All Art Everywhere is Free-ish

I Am A Party

2011-04-12T23:28:00.000-07:00

This site is a gravesite, no activity occurs here, you know? Check out what is going on below.

The party has started.

Oppen note from daybook IV:I

2009-07-04T09:01:00.000-07:00

Each decade a tap is opened
Which becomes the easiest thing to run out of.
It is exhilerating as running water.
This is an image

Of the fact
Of the thousands
Who in the name of originality
Are determined to write
As everyone else in that decade
Writes.

cross promotional post

2009-07-01T07:39:00.000-07:00

a new journal of twitter feeds from the normally seen and not heard at twitter666.

The Generals Play Video Games: a short list of ways the internet, iphones, and technology is effecting my and some other writing in 2009 part 1

2009-06-28T23:57:00.000-07:00

This isn't an essay, don't worry. I am going to think about things publicly a little. I think about these things a lot and rarely bring it into public. I am going to make this list with headers. I will try to be as concise as possible.

COMPUTER EDITING

A newish (decades old) method of editing that can make it tough to tell how much has changed between the first draft and the final product. In this method of editing one may write some, then go back to the beginning and edit word by word. This is like a one step forward, two steps back method of writing. Editing in this method makes it so that by the time something is completed, it has already been edited many times-with no physical evidence of drafting. Sometimes, records of drafts are hidden on the hard drive, or saved with titles like: 'title:1;title2;titlecomplete'. This may be related to the phenomenon of students not showing their work, when completing a math problem on a scientific calculator.

TYPEWRITER COMPUTER

The line made with a typewriter is different than the line written on a computer. Computer editing is not the only reason.

When I write on a typer there is more time taken to physically manipulate the paper and machine; this leads to longer lines of association or a backlogging effect of association (in continuous writing). I get tired faster when working on a typewriter, and at times, when I am too tired I can not work at the typewriter, because thinking about it makes me more tired. In times like those I may put in a piece of paper and leave it. The typewriter leaves one (or some carbon) copy, these can be lost, given away, damaged, or misplaced. However, there is emotion in the typing itself that may move one, when typing into the computer, to become more emotive and related to the initial emotional outpour. This aid often changes poems completely. Basically, it is a writing machine, and nothing else.

The computer acts as a resource and a distraction. The resources give the writer super power like intellect, so long as they continue to write on the project and not get sucked into the web of games and porn and fun fun fun. I mean Kevin Costner is on the web 24/7. How could anyone continue to focus when that is around. Number one resource on the computer: other people. These people can sometimes save from loneliness, aide in projects, and just think generally different. This thinking makes writing on the computer a possibly public experience, something that lacks on the typer. And a computer,over many years, can help teach you how to spell.

I think that both are really important tools for the writer in today's writing life. Neither is needed really, both extra, but both add things. I believe a typewriter phrasing or breath length is different, and helps add versatility, while a computer has resources and connections like an important ceo-it can go either way.

MICROPRESSES

These things are so important. I don't know how so many people managed to do magazines back in the back in the day. That is impressive. This is important, and impressive sometimes, and it doesn't matter. It is a marketplace that doesn't operate on money as much as the wealth of writing being made today. These little things put out ebooks and little books and regular books. They are the sign of a people committed to developing community. I think it is a growing marketplace, that will soon become a minor leagues of publishing. The big presses will see the possibilities, and start to buy things. These presses will start to be put up like top authors, eventually, and stream line so new kind of things into the marketplace- to stimulate the overall marketplace of books and kindle buying. This is just an ideal outlook, but I think it makes sense in the movements of books to digital release, why not try to make money all the way up the book ladder, if the top isn't making as much.

