Postcard from Lisa Jarnot

Lisa Jarnot is a celebrated poet, actor and literary biographer (of Robert Duncan).

I had appreciated a poem of hers in a magazine with either a postcard or a letter and she responded with this splendid postcard.

Is this a gorgeous photo of New York or what? Even the heavens are cooperating, clouds dutifully chipping in and pretending to be interested in setting up the perfect vanishing perspective.

Of course, that effect might have been assisted by a special lens.

I'm sensing a Lobachevskian curvature thing going on here with space that might be the work of a lens.

From the reverse: "Winter Sunrise over Central Park." Photo by Jeff Prant. Be sure to enlarge this to see the runic beauty of the fallen trees.

Okay, I have idea if those are actually fallen trees. They look like giants were throwing the I-Ching in Central Park. Fluxus giants must have invaded Central Park in the night while a heavy snow hid their giant bodies.

I just wanted to say "runic beauty." Sue me.

This is before she had any books out. She alludes to her first book as forthcoming (Burning Deck) and offers to send a copy.

Which she did.

Lisa has a celebrated blog and I think she teaches poetry workshops in New York occasionally.

I think that would be a really fun experience for a young poet. Because her poetry and sense of formalism are as playful as they are inventive.

It would probably be like taking a workshop with Bernadettte Mayer.

This is dated the 11th of December, 1995.

Lisa writes great animal poetry.

I felt I should mention that.

And she likes polysyndeton, if I'm remembering correctly.

Maybe anaphora too.

She was in a celebrated, award-winning independent movie.

I think it was about a woman who never leaves her apartment.

I think she teaches at Naropa a lot.

I read her blog a few times and enjoyed it.

She likes horseracing.

I almost bought a stack of books she was trying to sell on her blog one time (back when I was working) because it was a great price and the lot included a number of good titles.

But her blog's "verify" pop up-thingie was all messed up and wouldn't let me get through.

It was like you had to be able to calculate pi to eight-thousand digits or something to get it to let you through.

I have no idea why I remember this.

This was years ago.

This is where my Mom would intone, "You must not have wanted those books that bad or you would have figured out a way to get them."

Sigh.

She's right. But I never get buyer's remorse.

I get buyer's cramp.

Buyer's bursitis.

How does it compare on the pain scale to cocksucker's cramp?

Well, that's one Wittgenstein should address.

You're leading with your wrong foot if you ask questions like that.

I meant to steal one of those PAIN CHARTS from the emergency rooms at the hospital on one of my three dozen trips there this past year.

Did you ever see them?

They have these really awful faces based on the original Smiley where different things indicate different degrees of pain....like they have Smiley grimacing in one, and here he's really racked and sticking out his tongue involuntarily.

It really looks like a joke when you see these things.

They're so unmedical and unprofessional.

It looks like a kindergartner made these.

Okay, that's sterotyping. Sorry. Soz.

There could be professional kindergartners out there.

Anyway, those crazy "pain illustrations."

They'll probably be in the Museum of Comical 21st Century Shit.

Along with the Huggie. And the Snuggie.

Sometime in the 22nd century.

Here's a poem by Lisa I found online just now.

The cataloguing profusion is bound to make some think of Whitman's influence.

The poem chants and enchants itself into existence.

And then I could see people making comparisons with a poet like Ceravolo, for the way her poems are polymorphously perveres with nature and grammar. It shares that exuberant dippiness (exuberant? try ecstasy) that's everywhere in Ceravolo's poetry. Maybe it's the child's eye inside the adult. A lot of this is child perspective, down on the ground, lying on the actual earth to make snow angels and see the "decapitated mice," etc.

Because adults are usually not even going to notice that.

I like it when poets add that child perspective in poems. Who else does that? A lot of great poets. Dylan Thomas. Michael Palmer.

I think a lot of readers were grateful for her poetry when it appeared, because it was a slide back into the lyric (huge manatee burst of breath here--or maybe the sound an Icelander makes sliding into a volcanic lagoon) when poetry was hatin' on the lyric and anything that resembled literary Romanticism redivivus.

Which this definitely smacks of.

I mean in a nice way.




O Life Force of Supernalness of World


O life force of supernalness of
world, o supernalness, decapitated
mice upon the tracks, o ear muff
head gear of the subway trains in
spring, o the day I saw Lou Reed
on a sidestreet near 6th Avenue, o
jubilance of paper cuts and paper
clips and snow, the small dot on
the page above the snow, the
telephone, the radio, the snow, o
spring, o snow, the snow, the sno
cones and the ski lifts of the snow,
the snow, terrific snow it is, the
spring, the snow, the lack of snow,
the snow itself, o snow, yourself,
the snow upon the human engine
as it waits to be the snow, go out
and be the snow, unloved and
melting in reflections in the grass,
illuminated on the beds of god, you
snow, the crescent jerk of snow, the
city of snow and the city of bacon
and the city of the snow, the
permission of the snow to be the
snow, its lack in spring unlike the
bacon, jerks of god, and snow.


aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa