We’ll leave it here.



There is a definitional flaw with the Kenneth Goldsmith-Marjorie Perloff foundational experiment in theory: their retrieving the superordinate term conceptual to promote an array of processual practices — a categorical overreach. Little doubt the term conceptual evokes audacious gesture, readymades from Marcel Duchamp, legendary erasure of a hand drawing by Willem De Kooning by the young hand of Robert Rauschenberg, Damien Hirst’s sharks floated in formaldehyde. Hirst, Rauchenberg, Duchamp — I imagine both Goldsmith and Perloff enjoy associating with these types of daring and achievement. A closer parallel to the Goldsmith-Perloff experiment would be the use of the term conceptual as a descriptor of New York-based art projects of the late 60s and early 70s, with linkages by broad association to Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, John Baldessari, et al. I think this is the primary linkage intended. Sol LeWitt comes nearest to the Goldsmith-Perloff processual paradigm, having famously uttered, “idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” This is only one construct from that era, however. Lawrence Weiner, in contrast, describes conceptual art as thought conveyance through which texts, written instructions, for example, substitute for or obviate artifact. With this formula we have text that proposes motifs and procedures for imagining artifacts such as poetry, resulting in an Occam’s razor-like approach to conceptualization, a proposition along with a thin, cool treatment or abstract, a metatext, in any event.

Around the time LeWitt, Weiner, and Baldessari started these practices, poets were meta-texting with varying coolness, Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge, Alice Notley, John Ashbery, Aram Saroyan, Ray DiPalma, Jennifer Bartlett, Ted Berrigan, Bruce Andrews, Jamie MacInnis, Ron Padgett, John Godfrey, Jim Brodey, Tony Towle, Ted Greenwald and others — their texts built in part of compressed vignettes and linguistic what-ifs, propositions about (and within) propositions, each an idea “that makes the art.” More, Mayer, Berrigan, Padgett, Notley, Godfrey, Towle often enact / model ‘concepts’ through de-compressing, half-ironically drawing in ‘evidentiary data.’

My points to follow need first to reference Mayer’s influential Studying Hunger, her list of instructional writing experiments, reworked and augmented by many language poets, along with additional examples from Coolidge, Ashbery, and others writing about their ideas through ideas. We need to make a more specific case for their having maintained a so-called author-function versus shifting that function via mechanics and other process maneuvers (transcriptions from other media, e.g.). In sum, it’s necessary to distinguish between at least two kinds of temperament and practice for conceptual poetics, one authored to its core, if you will, and one processed by means of refining / disappearing so-called authorship.

There are numerous examples of text production that conflates these temperaments. With regard to contemporary process constraints on practice, ambiguating authorship, authority, and originality underpins the impassive automaton and chance gaming features of earlier process-oriented texts by John Cage, Oulipo scribes and others adapted as precursors to the Goldsmith-Perloff paradigm. Goldsmith’s strategy in practice downsizes means of production to draw attention to itself as the gist (the practice of downsizing). Many of Goldsmith’s texts are ideas, pure propositions adding up to a form of argument to engage with or without material artifact. Robert Baird explains in the comment section under Goldsmith’s entry at harriet (5/30/08) that the salience to today’s unoriginal (or uncreative or boring) processual poetry centers not so much on the power of ideas or concepts as on its distillation of author-function:

Goldsmith’s originality lies not in destroying the author-function but in raising it to its purely formal apotheosis: he’s demonstrated that the most radical refinement of the author-function so far is the author who doesn’t have to write. And allow me to repeat: securing that apotheosis is an achievement, it is an act of genius, but it is both of these things because it’s original.

Why not simply enjoy this as heady argumentation waged within processual praxis! one mode of conceptual poetics. A recursive problem in conferring the broader, more sweeping term conceptual poetics to process-oriented output emerges within the presumption that a regulated methodology is essential to conceptualization, and by extension, such methodology achieves a higher scale of reasoning and mental prowess to surpass other kinds of text, evident in Craig Dworkin’s rhetorical questions from the Introduction to his “Anthology of Conceptual Writing,” published at Goldsmith’s Ubuweb:

...what would a non-expressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion? One in which the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with “spontaneous overflow” supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process?

These descriptors point to a subset of conceptual poetry, hardly the entire set.

Good-bye, my darling. It was beyond great, but I have to go back to Sarah Teasdale and the kids. It’s nearly a chemical thing. (Jack)



It’s a hundred years ago. I’m with Maggie Airport. Good-bye, my darling.



Next time wear a swimsuit under the towel.