IPHONE

This device is a sign of things to come. It is an iceberg tip. Wow, when I was young I your a vest to carry the books and notebooks and pens and recorders and phone and cd player. A hunting vest, all the time, because I was writing constantly and wanted to read and think with people on paper. If I had an Iphone this wouldn't be needed. That device is a whole vest of things, really crazy-just the start. I borrowed a friend's for an hour at a concert. I wrote two poems standing in the concert crowd. Iphone just means any next generation device at this point.

quotes from 'George Oppen's Serial Poems' by Alan Golding

2009-06-27T01:44:00.000-07:00

describing the long poem, in context of oppen's serial poems.

most paradigms for reading the american long poem or sequence cannot accommodate Oppen's work...(others describe as) 'an effort to wrest a hero from history'-an effort on the poet's part to make himself or herself into that hero by persuing through poetry a struggle for 'self-idenification and self-preservation'...'the epic struggle of modern times.' Oppen's series, however, are resolutely nonmythopoetic and nonheroic, and he suspects the ambition and large vision by which ...measures the success of the american epic.

Oppen is temparmentally suspicious of the large claims for poetry, of the expansive tone and form which in various ways characterize the modernist long poem.

For Oppen, poetry is a form of thinking, and the serial poem allows him a different, a more extendedand flexible form of thinking than is possible in the lyric...'the series permits any number of variations without forcing new beginnings and without losing sight of the object.'

By Oppen, cited in essay:

out of poverty
to begin

again

_______

Soul-searching, these perscriptions,
Are a medical faddism, an attempt to escape,
To lose oneself in the self.
The self is no mystery, the mystery is
That there is something for us to stand on.

_______

what breath there is
In the rib cage we must draw
from the dimensions

surrounding

_______

the simplest
words say the grass blade
hides the blaze
of a sun
to throw a shadow
in which bugs crawl
at the roots of the grass

Bill Williams can do the mash potato better than all of us

2009-06-25T04:51:00.000-07:00

Everytime i heard william carlos williams refered to in a letter he was called bill. I tend to read so many of these letters that I start thinking of these writers by the first name. I don't know why. Bill is a doctor. A liver of life. He sees that pain that is so hard to come by with a clean bill of mental health. And he was so gentle. He was like linen. I imagine his poems in the morning or in transit at night. the wheelbarrow is morning, queen anne's lace? not sure, plums, the genius of this house. I guess i say night in transit because when I was younger I saw a documentary about him, and there was alot of stock doctor at night montages going on.

Williams wrote short poems, but he had huge ambition. I see this ambition in paterson. This long poem is powerful and raw. When I was starting writing, there were things in paterson I wanted to learn how to do like:
***
*s*
*o*
*d*
*a*
***
he did it with such ease, as if he didnt even know there was a visual device being created by the text. that is what i envied, like the way I envied olson for his use of the page in maximus (all the white space is inspiring).

I don't really know why bill wrote his whole life. it is against the grain to consistently write, have a fultime job, have love in family and wife, a place in the community. This fact alone, makes williams one of the rare infultrators. He was able to get into the grit of life and communicate it to us poets in our rooms looking for work. He had one foot in real life and one in the world of writing. Powerful man.

He has a sweet voice. I imagine him as the most sincere person I ever met. The kind of guy that was an old man in mind, before the body caught up and his wisdom started to make sense.

link to martin being martin and some plan notes

2009-06-23T02:34:00.000-07:00

sorry. I realized the link doesn't work on here, and instead of fixing it right now I am putting up a post to link you to poems by Martin Wall.

I am doing this to keep a short update, while working on some longer two and three part series. Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser are coming. Out of order. The order is going to hell, I may abandon it. These three are an important team and I was reading The Holy Forest a few nights ago and the power that is between those three returned to me. I love a good group. A team. I think that comes from a mental model produced through my youth in team sports. I will always favor a working team to a solo act. Though I relate more to the solo act, because my teams always fall apart. I am a solo act by default. Only a couple people respond to my emails. I think I come off as overbearing because I treat everyone like they are my only friend in emails. That was a segue. I am working on a suite of brief recaps of the books of letter I have. first up is Pound/Joyce. stayed tuned. please stay tuned.

the power of ken baumann compels you.

out of order frank stanford start

2009-06-18T19:15:00.000-07:00

_explicatory statement-skip if you are in a rush_frank Stanford does not fit into my scheme of modernist and observationist writers. I will move on from those groups slowly. Frank is the writer that gets me thinking more than anyone else. I think it is because his life was too short to explain anything. Therefore, I will be writing entries about frank alongside all the groups I move through, toward frank’s place in the timeline. I feel that Stanford is a floater. He is a ghost that moves throughout the movements. I will try to keep up on relating Stanford to the groups he is posted near. However I do not know how he will line up through time. It will be interesting to see where he can.

