out of order frank stanford start

_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

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

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

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

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

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

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.