck-you’d home via a fever of wings.

During the in-flight’s deep sleep an akrolith stood for the being her.
why couldn’t the hero swing? why wouldn’t the hero reach?

A mobile of diminishing returns installed above a crib of hate.
Once service charged, when we’d pretended doing something meant.
We meant what we did, but who is we?

All hands feigned to deck, of every rubbered foot, beware beware
the twist and temperature of the lover’s hair. Which is mostly fair?

Tell the sinking boats of tranquil proximities once beloved, to clever back.
The word(s) cellphone something to the breast — what of it? — last night’s
percision intimidated you gone. admit it, little hospital gown
torn from the kidney down, to the rib’s

where breakfast.

Surprised? Ye, a bloom once in awhile. toxin or fairy tale?

Hate, you stupid child, blind, hate, you stolen labour–get your own.
no such thing as own. no such thing as number one. such a thing as no.
collar grabbed and gaunleted like an artist’s rag in the room,
groom of a useless heirloom, rhyme us to death.

Cheer us up! But no the devil says. no the asphalt in the rain, and no the boot.
Head splitting with infinitives from the night before, heart full of disobedience.
Angry in the knee and swollen eyed and pickle mouthed. the loss!

loss is so much hungrier when have’s had.

Part Duex: Nothing to go on.

Part three, part four, part five, part of the problem…

Part six. There isn’t a part seven, there never was.

It’s a hoax. Hail a cab. An American cab. A city cab.
It’s a fucking hoax. Get out of the devil’s way befuddled one.
You’ve been had.

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