I have been thinking about the battlefield where the moon says I love you. There is controversy about whether or not Stanford actually wrote it early in his life; or pumped it out in secret in the later years. Many believe, because of the sheer power and knowledge base represented, that frank must have written it after his earlier work, or at least majorly revised the early lines to keep up with the rest of it. I have been thinking. I believe that Stanford wrote most of this early in his life. First half. I mean the book came from St. Francis and the wolf – an even longer poem a high percentage larger than the battlefield. These lines seem to be frank learning to write, line after line and on. I now believe, more strongly than ever before- that frank writing these lines taught him how to write lines in short order later in life when in the university. Not the other way around.

There are passages in the battlefield, particularly ones in the more narrative sections of the text, that drag on and on. These sections of text are so far below standard for the shorter poems of ease he produces. I will continue this post soon with cited examples of each and what they compel in me.

More generally frank is a king. A method actor of words. Bale aint got shit on frank. His constant address to death is inspiring, if it wasn't so crazy that it led him to that suicide.

Frank is alot like a modernist in the way that the myth of the poet is alongside, if not above or surrounding, the poetics. I cannot read his things without thinking of his life. His life was so short there was no time to document anything, and because of that the battlefield fills in that history with mythic power. Not to mention the fact that his death itself was of such poetic power that at that moment his poems would always be touched with that moment. I am attatched to the pity of you, frank. Sometimes I think about cd Wright remembering the living frank. That is part of her gift and grit. But we will get to her more later.

George Oppen was goodlooking when he was young and badass when he got old

2009-06-16T20:48:00.001-07:00

Here is a link to hear george oppen reading.

When I record poems onto tape I try to be in a room, or create, similar reverb to that of george oppens recorded readings. I love the echoey room that feels large. It makes the words last longer in a good way. One time I was in a reading of Billy Collins and I was so bored, and that made the words last long in a bad way. All I can remember is that he talked about geese and I was sitting next to a pretty girl while he talked about his dog chasing geese.

Back to george. fuck off billy. George's poems were discrete and serial. He loved the fracture. I remember reading the discrete series and focusing on the fact that a discrete series in math is when one number depends on the previous number to exist in the series. The poem is like that, the words depend on one another. I learned alot reading that poem and it has had a huge effect on the way I write. Sometimes I get too caught up in the letting go of the long previous and too dependent on the immediate past. This is a problem that is pervasive in more than just my poetry. But I don't blame that on the discrete series.

I love a writer that stops writing for a while, during trauma. Oppen was exiled at one point and stopped writing for almost twenty years. Then he continued to write later in life. He was in political limbo and his poetry will always be looked at through a political lens, for good or bad, because of it. I don't read oppen politically. I think this helps me read his writing. It is less about something and more ethereal. More about the shortcomings of the world at large, than the political shortcomings of the few with feet in doors.

A line I will always remember by oppen is 'the dirty feet' it is in a poem about a homeless child in the street. i think there is something about faces in there too. i will find it.

When I started writing I found out that I like to have an image base from which to associate. In the beginning, for about seven years, it was on a piece of cardboard next to a dumpster in an alley across the street from a movie theater. Lately, it has changed to a supermarket parking lot next to a field. the latest is more expansive and detailed. I credit the first to oppen influence, not the associations of my physical surroundings, that is why the first is less detailed than the second. The second comes from something I often see and feel quiet emotions within.

blog progression or how i think of this blog in my real life

2009-06-14T12:39:00.000-07:00

as this blog moves along I will be taking note of how I think of it. This is the first note.

When I started this blog I wanted no one to know who wrote it. I always think everyone is going to sue me these days. Hypervigilance. But now it doesn't matter to me so much. I make a point to make the posts not about ken, and to make sure he is not defamed in any way by this site.

