FROM
THE EC CHAIR:
Wherein the EDITOR describes with Impunity & Authority
what makes this issue & other current issues impossible
to ignore
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MARTIN
E. LEE:
Over
the years...contacts between Nazis and Muslim nationalists developed
into dangerous networks that have been implicated in a number of
bloody terrorist attacks in Europe and the Middle East
JOEL
BROWER: Whatever conservatives planning for the last
war may think, women have become indispensable to the victorious
militaries of the future
JAMES
D. FERNANDEZ: Romanticism's twin brother was nationalism;
it taught us that the nation was the sole legitimate collective
subject, and that a nation's success is to be judged not on the
basis of such trivia as the rights and privileges and comforts it
provides to the citizens living within its borders, but rather on
the basis of its fidelity to its own essence
JUDITH
BECK: Osama bin Ladin and the other terrorists have
a longer timetable than Hitler, but like him, they've been keeping
watch on world reaction
DIANA
POVIS: If I am ever in a face-to-face confrontation
with a terrorist, and need to kick him in the balls, I hope that
I am brave enough--and that he is short enough
LISA
REARDON: The role of the media, Didion asserts, has
devolved to the point that they are largely complicit crewmembers
in the theater of political campaigns and changing administrations
JUD
LAGHI: On a brisk November Tuesday, seven members
of the entertainment and popular-culture elite found themselves
downtown at Cooper Union for a symposium entitled "Style and
Culture After"
HARIETTE
SUROVELL: One almost wishes that the Mormon Angel
Moroni, the Italian angel, had descended upon the 2002 Salt Lake
City, UT Olympics
A.C.
KOCH "The Muckraker": imagine picking up
the Marthasville (MO) Courier, fresh off the presses on a
Wednesday afternoon in March, 1998, and finding this item on page
6 between the wedding announcements and classified ads: "American
Tube Using Untested Technology to Transport People Around the Globe"
MIKE
GOLDEN "That's Just Show Business": I was watching
pro football with Abbie. Patriots-Jets, exhibition
ERIC
BOSSE "The Nirvana Project": Our commitment to
the Nine Devotions of Apathy has gotten us this far, my spiritual
friends
YOUSSEF
ALAOUI: The war is endless, Sir Leggett
ANTLER:
Two weeks before the terrorist attack
RONNIE. BURK: On Wall Street an ash covered statue
of George Washington
BILL.
EVANS: The job is killing
JEAN
C. HOWARD: As I travel across
IRA
COHEN: The double mirror is broken
PLAMEN
ARNAUDOV: That morning I woke
VICIA
CRACCA: Meet me in the Alfalfa room
NATASHA
SAJE: I demand you return the key
CARMEN
FIRAN: I try to get closer to those around me
BARRY
GIFFORD: Imagine lying in bed
GERALD
NICOSIA: Our marriage was marked by courthouse appearances
MICHAEL
GREGORY STEPHENS: I had to excavate self from myself
DAVE
BRINKS: And as many hours the beauties of traveled
sleep
REBECCA
LU KIERNAN: He vomits again on a lime chessboard
floor
SCOTT
BAILEY: My family's the way it's always been
ROBERT
MCGOWAN: How to guard your garden
LEE
BALLENTINE: She has three infallible ways of preparing
the body
TRAIAN
POP TRAIAN: the singers did not sing
CARMELA
COHEN: For some reason (failed car inspection)
JOHN
HARRIS: A merry lad
UTAHNA
FAITH: Arch me
URQUIZA
VICENTE: Then the senator's ripening daughter
SAM
ABRAMS: After poking up last night's fire on the
hearth
EVA
HAYMON: It turns me on, the idea of a man
JEFF
STUMPO: Thanks to false astrologers
PAUL
CHASSEY: neon asphalt
MIKE
TOPP: Dear Karen Carpenter
CLAUDIA
GRINNELL: Hunting, fishing, harvests from the ample
growth
RICHARD
COLLINS: Not all of these eyelids are fully open
ALISTAIR.
