John Taggart and C.S. Giscombe

Grooving out on the bus reading this poem from New World Journal that David Highsmith let us take, much more so than I was feeling about him in the reading, I think it might be his masculinst reading style that makes me feel incapable of paying an ounce of attention to him. But the poetry is actually nice with this repetitive lyricism thing.

From "That This May Be":

"As if no one no one were seated beside you no one beside you as if you were alone yourself completely alone in a room a room without Ezekiel as if you were completely alone in a room in a finite room as if no one were seated beside you when a tongue when a tongue feeds a train when a violet tongue feeds a violet train into a violet room when a tongue feeds a train into a room made all violet in waves of a wide wave on wide wave of a as in father mist of a thousand waves over you ...."


He talked so much in his reading it felt almost more like a lecture which was nice, albeit also masculinist stance-ish. He mentioned Robert Duncan and Oppen as two of his major influences, and then later on after reading a poem with the line "walls do not fall" he started to talk about a third influence, and I knew, just knew, it was H.D. But then he said it was Zukofsky. Oh, just Zukofsky. I felt SO disappointed in him.

Then he spoke of a 70 page poem that couldn't make it into Is Music, so it went into There are Birds, called "Unveiling/Marianne Moore." I frowned.

C.S. Gisocombe, I can't remember as much because he didn't upset me. I liked how he had a project about trains. Trains as sexual and trains as racial. Want to read more of him.