Jim Behrle edits can we have our ball back? and serves as Roving Poet for WBUR's syndicated radio newsmagazine "Here & Now."

Edmund Berrigan was born in Colchester, England, moved to Chicago two weeks later, and two years from then went on to New York to study rent escalation. He is the author of Disarming Matter from Owl Press (1999). Recent poems have or will appear(ed) in or on Lungfull!, Pom, 3ammagazine.com, Van Gogh's Ear, & Cock Now.

Jim Cory, a 25 year veteran of the Philadelphia poetry scene, has been a Yaddo and Pennsylvania Arts Council fellow and published seven chapbooks of poems.

hassen writes poetry & fiction & lives near Philadelphia. Poems have been to Skanky Possum, Nedge, Barque Press' One Hundred Days Anthology, and in the upcoming issue of Frequency Audio Journal. Hassen likes summer a lot.

Sofia Memon is a poet and welfare rights lawyer who lives and works in Philadelphia. Sofia has read her work at The Khyber, the Asian Arts Initiative. Her poetry will appear in the soon to be published anthology, Writing the Lines of Our Hands. Her writing is an exploration of sound, lyric, and form as well as an expression of cultural fusion, muslim spirituality, and humane politics.

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore's poems have appeared in Zyzzva, the Citys Lights Review, and The Nation. His books Dawn Visions (1964), and Burnt Heart, Ode to the War Dead (1972), were both published by City Lights Books. His latest collections are The Blind Beekeeper and The Ramadan Sonnets. Visit his new website:

Deborah Richards is known for her colorful wraps and her slips into British English. Her first collection of poems, Last One Out, is now out from Subpress.

Molly Russakoff has published and performed her poems widely over the past 25 years. She was a recipient of a Pew Fellowship in 1995. She currently owns Molly's Cafe & Bookstore in Philadelphia's Itlanian Market, where she hosts poetry and prose readings and tries to sell quality used books. She also is an editor of Joss, a poetry magazine, and the poetry editor of The Philadelphia Independent.

Prageeta Sharma is the author of Bliss to Fill (Subpress, 2000). Her poems and other writings have appeared in journals such as Boston Review, Agni, Fence, The Women's Review of Books and others. She lives and writes in New York City.
- posted by 9for9 @ 7:49 AM

 
Jim Cory:
7) I know many visual artists, and I spend a lot of time visiting
galleries and museums. I sometimes have the experience of being moved to
tears by a painting. But I couldn't say one particular visual artist has
provided a model for what I write, in the way that, say, reading the New
York School, Beats, San Francisco poets, Black Mountain people, etc.
showed me how to write poems. I love Demuth, Hartley, Maurer, O'Keefe
and of course Joan Mitchell, DeKooning, Pollack and that gang. I like
color and the attraction, for me, to painting, is every bit as powerful
as the attraction to literature or music. But the method of creating a
painting, vs. making a poem, is altogether different. Painters think
like poets, but then again they don't. Then again, if I see a certain
visual image that overwhelms, I tend to analyze it. I try and mentally
re-create the process that brought it into existence. I do that with
anything that gets past my guard. The greatest art, of whatever genre,
belongs in a genre of its own.

8) I think it might be one of those rubber shrunken heads people used to
dangle from their rear-view mirrors in the 60s.

9) It'd depend on the time of day and circumstance. If I'm just back
from the the big Borders on Broad St. here in Philadelphia, having
perused shelves and shelves of mediocre books that somehow made it into
print, your pill would change me into that creature Sigorney Weaver
faced down in Alien. On the other hand, if it's a rainy Saturday
afternoon and I've taken to my bed with, say, "Poems for the Millenium,"
or Zukovsky's Collected Poems, I would walk in the bathroom to pee and
suddenly see, looking back from above the sink, a gardenia that could
smell itself.

Sofia Memon
7. I learned pottery from this beautiful woman named Roseanna Cruz. Boy, I'll be so embarrassed if she reads this. Anyway Roseanna was this audacious woman who was stunningly, but not conventionally beautiful and had this great black curling hair and didn't mind sweating. She was fabulous to watch-and she said while she was throwing a massive bowl that it was the shape inside of the pot that was most important. That insight, by analogy, informs just about everything in my life, including poetry. Poems work best for me like containers, telling you a thing by showing you its perimeter; humble, like bowls.

8. I don't know. I didn't know what L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry was when I was asked this question. I'm still not entirely sure what it is. But here's a gesture at an answer: I might not like Ezra Pound or William Blake, but I love playing with form. I love the freedom to play and I love the form with which to start playing. I want both and I enjoy both. So I guess L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry would be brown goo which would be nice if it were chocolate that could be scraped into bites, or if it were paint and I could take a sieve and separate the colors and start again winding my way carefully back to brown goo.

9. Once an Egyptian man living in Italy made me a meal. He fried whole, finely breaded fish. It was a little grotesque as I was a vegetarian and the fish eyes were all glassy. But it was so decadent and so irresistible. He made a spicy meat stew and drained the juice into the rice for cooking. He mixed feta cheese with olives and put oil and pepper on the every green but lettuce salad. He pulled out the only table from the wall in his one room house and set it with simple white plates. That table, set with the eyes of the fish staring up at me; that's what I see in the mirror.


