Tuesday, August 12, 2008

American Vernaculars

A new passion project.

The answer to all questions about one's conduct.

Q: What are you doing (there/in that bar with those old men/outside)?

A: I'm collecting American Vernaculars.

Q: Why do you work so hard?

A: Work is the original American Vernacular.

6 comments:

Ahab Cloud said...

From now on, assign random tags to your posts (see the bottom of the post box), based on unimportant words in them or previous phrases from other posts. On this, I insist. Tagging, too, is a kind of American Vernacular.

Ahab Cloud said...

Check out the news feed, too, on the bottom left. This blog just got new underpants.

Ahab Cloud said...

It occurs to me that the tags will make a kind of poem as they expand down the left hand column. Already, they have formed a solid line.

However, the challenge: they will arrange themselves alphabetically, soon turning against coherence.

Why must language push this way and that? Some days too neat, other days too bedheaded. Always, a few days off, thinking the other way might have served [something] better

Anyway: Tend them tags, tend them well.

Ahab Cloud said...

The point: to create a chance encounter with this blog, modulated through a poem structure that, given its allegiance to the alphabet, we must fight against.

Furniture Musik 2.0: Making reading (of it) fun again.

yogacephalus said...

I just started clicking on lines in the accumulated "tag poem" to the left of the blogspace. Interesting. At this point I think it'd be only appropriate for someone to lean in and begin whispering a little something smart about "interbraiding vectors".

I should let you in on a small secret. I have been using the "New Post" window as a way to write drafts of new poems. I've been working with the surprises that occur when I post them--in breaks and lineation, mostly.

So hopefully you don't mind if I post new poems. You can take it or leave it. And if you begin to notice that some of the poems begin to disappear, that's because I will have been busy removing them from sight, to send to journals.

So this will be a vanishing blog too, I guess.

Let's see if I can figure out how to set tags on this thing...

Ahab Cloud said...

I could tell this blog was birthing some useful language for you, and I love that.

The tagging thing is fascinating me at the moment because it's a way of writing through selecting, through indexing, etc. Once you start in, you'll see what I mean.

Below each post, just start typing in the label box. Old tags will come up, or you can write new ones. You can tag old posts, new posts, whatever.