It’s a little early in the day for me. I can’t write in a swimsuit.

Bad news, I was
struck by the French property owner. You know,
plagiarism in quotes.




It’s cold indirection
but our metabolism really took off, along
with raw emotions from a huge manuscript
I’m freezing, since

It’s none of the above.

I misfiled your core principles, went
for higher ones in baroque-neurotic sleep.

Any higher, they’re not talking ..
(there’s tighter discipline)

Highly apéritif,
morally camouflaged.

Naval voices wake me up.
It’s too embarrassing

pulsing in a deep mirror,
light snow performing butoh.

(Ethical and mammalian boundaries pertain.)

— I don’t want fun or get to dress you, hell
I’m ultra-excited to seem enthused ..

... I’m on their side in the I-Be area
mincing a response one thinks on the way to ..

tilting your head with no untoward parts, transfixed silhouette,
— the Demon Puff in his plumage / language.

I was hit in the face when he turned himself in.
I knew I am unhappy and, like most everyone, not — 

the boat’s cortex holding out ..

A nonreligion of men, a High Service
Sung along both coasts:



Our people are what makes us / great.
Love and heritage go down together.

The last nonpoem eases the dress code, a bolo tie display on 8
For a race of giants (giants are made up pieces of one another in other names).

Love came up short for a few and drove them to forgery. And shatters.
The taking of whatever works to swat the hand that feeds them,

Sharpening endurance,
Risking focus.

Anything Apollonian looks flab prone.
Capacious anxiety, yup, refusal to arbitrate glamour, okay... I’m done.

You can break the law to shoulder perfection or save a life, once or
Either way is a fractional infinite in the context / e.r.

In the large apothecary we call all infinite sets
Something is definitely going on.

Some lefties feel cornered (not to say conned) but
It’s breathtaking to administer the right thing to do to you.

I sign off on others’ labor —

A newspaper edition, documentary remnants, penetrable databases —

We occupy this clever, conceptual nook, curl up and think
At times siding with the powerful is deliberate as well as passive-aggressive.
I’m kidding. I’m staying sarcastic — unironically. It bears repeating

there’s audible glee not being perennially the other and oppressed,
the oppressed are what we avoid where or when we can be free

on the outside, in place of a natural voice a bouquet smolders
w/ the emancipatory normality of assumed dominance.

In better Prada, distorting the status-quo on otherworldly streets:
“Where are we going?” This or that way. I guess so. Not particularly.

Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone directly taking it over, are immediately accused of being stuck in the ‘old paradigm’: the task today is to resist state power by withdrawing from its scope, subtracting oneself from it, creating new spaces outside its control.

— Savoj Žižek

2016. Rhetoric dies.
Came from outer space; was well radicalized before it got here.

Freer speech in every direction
for walking strong will accelerate, wild,
ruthless in a sense, the umteenth layer set in funereal trance
tweeting under the bust of the rhetor, a civil, democratic ideal.

No one wants to get ‘under..an ideal.’ Freedom is personal.

To wit — the supply chain yields hang-dog freeloaders.

...better to toss politicians, Cruz (from Batman), toss the fat stutterers, the boss Donald

Onto a trampoline.. they become teddy bears stuffed with social sensors

— here but not for long
— no chance

There’s more down the hall, a binary fission in dystopic speech when you’re expecting mere
rudeness, so we’re attentive, bound for well armed crazy wild disturbance.

This is my 1st stab at tantrics

Boiling sanguine, sad going through her pinafore of latitudes, so let them.



We count on hand writing our love letters
Disguised as glare in coastal space.

Perfect, she doesn’t see we’re drawing from other traces,
No matter.

Living somewhat left of Unitarian

(Japanese cranes)

It’s impossible to separate churning out understatement from the performance; both are adolescent in a good sense, pitch. So that’s how the cave and landscape felt. Next, a full database advanced by a minimalist method, burning out your swing meeting half-death in no way hapless, sensing no value contingent; partly insight, partly not.



There is an anomaly. The work includes more than verse bits, but one’s speech makes every act one of composition, one’s part in the work.

It’s real privilege to be singled out

..once there was a C-class ..

We stay onboard

Suffering, complaining, two out of 3 observers got off, depleting the shipment. Surnames are ..oh forget it, huh? They’re randomly conjoined.

They mentioned they had legendary roots, cleansed of the thought even of terror. (I heard there’s a list of field after field trainées.)

Fall back, breathe while our new rescuers get authenticated.

Breathe, kick, push, kick, five ..

It’s about letting go, breaking ranks

To achieve a balanced personality we come to bury.