When I was younger I studied poet's lives a good deal. I would say I know more about the poet's life and the context of the poems, than the poems themselves. I remember in high school, having never read the waste land, and sitting down to help someone with the reading of it. I felt like I was bullshitting them, but everything I was saying (on this, five seconds after my first reading of the poem) was related in one way or another to the possums life story and this he had said in the past. I'm not sure why that is important, but it felt important.

This site is unofficial.

I will let you know, I started this site because alot of people out there still have links to this page. I pirate those links. I get about 22 hits a day, and I don't know how many people realize this isn't ken baumann. There I said it, if you have read this far, this isn't ken baumann. He blogs at a new address. I think there is no dash on that one. I really like ken, and am amazingly impressed with everything he has done at such a young age.

I am curious if anyone ever has real conversations with people they meet on the web. I send out personal emails and never get responses. They must be too long. Sometimes I try to keep the emails short, but that is boring to me. I like everything too long. I like things to remain mysteries even after you have entered them and their form seems like a habit. I want there to still be hidden things at that point.

It is like people's mean side comes out on the internet. I want my nice underbelly to show. The sweet core.

Back to about this blog. link to it as baumannish if you like it. but know there are real baumann's out there. They have more prestige than I. I write the writer entries off the top of my head and am sure they would be better with research. I like to see how much I can remember from studying when I was younger, trying to bring it all back. I still intend to write more about reznikoff, some oppen, more about all the modernists (as that and objectivists is what i know most about), i will cover alot of writers from modernism through the new york school. Poets only. I don't know anything special about fictioners. David Robinson is really cool though. So is adam robinson. They will always be brothers in my mind.

Louis Zukofsky had reach like a helicopter

2009-06-13T02:02:00.000-07:00

That man was a wild one. He was real tall. He got his first taste of a poetic community when he was young and he sent 'a poem beginning 'the'' to ezra pound overseas. Ezra found such vigor in the poems that he actually responded to Zuk and told published his poem in a short lived publication pound had started called the exile. he is very much on the outskirts of the poetry community. However, Zukofsky is credited with the term objectivist poetry. They were putting together an edition of poetry magazine, and it was an objectivist issue. Zuk reformated an old essay about charles reznikoff to speak more generally about the movement. Other notable objectivists include Lorine Niedecker, Carl Rakosi, and George Oppen.

Here is a Niedecker poem:

from Come In

the men leave the car
to bring us green-white lilies
by woods
These men are our woods
yet I grieve

I'm swamp
as against a large pine-spread-
his clear No marriage
no marriage
friend

Secret Life of Charles reznikoff part 1

2009-05-30T06:29:00.000-07:00

Charles used to walk around New York city late at night. These days when I think about that I get a little scared. I think if I walk out there at night I will get attacked, and I don't mind being attacked, but it is nice to not be attacked. Charles was a sensor. He moved through the city logically digesting the variety of input he encountered. I think just about all of Charles life is sort of a secret. He had a very jovial voice. The kind that may be used as a voice for a cartoon mouse. He had a happy kind of chuckle, and he just beamed kindness. I look at Charles as a collector and a transcriber. He spent much of his life studying and being involved with law. He transcribed court cases into poems in testimony and transcribed journals into poems in Holocaust. his short poems are like the urban hiaku. When I think about his lines, I imagine a flock of bulbs surrounding a excavation. but I cannot recall how charles worded it to make it a visual memory for me. Even though I never seen that. I even return to it, like a memory from my distance. Charles. I will continue on you more in depth. Charles, witness. He knew how important it was to witness at all times. Even in daily life. This is part one of a few. Charles I will return to you soon. Charlie. The captin of the mighty ducks. Reznikoff is a kettle that whistles and continues to whistle. I lean in to the whistling, I hear short phrases without metrognomes. I once saw a picture of charles on a bus with bill carlos williams. he and bill we on the bus looking at a broadsheet. They both had wives there. There were three other people on the bus. It may have been a trolly. They looked so happy. Happy Charles reznikoff day, for no reason. this is charles reznikoff week. and on this blog we will celebrate by exploring him more in depth, as a person writing.

