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June 1992
Poetry, the SF style, and points south.
((I'm gonna see where this goes, and avoid being too anal
about subject headings... ))
Once there were "poetry readings".
Now there are "spoken word performances".
(And "stand-up comedy" I suppose.
All hail the spirt of Lenny Bruce).
Think about the SF Poetry style, 6-20-92
The S&M G&L subcultures. Children of punk,
of Jim Carrol... William Burroughs?
It may not be great poetry,
but it's not bad as journalism,
Or maybe as rock n' roll
without the music.
Stark, nasty, _honest_... POETS
Danielle Willis in _Dogs in Lingerie_
has a prose piece about the transvestite,
who complains about Art Photographers
who always want you to look _ugly_,
using bright lights to show off every
wrinkle and zit. She/he complains,
what's wrong with looking good, with
glamour?
But isn't Willis herself the prose
equivalent of an Art Photographer?
She tries to make things as ugly as possible...
Glorification is _not_ the punk esthetic... PUNK
Connect this to:
Paul Goodman again, the "gentler curiosity".
Contrast this to Sturgeon, the feeling
you get reading a work like _Godbody_, compared GODBODY
to, say, the _High Risk_ anthology.
Another connection: "Diplomacy is what you use on your
enemies." The idea that there should be no need to be
polite, to take it easy, to be _nice_...
Some data: A poster found in the Ground Zero coffee house,
on the lower Haight.
NO BULLSHIT
Poetry/Writing Workshop...
FOCUS ON POETRY
toward developing
terse decisive
language, to
set aside
the myth of "writing
poems..."
Logo: A medical diagram of a human heart,
subdivided and with sections labeled,
reminiscent of a butcher's diagram.
(Workshop by: Richard Loranger)
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6-24-92
Ah the Satoris of yesterday...
They just don't hold their zing, do they?
The above was such a hot set of insights, as
I wandered around the Castro, a little short on
sleep, a little high on caffiene...
Go back to the modoid file, written that evening.
I bet that doesn't look as hot, either...
Still, the work is all good, even if it
doesn't seem great anymore... and maybe
I owe it to myself to carry through on
it even if it's no longer so exciting...
Maybe I need to psyche myself up about
it, get excited about it again, and not
be so harshly critical of my own ideas?
And maybe this isn't such a digression from the above
little satori?
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