e·ratio

E·ratio issue 13 is in production. (Proofs. Yes. Soon.)



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After a while, my eyes regained their strength,
And I looked up—to find myself translated,
With my lady, to a higher joy.

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It’s not so much that I am reading Skip Fox’s book, Delta Blues, as that I am having an encounter with it. And all that “encounter” suggests; as in, say, confrontation. This is subway reading without the subway. As I get older I begin to appreciate different writers; as I get older I begin to appreciate different writers writing differently. Writers like Pete Hamill and Phillip Lopate, who belong, really, to someone else’s generation. I think it’s in the confrontation, and in what is being confronted. (They’re not the same.) In Delta Blues (2009, Ahadada Books) Skip Fox confronts life. (Wait. . . .) Life in the form of other people. Mr. Fox has a definite interest in life, and more perhaps than in being alive. (Got the difference?) There’s something Roman going on here, and that’s a tough scene to master. I want to index these pieces according to subject. And list of names mentioned.

p. 3 “Blue Note: A Valentine for the New Millennium”

p. 25 “Cavatina” and footnote.

p. 40 footnote.

p. 42 “COmMA.”

p. 43 from “Tombstones for the New Millennium”:

“Imagine jail time for asinine ideas that catch hold and sprout in the barren cultural soil of this nation-planet.”

p. 80 from “Notes toward Definitions for the New Millennium”:

“I wonder what constitutes blockhead, as Olson and Creeley called Corman in correspondence. His dull self-insistence, perhaps. Sufficiently stupid and petulant. Smothered in lethargic gravy. Fog of an identity.”


riddle of the abyss

age is telling a long joke, with some apparent joy, early
at a party, not all the guests have yet arrived, a first
drink freshly in your hand, he’s an interesting stranger in
no hurry, pausing for laughs, comments, not prolonging
the punch line but forgiving it its necessities, standing and
laughing and listening, slowly he reaches the part about
deepest Pacific blue and the sound of sails at sunset, how
their color changes in the changing light, shades of white
in encroaching darkness, pewter, you are still young, any-
thing can happen, yet is a word you can still use as a soft
wedge, argumentation may again be filled with joy, now
for witness of sheer mind’s leaping, but his words have
slowed, slightly, and his head almost turns, then with a
light shift in his eye, oh yes, the abyss, I almost forgot


Mr. Fox’s Delta Blues takes various narrative forms (including visual poetry). I found the poems “solstice two days out” and “solstice two days out, take two” to be especially compelling (and something of the eidetics of an askesis).


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09/09/09









































Revolution 9
(Lennon/McCartney)

[Bottle of Claret for you if I had realised. . . .
Well, do it next time.
I forgot about it, George, I'm sorry.
Will you forgive me?
Yes.]

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number

Then there's this Welsh Rarebit wearing some brown underpants
About the shortage of grain in Hertfordshire
Everyone of them knew that as time went by
They'd get a little bit older and a litter slower but
It's all the same thing, in this case manufactured by someone who's always
Umpteen your father's giving it diddly-i-dee
District was leaving, intended to pay for

Number 9, number 9

Who's to know?
Who was to know?

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9

I sustained nothing worse than
Also for example
Whatever you're doing
A business deal falls through
I informed him on the third night
When fortune gives

Number 9, number 9, number 9

People ride, people ride
Ride, ride, ride, ride, ride
Ride! Ride!

9, number 9, number 9, number 9

I've missed all of that
It makes me a few days late
Compared with, like, wow!
And weird stuff like that
Taking our sides sometimes
Floral bark
Rouge doctors have brought this specimen

I have nobody's short-cuts, aha. . . .

9, number 9

With the situation

They are standing still

The plan, the telegram

Ooh ooh

Number 9, number

Ooh

A man without terrors from beard to false
As the headmaster reported to me
My son he really can try as they do to find function
Tell what he was saying, and his voice was low and his hive high
And his eyes were low

Alright!

