gas

sounds

2010-09-10T13:51:00.000-07:00

11 albums of Futurist, Dadaist & Surrealist music, sound, and poetry [MP3]: http://is.gd/f3g2k

A Tribute

2010-02-19T08:42:00.000-08:00

David Cassidy:
I think I love you
but--

Howard Zinn

2010-01-29T16:33:00.000-08:00

...wars don’t solve any fundamental problems, and they always poison everybody on both sides. They poison the minds and souls of everybody on both sides. We’re seeing that now in Iraq, where the minds of our soldiers are being poisoned by being an occupying army in a land where they are not wanted. And the results are terrible.

Howard Zinn, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/28/howard_zinn_1922_2010_a_tribute

Buff-Cinci-Oxfluxus

2010-01-11T11:03:00.000-08:00

WORD+SOUND AT BRANDT GALLERY, CLEVELAND
Michael Basinski, L.A. Howe and William R. How
with special guests Fluxmonkey and Frass Accolades
SATURDAY JANUARY 16 8PM SHARP $5 DONATIONS

MICHAEL BASINSKI (left) is the Curator of the Poetry Collection of the University at Buffalo. He has published a batch of books of poetry including All My Eggs are Broken (BlazeVox 2007), Of Venus 93 (Little Scratch Pad 2007) and Welcome to the Alphabet (Red Fox2007). His poems, visual poems, sound works, essays, reviews and such have appeared in magazines from Poetry and the Village Voice to fhole and the Wormwood Review. He regularly performs with his ensemble, BuffFluxus, wherever art administrators will allow. Don't miss him, he's 59, and his bags are packed.

L.A. HOWE (center) is a writer, artist, and editor who lives and works in Cincinnati. She is the author of the chapbook, Entropic Easter (Little Scratchpad Books), which is now out of print. She is a co-founder of Slack Buddha Press, co-editing Slack Buddha’s La Perruque series of chapbooks, which publishes the work of contemporary practitioners from the U.S. and the U.K., including poetry, prose, performance texts, and verbo-visual works. Also a bookbinder, Howe crafts artist’s and writer’s journals to sell at bookfairs and online.

WILLIAM R. HOWE (right) is a poet, book artist, publisher, editor, performance artist, and visual artist. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Miami University of Ohio. His work has appeared in Plantarchy, Mirage #4/Period(ical), FerrumWheel, The Gig, and others. His most recent book is translanations one (BlazeVox 2009). He runs the Putitupor Broadside series, and he and his wife, L.A. Howe, edit Slack Buddha Press. His second full-length collection Kid Stippler & the Sty-elf is forthcoming in Spring/Winter 2010 from Slack Buddha. His third collection Sixes & Eights will appear with white print inc in 2010.

http://www.pluggedincleveland.com/events/view.cgi?num=34921

Delirious Hem

2009-12-09T07:47:00.000-08:00

This is a project worth following, and if they keep to their calendar an audio poem by Cathy Wagner should be put up sometime today: http://www.delirioushem.blogspot.com/

Whiteprintinc Press Benefit Cleveland 11/15

2009-11-09T11:44:00.000-08:00

POETS FROM DETROIT AT BRANDT GALLERY

A BENEFIT FOR WHITEPRINTINC PRESS
MIRINDA FLEENARY || JAMES E HART III || ANITA SCHMALTZ
WITH CARMEN TRACEY & MUSIC BY JOSE LUNA & TEMPLE FUGATE

SUNDAY NOVEMBER 15 || 1028 KENILWORTH AVE CLEVE OH
7PM SHARP $5 DONATIONS

Mirinda Fleenary is 22 years old and currently resides in Detroit where she makes art. She is working on her fifth collection of poems. She received the Francis Barrett Creative Writing Award (2008) and The Larry Colter Poetry Prize (2007, 2008). Her work is forthcoming (invisibles) from white print inc.

James Hart III lives in southwest Detroit. Currently he has published two manuscripts: the watchable book, Weightless Language Press (2003) and white holes, Marick (2006). Forthcoming, high-coup Slack Buddha Press, Spring (2010). His work has appeared in Dispatch, Door Jamb Press, Past Tents Press on line anthology, and The Cafe Review (ME). He is the director and editor of white print inc, a new avant-garde Detroit press dedicated to emerging and unknown writers, as well as the Cass Corridor history. He curates The Woodward-Line series, currently Detroit’s only independant national venue. He has corresponded with Jacques Derrida, who expressed great interest in his work.

