happy rummage of the attics of the mind       found
objects
            delight                                  but don't suffice
     and meaning scares me                   I pretend    they don't


       if   the gagged head    fills   with CO2
           if
            you seal entry  from the out side            suppress
                           expression of

                      or knowledge



           I want         to come                  to know 



     But ah! thought

                                ,that I am not thought,

LINKS

More from Thin Straw That I Suck Life Through

Heather Fuller, a DC poet whose first book, "perhaps this is a rescue
fantasy," just came out from Edge Books, gave a great reading. She has
a quiet demeanor at the podium, and speaks slower than I expected
considering the style and form of her work, which has a momentum to it,
but instead of the slow and quiet seeming inappropriate her reading
recontextualized the work as a kind of subtext. And now that I think
about it her work has to be read with a steady intensity, echo on the
"tensity." I kept thinking how as a performance piece she could read
her "Placards" (in Chain 3:2, and in the new book) seated at a news
anchor's desk with her hair moussed into those Connie Chung
behind-the-ears bird's nests.

Growing up in the Virginia suburbs of DC I always had a sense that
all news came from our nation's capital, and that news itself was
only news if someone wrote it in The Washington Post or stood in front
of a network camera to say it, that the city was a perpetual sausage
grinder of text and context, information, misinformation, and
dysinformation, and that also news somehow came shawling out from in
between sidewalk cracks and under yellowcabs, that it topped
cornerstand chilidogs and glinted off the gold badges that museum
security guards wear. Heather Fuller's poetry is as if this idea of
news narrated itself to itself, practicing alone in front of the
mirror but imagining a data-hungry nation watching, biting their
collective nails. I think I hear this in the work of all the
poets living in DC.

The "DC style" is levels more than some general cultural and societal
critique peppered with teenager-recognizable references placed to
make a poem seem hip-the poems are blasted always with insight and
nonsense, simultaneously and seamlessly as any anchorperson's
monologue. After a couple of poems I really saw how intentionally
Fuller paces and combines the signals and noises. Her finale was a
collaborative reading with an audio recording of her voice speaking
the refrain throughout the poem (the word "report," interrupting or
punctuating lines) and she had timed it out perfectly with the text
she spoke live-which made it obvious that she puts as much careful
energy into her performance as into the writing in the first place.
We all leaned forward, cocked our heads, and listened to Fuller very
closely.

William Howe's performance however must have been occasionally
audible, and certainly baffling, to the happy bar-goers jostling by
the open door of Ruthless Grip along U Street. Plenty of shouting,
vocalizing-I expected maybe keystone cops to wobble in waving
nightsticks and mustaches. The noisiest piece was a opera for five
voices, raucously embodied by, among others, Buck Downs, Mark Wallace,
and, at one point, a canister vacuum cleaner. Chaosmaster Howe exuded
a nervous out-of-controlness, as if what he was doing could hurt
somebody in the room, most particularly the performer himself. I
found myself leaning hard against my chair's back during a poem
composed entirely of "o-related" vowel sounds Howe heard at another
poet's reading. It was like fearing falling off a girder high above
a construction site.

Howe's work has not just a visual but a material emphasis, qualities
that visually-oriented poets and book artists usually treat as
secondary components of an otherwise conventional written text when
faced with the challenging situation of a public reading. But this
night the visual and material emphases remained integrated in the
work because Howe blatantly incorporates them into his performance.
Several poems were read aloud from poster-sized composites of many
hand-scrawled pages glued to foam core. From the audience you could
kind of see the poems as he was reading them, little mutant stanzoid
lettroid shapes. One poem's performance merely consisted of silently
folding the printed page from a flat piece into a 3-dimensional
geometric shape. Another poem was read from a broadside that had to
be gradually unfolded to reveal its text. Between poems Howe would
rummage through a cardboard box full of envelopes, loose pages,
book-objects, and god knows what else looking for the next thing to
read. Definitely mad professor shtick, but Howe really pulls it off.

His performance concluded with I think a significant poetic act.
Ceremoniously he ripped open 3 boxes of Alpha-Bits cereal, dumped it
on the floor, got on his hands and knees in the cereal pile and began
reading it. It was a hilarious scene-I was in the front row-imagine
a businessman kneeling in a dune of crunchy, sugar-coated language.
Howe did it up: eating the letters, spitting them out, crushing
them, spelling things on the floor, taking an exacto knife to a "B"
to try to make an "H," laughing, coughing from inhaling the cereal
dust from the bottom of the box. I loved this and really got the raw
material point, but even better I sat there thinking of about ten
other things that could be done with all these letters, ideas were
bouncing all over the inside of my head, and all of my ideas had some
type of point to them, not reaching any conclusion but definitely a
language observation-I wanted to get down there in the letters with
him and see what I could come up with. Probably I wasn't the only one
wanting this.

I always notice when I read someone's work and get jealous wishing I
had written it. I choose to take this as the mark of strong work, not
as a personal shortcoming. Driving back home to North Carolina I was
wishing I had performed Heather Fuller's and William Howe's poetry, or
that I could mold the whole evening into an amulet I could keep in my
pocket, so when I was walking around with my hands in my pockets I
could hold the amulet and no one could see. Either it was a great
reading or I need some help.

LINKS

Poems by Chris Vitiello

the category hasn't a body 
one thinks it could raise
my atrocity or my distraction
a good and orthodox humor
these were not ravagements 
riotously, or convincingly, 
convulsions that terror
to need, as it did need,  
the name of greater good 
I pulverized 

                           Not "disagreement" 
                           those who submit
                           to experience.

	. . . took any three men standing close to each other, gave them
a horse and two guns, and they were a unit from that point on.  At the
rear people could see what was happening, and within a few minutes
everyone in the woods came running back, some with their pants half-down,
and people were yelling for their relations.
	We crossed the entire range.  We survived as a people.

	That fell
            his things 
            apart

	Not passion.  Not order.

	And those of you who protest, saying it is in language these
ideas have come to you, well!  It was determined for you to think it,
never having a choice at all, you little bug.  Thoughts that produce you,
that are your culturism, exist happy as clams outside your will, deciding
what should be done with you.  Haven't you come to the site of your past
misery only to compare your present happiness?  So you did! 
  	People have whistled through a board, you know.  And they will
again!  
	I ask myself: why do I throw and throw the light of determinism
upon your ungrateful countenance?  Isn't it a living thing, going where it
desires to go, staying if it decides to stay?  Actually, I've begged and
cried in front of it, I've clung to its clothing, and it allowed me to sit
in its radiance another few hours--I tell you I'm grateful for it.  There
is your majestic pinnacle, your every reward, but what do you think you
know about it?  Tomorrow it might say I'm a fawning thing, it might
pronounce my name in disgust, and look at me then. . .

          . . . as grass delights the wind . . .

              "But I held him all the time"