Of course, this will be done with a cinematic eye, because I cannot move off from my hollyroots.

secret about banking in hollywood

2009-05-18T21:34:00.000-07:00

Mind you I haven't seen the international or the bank job. But, I have noticed alot of banks in american movies these days. They are not prominently placed. But in Yes Man and the upcoming Drag Me Two Hell the protagonists are both laongiving bankers. In one of these movies jim carey gets promoted to ceo or something for agreeing to all loans. In the other a nameless lady gets dragged to hell for turning someone down on loans. Man. Complex time to be a banker in hollywood.

secrets of multitasking

2009-05-17T22:59:00.001-07:00

I would never talk about it in my real life, because that is part of the mystique; but I really love doing a number of things and keeping incredibly busy. I am addicted to the action of daily life. And my days are full. Sometimes I get very tired, but it works out well. I am grooming a great life. One very important aspect of doing this is not wasting time talking about it. That is why it is our secret.

New screenplay by Ken Baumann, coming soon, big money. Pumping the pumpers over here. Awesomeness extreme. Yesterday I was watching Jumanji and an ad for the secret lives of teenagers came on. There I was holding a baby.

I met Robin Williams, I was little and he was doing Patch Adams at the time. He told me to keep working hard. I believed him. I still do.

Secrets of LA basketball

2009-05-17T19:53:00.001-07:00

I know a secret. It is that the LA Lakers won a game seven basketball game. Go Lake show. Shh. Kobe is shy, so don't spread it around.

secrets of the modern poets #2 - ezra pound loves having two wives

2009-05-16T20:34:00.000-07:00

Everybody know Ezra Pound played the bassoon. That's because Ezra Pound was the first blogger. He was a blogger that used other people's publications to document his life.

His romantic life was out of the tabloids. Olga Rudge and Dorthy Shakespear. Both of them. To the end.

He was fire in public, like gary busey. He would fence with his cane walking down the street. And made frequent scenes while reading poems to Wyndam Lewis and others at restauraunts. One bistro actually had a folding wall they would pull in around the writers table to keep the rest of the eating people at ease.

Pound was a control freak, a grab the wheel type. He helped bring up many of the figureheads of modernism, and liked to think he had a part in so many more. Toward the end of his life he became a cover band. Charles Olson comments on his change in the notes he wrote while visiting pound in St. Liz's. As Pound repeats CHAW CUT PLUG to the gaurd there Olson describes it as, "the poet making sounds, trying to see if they warmed his ear. But it was the fascist too, as snob, classing the gaurd." Pound began to use the pretty past of poetics to mask an increasingly agitated view on people, but mostly american and jewish people.

When pound was young he was going to a party one night, and before he got there people at the party were saying, "ezra pound the jew is coming." and when he got there he heard of the things that had been said. I always imagined this had some effect on his later antisemitism.

When I was younger and I found out about Pound's 'double-cross' on america it made me want to stick by america for the rest of my life. I told myself, don't worry america, you will get your due. Pound made a mistake about you. I believe in your great dingy."

secrets about modernist poets #1

2009-05-16T19:56:00.000-07:00

When TS Eliot was little he used to go through the fence behind his house and walk the halls of the girls school behind his house in St louis. When he graduated high school he was sent to milton academy by his parents.

Stearns family life was rigid and oppresive. He had a big family. I think he loved his mother alot, but felt she was often too busy. Eliot loved the rigidity of schools. It was this systematic lifestyle that lead him to banking and eventually to catholic life.

It seems Eliot's family had an indirect effect on his literary life. I don't know if he would have become as important if his father wasn't vaugely a philanthropist.

Don't forget Tom also married up, and seemed to always have his eye on some prize. I wonder if some of those poems weren't frustrated outbursts on the systems that organize him to the margins. He could of just been addicted to the research he started as a child, watching his religous family move room to room. He had such terrible attempts at marraige, but I guess that is always common.

the backpack secret is kept in a part of the world I will not travel towards

2009-05-16T01:18:00.000-07:00

I don't care what is in that direction. I'm not going.