Anita Schmaltz is an artist, writer, photographer, musician and teacher. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the College for Creative Studies and a Masters of Creative Writing degree from Wayne State University. She’s written hundreds of articles and reviews about the arts for the Metro Times. Since 2000, she’s been a creative writing teacher through InsideOut Literary Arts Organization. A founding member of the band Ass, Anita’s currently involved with the music project In Your Hand. She lives in Royal Oak, Michigan.

http://www.whiteprintinc.com/
http://brandtgallery.org/

Intercollegiate Athletic Guide

2009-10-29T08:57:00.000-07:00

The Rugby Player

And here is another name, a football name
something else like a tough nickname
a brown suit and slender tie

The Coxswain

Boats are quoted and ships italicized

The Golfer

Fair Isle sweaters and pea coats are function
not fashion again

The Lacrosse Player

No, never mind him
Ben Sherman jackets match Fred Perry shoes
Mohawks and leather on the other side

The Ballplayer

or a film about him
or the poster outside the theater

The Swimmer

Seen here in the convex mirror
backwards
around the corner

The Fencer

Stage combat certification
looks good on a resume

The Wrestler

With another name, wear a tuxedo
or a linen shirt and summer shoes
Here, center ring, stained glass

In the Money (2)

2009-10-20T06:25:00.000-07:00

Symptomatic Urn

Romantic Stumpy

Impact Yum Snort

Company Sir Mutt

Cramp Unity Most

In the Money

2009-10-20T05:42:00.000-07:00

Clans Mash God

Cash Mans Gold

Glad Hams Cons

Scam Slang Doh

Hang Mass Cold

Sand Gal Schmo

Cads Sham Long

Clams Gash Nod

Oxford Poetics Group

2009-10-10T18:07:00.000-07:00

we shall meet at 7:30pm THIS wednesday (but NOT the following week)

i was half-asleep last week, but vaguely remember something about bringing in extra-textual material to discuss in relation to poetics, with a (preferrably short) film screening as well (this might be a little awkward on our wee TV monitor) -- this should also leave us time to share a couple of our own or others' poems

OH, AND: I desperately need creative types -- writers, though especially artists and graphic designers -- to help out with some exciting forthcoming activist events. I'm currently trying to bring both the lovely beehivecollective.org and the hilarious Yes Men to campus over the next few months. any help always appreciated

MWAH!

musicality

2009-10-10T13:48:00.000-07:00

This is for Keith mostly, will you see it? I saw your Attention Span 2009 post about von Hallberg -- whose lyric book I haven't yet read --

"Musicality authenticates poetry, a crucial function in a discourse that strains against social conventions." Von Hallberg links poetry or rather an “orphic tradition” with structures of belief that persist beyond irony and skepticism in a secular culture

OK, musicality. Because of the Rhetoric of Song class I was thinking about lyric vs. song. A duh difference between lyric and song is that songs are performed out loud and a performer and a listener are both present (epos, in Frye's terms). A lyric poem even if spoken aloud doesn't call into being the resonant frequencies associated with music. And of course it's not necessarily performative (calm down cris, I mean performative very narrowly here) though it figures or implies performance.

I want to connect the silencing of the literally performative aspect (musical) aspect of song with the paronomasia of lyric. Of course lyric *figures* the situation of song, but I mean something more literal, to do with the creative process: that when music goes silent and the potential for song is realized silently, maybe that's where we get paronomasia. The resonant energies that would have occupied musical frequencies are diverted into other sonic and semantic registers.

Reductive, and not applicable to all lyric, and totally dreamy speculation --

revenge of the poetics group !

2009-10-04T20:24:00.001-07:00

regular and future poetics group participants!

we will meet at my apartment this wednesday

at 7pm-ish -- methinks it will be groovalicious

note:-- for invite-only membership to the sunday-night Dandy Group
please demonstrate your abilities (red wine consumption, cigarillos,
purple velvet jacket, long swishy-girl hair, foppish walk w/ cane, etc.