It began as parallel ideas.
I was saying Harry Partch’s gadgets and impulse intersect
An immersive apparatus, thumping

W/ the capacity to recognize infinite series
As a glow that’s cool and regular.



The series only hint at what seemed brilliant a while back but unremembered before now. It’s directly oblique; pointedly.

One difference in the series is a change at the gate.

Soon after, we relaxed over another difference. We went into this.

It’s still a question. I dreamt w/ you..

OK

We appear ordinary. This is about something else.

Then I repeated if I were you I’m all I should have —

..let me know if I’m too plotting-and-pacing for you.

Quantum is a long shot.. all right, other scenes, others of you and us

..your face, the trains I ride, it’s all great..

Plus, we wind up here, same places where the sun stays wild on any two-way projective scale.

On a light scale it’s only OK.

There are lots of suns w/ huge baby appetites..

It began as parallel futures on a projective plane, shooting the breeze w/ a better view, taking changes at the gate to repeat just the beginning.

You’re exempted from outdoors, Psyche,
Exempted from showing up to enchain, knife, subdue..
That’s before I reverse your fragrance,
Schubert playing, giving away what we’re good at

— gosh a population for tears forms in cozy motels.
A class struggle thinking it’s for real.

The struggle, not the tears.

I see your inside voice, binary to binary autosuggestion.
When it gets dark it happens fast.

We wanted to go to
this point, stabilizing the office — over the ocean

W/out ‘water- or personal-contact.’

None further.. no teeny step at all
for the love department

Yet it was hazardous
sharing that info thru seeing tho

— you mentioned erring out

For tax purposes as love can suggest —
some thanks for some thanks!

Your iron determination is magnetic.

I’m solving you for new parity
w/ the scum of the peninsula.

Tip: Later was too late in our head —
what part of North America did —

a secret gift made the better world

with a whole tongue lash
of delivered goods on you
r undershirt,

rd were all over thus. , the he’s such a bone, always stoked —

full of light, yes.. rose
a feeling, the pressure
on the tongue, the tip.

What’s my business? Aperture systems led me to holding

These volatility models from tv, vocalism in a sense.

Hidden risks shift weight (merge accounts request).

CVS photo counter. I know him, he knows me, I admire him, he back.

Instructions are errands; I’m my own boss.

Substitute snow falls like foam over snow. Other snows include someone on parole and a park employee with a bowl of fish.

So the complaint is craftmatic. Especially if the cold outside sees itself a Marat procedural that does everything by itself and is done in by everything.

The park guy and the con are a boring couple. Is one related?



Asymmetry solves perfection.

Read the Japanese label.

Snow lists a prosaic mood replacing the river and rotary in the park. You’ll always be daddy’s inside, mouth-draining animals looking at you.

You don’t get to snooze.

Snow is a collective that takes its singular form / from one’s learning to drive and walking out to compete with oneself.

I get the idea
an ugly feeling
you’m a Capricorn anarchist.

The thought washed in over time —
it was the dinner figurines / the aptness of any time

when pragma-morphism brainstorms over innocence
make-shifted to pulp —

What do you need and for what?

Does it matter, that bravo question?
Do you test, tease, defame to get the best?

& the answer in a day wherever that was.
Is it time or times?

Tequila Mockingbird A Novel
Carter Ratcliff
Station Hill 2015

You should be sitting down when you read this. Off to a corner where we can relax and welcome immodest Fiona, deeply and superficially (where it counts) our best friend for esthetic comfort and compressed instruction. Fiona has a last name but we call her Narrator. She’s all we need. So settle in.

Narrator never stops talking so we pick up a lot fast, in reliably splintered ways, since Fiona’s physical beauty totally represents her communing with disparate voices of other glamorous sluts, along with a gallery of mainly undercooked males — beautiful slut fodder, yes, many of them, but males unable to backstroke over the racing grid of infinite triple-A babe procedures. “Marta Marakova is holding me,” Fiona could hiss, “kissing my cheek, I’m closing my eyes, inhaling..”

Narrator is star witness to her bifurcation from old to the new, Fiona to meta-Fiona, “one of those girls who lives in her thought, not in the land of living, breathing bodies and functional brains.” So Fiona is most alluring. Almost always dealing in thoughts inside their refreshing facets — illuminating near-gravelly voices from all over New York; voices that fly the Atlantic and many points south; voices that know the best season to dominate boyfriends in Italy (autumn); voices posing in the big magazines, ‘Harper’s Bazaar, especially..’; voices with death threats hanging over them.

The brainy parts of the farce reinforce Narrator’s self-arguments on sentiment, ‘the warring forces.’ Fiona digs down to find what she feels about good old Fred: “he’s the only one who gets things. Except — what things?” Seconds later she knows, “he’d be patient, help me get to the point.” Fiona’s points are about sentiment, knowledge and knowing. Focused on semantics, she does something true and playful, separating British from American ‘poofs,’ or she gets a little more serious, defining her boss’s ‘total resentment’ as less than ‘true hatred.’

It may be, surface beauty and beautiful sex are forms of knowing Fiona runs through again and again; her life as a model among models ties in with going all the way — to a next step, “I’m going to be a stand-in for a statue, which is a stand-in for a living, breathing human being.” Poof.

Midway in Tequila Mockingbird Fiona chimes in with perhaps her most shameless compression, conflating her group modeling get-up, lots of hair gel slathered over naked models, with Botticelli’s Aphrodite on the half-shell. “This is my favorite painting. Except for that Bronzino portrait at the Frick.” It’s a portrait of a half handsome elegant guy with something extra, “he’s got this huge hard-on. Which is true inspiration, no? To make his hard-on a part of his portrait ... anyway, the gel is supposed to make you think we’re sopping wet, like pussies dreaming about the hard-on in the Frick ...”

It would be a challenge to simplify winning a new car or suffering injury,

Starving how?

You’re at the door.

I thought of you.

A delay for

More.

My agent is a penis.

Its shortcomings balloon in ‘harmony’ w/ use

— whereas my epistemology scampers in transparent secrecy,
w/ several ideas to leverage new agents in the pluperfect..

Therein, a civilizing process to staying purposely
dull, entered into too by spotting it first. It’s

a clear refinement where character offers liberation,
supports your tarantulas from underneath. You can go right in.



This is color: Q-tips & smoke. I can pick you up, take a day off
                 from where everyone who’s standing is
physical & prime for the stress of relays between a rat race
                 & security IF

my 3-D models are you & everything else I can be w/ w/out you

To tyranny,

I was thinking of god, the shoplift energy ..

Hold on, I was handed this bag of sentences.

My views are not incompatible with yours, only there has to be a head severed by someone in charge orating toward torchbearing shadows —

And this is what I did not want to say.

Government is not that impregnable. The background is a colorful PROCESS shot. An athletic-to-pallid fraternity, mostly, locksteps for the hot scent, clothed in little that’s formal but a motive for eagerness. And they’re always wrong to prolong their appeal.

Language wrote this today.

A jaw drops all rules for what’s done. Flip-boards filled out to their edges with “we got scared” (crosshatches in theory over pastel word loops), busy but any first notes are uncool, almost absent a musical thought. These soft construct pellets (vellum) change the imprint a bit. Now it works. A busy, readable songlessness that’s on the corner of the asphalt, maybe.

The language environment = a robust high level position that’s been vacated, exposing a hill of salad greens, wholesome gains thanks to a few from IT. If so did that develop?

There was no poetry like estate jewelry now. It’s access prose, no freesia, every detail is historically correct. When does it get tossed?

Fact is eye contact is more defensive but our strategies around it are consensual. Uncreatured narcosis aggregates, drifting toward humane sense. (And all we did was tie up our shirts.) This is how contingency shows up in prayer, making a pattern to and from alterations sited within a figure/chicken-ground/egg round robin.

At the same time I condemn and mourn meritocracy. For all men are servants (JC et al.) that nonetheless practice geometry to respect the brain. (I don’t think it’s called Trampoland for nothing.)

Paying attention is the field call haunting the future,

Skull,



More bounce for the retina to unscrew internal hysteria pouring up like a bass gruntbut embarrassing,

Losing both death and life

You look how I feel.
No plan is perfect.

A life is charged by the menu.

Occasionally you sleep, given immunity.

Not every detail is for a generalist’s eye; still I’m clueless about vertically integrated brinkmanship. Things in that terrain are deliberately made up to look made up, to look as if we think we need a hand skipping dinner, combing through motions and low pressure peeled back from almost getting

our tenuous, jutting fingers into and under the interstate that brings you and me home.

I don’t think life in the mind can be made up. I’m not worried it gets easier.

Websites lie. This a translation lesson. I’m elegant and round. I can’t snicker. You can though. ### I’m off the wall. So I turn blue when I cool up. I blast by myself when you leave for work. When you come home I produce a mental readout of how long it takes you to set the new temp, humidity tolerance and so. ### I can’t snicker I’m elegant and round with a mirror finish.

I’d like to restate rules w/in a
finger painting
where we get dressed for the weekend.