A train rattles the house as it passes. There are four cars. Right now I imagine an animal is sleeping on the backpack.

It was pawned by the person I don't talk to anymore and I like to think it is better of on it's own.

I hear a bicycle riding in a circle in my driveway. I use a mirror and crouch below the window.

I hear a voice that sounds like mine coming from the tv. That always makes me nervous and proud.

I am working hard. So calm down. I will be out in a bit.

I miss the vultures above the red rock. I burst from inside a vulture in mid air and land where I am right now.

under my pillow

2009-05-16T01:05:00.000-07:00

The way bees are born is cool. I don't watch tv as much anymore. There is a bottle of nesquick next to the computer. It isn't mine. I wonder who brought this here.

I had a bottle of water while walking down the street today. It was really tasty.

I believe in blogging as an artform, just as much as daily life is one. I live to recreate daily life.

secret map #1

2009-05-16T01:03:00.000-07:00

I have a map that I haven't shown anyone. It is my secret map. There are thirty one roads, a river, and an airport.

By the way

2009-05-15T16:28:00.000-07:00

If I were harry potter, harry would be much more badass.

I just finished Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets

2009-05-15T16:20:00.000-07:00

It is pretty damn good.

I walked through the town today. Some people carried a picnic table through the intersection. I helped. I felt like I was Harry Potter helping his brother from the demeantors.

I have a friend who had a rough night last night. He didn't feel like driving. Now that I think about it the Harry Potter thing to do would of been to fly him home in my car.

I tried calling him just now, but I got his voicemail.

I wonder if Harry ever finds money in his pockets. I found some money once in my life. It was a good time.

Now I am pretty busy with work, and I am working towards a nice chair. It will be yellow brocade with green trim. I look forward to this. It is my harry party throne.

who's in my fave five

2009-05-15T13:39:00.001-07:00

This commercial was important for me because it made my audience realize that I look like Bob Saget. I like to watch it on youtube sometimes. I like when my 'girlfriend' comes in because I am so ready to go when she asks.

The dad in that commercial was very nice in real life. We went to the Harbinger Bar in the Commercial Concourse of LAX. He got sorta drunk and told me that in real life, I would be allowed to sleep with his daughter. Because I am a good guy, I'm quiet and sweet.

I went out to dinner with the daughter in the commercial. She wore a real short skirt. I walked into the pub and the host said, 'uhoh, you got a boner, holmes.' I wore it proudly.

Secrets about Mini Horses

2009-05-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

My parents have a mini horse farm. When I was little I would ride the mini horses around our land. One of them was named Debrah. Debrah was four feet tall and chestnut brown. I used to eat nutella and dance on top of the mini horse riding around the fields.

When I would swim in our pond, Debrah would drink from the water.

When I was twelve my parents sold Debrah to an investment banker from New York. I ran up to the mini horse as he took her. 'Not Debrah!' He said, "Well no, this is not Debrah anymore. It's MidgePidge.'

I am little Kenny Baumann from Riding the 9,
and I am screaming, 'nooooo. not debrah.'
I run toward the pond.

I have a secret life

2009-05-15T13:03:00.000-07:00

that even I don't know about yet.

-kenny

Ode to Brownie Coop

2009-05-15T12:51:00.000-07:00

I love watching your two episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger over and over and over and over.

Sometimes, when we are sitting on the couch together I think of you as Mullet Fingers in Hoot.
I like you better than Mullet Fingers.

I love Oasis and you know that Wonderwall is my favorite song.
When I listen to you signing it on your myspace page it's ten favorite songs all at once.

Someday I want to be on dancing with the stars and just read books on stage instead of dancing. I will light a vigil for you as I do this.

You know I want to marry Amy, it is no secret. But I second guessed when I saw you jumping over that chair on Jimmy Kimmel.

I am sorry about your appendix.
I am sorry you lost on dancing with the stars.
When I can't call you I watch your episodes of Hannah Montana and pretend to be Miley.