Prageeta Sharma
7) Is there a visual artist who has inspired your poetry? If so who
is it, and how have your poems been informed by their work?
There are so many visual artists. I currently am loving Chinese Conceptual art as well what is happening in my generation of painters.

8) If L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry arrived at your door in the form of a gift,
what would it look like? An orange parka.

9) I have a bottle of pills that will physically change you into the way
you feel about poetry. You take one, and when you look in the mirror, what
do you see? I wouldn't see it in the mirror but I would feel wonderful all of the time.


Molly Russakoff
7) Is there a visual artist who has inspired your poetry? If so who
> is it, and how have your poems been informed by their work?
> My sister Julie, who I am sadly no longer in touch with. She inspired and
influenced me in most ways. She had a very joyful and intuitive approach to
painting. She painted large cartoonish canvasses, had a great sense of
humor in her paintings, lots of bright colors. They were also fairly
narrative for paintings. My parents have one of her paintings hanging that
is a large literal depiction of the song ST. Louis Woman.>
> 8) If L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry arrived at your door in the form of a gift,
> what would it look like?
> Refrigerator magnets. Just as an aside, what really did arrive in the
mail...was a free sample of special KY Jelly that heats to the touch. The
weird thing was that it was actually addressed to my mother.
> 9) I have a bottle of pills that will physically change you into the way
> you feel about poetry. You take one, and when you look in the mirror,
what
> do you see?
I look like a gazelle traipsing through a field of flowers.


Jim Behrle
7) Is there a visual artist who has inspired your poetry? If so who is
it, and how have your poems been informed by their work?

Jim: Tom & Jerry. And X-men comics.

8) If L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry arrived at your door in the form of a gift,
what would it look like?

Jim: (At this point I stood up and stripped off to display the homemade
Charles Bernstein LANGUAGE POETRY Wiffleball Team jersey I wore under the
Pirates' jersey I had on. They will soon be available.)

9) I have a bottle of pills that will physically change you into the way
you feel about poetry. You take one, and when you look in the mirror, what
do you see?

Jim: I quit drinking 6 months ago. This pill doesn't sound like it would
jive with my sobriety. Sorry.


7. So far as I can think, no artist has directly inspired my poetry.
However, there are quite a few who have provided re-affirmation of
life-perspective I mentioned earlier/above. Immediately to mind come
Cornell, Duchamp, Goya, Wyeth. C for wonder and play, D�s possibility and
humor, G�s truth, vigilance, W�s ability to listen, reflect. Oh! another: I
have a pic of a painting on my bedroom door � Brad Eberhard�s �My Squid Suit
Brings Isolation.� It�s a found image - of Wyeth�s �Christina�s World� - but
Eberhard painted a goofy red squid suit on her. One of the best things I�ve
ever seen. The work of some artist friends really excites me, too. To answer
the second part of this question � my poems are not directly, so far as I
know, informed by their work, but again, they likely (hopefully) reflect a
certain perspective to living these artists reinforce. Now that I think
about it, I wouldn�t be surprised if the Crap I often frame (for coin)
inspires me to subtly deride one or two specific & overrated artists in a
future poem.



8. It would be portable steps. & reversible.



9. It seems like a funhouse mirror. I can only
.focus.on.how.the.mirror.distorts.my.image , which might be, what, a
transforming sky? shadow? vapor? Hey now...


Edmund Berrigan
7) When I was 15 I went to the MOMA with my mom and looked at some cubism
paintings. It blew my mind and I had to leave 5 minutes later. It seemed to
be just like the way I wanted thought to work.

8) It would look like a stone. I would love it for being a stone, and it
to my collection. I have two cats who sometimes knock the stones off their
shelf. They break apart. But they're still stones, and still great.

9) I see nothing, because I have no eyes. I feel gaseous and peculiar, and
everything is motion. After awhile I can tell that the types of motion are
different. Then I stop having human associations.


Deborah Richards
7) Is there a visual artist who has inspired your poetry? If so who is it, and how have your poems been informed by their work?
I loved this question. I'm interested in modern art-- anti-art movements such as in Fluxus, Vito Acconci's procedures, Jeff Koons kitch, Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden project. I find that I'm energized by conceptual art. I enjoy the space of the installation, and minute detail of a Chuck Close portrait.

I would like my own work to take up space, be large, yet have the quirky detail that calls the eye to attention.

I once trained to be a volunteer docent at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, but I left before I could do real tours. I'd love to learn more and use some of the concepts and techniques in my work.

I have started (almost!!) a collaboration with Alicia Askenase on trompe l'oeil (trick of the eye)because of an exhibition I saw in Washington about a year ago.


8) If L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry arrived at your door in the form of a gift, what would it look like?

It would be a collection of excyclopaedia, bound in mauroon leather-look fabric with a gold trim. The pages would be fine, and the print would be small, but it should be well-written and include actual examples of texts. As I like research, it would be a perfect gift.

I'd prefer the hard back version of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, because I'd find it easier than browsing the C.D-rom. Though, the C.D- rom would be easier to take with me if I moved.


9) I have a bottle of pills that will physically change you into the way you feel about poetry. You take one, and when you look in the mirror, what do you see?

A "magic eye" picture that, with closer investigation and concentration, becomes an image. The poet is not trying to hide the image, but create another of view of a series of lines, dashes, and squiggles. In the magic eye book there are some pictures that are easier to read than others, and that's the fun, the seriousness, and variety of the form.


Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore
7) Is there a visual artist who has inspired your poetry? If so who is it, and how have your poems been informed by their work?

I can't mention William Blake enough, it seems. He is the real Sufi English poet and illustrator of heavenly realities for me, even as his nude figures would be frowned on by the sterner and more puritan "religious" Muslims. But from the first time I saw his work, luminous, making the unseen palpable, actually radiating light as in (or out from) the paintings of Turner, I felt the breath of his multi-worldly dimension on my cheek and wanted to inhabit it. As an artist in both graphic and verbal realms, he is the model of the rugged innovator, an earlier Harry Partch (in music), certain of his mission, working in obscurity though he didn't want to (he hoped for more unanimous cultural usefulness, as did Whitman and Van Gogh), for the sake of social, political and spiritual revelation, but from the deep soul's standpoint in every case. As well as the fluidity of his figures and the amazingly otherworldly light in his paintings (seeing his paintings "live," as at the Met show a year or so ago, I was often staggered by the actual radiance that seems to emanate from within his works), his non-insipid angelic beings and spiritual entities, always Michaelangelesquely muscular and energetic, the reality of his imagination always stands forthright and strong and vigorous. As he said in the "devil's" voice in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight."

From my manuscript, Angel Broadcast:

SHOWER OF ANGELS

There's a shower of them, a downpour of
intelligent angels through the air,
landing and seeping into the ground everywhere.

They're impassive as they slide down into
matter and go, like cutouts, past its
surfaces, eyes always ahead, tinged with joy.

How could angels heed warnings? They do what they're
told, they have no
way to deny except to
burst into flame and burn
incandescently on a cloud-edge or eyelid-edge
forever, heart-edge sharp as broken glass,
their face-cavalcade showering through the air
toward and away from us

going out in a mist above the bay-waters of
human commerce.


8) If L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry arrived at your door in the form of a gift, what would it look like?

Labyrinths in lab coats with tongue depressors or
lang. gauges like Laplanders with little lights on
talking through mazes where amazement manifests

age after age in angelic formations
though to our minds or minefields
miasmas of ams as in "I am" or "you am," (Popeye)

"I never met a poem I didn't like" (Will Rogers)

as against
"I never killed a poem that didn't deserve it" (Al Capone)

(Hey, some of my best friends are L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets)
or could (should) be�

I consider some Eskimo songs poems of this ilk
(elk)

The milk of kindness flows from poem to poem
in vessels as varied as faces or surprises


9) I have a bottle of pills that will physically change you into the way you feel about poetry. You take one, and when you look in the mirror, what do you see?

I came of age in Oakland and San Francisco in the 60s, met and knew the old school poets Ginsberg, McClure and Ferlinghetti, was energized by massive poetry readings attended by blissed out multitudes packed to the rafters who hung on every word and waited for every new book of poems to come out�"news that stays news" (Pound), started a poetry theater company, The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, writing ecstatic texts to be declaimed to the night skies of psychedelic Berkeley, then in 1970 entered a Sufi realm where the poetry of Mevlana Rumi was the portal, and the diwan (or poetry-song collection) of our enlightened teacher in Morocco, Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, became our daily reading and singing, along with studying and reciting the Qur'an, whose acknowledged sacredness of language and elevation of meaning was beyond anything I'd ever encountered. I can't be blamed, therefore, for having a take on poetry that is rooted in Beat directness but heads into stratospheric empyreans (as Jim Cory calls it) in search of new meanings and fresh inspirations. I mean, I can be blamed, of course, but I've got a good lawyer.

So when I look into the mirror, I may not see a glib or cocky self, may not see a corduroy'd poet with leather elbow patches, may not see respectable member of the poetry community looking straight back at me with confidence and even a certain self-effacing brio, but having seen a new dimension of poetry as a way toward direct, experiential knowledge of God, and as a means through ecstatic excitement and vaster dimensionality to lead others to a simultaneously experienced knowledge (as against one previously experienced and then rationally explained)�(I mean one experienced at the very writing of the poem!), though I make no similar claims for myself in terms of a station of elevation, yet having sat with someone whose "poetry" didn't come from sitting down to write, but rather from being overwhelmed with angelic dictation (see Jack Spicer�but think in terms of Sufi or Judeo-Christian mystical tradition where such ideas are assumed and expected - Saint John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, even Japanese Zen Master Dogen, for example)�

so that hopefully
if I looked into a mirror after having
swallowed such a pill
bitter sweet or bittersweet

I might see rolling hills with a strange green light splashing over them
rainbow-lit ocean waves heaving over their silvery fringes

or a hood with no face in it looking back at me

and in that open space

God's light itself
o



- posted by 9for9 @ 6:03 AM