my triumphant return

I have been in Pittsburgh. Sorry.

I've recently been reading over at Amelia's & noticed that she's been weighing in on Spicer & bookburning. This is not to say that Jack Spicer's been burning books, or that people are burning Jack Spicer's books (they'd have to find them somewhere first, & after spending fifty bucks on his collected books I'm not offering mine), but that people are burning books & Amelia's reading the good ol' Spicer biography.

First off, bookburning is senseless & any argument for or against is senseless, whether in jest or not. No object is sacred. Immolation is nothing more than burning, a process, or "rather, it is an exothermic chemical reaction accompanied by intense heat released during a rapid oxidation of combustible material. Fire may be visible as the brilliant glow and flames and may produce smoke" (wikipedia, here). Arguing that the immolation of a text renders the said text sacred, is similar to arguing that death in the name of god is somehow more sacred or more more. Fire is fire. Death is death. One cannot distinguish between ashes as one cannot distinguish between corpes, & why would one bother, other than through some sentiment for the book/person.

That aside, Jack Spicer is not rapidly oxidizing. Instead, he is my poetic hero of the moment (falling somewhere around Frank O'Hara, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notely, & Ted Berrigan, in the Ward's poet hero of the week sweepstakes). I read his biography & though it was mostly rumor & innuendo, & it seemed to make him out to be an A1 jackass, I still hold him up on my hero pedastal (on my kitchen counter). I'm beginning to write more poems in series, & enjoying that more, freed, I suppose, from the drive for some kind of singular perfection.

I'm listenting to Slint now, while I type, & thinking about will reading Zukofsky all of sudden, & about, I suppose, to become a regular poetry blowhard, an outsider academic, or, gasp!, an MFA student. Don't do it will! You can't handle it anyway.