MCHARG: Lobster, butter, fresh, sweet corn
MICHAEL
ROTHENBERG: Shechinah, Mystery Squid on planet Venus
RYAN
ECKES: Following a ten-year hiatus which included
puberty
BRANDON
FREELS: I pretend to sleep in this hot hole
KELLY
L.C. RUSSELL: If you think about it the tampon is
also
MICHAEL
TOD EDGERTON: How the blood hunts down the heart
wants
MARC
PIETRZYKOWSKI: Poor baby, lolling in a carriage
URMUZ:
Fuchs was not engendered by his mother, not quite
GOOGLE:
World Poetry by Google
BABELFISH:
World Poetry by Babelfish
TERRY
JACOBUS: The Poet Gods Gathered
ALICE
HENDERSON "Poets in Their Youth":
I have to describe myself as a very sensitive creature. My
friends Jeffrey Miller and Glen Knudsen died 25 years ago,
July 29, 1977, but I still have skid marks on my heart from
that accident
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JOHN
CARTER "Drawings": his drawings are
a means of allowing his psyche to play and inviting its forms
to emerge with spontaneity and candor
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IAN
DUNCAN CAMPBELL "New Orleans: An Urban Gallery":
As a local, enlightened insider, I am documenting the
outward visual expressions, often signage, of the colorful,
indigenous culture of the city of New Orleans, one of the
most unique cities in America
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MARILYN
KIRSCH: I'm interested in the tension created
by combinations like inviting and menacing, vast and intimate,
inside and outside, the personal and the collective
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JOHN
SCHUERMAN: We imagine new possibilities and
we internalize some horrors of the past
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TANTRA
BENSKO: The pictures are my nectar, my juice
of a golden glow
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LETTERS:
Our READERS rave on, but we can take it
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OSWALDO
DE ANDRADE's
"Cannibal Manifesto," translated from the Portuguese
by Mary Ann Caws and Claudia Caliman:. Only Cannibalism unites us.
Socially. Economically. Philosophically
WILLIAM
LEVY's "Zock, the Outlaw Manifesto of the Century":
The right to suicide, the conscious uncompromising realization of
stepping out of society in public (on television) is an inalienable
fundamental right of ZOCK man
ED
SANDERS' "The Z-D Generation: The Age of Investigation":
surround the glyph with gnosis-vectors
GEORGE
QUASHA's "Axial Poetics An AXIAL LINE"
suffers every unitary, referential or surcharged connection as if
it might be an instance of "original sin" -- principle
of a first wrong turn -- ready for a process of self-immolation.
Its cleansing of pattern ends in a free embrace, enacted within
appropriate reading
KENJI
SIRATORI's "The Etude of Murder": the aerofoil
of the fractal cyber of the cadaver
ROBERT
DOWNING's "Dear Canada: A Manifesto": I've
come to realize the error of my ways and promise that I will no
longer be a practicing Canadian fine artist
KEN
WRIGHT's "Wild People, Unite": We can argue
about the details, but first we must unite against those who have
no meaning of Place beyond the money that can be extracted from
the land
PATRICK
PRITCHETT's "Continuation Manifesto (The Impossible)":
Continuation rooted in groundlessness starts with the recognition
of a central impoverishment. On this absent foundation the poem
builds the word that utters emptiness
LAWRENCE
FERLINGHETTI's "History of the Airplane":
And the Wright brothers said they thought they had invented something
that could make peace on earth
IAN
AYRES' "Cuntlicker/Cocksucker Manifestoes":
Whether you're a cuntlicker or a cocksucker
ELLEN
CHAMPAIGNE's "Golden Shower Manifesto/Peeing Down
the Bones": I piss, therefore I am
DAVID
HESS and KENT
JOHNSON's"Yasusada Dialogues": the most controvertial
work of poetry... a criminal act
ALLAN
GRUABARD on Penelope Rosemont, anthologist: Should
you love maps of elsewhere, and wish to use this book as a guide,
keep your senses about you. You'll be walking into an erotic-magnetic
night with your sunglasses on
MARY
ANN CAWS interviewed by MARK
SPITZER: Yes. The Whistler, the Wilde, and the Mallarmé
remain of ultimate importance. AND I am very fond of each of them
JANN
BURNER: Until the 1980's most kayaks were of the
white water variety
JAMES
M. CROTTY: I knew Kurt Cobain
RODRIGO
DORFMAN: Nobody seems to know the exact time and
place the term "Reality TV" first came into existence
JONATHAN
KIEFER: Not long ago, at a downtown subway station
in San Francisco, I was forced to consider logging on to Monster.com
LUCY
GRIFFIN APPERT: One fall semester, I lectured on
Great Books before a class of 28 New York University freshmen and
one naked woman who perched in the window directly across from my
sixth-floor classroom
JOZEF
IMRICH: Back in July 1980, two burial vaults awaited
the caskets of my two drowned friends. Our mother country Czechoslovakia
forced them under, legs kicking, arms flailing
INA
PFITZNER on Paul Celan: As translations they reside
in the middle-ground between the "domesticated" translations
by Michael Hamburger and/or Joachim Neugroschel, and the formally
more daring, foreignizing versions by John Felstiner or Pierre Joris.