Joint Effort!

2009-10-02T16:37:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey:

I’m left thinking about Obama. And Glen Beck. And Reagan. And Clinton. And Hitler. Would you prefer Jefferson? I’m thinking of him too… Walker (paraphrasing Hesiod) suggests the world of “rhetoric” breaks into two clear worlds: in short, the rhetoric of art and the rhetoric of business/politics. That rhetoric (or whatever word will eventually become “rhetoric”) is a “pyschagoogic art” of enthralling the given audience and turning aside listeners’ minds. Literally, taking control of their thoughts and bending them to the task at hand, be it poetry or policy. That the Arts would originally be considered the “secondary” half of the two is not surprising. However, the deduction that the most-successful rhetoric of politics and business actually springs from this “secondary art” is quite interesting to me as a writer and as a teacher and as a citizen, and I think Walker and company are on to something quite empowering here. Back to Obama. He is our President because he’s a good speaker. Period. That’s it. Politics aside, what separated him from that pack and captured the imagination and support of so many a year ago was his ability to speak well. To share his vision in a way that was comprehensible to the “lore and language” (epos) of his mass audiences and supported by the “rhythmic formulae” (epea) of a sweeter discourse clearly found within our churches, streets and cultures. Our ears, suggests Walker, are trained to appreciate these “rhythms” and devices through church, ceremony, art. An epideictic code of an almost Jungian nature that the audience (must never forget the audience) shares collectively. To this, does the master speaker address.

I should just get onto my question: What rhetorical practices that we’ve encountered so far this year in song appear in your favorite “practitioner of pragmatika?” I’ve had a ball the last few days watching Obama speak (on Iran) and Beck rant on Fox. I’ve thought about the best salespersons I’ve ever worked with in the business world. I’ve thought about the “best” teacher I ever had and why... How did he speak? Question #1: What in the language of these practical speakers is similar to the rhetorical devices found in song? From repetition and cadence to expletives and hyperbaton, and everything in between. These devices are learned by the audience from ART, from the poetry of five thousand years of song and story. If Wallace speaks true, we’ll find these same devices in the next speech by your favorite (and least favorite) politician. And if, indeed, the Muses have blessed us with the gift of rhetoric to foster peace and justice on Earth, our very best leaders will those who have assimilated the very best practices of art (rather than the detached “rhetoric”propsed by Aristotle and Socrates). Question #2: As writers and educators and citizens, what rhetorical devices might we learn for ourselves and pass on to the next generation that are lifted from directly from the “bards” of so long ago and today?

Meg/Woog:

As I read through Walker's essay I couldn't help but focus in on the sophist as he defines (if they can at all be defined fully) one. A "...professional intellectual, a 'wiseman,' 'sage,' or the possesor , performer, and a professor of some special skill...The sophist might, perhaps, even be a 'wizard'..." (37). This is because they seemed to translate as poets, in that a poet must be some type of wizard to pull the audience into the text/performance with grace. I use the word pull because I am imagining now a ribbon in the wind that a speaker must extend to the audience in order to reach them. The audience might not always be able to catch the ribbon (meaning the imagery or every word spoken) but that the image/text/performance is ever present, dancing before them. The subject matter in poetry can be stronger or more engaging when it dangles in from an audience, leads them to or through a story. This is most clear in poems such as Edmund Spenser's "Aegloga Quarta" and Shakespeare's "It Was a Lover and His Lass" where the story seems whimsical, fluid, song-like. And, of course these are song-like, as Spenser has a, sort-of duet with these two voices talking back and forth to one another. And as Shakespeare writes with refrain using "with a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino" Sophists are poets in the sense that they bridge the gap, or more importantly, overlap the epideictic and pragmatic speech. So, to the question. If poets like Blake, Spenser, and Donne are capable of creating poems that are "timeless," in the sense in that they "embody an ancient, ancestral wisdom," (23) speaking as "sages," how then, can modern poets such as Langston Hughes or Geoffrey Hill immortalize their poems? Are they steeped in the language of the present and is that language song-like enough to keep us from forgetting it or its importance/success as a "timeless" art? P.S. Does anyone still have the Lip Gloss song in their head? Man, I can't stop singing/humming it.

