Five Poems in Otoliths (47)

Five new poems up in Otoliths (47). Many thanks to Mark Young.

Computer Raunch/Perfect Webpage

It's been a summer of computer raunch for me: from my hard-drive breaking down in June (many thanks to the masterminds at Silvertek in Broomall for assistance) to online operating systems breaking down. That's something about American life in 2017: computer issues will have you begging for mercy. Especially if, as is the case for me, your sturdy desktop set-up is your home, office, and den. As I continue my experiments with webpage archiving and preservation, I do now have a nominee for the most perfect Philly Free School webpage, the most solid all-the-way-around: the British Library version of my Argotist Online Apps/Sonnets page. The last capture, here, is from July 1, 2017. Once you have a perfect, solid webpage set in place, it is helpful to realize that it can't be truly perfect until a solid portal-page, which also must needs be highly prominent and visible, is set in place. Hidden gems are the way of the Net, but chip away at the aura of the "consummate" which I want pages like this to have. For now, a bunch of portal-way entrances on Blogger (including this one) will have to do for the page I've linked here. Also the attendant solidity quid pro quo is massive: the British Library Wayback Machine is tightly wound, compressed, compacted the right way to achieve maximum durability for its pages; yet the pages won't (as computer heads know) show up in searches on major search engines. So, the vision quest continues.  

September Heat

That September night we followed our
party back to a twin near City Hall, under
an aegis which was not for us, & which
included our enemies, dirt & grime came
down, settled on our backs. Now, I blame
a sense of excess which was just the Aughts;
I got used to knowing a step up on a Philly
ladder could be a step down. They were
snorting coke in a room upstairs at this
party, and, it was rumored, playing Russian
Roulette. The pistol (I saw) had a silencer on it.
I looked up, from the landing, at a greasy light.
September heat cast an eerie glow of nowhere-
someone pushed past me to join the affair.

Eyewear

The UK blog Eyewear has adopted a rather tumultuous approach to what stays and what goes, conservation/preservation, over a long period of time. Most of what I had on Eyewear as of '13/'14 is now erased. Yet, Eyewear is being archived by both the British Library and the Internet Archive Wayback Machines; and this page, from 2008, which contains my poetic apostrophe to Dawn Ananda Hulton, is here completely intact.

Another interesting Ur-page

Another now-offline Ur-page salvaged by the Wayback Machine: poems from Apparition Poems in Listenlight, ed. Mackenzie Carignan, 2010.  

Ricochet Matrix

Over a long period of time, I've noticed that having a large body of work online, in different/disparate disciplines (and representing interests, also, other than my own), creates what I call a ricochet matrix. An environment is generated out of different parts of a kind of organism here, so that when one constituent form held by the ricochet matrix changes in any way, expands or contracts, all the parts respond. Some of the ricochets held within the matrix structure flirt with the unlikely or absurd; por ejemplo, "Brown Eyes Like His" on Soundclick against the Kant-related pdfs on Internet Archive against the Sonnets/Apps on The Argotist Online against Abby's "The Walls Have Ears." The larger matrix structure, which both creates and constitutes the environment around/for everything I do online, is the architecture in Conshohocken, the Philly 'burbs, and in Philadelphia itself. Like a computer, a substantial architectural construct has inbuilt a kind of sentience, and interacts in a semi-sentient way with the world around it. Thus, King of Prussia, Gulph Mills, and Conshohocken are continually poured into my brain as ricochets against the smaller/larger environment of our online matrix as it develops, to nurture (as environment) other brains to remain expansive, too. 

Tears in the Fence 66

Tears in the Fence 66 is now out and available to be purchased. It features two new sonnets from me, lots of other good stuff. Many thanks to David Caddy.