CONTENTSI:          White Men, White Whales, and WhiteheadII:         Abandon the Creeping Meatball: An Anarcho-Spiritual TreatiseIII:        Epistle to the Summer Writing Program (on the Metaphysics of Deep Gossip)IV:        Is That a Real Poem or Did You Just Make It Up?            Selected Bibliography and Works Cited            Acknowledgments

 “Lisa Jarnot . . . suggests that Language Poetry may be mutating, back to the modernism of Stein and Joyce, having been permanently inflected (or deflected) by a late twentieth-century sharpness and exasperation. . . . These are haunting, perplexing narratives of the inenarrable.” —John Ashbery, Times Literary Supplement “Her best effects arrive as you zoom headlong right through her high-energy tangle of dissociation . . . in a particle accelerator where connective sense is bombarded by shards of broken grammar. . . .” —Albert Mobilio, Village Voice “Adjective-noun combinations, such as “offending purple snow suit” and “oaxacan space dog,” are the norm, summoning the childlike enthusiasm and pleasure derived from recontextualizing words and their possible combinations.” – Publishers Weekly on A Princess Magic Presto Spell

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Poet with wide appeal: For many, Lisa Jarnot is a foundational poet who cannot be tied to any one particular school, and has connections to the New York School, the Black Mountain School, and the Beat Generation.Bagley Wright Lecture Series: Lisa Jarnot's book is the seventh BWLS book Wave has published. This series is gaining traction and is perfect for university outreach and course adoption. Recordings of her lectures can be found through the Poetry Project and elsewhere, making it a great companion book to these recordings.Wears many hats: In addition to being a poet, editor, and biographer (she published a biography of the poet Robert Duncan), Lisa Jarnot is also a spiritual leader who is a minister at Safe Haven United Church of Christ. While her lectures aren't necessarily religious, they do hold a devotional appeal in regards to poetry.

White Men, White Whales, and Whitehead“Shepherds are honest people, let them sing!”—George Herbert, “Jordan (I)”  OneI should begin by saying that my capacity for earnestness is either my super power or my fatal flaw. And given this very terrific opportunity to delve into my life and work as a poet, I’m just going to let it all hang out tonight, and I’m hoping that you find something useful in the earnestness and not something dreadful in it (as my eleven year old daughter so often does). This is the first of four lectures that I’ll be presenting over a period of four seasons, and I’ve decided to frame this sequence of talks not only as a “call story” and testimony about my own work, but also equally importantly as a testimony about a tradition in American poetry that has absolutely sustained me and it would be appropriate to say has absorbed me into it (as much as I have absorbed it) over the last thirty-five years.            When I think about what this tradition is, which we might call an American “experimental” or “open verse” poetry originating out of Whitman and Dickinson, (and before that, on the other side of the ocean, out of William Blake), I know for me that it has always been populated with white men, white whales (as in Melville’s in the novel Moby Dick, 1851), and Whitehead (as in Alfred North Whitehead and particularly his cosmological treatise Process and Reality, 1929). This might seem like a seriously complicated barrel of monkeys, and I think it is, yes, but I’d like to frame it as something to explore and to be curious about tonight.            The other thing I want to be clear about from the beginning of this talk is that I am not a fancy poet even as I invoke these big books by Melville and Whitehead. I don’t want to wield these texts as intellectual currency; I want to use them to tell a tale. I seem to have the mind of a poet, which makes me good at poaching and weaving, and not so inclined to traditionally academic discourse. This leads me to a second note, which is that I’m also a “townie,” as poet Ron Silliman once called me, meaning that like him I’m a local yokel who found my way into an intellectual world by the accident of being in the right low-tuition public university at the right time: in his case UC Berkeley in the 1960s, and in my case SUNY Buffalo in the 1980s.