Surely,.f to many readers' liking, these poems sound like originals
themselves
CHRISTIAN
PROZAK on Ed Sanders: From the man who brought us
the immortal sentence "All was"
RONNIE
BURK on Philip Whalen: If Gertrude Stein and William
Carlos Williams had a baby it would have been Philip Whalen
KIRBY
OLSON on Larry Fagin: I first met Fagin at Naropa
University in 1977 where he worked as a poetry professor
JACK
MICHELINE interviewed by EDDIE
WOODS: I was fucked up like anyone born in the Bronx, in
an Irish-Italian neighborhood
SUSAN
M. SCHULTZ on Charles Bernstein and Marjorie Perloff:
Bernstein's claims for poetry are in many ways even stronger
than Perloff's, although he begins from the same starting blocks
with (an all-too-easy?) attack on advertising culture, arguing that
poets should display
MICHAEL
ANDRE on Richard Morris: Richard Morris is widely
admired in the small world of alternative presses and daring websites
VYT
BAKAITIS on Michael Andre: Hauteur clings to pedigree;
that is to say (as one might be inclined to defer to royal presumption
of any order as a given, basic as tit for tat) his idiosyncratic
mind holds to a line of descent
MARIA
FINN: Annie Sprinkle was just on tour autographing
Hardcore from the Heart with "tit prints."
EDDIE
WOODS on William Levy's Otto Muehl: anyone who feels
seriously uneasy reading about this should ask themselves whether
their discomfort springs from genuine compassion for all sentient
beings or, instead, a deep-seated sexual arousal which their conscious
minds are scared shitless to acknowledge
DANA
WILDE on new books about Buddhist monks and Jim Morrison:
I believe that there is a limit to the extent to which you can mold
the specifics of your life, that there is no escape, not into the
manufacture of Shaker furniture nor into the excitement of travel
SKIP
FOX on Kevin Young: Young's poetry floats just over
the center, as above the rotating blades of a helicopter, almost
pacific, with one or another of his figures
JESSICA
MAILMAN on Michon: Recommendation: read during an
absolute downpour, and have wine and fish for dinner
ANDREA
ADOLPH on Bloody Twin: The integrity of poetry, in
these four volumes, is not sacrificed to the concept of vehicle
SAM
ANDERSON on Howard Bone: Howard Bone... was heroically
unsqueamish about the circus
TERESA
BERGEN's Madame Tingley's Organ: Eddie Martinelli
ended in date rape. In the present, Lex attacks her bandmate after
he tries to capitalize on publicity surrounding her sister's death
DAN
FANTE's Mooch: If you are getting the feeling
that Bruno's life is about to explode, you might be right. He's
just found out that the woman he loves has a son - a genius chatterbox,
and that she doesn't give a damn for anything other than her next
hit of crack
EUGENE
MIRABELLI's Trinicria: We rejoin the old painter
Renato Stillamare as he scribbles about his mis-spent youth. In
the previous excerpt he told how his infant self was found on the
doorstep of a large, disorderly Italian-American family... In this
excerpt he chronicles some of the women he met along the way
JULIAN
SEMILIAN's Skeuromorph Detective: But now
the hours were passing, perhaps, I reasoned, it is her season to
make me panic by exaggerating this ruse, how could I ascertain whether
she imperiously intended this comedy to be horror
MARK
SPITZER's Chum: Holy Guacamole! It's finally
gonna end! The whole gawd-awful adventure of the studly dumb fisherman,
the silicone starlet, and the plain-Jane Manson-family reject. After
this, no more misogyny, blasphemy, pornography, cruelty or toilet
humor
NICK
ROMBES: The White Stripes, who hail from Detroit,
play music that comes at you like the flaming shards of a crashing
Molotov cocktail
ROBIN
BECKER: Ross Beach is a modern-day troubadour recasting
no-depression-brand folk country by flirting with alt-pop, post-grunge
icons
MARK
JACKSON: In the three recordings by John Handcox
included here, you will not find a honey-smooth... Perhaps his voice
will even grate on your ear a bit--it has a bite to it
NAT
HARDY: The Angel Scratch Radio Project by
the Pointless Orchestra offers listeners an eclectic blend of controversial
voices and intricately weaved musical passages
ALFRED
BURYCHKA: The Radio CD delivers one pungent
punch after another, crushing the silences between songs with snazzy
snippets from their own bag of ethereal buffoonery and crushing
the songs themselves with silences
PARIS
TIRONE: God (anyone!) help us, for Ellis is making mischief
of music again
SIMONE:
Moulin Rouge the movie? I hated it. Make that, I hate it
KATHLEEN
J. WELCH: Dick and Harry are puppets, who once ran
for President but didn't know it. They reminisce about the way things
were, before September 11, 2001
CYBERBAG:
Voila! Bow down to the omniscient CYBERBAG -- wherein
our contributors are made legend and stuff is perused |
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ABBAS
ZAIDI "Lumut, Pakistan: Queen's Street":
Close to my gate stood an extremely thin bare-footed Tamil-looking
boy about five years of age; he was wearing the Batman costume,
holding the Batman mask in one hand and a big toy machine gun in
the other; an enormous fake moustache was his most pronounced facial
feature. He was looking up at the mango-laden tree inside my house.