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9

So the wife called me and we'd better go to see a surgeon
Or whatever to price it . . . yellow underclothes
So, any road, we went to see the dentist instead
Who gave her a pair of teeth which wasn't any good at all
So I said I'd marry, join the navy and went to sea

In my broken chair, my wings are broken and so is my hair
I'm not in the mood for whirling

Um da
Aaah

How?
Dogs for dogging, hands for clapping
Birds for birding and fish for fishing
Them for themming and when for whimming

Only to find the night-watchman
Unaware of his presence in the building

Onion soup

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9

Industrial output
Financial imbalance

Thrusting it between his shoulder blades

The Watusi
The twist

Eldorado

Take this brother, may it serve you well

Maybe it's nothing
Aaah
Maybe it's nothing
What? What? Oh

Maybe even then
Impervious in London
Could be difficult thing
It's quick like rush for peace is
Because it's so much
It was like being naked

If you became naked



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"Vacation" by Márton Koppány

KOPPÁNY WAVES TO E·RATIO EDITIONS.

E·ratio Editions is happy to announce the publication of Waves, an e-chap by Márton Koppány.


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Postcards, 1994.


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"Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" by Julian Lennon (1967)

"Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes."

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"Still Life" by Márton Koppány




Read my review of Márton's 2003 volume, Investigations & Other Sequences.


Investigations & Other Sequences
by Márton Koppány
Ahadada Books, 2003
ISBN: 0-973223-1-6


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a noun sing e·ratio 12 · 2009

with poetry by David Chikhladze, Gautam Verma, David Rushmer, Anne Fitzgerald, Mary Ann Sullivan, Ruth Lepson, Virginia Konchan, Sandra Huber, Paige H. Taggart, Marcia Arrieta, Sean Patrick Hill, Travis Macdonald, Mark Lamoureux, Camille Martin, Nathan Thompson, Philip Byron Oakes, Cyril Wong, and Derek Henderson

edited by gregory vincent st. thomasino



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“For the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of
the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung
has raised him one step, he leaves it behind.”

—Schopenhauer


In a dispute by correspondence with a young admirer of his named
Kugelmann, Marx explains the application of the dialectic to current events. It
was 1870 and Kugelmann could not see why Germany should turn her
defensive war against France into an aggressive and imperialistic war. Marx
replies that the dialectic consists not only in opposing another force but in
overcoming it and so fusing the two elements. Then he writes to Engels: “When
a man attacks me on the street, according to K., I have only the right to ward
off his blows; to strike him in return and knock him down would be, according
to him, to become an aggressor. It is clear none of these fellows understand
anything about the dialectic.”

—from Darwin, Marx, Wagner by Jacques Barzun







































































"I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me.
Anything I cannot transform into something marvelous, I let go." -- Anaïs Nin


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Edward Gorey's cover for The Second Sin by Thomas Szasz. At first glance one might take this for a card from the tarot deck.


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MYSTERIOUS VISPO DISCOVERED at JAMESTOWN



























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Term as in Aftermath is Alan Halsey's new full-length collection of poetry.

The Dedication reads, in part,
A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts is for Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino.

Wow. Thank you, Alan.






Read me on Alan Halsey from the spring 2005 issue of E·ratio.



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E·ratio Editions is happy to announce the publication of Correspondance (a sketchbook) by Joseph F. Keppler.


Correspondance (a sketchbook) by Joseph F. Keppler. Digital art.

“What can I call this work? Neither painting nor critique yet informed by art, the following are sketches to me. Rather than executed on paper, they’re drawings designed using the pervasive computer. These graphics approach oeuvre subjectively, not as meticulous copies or art history illustrations, but as some poetic efforts. My laptop simply opens a new capacity for thinking about art and drawing it. As studies these are (a)musing tributes as well as appropriate(d) attributes.” —Joseph F. Keppler, from the introduction.