Regionalism in Practice: Lessons from Architecture

2009-09-29T14:01:00.000-07:00

a Plum Academy Forum
at SPACES Gallery, Cleveland OH
Tuesdays October 6, 13 & 20 6:30pm

What would it mean to paint a uniquely Cleveland painting, construct a uniquely Great Lakes installation piece, write a uniquely Midwest poem, compose a uniquely Rust Belt song or dance? What makes these regions different from any other regions of the world, and how does that something get expressed or translated into art? Does it happen at the level of themes, content, materials, shapes, forms, or something else? As it turns out, architectural theory has a well-developed body of writing on what constitutes regionalism in building design and construction. Our job in this forum will be to study and discuss the basic ideas in architectural regionalism, and then determine the extent to which these ideas can be applied to other forms or creative practices. Please note: this forum is NOT about architecture per se; we are testing specific architectural theory as it applies to other creative practices.

facebook event page
plum academy page

A night of Slack Buddha Press poets

2009-09-29T13:48:00.000-07:00

The Woodward Line presents:

A night of Slack Buddha Press poets
featuring William Howe, L.A. Howe and Tom Orange
Wednesday October 21, 7 PM
Scarab Club 217 E. Farnsworth (at John R.)
Detroit, Michigan
Admission is free

healthcare hits close to home

2009-09-26T13:41:00.000-07:00

"A 22-year-old woman from Oxford, Ohio, died from swine flu on Wednesday. Kimberly Young graduated from Miami University in December and continued to live in Oxford, Ohio, within Minority Leader John Boehner’s congressional distrct. Reports now indicate that after initially getting sick, Young put off treatment because she was uninsured..."

full story at thinkprogress.org

I'm Conducting Research

2009-09-23T05:49:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Brett for mentioning ToxicPoetry.com. I'm actually, currently attempting to conduct some research on the site (for the purpose of bringing in a bit of funding for my endeavor). If you are a fan of the site or if you have thoughts about it, I'd love to do some informal chat interviews to gather some info. I've also created a one-page e-mail survey. If you are interested, give me an e-mail at editors@toxicpoetry.com

Wednesday Night Poetics Discussion

2009-09-14T18:45:00.000-07:00

For those of you whose email address I don't have:

This is just a reminder that we're planning on meeting at Mark's apartment Wednesday night, around 7:30.

Come, bring something to drink if you like, and remember that last time we discussed bringing an example of what you DO NOT want to be doing with your verse--

I believe we're still planning on discussing the poems that Meghan sent around, so bring your copies of those along as well.

And: I'm not sure if Jade ever posted a link to his new online poetry magazine Toxic Poetry, so if you haven't checked it out, follow the link. (Hope that's alright, Jade)

Gertrude Stein

2009-09-09T10:19:00.000-07:00

1945, post-war, from The GI's

That evening I went over to talk to the soldiers, and to hear what they had to say, we all got very excited, Sergeant Santiani who had asked me to come complained that I confused the minds of his men but why shouldn't their minds be confused, gracious goodness, are we going to be like the Germans, only believe in the Aryans that is our own race, a mixed race if you like but all having the same point of view. I got very angry with them, they admitted they liked the Germans better than the other Europeans. Of course you do, I said, they flatter you and they obey you, when the other countries don't like you and say so, and personally you have not been awfully ready to meet them halfway, well naturally if they don't like you they show it, the Germans don't like you but they flatter you, doggone it, I said I bet you Fourth of July they will all be putting up our flag, and all you big babies will just be flattered to death, literally to death, I said bitterly because you will have to fight again. Well said one of them after all we are on top. Yes I said and is there any spot on earth more dangerous than on top. You don't like the Latins, or the Arabs or the Wops, or the British, well don't you forget a country can't live without friends, I want you all to get to know other countries so that you can be friends, make a little effort, try to find out what it is all about. We all got very excited, they passed me cognac, but I don't drink so they found me some grapefruit juice, and they patted me and sat me down, and there it all was.

The Circle Makers

2009-09-03T14:59:00.000-07:00

A newish poem, with slight revisions since some saw it in workshop. Cuts, a few new line breaks.

Inspired somewhat by Wallace Stevens and his "priest of the invisible" quote. Still playing with a title-- originally it was "The Circle Game" until I realized I ripped it off from Margaret Atwood.

The Circle Makers

I am drawing circles around
what cannot be drawn—tighter
& tighter, until only a thin line
defines the unknown.

& I have been squatting at the edge
of each, attempting to sound
gray—never to strike firm earth but
plumbing depth all the same.

Once, I saw someone drawing circles
wider than I imagined possible—so wide
they encompassed themselves. In the shallows,
they were on their bellies, drowning in what
they refused to know.

cheek in toronto

2009-08-25T11:52:00.000-07:00

Aug.29 in Toronto:

A poetry/sound/multimedia performance--

*cris cheek *(London/US)
+ *Barnyard Drama *[Christine Duncan/Jean Martin] (Toronto)

8pm, at
Somewhere There
Live Creative Music in Toronto
340 Dufferin Street - one block South of Queen Street
** entrance from Melbourne Ave. **
www.somewherethere.org

$8 cover, or free admission if you purchase cris's new book *part: short
life housing *(specially priced for this event at $16!)

*ABOUT CRIS CHEEK: *cris cheek is a sound artist, poet, photographer,
mixed-media practitioner and interdisciplinary performer, whose works have
been commissioned and shown locally and trans-locally, in multiple versions
using diverse media for their production and circulation. Born in London in
1955, he lived and worked there until the early 1990s, a performance writer
very much a part of what was going on with poetry in that capital city. His
musical collaborations include Slant (a trio with Phillip Jeck and Sianed
Jones) and Garam Masala; he also collaborated in 1999-2007 with Kirsten
Lavers on the cross-disciplinary project Things Not Worth Keeping (
www.thingsnotworthkeeping.com) . He currently lives in the southwest Ohio
River Valley.

cris's most recent book is *part: short life housing *(Toronto: The Gig,
2009), a collection of six texts from the 1980s and 1990s, including
canning town chronicles, a scathing set of verbal accretions that emerged
from the wreckage of the Thatcher era; and f o g s a series of
typestracts quarried from verbal improvisations recorded during outdoor
walks in densely foggy weather.

For more info contact:

Nate Dorward
109 Hounslow Ave., North York, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
nate.dorward@gmail.com - 416 221 6865

translanations one

2009-08-23T10:25:00.000-07:00

Great news: Bill Howe's book is out: http://www.blazevox.org/bk-bh2.htm

The site links to Amazon, which lists the book as ready to ship. Get on the boat, and take your lifejacket.

Ride to Cinci on Thursday

2009-08-11T19:05:00.000-07:00

Hey All,

If anyone is interested in a ride down to Cincinnati on Thursday for the reading at CCAC, I'm driving and will probably leave Oxford around 5:40ish. (I have't looked to see where in Cincinnati it is, but I'm guessing that's enough time.)

I have room for four others, so email or call if you'd like a ride.

strickland.brett@gmail.com

419-270-7467

2009-07-23T12:44:00.000-07:00

This from Sandra Doller at 1913
http://www.journal1913.org/home.html

"& psst. i'm starting a reviews bloggy thing via 1913 if your students have any desire to write some wacky po or non-po reviews...wld love to have someone write on R Wolff's newest & how bout a review of yr 4 recent chappies eh? anyone in mind for such tasks, do send em my way..."

I wd rather yall not review anything of mine but do send something to her

she's at
1913press (..at..) gmail (dot) com

Ode to Eczema

2009-07-23T07:12:00.001-07:00

it puts the lotion on its skin
& then it gets the hose again!

2009-07-17T13:49:00.000-07:00

"2ND ANNUAL FESTIVAL OF WIERD [sic] MUSIC"
Indian Meadows Campground
Pentress, WV
August 14, 15, 16 2009
featuring many ohio musicians and sound artists including emeralds, aaron dilloway, jason zeh, ryan jewel, tusco terror, skin graft, bee mask, and fluxmonkey aka bbob drake.

Linking Ohio by rail

2009-07-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

Communities of all sizes across the state are touting their best assets in hopes of being chosen as one of the stops for the proposed passenger rail line from Cleveland to Cincinnati. [...]

As the dream of passenger rail between Cleveland and Cincinnati moves closer to reality -- with officials seeking up to $400 million in federal stimulus money and Amtrak undertaking a study -- communities along the line are lobbying for a stop. It even has spawned competition in parts of the state. [...]

Community leaders say the service would bring economic development, tourism and a chance to recapture the time when passenger rail was a primary form of transportation in the state. Cross-state service ended in 1971. [...]

Middletown City Manager Judy Gilleland said her community is perfect for a train station.

"We are centrally located in the middle of Dayton and Cincinnati," she said. She added that a station would attract business and pleasure travelers and Miami University students. The city has a bus system and a regional airport and is close to Interstate 75, she said.

full story here.

A Dream in Day

2009-07-14T10:21:00.000-07:00

Jessica and Tony call it quits.
I’d see they’d go from fight to fight.
The mountains had butterflies on their first date,
wanting to puke into a cup holder.
It took forever to put together an outfit,
and all those keys. When he tried leaning
Over the table free from thought,
white lions never dated a person so simple.

Eleanor Antin's 100 Boots

2009-07-08T07:45:00.000-07:00

"100 Boots Go East"

Taken on my birthday.

Can also be seen on the cover of Rae Armantrout's Up to Speed.

See more of the series: http://www.barbarakrakowgallery.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/6198

Local food and an historic avant garde

2009-07-01T08:35:00.000-07:00

This past Sunday's Plain Dealer contained two pieces of particular, and for me not unrelated, interest.

First, a nice little feature on City Fresh, the farm share coop i've been working with the past few months. City Fresh is a CSA (community-supported argiculture) co-op: several times a week a truck that runs on vegetable oil makes the rounds of organic farms in nearby Summit and Portage counties buying available produce and bringing it back to various distribution points throughout the city, where shareholders have placed advance orders for whatever the farms have available that week. This is rare among CSAs, which usually require shareholders to purchase an entire season's worth of produce in advance, usually from a single farm provider. Our weekly shares are also priced on a two-tier system so that those who can afford it subsidize those who otherwise couldn't.

Second, a backgrounder on the Kokoon Arts Klub of Cleveland, which promoted experimental arts dance and lifestyle even before the famous 1913 Armory show in New York City. Founded mostly by disgruntled German lithographers who were bored with commercial art (particularly movie posters coming out of Cleveland's then-major lithography industry), the KAK held an annual "Bal Masque" or fundraising soiree that featured some rather outlandish for-the-time attractions. But they were also committed to the kinds of innovate arts emerging elsewhere to the local Clevleand audience. The Klub's history and their work are featured in an exhibit running though March 2010 at the Kent State University Museum.

A critique of growth

2009-07-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

...by default? Sometimes it's important to make a virtue of necessity; from Plain Dealer Reporter Robert L. Smith:

The U.S. Census Bureau will announce today that Cleveland lost nearly 10 percent of its population this decade, the fastest rate of decline of any major American city except New Orleans, which weathered a hurricane and is bouncing back.[...]

Across Ohio, two out of three villages and cities have lost population since 2000. The exodus is most pronounced in the major cities. Among Ohio's 10 largest cities, seven lost population this decade, none more than Cleveland.[...]

Three major Ohio cities likely will celebrate the 2010 census. Both Cincinnati and Columbus grew this decade, Columbus by a state-leading 41,879 people. But the biggest surprise may be Lorain. Hard hit by factory closings, Ohio's 10th-largest city saw its population climb by about 1,500 people this decade. The North Coast Building Industry Association credits home building on the city's west side that borders Amherst.

Factory closings and job losses are emptying cities, experts say, but sprawl is also a powerful force. Three of Ohio's 10 fastest growing cities are the far western suburbs of Avon, Avon Lake and North Ridgeville. [Where I just moved from!]

Meanwhile, eight of Ohio's 10 fastest shrinking cities are Cleveland inner-ring suburbs. Brooklyn, Lakewood, Fairview Park, University Heights, Shaker Heights, Euclid, South Euclid and East Cleveland and all lost 10 percent or more of their populations this decade.