He fired the gun at us and ran away
MARK
TERRILL "Five Prose Places": The old dented
black Peugeot taxi hurtles through the streets of nighttime Karachi
Pakistan at breakneck speed seeming to catch each & every pothole
& rut with a shuddering slam
JOHN
VERLENDEN "Road to Damascus, Part Two":
Damascus, dusty by day, shimmered red, blue, white and green courtesy
of neon. A shakily amplified muezzin wailed out prayer hour, but
my sidewalk's crowd kept chattering
ROBERT
E. GARLITZ "South America: The Traveler and the
Beauty": By most accounts Bolivia is a harsh and striking
country, marked by extremes of altitude, climate, barren terrain,
and great poverty and some of the worst living and working conditions
in the world
MARALYN
LOIS POLAK: "Expat Land: Guatemala City;
Tuesday They Poisoned the Dogs": It was a Tuesday when
they poisoned the dogs in Guatemala. As a Philadelphian, I felt
right at home
PETER
WEVERKA "Punta Desolacion": Today I went
to the bank and tried again to exchange the gold ingot for paper
currency
KIRBY
OLSON "Mexico": It had not been long after
I had embraced the Mexican aesthetic when my wife began to grumble
JOSEPH
GELFER "Anarchy in the PRC": Everyone I'd
met in Hong Kong, whilst securing my Chinese visa, who had just
come from the mainland, had a look of vague trauma about them
STEVAN
WEINER "From America to Kosova and Back":
Kosova is destruction, ugliness, sorrow, stubbornness, but also
pride, solidarity, beauty and triumph
ALLAN
GRAUBARD "Sarajevo Notes": I first came
to the Balkans in 1997 -- in search of a Croatian production of
Radovan Ivsic's King Gordogan, which I had previously opened
off-off Broadway at the Ohio Theater in New York
STEPHEN
F. ANDERSON "Team Boracay: 200 Miles South of Manila":
This dumbbell-shaped island is only four and a half miles long
(about 75 soccer fields) and little over a half-mile wide at its
narrowest midsection
STEPHEN
RAHAIM "First Impressions, New Orleans":
It's an amazing thing to get caught in a cross wind, a particular
spot on the street where you can hear three or even four bands melding
together into that singular song of the Quarter
STEPHEN
CLAIR "Mack and Stan in New Orleans": Mack
and Stan are spending the summer in New Orleans, housesitting an
apartment just outside the French Quarter
MICHAEL
STANDAERT "Down & Out in Brussels & Bruxelles":
The barmaid struck me eye first off, all buxom blonde and brass-eyed,
a corset setting off her bosom which gravitated toward the night
sky, cross-laced in the fashion of an Octoberfest beer-maiden
DEAN LENANE "English
Culinary Atrocites": England without a doubt, offers the
most execrable collection of edible dreck you are likely to encounter
anywhere in the world
BRETT
PERUZZI "Driving in Italy": One of the
tricks the locals seemed to employ was to only look straight ahead,
never back, or not even to the side
MICHAEL
BACKUS "Santa Fe Cab": I'm parked on the
edge of the city, right where it turns to scrub brush and red sand
hills
D.W.
