The kitchen was busy rewiring itself when we all came in. We wondered when the kitchen would retire and start selling pork by-products

"Buy this product now and all women will be yours" was the point of the commercial.

I am sure it was

Of course! Obvious by hindsight. I knew of a dozen hypnotic gases
hanging out, away in the opposite direction and around the bend.

Politics and the Language Poets(excerpts) by George Hartley (1989)--------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Let us undermine the bourgeoisie." So Ron Silliman ends his contribution to "The Politics of Poetry" symposium in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 9/10 (October 1979).

Perhaps we're all trying to dismantle the mortality table, that mythico-philosophical mischief of the writer's task.

Old-age is the pea green face of a pensioner

Some shit:
Neo-hellenism
Mutation's pressurized paradise
pallid-faced one-ideaed, like Notre Dame
moss-bound mining, building by destroying, like an bio-engineer would for molasses and grass

Ha! Old womanishness becomes a narrow guage for the blindness of memory.

But in what ways can the following excerpt from Charles Bernstein's "Lift Plow Plates" be seen as a critique of capitalist society?

"For brief scratches, omits,
lays away the oars (hours).
Flagrant immersion besets all
the best boats. Hands, hearts
don't slip, solidly
(sadly) departs."

This play seems forced, like night vision, with the soldier or investigator in a neon tube made of pearls, hardening like arteries or freshly metal tipped trees.

"We have to sacrifice someone to get it done," she said that night. At least, that's what I remember her saying as she tried to cut off my ear, but I was so loaded, she probably could have cut off my cock and I wouldn't have cared. Luckily, someone else cared more about me then I did at the time and we stumbled away with my ear still intact from the house to an empty bonfire along the beach to fuck.

For Susan Howe, the opening up of syntax is the opening up of thought, the denial of imposed intellectual categories. "Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein," Howe writes, ". . . conducted a skillful and ironic investigation of patriarchal authority over literary history. Who polices questions of grammar, parts of speech, connection, and connotation? Whose order is shut inside the structure of the sentence?" (My Emily Dickinson, 11). What is needed is a new grammar:

Fantasticality
nimble phantasma capering on a page

with antic
gesture.

Stein's work, as Howe suggests, is a second major precursor of Language poetry. The December 1978 issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (the journal, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, which served as a forum for poets involved with so-called language-writing) began with a special feature on readings of Stein's Tender Buttons (1914). A key passage from these readings is the first poem in Stein's work:

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a
single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing.
All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The
difference is spreading.

This partriachal authority is the authority of the writer (Aristotelian, really), because at the time of Stein, most writers were guys, so they wrote about guy things, but didn't Stein kinda write like a guy would. Of course, I have to wonder what she was like in bed. Was Gertrude Stein a good lover or did she make love like a guy would, too?