Dinosaur Bees

Excerpts from Astral Visions and Weeks
Hannah Weiner

from Astral Visions

charles gave instructions and said "sir not hip hop to sir cot without sir extra blanket" and "sir not get sir solomon r guggenheimer, if sir eat sir but" and "sir not get sir solomon r guggenheimer if sir not wear sir slip" and "sir not etc, etc" until finally i said "charles i am going to take you out of lead position" and he turned into godzilla a huge image of godzilla before me with the face of charles and he only did that once we have to attribute this to emma his daughter i suppose, whose favorite movie was godzilla i do believe at a certain point and i have a movie of godzilla and i can hear charles's voice saying still "here, here comes the hero" and there was one point if you read the first line of silent teachers where it says "blah" and that was charles's way of blanking out on my forehead any words that were not accurate he would just go "blah, blah, blah, blah" stamped across my forehead and the other thing he did once was i woke up one morning and there he was in his godzilla form, or just the head rather with his white teeth going "grrrrr"

as families go his son felix appeared at 3 mos. as a lizard quite often and taught me yoga i had a slight irregular heartbeat at the time and felix would make me lie down in a cool place in the living room or in the bedroom, wherever, in a relaxation yoga pose and do some very slow breathing, and he would make sure i took my medicine at night and sometimes he would appear as himself as a baby in a sort of basket, it looked like a basket but wasn't of course, but a sort of crib felix first appeared in a swing whose ropes were covered with flowers

so those are two other animals that i have, godzilla and felix the green monsters, like father like son and i wanted to say in closing because i think i will after this before i get into a whole different category of stories but i could say which has nothing to do with anything on the astral plane or the visual plane that i was vastly amused to find that felix's favorite program was barney who turns out to be a dinosaur now how all this runs in the family i don't know, but i think the important thing is to remember both charles bernstein and felix are silent teachers

from Weeks

This is invisible stuff up there   Folks were just lying around on the grass   This
year we have carefully added new titles not previously available to a national
audience as well as selecting titles from last year's list of publishers   Does a
healthy body mean a healthy mind   The Soviets have vastly understated
their losses   We've got nuclear trucking going through our city   Ham radio is
always used in the initial stages of a disaster   There is fear of loss of face and
world opinion and the space program will go on   We're here on 67th St. and
Lexington Ave.   That international aid be allowed into the Ukraine   An ex-
pert on bone marrow transplant   Perhaps he will offer them access to the
American list   The documents were found in the national archive in Washing-
ton   A resistance to the hiring of gays on the part of the membership   How do
we know some of those haven't infiltrated the police dept.   They're disgracing
the job   The crunch comes when the issue goes public   U.S. oil companies or
their subsidiaries still pump most of Libya's oil   Radiation clouds dissipating
It was a special day for some special dogs   We'll brighten up your patio, shove
a couple of creepers up your trellis   This was Haiti last February   No charge
against the former first lady seemed too extreme   Nice weather, spring, it's so
wonderful   Do you know the name of the astronaut who became America's first
man in space   It happened today twenty-five years ago   Will the 49,000 who
had to be evacuated from the area ever be able to go home again   That's some-
thing I can't give any credence to without a professional evaluation   A mother
and her 13 year old son were both selling drugs   This is holocaust remembrance
day   How big a ransom did the letter ask for

HANNAH WEINER was an American writer, born in Rhode Island in 1928. Associated with the LANGUAGE school of poetry, her many books and “happenings” included The Magritte Poems, Clairvoyant Journal, Little Books/Indians, The Code Poems, Weeks, Spoke, Hannah Weiner at Her Job, and Silent Teachers Remembered Sequel. Weiner began to write poetry in the 1960s, experimenting with such linguistic systems as the International Code of Signals. In the early 1970s, she became clairvoyant and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She explained: “I SEE words on my forehead IN THE AIR on other people on the typewriter on the page These appear in the text in CAPITALS or italics.” She went on to create a series of journals and texts driven by these experiences. Patrick F. Durgin, editor of the 2007 collection Hannah Weiner’s Open House, writes that Weiner’s “influence extends from the sixties New York avant-garde, where she was part of an unprecedented confluence of poets, performance and visual artists including Phillip Glass, Andy Warhol, Carolee Schneemann, John Perrault, David Antin, and Bernadette Mayer… her influence can be seen today in the so-called ‘New Narrative’ work stemming from the San Francisco Bay Area.” After her death in 1997, Douglas Messerli wrote, “Hannah's was certainly one of the most original contributions to American poetry ever. Her work was like no one else's, and its ability to combine the personal and linguistic experimentation should serve as a beacon to all those who mistakenly feel there is a split between self-expression and intellectual pursuits.”

Chad Redden ::	Growing Up Baptist

Sherri Marilena Pauli ::	Translations in Rainstorms on Salt Flats

Megan Kennedy ::	Afraid

Jenni Lord ::	Five paintings

Steve Subrizi ::	Migrating to Portland
	Backstroke

Ben Segal ::	Tell It Again From Your Mouth

Russ Februaryy ::	I Put My Fingers In Your Eyes

Elizabeth Glixman ::	American Cats Are Overweight Studies Suggest
	Why Did Frankee Stein Become A Free Market Capitalist?

Nick Sturm ::	The Fences
	Three erasures

Andrew K. Peterson ::	Language, An Actress
	Steve McQueen’s Lines in The Blob

Rich Ives ::	Anatomy Lesson

Gabrielle DeMarre ::	Stan

Kristen E. Nelson ::	Song of Praise i. Him One
	Song of Praise ii. Him Two
	Song of Praise iii. Him Three
	Yvette

Acquanetta M. Sproule ::	A Nursery Rhyme