Cy Twombly

























Marcel Duchamp


























What the cognoscenti are saying about Correspondance (a sketchbook):

“Readability and meaning construction, as well as the relation between the visual and the literary, have been concerns of Joe’s for many years. In Correspondance we see Joe, who is also an astute critic on both literary and visual art, take an artist’s approach, a visual poet’s approach, a visual artist’s approach. Joe Keppler is very unusual in his deep engagement both with art history and the literary. He’s a poet, a visual poet, a sound poet, a sculptor of steel, a photographer, a painter, a polyartist. Not only in his practice but in his wide reading and viewing of contemporary and historical work. I don’t know anybody else as voracious as he is not only in his own artistic practice but in learning about art and philosophy. He is an incredibly learned man as well as an important poet and artist. He shows us what it now means to be literate.” —Jim Andrews Vispo ~ Langu(im)age

“Correspondance is suffused with correspondence, bright exchanges between artist and subject, playful responses between form, light, color, and art history. Poet and sculptor, Joe Keppler brings both mediums to bear, poetry and sculpture, word and material, hand in hand. Keppler adds a third-dimension to the graceful dance (Joe the humble artist says, ‘bump’) through his lifelong study of painting and sculpture: allusions to significant works, quotations of style, and adaptations that bring old works to new life. In this series of sketches, poet, artist, and art will wheel you across the dance floors of the page.” —Crag Hill Poetry Scorecard



Also available from E·ratio Editions:

#5. Six Comets Are Coming by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino. Volume I of the collected works including Go and Go Mirrored, with revised introductions, corrected text and restored original font.

#4. The Logoclasody Manifesto. Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino on logoclasody, logoclastics, eidetics and pannarrativity. Addenda include the Crash Course in Logoclastics, Concrete to Eidetic (on visual poetry) and On Mathematical Poetry.

“As an exegetical object, Logoclasody documents quite brilliantly an ontological crisis in poetry and is, by design, an exemplar both of the problem and the solution. St.Thomasino conceives the central aporia of writing as one of recovering, from the ruin of a necessarily incomplete knowledge, the deep-structure(s) of representation. And by exploiting the tension between grammatical function and the irruptive energies of text itself, the St. Thomasinian program deploys logos as an expressive motif, through which are diffracted both meaning and its contested relationship to language.” —Scott Wilkerson, Columbus State University

#3. Waves by Márton Koppány. Visual poetry.

“These works are minimalist by design, but should we paraphrase the thought channeled therein, the effect would be encyclopedic, ranging through philosophy, psychology, politics, and the human emotions.” —Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino on Márton Koppány

#2. Mending My Black Sweater and other poems by Mary Ann Sullivan. Poems of making conscious, of acceptance and of self-remembering, and of personal responsibility.

#1. Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino joins John M. Bennett In the Bennett Tree. Collaborative poems, images, an introduction and a full-length critical essay pay homage to American poet John M. Bennett.






taxis de pasa logos

From the book, I Wanted to Write a Poem, by William Carlos Williams (Beacon Press, Beacon Hill, Boston, 1958):

William Carlos Williams:

"The suggestion to collect my poems was a lovely gesture from my own gang and I was deeply moved by it. Louis Zukofsky did most of the work of making the collection. Needless to say, it didn't sell at all. I was pleased when Wallace Stevens agreed to write the Preface but nettled when I read the part where he said I was interested in the anti-poetic. I had never thought consciously of such a thing. As a poet I was using a means of getting an effect. It's all one to me—the anti-poetic is not something to enhance the poetic—it's all one piece. I didn't agree with Stevens that it was a conscious means I was using. I have never been satisfied that the anti-poetic had any validity or even existed."

Wallace Stevens, from the Preface to Collected Poems 1921-1931 (The Objectivist Press, New York, 1934):

"His passion for the anti-poetic is a blood passion and not a passion of the inkpot. The anti-poetic is his spirit's cure. He needs it as a naked man needs shelter or as an animal needs salt. To a man with a sentimental side the anti-poetic is that truth, that reality to which all of us are forever fleeing."



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A reading list. A Propaedeutic for the Logoclast.

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Sonnet No. 124
The Phoenix and Turtle — Shakespeare
To His Coy Mistress
Eyes and Tears — Andrew Marvell
Sea Poppies — H. D.
The Red Wheelbarrow — William Carlos Williams
Mana Aboda — T. E. Hulme
“All in green went my love riding”
“anyone lived in a pretty how town”
“all ignorance toboggans into know” — Cummings
Broad Street Drag '87 — Alan Halsey



Language. A shift in consciousness. Indirect communication. To recover the poetic and to renew its purpose. Indeed — to restore the "poet's eye"!