YOUNG "A Fitting End": After the incident
with the deranged lepidopterist, Frederick Vance began to have trouble
sleeping
PETER
WEVERKA "A Ghost Story": One afternoon
as I purchased cigarettes in the corner store, the man asked if
I had seen any fantasmas in my rented house
JORGE
LUIS BORGES "Ragnarok" translated by Noah Hoffenberg:
The place was the School of Arts; it was dark
ARLEN
DONZI "Microphone Guy": Denise's professional
life as the buyer for a chain of music stores brought many men into
her cramped workspace with offers, and most of them earned titles:
Tape Guy, Cable Guy, Drum Head Guy, Guys on the Floor, Guys in Stock
and Guys With Needs
ART
ROSCHE "Fish Store": For eighteen years
Trevor had been the lead guitarist with Fish Store
WILLIE
SMITH "The Art of History": The autumn
I turned thirteen, I went through, for about a day, an aborted stage
of trying to be egalitarian
MARK
S. WEBER "A Scholarly Thirst": I know,
I know. You've all heard it before. Shakespeare was a fag. When
I was in graduate school they told me Shakespeare was a fag. But
it wasn't Shakespeare who was a fag! It was just that they were
fags and they wanted Shakespeare to be one too
SAM
WILHIDE "Lepus": Even after several years
of practice, he was still no good at teaching sex education
NELLY
REIFLER "Two Stories with Beginnings by Henny Youngman":
I was so ugly when I was born that the doctor slapped my mother
EUGENIO
VOLPE "Love Sick": My sister, now happily
married with three kids, slept upstairs
BRYAN
QUINN "Bachelor Boat": In the stern, Mark
the pirate was cutting up a mackerel for bait
PAUL
A. TOTH "Glowfish": Bonnie knew Maggie
was bright, a good writer, and passionate
SWEET
VETCH "Hedysarum Alpinum": Seeing my befuddlement,
she grabbed me by the balls and led me to her river
SCOTT
RUTLEDGE "A la Carte": The garbage is offered
to you before it is hauled off to the dump, and you pass by the
display lining both sides of the alley, selecting items which you
place into the shopping cart
DAVIS
SCHNEIDERMAN "Always Crashing in the Same AlwaysCrashingCar":
Old Mann Roderick screams "Ich ein bin Berliner" and shoves
jelly doughnuts directly into his stomach, bypassing lips, jaws,
and esophageal lubricants with full-fisted determination
MARK
ESTRIN "Eve of Destruction": Eve jumped
out of bed, and into her sweats. Arnold reached out after her, grabbing
only the air
PETER
FREUND "Place of Skulls": The first ones
to hear the strange noise were two sailors from the Black Sea Fleet
and the girl they were trying to make out with by the Place of Skulls
on Red Square
MILTON
BEYER "A Shadow in Chelsea": Orson Welles
and John Houseman created the Black Theatre in Harlem, an offshoot
of their W.P.A federal-funded Mercury Theatre. They produced "Macbeth"
there in 1936 and I took a school chum, Ruth, to see it on a date.
I was 19; she was 18
MIHAI
GRUNFELD "Raw Potato": It was always Father
who read the prayer book, so although Mother recited the Shabbat
prayer on Friday evenings, I was surprised that she knew how to
read Hebrew
AL
MASARIK from Heron Dance: Hospice came with
its catheter and morphine patch
JANET
MASON "The Dolorous City": A low moaning
surrounded her, tossed back and forth in frothy swells. In their
grief, the girls were echoes of themselves
DARREN
HIGGINS "Two Stories": Sickroom Raskolnikovs,
the would-be-kings, take feral advantage of season. Nurses and custodians
clatter through the halls seeking the perfect syringe
JOE
KUHL "Two Expats and a Homeboy": I was
out for lunch with Ray, a smart, sexy Italian-American young woman
who turned down a teaching job at the Gulf University where I was
teaching in favor of marrying one of Ted Turner's boys
SUSANNA
BRESLIN "Two Stories": He had cried constantly
as a small baby, masturbated obsessively as a young teen, and become
the kind of man as an adult who only truly enjoyed himself when
he was hurting other people
BROCK
"Two Stories": So there I am spanking the old monkey
on my bed
PAT
NOLAN "Phone Sex": He had been slowly masticating
the bland fare and indulging himself with people watching, an occupation
of the smug and ultimately insecure
LEE
COOMBES "My Girlfriend Is Becoming a Bloke":
I've come to dread the sound of her feet on the stairs, her beery
breath, her drunken bonhomie, the way she pushes her fat fingers
into my ribs
ANDREW
GALLIX "Sweet Fanny Adams": It's like this:
your train is due to leave any minute now
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