. .

For Sheryl Luna: a link to a post Jasper Bernes made late last December. I've linked to it before but it's worth pulling out of the archives even as Jasper has revised and amended his thinking since.

This is what happens with Ron, he confuses forces and flows and market conditions with people. There's no conspiracy here. There's five billion shooters on the grassy knoll, dude. It's not like J.D. McClatchy and who-not are sitting in smoke-filled backrooms plotting their takeover of the poetry world. It's a lot of people, whom the big pictures eludes, making decisions that are for the most part based on what they think is right, and the rest of the time on their own petty needs and allegiances. Talk of a "School of Quietude" or a "Gang of Eight" is just bullshit; it hypostasizes into concrete personages and institutions things that are trans-personal and trans-institutional. . . . [read on--it's worth it]

(p.s. I think Jasper is endlessly right-headed in his blog.)

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from the Annunciation notebook, May 23, 2003, Ithaca, NY, 10:51 p.m.

My brother calls and talks for awhile which is rare, so I don't understand him at first, what he's thinking about, why. He's studying for a certification exam to get his plumbing license. He's nervous. Already he spends his days thinking about water and gravity, water in pipes and resevoirs, water under pressure and water leaking in the walls of somebody's house. He's been working with Dan for years, learning the trade. Water is their language. He talks about ratios of weight and direction: water will always find the quickest way down. He talks about containment. The sea is a basin, the planet is a basin, is pounds per inch per mile of water, its contents pushing towards the surface, against air. Every cell in the body is just a balanced container of water, he says. I begin to see what he sees: there is water, there is cell. Nothing else much matters.

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postcard: Knox College

Please join us at Pookies Coffee Bar, today, Tuesday the 23rd, at 7:30, for the Senior Portfolio Final Reading. Each student will read 5 minutes a-piece from his/her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Having undergone all the anxieties, terrors, rigors of collecting, revising and introducing their work, all will be ready to "push off" from Knox by then. So please come out to enjoy a great reading, have a cocktail, and applaud our students' achievement.

All are welcome to The Cellar Door reception on Wednesday, May 24 at 7:00 p.m. in the Studio Theater in CFA. There will be live music, dancing, reading, acting, and a special gift for all who attend. Don't miss your chance to pick up the Family Issue!

And do join us for the final Caxton Club of the year, featuring Donald Anderson, reading from his own works at 4 p.m., Friday, May 26 on the west patio of Ford Center for the Fine Arts. In case of rain, the reading will take place in the Round Room. Anderson's short story collection, Fire Road, received the 2001 John Simmons Award from the University of Iowa Press.

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