A long letter from JET (Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum)

C: To be honest, I canNOT remember the last time I heard a poem THAT LONG (20 minutes read aloud?) with that much exuberance and vigilance to the detail-oriented care of what seemed every single word written/spoken. You reinvent for us (for me at least) the road to self discovery with the poem. There were threads of separate image/subject/style, these individual threads which you kept braiding from your mouth to our ears. And of course there are countless forms from poetry's history which repeat or rephrase. But these threads were very much your own, and each seemed to have total worlds of their own, almost separate voices of awareness (not to say that at times there won't be unconscious experiences which propel a thread into a certain conscious experience, but maybe no, maybe yes, maybe no, maybe maybe maybe, whatever...) but at the same time were each born from the same conscious being. Sometimes different ages of one woman lived in a single moment of a single word, so it seemed. How would you explain how you came to construct each thread's own voice?

CC: you are an incredibly generous listener and reader. Your choice of wording in terms of "threads" is entirely apropos as this is exactly how I refer to the different voices / sections / styles. (I have been obsessed with the "weave" since my Temple days and the notion of weaving together disparate threads which maintain their individuality continues to fascinate me).

AND MY natural enough REACTION IS: Well, what the hell was I thinking when I called poetry masturbatory?? ------- when it's abundant clear that THIS sort of exchange does masturbation one better!: "I'll help YOU masturbate YOURSELF if you help ME masturbate MYSELF!" It's not even proper whoredom; at least whores have market rates, and some sort of ambiguous relative worth, and there's a genuine exchange, and at least the john gets OFF!

No no no, this is something far creepier, far less human: this is the mutual agreement to suspend intelligence (and joy) for the sake of not having one's obvious inadequacies pointed out. "I know I'm ugly, but if I promise not to mention you're ugly, we can both say we're beautiful, all right?"

Witness C’s nonsensical, over-the-top drooling (which reminds me exactly of Shitlock's panegyrics before each of his readers): "You reinvent for us...the road to self-discovery" !!! "these individual threads which you kept braiding from your mouth to our ears" !!! "Sometimes different ages of one woman lived in a single moment of a single word" !!!!!!!!! MY GOD, how could he keep lifting that heavy shit-shovel? (especially with his little t. rex arms?)

And GLORY BE, how GENEROUS of Babs to acknowledge! and celebrate! how clever little C is! in his critical blowjob question! "My god, how wonderful you are, C, for understanding how magnificent I am!" Grotesque, absofuckinlutely grotesque little lice. AND I refrained, only with great difficulty, from c-ing-and-p-ing (pasting and lambasting!) the viscous blob of Barbara's pseudo-self-hagiographic criticism which is easy enough to mock: "The 'aging' of the threads / personas has become an increasingly complicated question.... to explore the 'little girl consciousness' as it grows and evolves into an 'adult (woman) writer' with an ever-increasing anxiety in relation to language." -- Oh indeed! Indeed! Girls become women indeed! Thank GOD I have a POET handy to explain these ELUSIVE MYSTERIES OF LIFE! Or rather (my god what they would think of my slovenly approach to criticism!) -- to employ a more decently high-fallutin' tone appropriate to the occasion: "The poet (the writer) elucidates (or "makes known") a realm of gendered dispositions, inflections, connotations, and un-languaged (or rather, pre-languaged) communications which take as their subject language itself -- that is, the "word" in relation the "wor(l)d" with transgressive yet gendered "l" understood -- in the service of making known ("elucidating") the dialectic of female maturation, both as she experiences in relation to herself (made known through language) and as her language itself experiences its own maturation in relation to herself (and make known through her own maturation)."

Now that's a lotta mutual maturation.

Once again, as I've too often ranted, poor Adam, whom I desperately need on my side: THESE are the ENEMIES: obfuscation and pretension, hucksterism, those who want us to buy without having anything to sell us, those who want us to love without having any way to love us back, those who want to become saints by martyring US.

AND IT'S A WAR.