We find poetry in language, and sometimes in unexpected places. This discovery is for me the thrill, the frisson of being a poet. My influences, my affinities, I have found in trobar clus, in cubism, in minimalism, in imagism, and in grammaticism (my term, for the interior form of logoclasody), the mediaeval grammarians, the entire articulatory movement (the expressibility, the emerging-in-language) that is logoclasody.









































At last Ken Russell's Dante's Inferno is available on region 1 DVD. Oliver Reed is Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Judith Paris is Elizabeth Siddal.

Bocca baciata non perda ventura, anzi rinnuova come fa la luna.
















































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OCHO #21 published by CASA MENENDEZ is now available.

With poets Laynie Browne, Abigail Child, Joe Elliot, Laura Elrick, Elizabeth Fodaski, Joanna Fuhrman, Anthony Hawley, Drew Gardner, Jessica Grim, Michael Lally, Douglas Messerli, Bill Marsh, Christina Strong and Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

Nick Piombino (Editor) Toni Simon (Cover artist)


This edition of OCHO is dedicated to the memory of Emma Bee Bernstein.

I'd like to direct you, dear reader, to this article by Douglas Messerli at his Green Integer Blog.

There are no words.

(I imagined you crying and it made me cry.)



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"A love affair obviously, hints of incest, revelation and even murder (the
marginalia is essential).  And yet the whole thing may burn inside that sun in
the puddle. Perhaps the strongest aspect of Stephen's Lake is the reoccurring
sense that an emotional state is every bit as visible, and valid, as the physical
world."

—Jake Berry on Stephen's Lake, a novel in parts

















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Cubism To Be Franc
by William Conlon





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There is an Eastern tale which speaks about a very rich magician who had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where his sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines, and so on, and above all they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and skins and this they did not like.

At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep and suggested to them first of all that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned, that, on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them; and in the third place he suggested to them that if anything at all were going to happen to them it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it. Further the magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to others that they were eagles, to others that they were men, and to others that they were magicians.

And after this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and skins.

— A tale told by G. I. Gurdjieff



Any Prayer may be heard by the Higher Powers and a corresponding answer obtained only if uttered thrice:

Firstly, for the welfare or the peace of the souls of one's parents.
Secondly, for the welfare of one's neighbor.
And only thirdly, for oneself personally.

— G. I. Gurdjieff



























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Hallucination
by Márton Koppány


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Sex and Poetry
This episode:  Sex and the Collage Poem

Or you could say poetry is like sex, in which case you want to ask yourself: If this poem is sex, do I want to have sex with it? Well, if it’s a collage poem you don’t know where that poetry’s been, and the poet who wrote it really doesn’t want you to know; or maybe that poet will tell you, but then that’s like that poem saying, Yes, I want you to have sex with me, but just not with me exactly, I mean with these other poems.




Merry Christmas, Everybody.

Alan Halsey
from In White Writing


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poem, 1

taut, to auto


poem, 2

Chloris chloris (the greenfinch) is a tautonym.


poem, 3

comma, roulette



found haiku

merrily, merri-
ly, merrily, merrily
life is but a dream



The Amsterdam Bed-In

"Begin——"
"Stop——"
"Break——"
"Go on——"
"All right——"
"And——"
"Leave that bit out——"
"Finish it——"
"Fine——"
"A bed-in? I don't follow you——"



Still-Life with Bonsai and Mauve Dancing Girl

informal upright
formal upright
slant

rock clasping
root over rock
slant

clump

swimming
cascade
literati

informal upright
formal upright
clump

forest
broom
rock clasping
twin trunk
multi-trunk
slant

clump

David Chikhladze.


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Guillaume Apollinaire's Il Pleut.


























