POEM FOR DEIRDRE

Chipper day co-host with
Punk art hair and
Old thrift store house dress chic
Just 18 and ripe to bursting
Staunch baby dyke defender of
Gay rights and abortion rights
Said it outright on radio and
I, awkward, a-gah, a-guh
About all of it
But slowly milling and mulling
Until summer came and she went away
And I went
Where the wild things are

Now she’s a video star and
I sneak into her latest installation
Sit solitary with multiple screens
Staring as she
Shimmers in sexy sepia tones
Same old Deirdre
Wide-eyed, questioning,
Never wavering
O the home of the brave
O the little
Superman

WARHOL DEAD!

On Wednesday, January 14, I joined what appeared to be half of the population of Montreal for the last ‘cheap night’ at the Museum of Fine Arts before Warhol Live closed. Given that the temperature was approximating that of the dark side of Pluto, I thought I was doing pretty good just getting out the door rather than opting for a snug night with a bad movie. But I even managed to carry out a complimentary and somewhat more complicated operation – finding a quiet alleyway near the Musée where I could spark up a half-a-joint in order to maximize whatever eyeball-kicks the Warhol show might yield.

RELEASE THE MILLER EPHEMERA!

Recently I confirmed my prediction in my essay “Scraping The Bottom of the Beat Barrel” that the recent aquisitions of various Beat archives by various public institutions would result in a deluge of ‘new’ material by Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac. Actually, so much has come out lately, I haven’t been able to keep up. Just googling around a bit, I found out Viking has released And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, the legendary collaboration between Burroughs and Kerouac on the topic of the killing of David Kammerer by their friend Lucien Carr. Penguin has finally released Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, Kerouac’s attempt to spread the Buddhist gospel, which hadn’t seen print except as a series in the venerable Buddhist journal Tricycle back in the mid-nineties. A batch of Allen Ginsberg’s letters has also been published, and in 2007, the University of Ohio (!) published the crucial 1953 Latin American notebook of Burroughs. Crickey! Who knows what else is out there …

RAMBLE THE FIRST

I keep putting off writing for my blog, mainly because I have discovered the limitations of time. I only have so much time, it seems. This goes for my life – hey, I’m getting older! – but also, it goes for the day-to-day realities. Like, if I have to do my laundry, cook my dinner, write a freelance piece, read a bit, take a dump, get groceries, go to the library … somehow in the midst of all the dailiness, it becomes difficult to wedge in a bit of time to write. I can spend an hour online reading the latest atrocities, but write? Meh.

My blogging habit of the past couple of years monopolized most my creative / writing time, to the point where I was no longer being ‘productive.’ Not that blog writing isn’t productive, it’s actually very productive, but I was no longer doing anything else, like making zines or chapbooks. So I stopped blogging last summer, lazed around for a month, and then I spent the whole fall working on several projects. I made a couple of CDRs of recent sound art / music / noise projects, and slapped together not one, but two new chapbooks, one of which came with another CDR full of poetry. I found that, besides doing the laundry and suchlike, just doing these little projects took up all my creative energies.

So in the last few months, there has been no blogging done other than quick announcements and a recent batch of poems that I happened to have handy. For this holiday week, the cusp of 2008 – 2009, I’ve decided to write a ‘ramble’. Whot’s a ramble,you may well ask? It is not an essay, it is not a review, it is not a story, it is not a poem – but it may partake in all of the above as it rambles along. My objective with this particular ramble is to ruminate on many things that have come to my attention over the course of the past several months, be they films, books, events, people, philosophical conceptualizations, or whatnot. Mainly whatnot. I don’t know where this ramble will go, which is as it should be, if it’s to be called a ramble.