Thursday, November 19th, 2009...9:51 pm
mark weber | movement is the key to everything

“Movement is the key to everything,” I over-
heard one of the trainers at the gym say -
amen to that-
I can’t help wondering if
I’m a textbook example of a middle-aged person
endeavoring to retain as much youth as possible
by becoming a gym rat?
my beloved Saul Bellow was a health freak, too
all those gym scenes in his novels
were from personal experience, though, he
was part of the racketball crowd -
I’m not aggressive enough to be interested in
racketball, hell, I’m not aggressive enough
to be driving a car! (if the etiquette
on our highways and byways is indicative of
our national character, then
I’m staying home)
Jacques Barzun says if you want to know about
America, you better learn baseball -
I think I know a lot about America and I don’t
know two things about baseball – our friends
Gary & Betty Jo take us to Isotopes games and I
have a grand old time and I haven’t a clue
what’s going on – (two of my jazz confreres
–Stu MacAskie and Chris Ishee — hold down
the gig with the ballpark organ) -
I learned about America by listening to jazz
and from what a little birdie told me
and from driving
I was the chauffeur for the Willem Breuker Kollektief
when they were in town last month to play at
the Outpost Performance Space and I asked the pianist
Henk de Jonge, who was sitting up front with me
in the van, if drivers in Amsterdam were this rude
and he slammed his fist on the dash and said
they were just as bad and worse, that all over
Europe the drivers drive like maniacs -
“Movement is the key to everything,” like
all the particles shooting around inside an atom -
I learned all about Europe by listening to Karlheinz
Stockhausen, who got away from us just
a few days ago, I’m listening to “Kontakte” as I type
at this end of the poem, in memoriam, his tamtams,
filters, potentiometers, electronic tapes, and orch-
estra instruments, for me his music
was one of the defining things about the 60s
—Mark Weber 30oct&10dec07
From BIG HAMMER No. 12, 2008, Iniquity Press / Vendetta Books. This issue is available by clicking here…
some related articles are listed below:
- mark weber & gerald locklin | zerx chapbook No. 63
- mark weber | hal mckusick and the finger snap of modernism
- mark weber | did you get locked out?
- mark weber | Em6
- mark weber | yoga + painting + jazz + traveling by air
- mark weber | world war two
- mark weber | happy birthday for connie crothers
- mark weber | move to the groove
- mark weber | poetry band | zerx 068
- mark weber | weet anorso
- mark weber | i’ll be go to hell
- mark weber | keeping warm but staying cool
- mark weber | up shit creek
- mark weber | on richard tabnik
- mark weber | tomorrow might be the day we get away from all that | ronald baatz | say a prayer for my dog
- mark weber | something like odysseus
- mark weber | ceremonies aboard the drunken boat
- mark weber | poems and doodles
- mark weber | starch
- mark weber | bip bop de biddly bip de bip de bippitty boo
- mark weber | there’s a drunk up ahead
- mark weber | south for the winter
- mark weber | assembled zen
- mark weber | chased out
- mark weber | words and stories
- mark weber | four poems from new york city
- mark weber | bygone tumbleweeds, tarnation of smoke
- mark weber | gerald lockling | zerx chapbook no. 60
- mark weber | for todd moore’s birthday party
- mark weber & michael pierre vlatkovich | jazz is everything
- fist of may!
- bukowski reads bukowski
- charles bukowski | something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks, and you . . .
- usage of the word fuck
- gil scott-heron | I’m new here
- till the heaven stop’s the rain | for allard
- dave church | drunk radio poems
- dave roskos | iniquity press / vendetta books











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