Drew Gardner's blog, July 22, 2005

Vanitas Magazine pull-quote sequence, ala John Latta / Nick Piombino

Ann Lauterbach

"token analytic muse in the glove compartment"

Fanny Howe

"to remember ourselves / as beings with no-fire costumes on"

"Gordian brain"

Ange Mlinko

"The mythical orgone box is in the woods, pancreas of our passions"

Carol Mirakove

"epiphone at all those brazilian voters. but all this action doesn't / stop me fantasizing make-out sessions"

Judith Malina

"THE SPARKS / SHATTERING THE FORMATIONS"

Nada Gordon

"What, you think you're special because you have / A DIRECT LINE / TO THE SONG OF THE UNIVERSE?"

Marianne Shaneen

"this isn't the first time that this has been said for the first time"

"amorous secret encounters between here and there"

"objects are only there to hold the empty spaces together"

Sarah Manguso

"marriage partners invite me to consider the possibility of being a deer"

Elaine Equi

"no god / no countries"

Anne Waldman

"With this you will be ready to star gaze and get your revenge"

Jim Dine

"listening to the years / ooze by / I don't see / the kindness of the left / helping those millions who hate / by the river of tattletales"

Jerome Sala

once I was a hog catcher / now I tattoo fine filigrees on snowboards/ you wouldn't believe how much I love it

Carter Ratcliff

"my darling, my pretext for opening my eyes in the morning"

David Lehman

"The task of painting and installing a door is a charming respite for a soul fatigued from the struggles of life."

Francis Ponge

"the collision of words and verbal analogies being one way to scrutinize the object"

Nick Piombino

"Watching / Those birds / fly south / again // my / sky / miles / are / no // consolation"

Richard Hell

Chocolate / Figures in colored foil / Come to life and speak.

Charles Borkhuis

"don't talk to me about your nightmares"

Daniel Bouchard

"new asphalt fills the street like black snow"

"I bet the president knew how to get seriously / fucked up; I bet he knew how to do some / serious damage."

Michel Bulteau

"Rabbit's ass near the eternal. / To make the wooden sword in silk. / Huge clouds slam on the breaks. / Solitude then traverses / the non-existence of objects. The shadow swallows up the kaleidoscope."

Clayton Eshleman

"centuplicating with the beliefs of Christian reconstructionists / whose 'immortality' is posited on / the extermination of humanistic idolaters"

Alvin Curran

"Thelonious Monk discovers 'frozen' time between keys and challenges Einstein to a duel for violin and piano"

"The voice of the president commands this ragtag ensemble into convulsive action, which leads to a strategy of silence, insubordination and sex"

Martin Brody

"Irregular, analog moves (melismas and timbres) link the various planes of discrete polyphonic events, shunting smoothly between data points rather than jumping from one to another. In the end, a vertiginous, virtuosic, analog move -- a 2 + octave emblematic arabesque descending through an impossible variety of vocal timbres -- leading to, juxtaposed with, a single self-contained data point, the last word -- and now the only remaining implausible mode of address: the "natural" speaking voice, Prince saying "kiss."

Morgan Russell (writing about Lydia Lunch)

"she is more a habitual pied-a-terre full-gamut embodiment of triune goddess for me...while she might be viewed as autochthonously self-regenerating, one could also just say she is easily possessed by some aspect of the goddess & always refreshed...

Vincent Katz

Ellsworth Kelly made a proposal for the World Trade Center -- a big green shape, bright like one of his colors, of uneven sides, not, at least in the collage he made of it, to indicate a planting of grass, or actual space, but a color space, a collage that could exemplify art's ability to take over actual, mismanaged public action.

Vanitas is packed with really good poems. Hilarious intro essay by Jordan: the history of New York School poetry done completely without using names, except for Joel Lewis!