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CTRL+ALT+S = SINCERITY

Fine. I fully admit it. The cliches are true. The PhD is the hardest f***ing thing I've ever tried to do, and it's perhaps only in these last few months that the final slopes begin to seem more and more steep.

It's largely the fact that, after 4 years, I have almost no desire to type even one more time the words "sincerity", "rhetoric" or "emotion".

So I made macros for the most commonly recurring words.

It's ironic: CTRL+ALT+S = SINCERITY

Am I becoming a machine?

It's just the attrition aspect of it that is so taxing. "You've got 400 decent pages you could hand in? Too bad! Now you need 600. Get back into your hole, goblin!"

Is this what you humans call love ?

Gertrude Stein : Just A Band

Thanks Klaus.

Labyrinths

I have a raging fever. Has been going on the last 2 or so days. This waking hour has been the first in about 18 or 19 I think. Entirely altered consciousness. If I wrote in this state, it may resemble a bad Lautréamont version (note that many spellcheckers amusingly correct "Lautréamont" to "Maltreatment").

This year feels like a labyrinth whose "exits" simply double-back on the roads one already took. Isn't that the definition of a labyrinth? Passons. In any case I dreamed of them last night, including myriad other things. There were, notably, mystically optimistic "solutions" offered by my brain to some particularly pressing problems. Charming, in a way, that my mind believed, at least in its 103 Fahrenheit state (39.4 C) that there were such easy solutions to what I, a simple biological mortal, considered "dilemmas"! Perhaps our minds are indeed exterior to us, and pass much of their time shaking their "heads" in dismay.

Or perhap, as Tom says, they are waiting for us to become slowly more robotic.

I dream of a "purely emotional" race of ethereal bodies who float distended through and among and over matter.

I dream of a "purely logical" race of beautiful machines who look upwards at the glory of the creatures of sentiment.

I dream of interbreeding.

I am also, notons, running a rather high fever.

Manning's Standard Poet Rankings

(Otherwise know as "-4 for Fascism")

I did this with my dear friend Greg Hermann very drunk one night, after 10 hours in the library, upstairs in the famous Pop In. I think we just concentrated on this without talking to anyone else for about an hour . . . I haven't really looked through it again, and I haven't even deleted the entirely random comments which Greg took down, even though they may in hindsight be entirely embarrassing. I also left the occasional misspelling of poets' names. I want it to retain it's 1:30 AM integrity.

And just to make you all realize how truly definitive these scores are, I wanted to quote a few of Greg's questions in his most recent email:

"A few things I was confused about:

Did we rank Elizabeth Bishop?

I forgot if you ranked Robert or Elizabeth Browning?

How do you spell Lynn Heijijimian?"

Enjoy . . .

(Oh and it's out of 5, obviously).

4.8 – Shakespeare

4.8 – John Donne

4.8 – Homer

4.8 – Stéphane Mallarmé

4.8 - Petrarch

4.7 – Guillaume Appollinaire

4.7 – Lord Byron

4.6 – J.H. Prynne

4.6 – D.G. Rosetti

4.5 – Dante Alighieri

4.4 – Paul Celan

4.4 – René Char ["S.S. Killing?" I can't remember what this means...]

4.4 – George Herbert

4.4 – Horace

4.4 – John Keats

4.4 - Virgil

4.4 – W.B. Yeats

4.3 – John Ashberry

4.3 – W.H. Auden

4.3 – Robert Creeley

4.3 – Andrew Marvell

4.2 – Théophile Gautier

4.2 – Fernando Pessoa

4.2 – Sappho

4.2 – Alfred Tennyson

4.1 – Rae Armantrout

4.1 – Alexander Blök

4.1 – Fanny Howe

4.1 – Alexander Pushkin

4.1 – Ezra Pound (‘-.4 for Fascism’)

4.1 – Salvatore Quasimodo

4.1 – Wallace Stevens

4.0 – Paul Éluard

4.0 – Thomas Hardy

4.0 – Harold Hart Crane

4.0 – Susan Howe

4.0 – Thomas Kinsella

4.0 – John Milton

4.0 – Arthur Rimbaud

4.0 – Ron Silliman

4.0 – Giuseppe Ungaretti ('Favorite Hermeticist’)

3.9 – Ingeborg Bachmann

3.9 – Charles Baudelaire

3.9 – William Blake (‘Best book: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’)

3.9 – Yves Bonnefoy

3.9 – T.S. Eliot

3.9 – Heinrich Heine

3.9 – Philippe Jacottet (‘I wrote Jacottet a letter requesting an interview and he declined, finishing his letter with Faites comme si je suis plus de ce monde, [your translation?])

3.9 – Mario Luzi

3.9 – Bob Perelman

3.9 – Gérard de Nerval (‘The height of decadence. Beautiful ghost stories.’)

3.9 – Leslie Scalapino

3.9 – Derek Walcott

3.9 – William Carlos Williams

3.8 – Paul Claudel

3.8 – Jean Cocteau (‘A bit silly. His poetry is pretty bad.’)

3.8 – E.E. Cummings

3.8 – Emily Dickson

3.8 – Geoffrey Hill

3.8 – Pablo Neruda (‘A guilty pleasure’)

3.8 – Jacques Prévert

3.8 – Paul Verlaine (‘+.3 for duel with gay lover’)

3.8 – William Wordsworth

3.7 – Victor Hugo

3.7 – Federico García Lorca

3.6 – Friedrich Hölderlin

3.6 – Eugenio Montale

3.6 – Sylvia Plath

3.6 – Anne Sexton

3.6 – Percy Shelley (‘Veggie pamphlets’)

3.6 – Gary Sullivan

3.6 – Walt Whitman

3.5 – Dylan Thomas

3.4 – J.W. Goethe

3.4 – W.S. Merwin

3.4 – Gertrude Stein (‘A low rating for the circle I run in.’)

3.4 – Thom Gunn

3.3 – ‘H.D.’

3.1 – Rudyard Kipling

3.1 – Les Murray

3.0 – D.H. Lawrence (‘For his novels too.’)

3.0 – Vladimir Mayakovsky

3.0 – Philip Larkin

2.8 – Robert Frost

2.8 – R.M. Rilke (‘Not very fashionable on my part, but he annoys me. Pompous and silly. Letters to a Young Poet is one of the most annoying books in the world.’)

2.8 – Charles Simic

2.4 – Paul Muldoon

2.4 – Seamus Heaney

2.2 – Mark Strand

1.8 – Robert Lowell

1.8 – Mary Oliver

1.8 – Richard Wilbur

1.6 – Billy Collins

0.0 - Ted Kooser

Mort à la poésie

I really need to pull those scissors out . . .

Emotional State No. 312

It is unclear whether covering certain strata of suffering with a carefully constructed quotidian lightness is in any way advisable. Silken veils upon a collective epiphemonal debris. This is, however, commonly what is termed "sociality". I do not believe in any sudden catharsis: breaking of flowers or furniture or any rage of scattered tears. Time erodes rather, and though stoicism is not less ridiculous, it rather, as Racine remarked, "gets shit done". Waking can be the hardest. It is the point of suspension of time. Moreover, you have not yet donned those lingeried veils of still distraction and forgetfulness. So rise rather, as quickly as possible, so as not to be trapped in any false phantomed faces. They are imagos, simply. They have no weight. Let them hurl round the room like banshees if they will. They will not obtain to any heart, save that touched by a momentary noise.