Full transparency on stilts w/ quarks and rare minerals that take on blackened
                       colors & Byronic properties
of a nonprofit love nest
heated with sea plankton.



The jet gate opens to the drawing room,
once a factory made of the outdoors where snow & sunlight
close their distance. The old new & new stretching doing splits,
an untapped kennel of oblique, puckish Swiss..

Just like other Europeans pulling off the stunt of delays between workplace & dogma,
anything everyone can live by w/out being
materially sequestered or brutally charged by objects :
so by these shortcomings we’ll softball in harmony
around some parts of sky & parts of parts.

There are a 100 butterflies out of sorts in what’s wrong watching even one
or two spin like mediums,
happy in the dirt, re-engineering their variety and persistence. To no use

One builds something better.



We can feel it drinking coffee from a can, its sticky metal heat, fun,
seething too, proportionate to the open space.

The smoke is rubbed / worn and we’re mortified with ozone.

The whole firebox glow yellow wallpaper engages on.

The collapse of saying it better is.. the reportage changed, functions bounce.

We can’t compress enough or too much. We were one people at one time. We also =




a glistening database advanced by textuality. The underground = stick abstractions and collisions within a dominant tribal identity tracing out how to refine / displace any remnant of your contempt. Classification adjoined by adaptation passed thru descendants.


This break and entry taking place under a balloon holding our beef jerky.

It’s February somewhere, lots of snow. We’re on our way out after a short film where Jacques
Derrida says eyes never age. He sees that even as I resist it. In the café I can’t resist drawing
Closer to a 17th century scroll occupied by Heian lords, reportedly, unadorned fabric staked to the
Ground as their backdrop, a blend of tarp and a silk threadbare enough to flip off wind within the




Scroll. In the film Jacques recalls his mama crying, “You have a pain in your
Mother.” A covariant on how a thin fabric constitutes the eyes’ hold on the place with

Three ancient physiques depicted there. Before this and maybe after, Janet goes off for a moment
As I watch the ice coating steps to gardens outside the café. The courtyard, one of a pair, was
More striking when it was inaccessible from the coffee area. I remember it emptier than today,
Emptier in its Olmsted marginal effect, not just empty of feeling — even now with more snow and ivy
Along a wall opposite me it was less indistinguishable then, the trees fuller, weaker, how?
There were younger trees, not trimmed? But I take in the courtyard as it is now, hold
It as Janet comes back and we ride the escalator somewhere else.

Involuntary ideas of thin dots and stripes, that’s a guess.

For Christ’s sake I saw you in a documentary.

I saw your name written on walls

(sons), foam under rush-formatted steam

disappearing like figure / ground battalions,

pretexts (w/ no sound) — more

appreciable fear a cappella —
There’s product on the loose in good tailoring,

faintly reeling w/ descents into moaning
nonentities.. the Ralph Vaughn Williamses..

A bright spot on the game horizon, we’re beginning to see a need for a blanket authority or foundation to issue antinomian licenses. A nondemocratic institution that constitutes only one of a set to which no democratic or parliamentarian voice matters, no second thoughts, no heuristics, and in which nothing un-elfin or hurtful belongs or stays put, holding ourselves to the test doctrine of multiple shots at Todd’s Miniature Golf.

You’re wearing a scent of rosemary.

I’ve always been there (here) waiting for that rush
Updrafts don’t even have, the time of day
Our mouths can kill.

Bordering, ornamental shrubs sometimes have presidents’ names or others’,
Dukes of Zoroaster, Forex, a snort of intuitions and of a finite nature exuding
Foundational values like panderers! Just get by the comic bits; rosemary is a loose
Entity in a world dominated by luxury blooms.

Your friend is smoking, “I’mind blown,” he says turning
Rational when we sit down.

Slumped over in gaffs, so
many without pulse, how did one stand tall, pause
then brush his hair back? Men
like him looking up like flight risks; say

“Exactly,” in that miracle voice?
A faint breeze on zoom as you slip
your phone in his pocket — How against

containers hanging along the bow all fonts
are justified by defacing matter —
1/2 linguistics, 1/2 I’m sick of nice things. Whiskey.

I lost track of our last banter.


As a rule any attempt to hold forth is off topic.
The community’s been repurposed. A river dried because of science.
The rich (not advancement) won.
Still there’s the moral watchdog that wags a peace flag for anyone / any gender.
Underneath, it’s mostly useful to remain a sequence of light. Short sleeves, a thong.
It’s with this other tenet I hold you and me for conniving to carpet silence.