Manuscript, 1916




























Typeset version, 1918



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a noun sing e·ratio 11 · 2008

with poetry by David Appelbaum, Donald Wellman, Mary Ann Sullivan, Joseph F. Keppler, Patrick Lawler, James Stotts, David Annwn, David Rushmer, Melanie Brazzell, Jennifer Juneau, John M. Bennett, Geof Huth, John Mercuri Dooley, Mark Cunningham, Derek Owens, Gautam Verma, and Clark Lunberry



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Thérèse Dreaming



"I believe deeply in the genius of painting, which parallels that of childhood. I've used painting as a language without really having decided to do so, because it suits me better than writing. Writing tries to be too explicit and go directly to a meaning. . . . For me, writing can only be in the ellipses, where I express myself. . . ."

--Balthus

My prose poem, “Untitled No. 2,” has been translated into français by Éric Dejaeger (and appears in the print ’zine, Microbe, #48, Juillet-Août 2008).


Sans titre n˚2

L’artiste peint sur sa toile deux vieux citoyens grisonnants. Ils sont tous deux perdus et leurs corps bégayent: vers l’est, vers l’ouest, arrêtent le mouvement, repartent, arrêtent le mouvement, repartent. L’un deux, une femme, elle veut l’autoroute. L’autre, un homme, il recherche la place du marché. La femme est maintenant un oiseau—un oiseau brun commun sans marques distinctives—et elle s’envole de la toile. Le vieil homme, vu qu’il a deux pieds gauches, marche en rond dans le sens opposé aux aiguilles d’une montre.


Untitled No. 2

The artist paints upon his canvas two old and graying citizens. Both are lost and their bodies stutter: Eastward, westward, stop movement, start, stop movement, start. One of them, a woman, she wants the highway. The other, a man, he is searching for the marketplace. The woman is now a bird—a common brown bird with no distinctive markings—and she flies off the canvas. The old man, since he has two left feet, walks on into counter-clockwise circles.


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KOPPÁNY WAVES TO E·RATIO EDITIONS

E·ratio Editions is happy to announce the publication of Waves, an e-chap by Márton Koppány.

Waves by Márton Koppány. "These works are minimalist by design, but should we paraphrase the thought channeled therein, the effect would be encyclopedic, ranging through philosophy, psychology, politics, and the human emotions."

Also available from E·ratio Editions:

#1. In the Bennett Tree. Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino joins John M. Bennett “In the Bennett Tree.” Collaborative poems, images, an introduction and a full-length critical essay pay homage to American poet John M. Bennett.


"Goings On" from In the Bennett Tree.


’Twas a lark, the sheaf in Hamburg
(empty form, “flit-fingered” in a lot);

sepsis-clothes and “high” remember,
glittered dark—

the rank of clouds and GOINGS ON.
“Wet-” parked, clawed sore, flown,

removed and so rainy off your Beth,
I “But, but, but” your flaily “Nein.”




#2. Mending My Black Sweater by Mary Ann Sullivan. Mending My Black Sweater and other poems by Mary Ann Sullivan. Poems of making conscious, of acceptance and of self-remembering, and of personal responsibility.

Click here to see Mary Ann Sullivan's digital/interactive poem, Shaking the Spiders Out.


taxis de pasa logos

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Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider, The Occult, and Poetry and Mysticism, in 1956.  Read the interview: Colin Wilson on poetry and the peak experience.




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"Waves No. 2" by Márton Koppány.





"Waves No. 2" is included in Márton's just-published volume, ENDGAMES





















ENDGAMES is published by Otoliths.



























See Márton Koppány's work online at e·ratio:

IT IS THE SAME

Dedication Poems




Read my review of Márton's 2003 volume, Investigations & Other Sequences.


Investigations & Other Sequences
by Márton Koppány
Ahadada Books, 2003
ISBN: 0-973223-1-6


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NEW FROM E·ratio Editions.

Mending My Black Sweater

Mending My Black Sweater and other poems by Mary Ann Sullivan. Poems of making conscious, of acceptance and of self-remembering, and of personal responsibility.

Click here to see Mary Ann Sullivan's digital/interactive poem, Shaking the Spiders Out.

Also available: #1. In the Bennett Tree.  Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino joins John M. Bennett “In the Bennett Tree.” Collaborative poems, images, an introduction and a full-length critical essay pay homage to American poet John M. Bennett.


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