Full story here.

work in progress

2009-06-26T07:45:00.000-07:00

(today's draft, which could disappear very soon depending on x and y and z--Keith)

The King of Pop

“Michael Jackson showed me that you can actually see the beat.”

P. Diddy

You can see the beat, all right,
though it’s better to feel it,
even if we’re talking moonwalk.
You can slow it to a crawl
with Demerol. You can tour
with Bubbles the chimp and name
your children Prince or Blanket.
You can cut your own nose off
and sell it to a sheik. It’s not enough.

There’s always a little more
if the show goes on, as it must.
There’s the history of racism,
for instance. If God exists
so does P.T. Barnum. Peter Pan.
You wouldn’t know it by the numbers
but death is white, very white.
God bless you Michael, big as Elvis.
God bless America, and good night.

two birthday poems

2009-06-25T21:05:00.000-07:00

hey all, a couple occasional poems, kind of Englishy (in my mind anyway). The second is a swerve on Halsey's style. PM often wears a black t-shirt.

DREAM OF THE BLACK T-SHIRT
For P. Manson’s birthday

The t-shirt says: “I do not exist. I am not stainable.”
The soil has smutched it. Have you tasted the bag
of the bee? Oh so dark, so sweet is he,
and I am...making conversation easily with Peter Manson,
like a little nasturtium nasty tertiary shtum; he responds nodding
like son of flower whose poem was blown in on a hot rail,
a didact frown or flounce he metaguarded. I dream-said,
“If you cut her, you can drink Gala-Tea,” meaning poetry,
because she is “lovely and alive,” to turn wave-function
into wire fence and undulate the terms.

FORMING CONTENT
For A. Halsey’s birthday

A letter arrives, he sends it packing
tape worm uses up best syllabub
in gay misrule. Scylla breaks down
syllables and morphemes—
Ah, foam and contrail! Fumetime.

Allen Ginsberg Sings William Blake

2009-06-22T11:55:00.000-07:00

from ubuweb: Allen Ginsberg Sings William Blake (1969) [MP3] - Recorded New York, December 15, 1969 Songs of Innocence... http://tumblr.com/xp224b0v6

Fun stuff.

A Test of Bioregional Knowledge

2009-06-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

What soil series are you standing on?
When was the last time a fire burned your area?
Name five native edible plants in your region and their seasons of availability.
From what direction do winter storms generally come in your region?
Where does your garbage go?
How long is the growing season where you live?
Name five grasses in your area. Are any of them native?
Name five resident and five migratory birds in your area.
What primary geological event or processes influenced the land from where you live?
What species have become extinct in your area?
What are the major plant associations in your region?

from CoEvolution Quarterly 32 (Winter 1981-82), quoted in David Orr, Ecological Literacy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), page 137.

reviews

2009-06-14T13:05:00.000-07:00

One of you 651 students has already had a review accepted for publication (I will reveal the party in question if I get permission) -- yay! send em on out, the rest of you, if you haven't already.

THE PARIS HILTON

2009-06-14T12:59:00.000-07:00

Keith Tuma's new THE PARIS HILTON is out from Critical Documents --http://plantarchy.us/paris.html. Keith read some of these at the evening thingy at cris's in late spring -- sharp sharp funny stuff -- go get!

Recommended Niedecker

2009-06-12T13:15:00.000-07:00

Paean to Place BY LORINE NIEDECKER

excellent

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=182885

New Pudding and More

2009-06-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

Thought you all should know that cris cheek's book part: short life housing is now in the world. Information about ordering it directly from the publisher--a better option than Small Press Distribution in this case-- can be found here: http://www.ndorward.com/blog/

You really ought to have this book. Buy a copy and a second for your landlord.

While you're at it, pick up a copy of the latest Miami University Press poetry book, Frederick Goodwin's Virgil's Cow, which you can buy from Small Press Distribution here: http://www.spdbooks.org/Search/Default.aspx?SearchTerm=virgil's+cow

or via the Miami University Press link to Pathway: http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/mupress/

Follow-up from PPN

2009-06-08T09:29:00.000-07:00

from Cori C: "Since I'm just starting out, I'm soliciting most of [the reviews] for the Oct/Nov, and just don't have much room! But perhaps in the future? Oh and if you look at the Books Received link on the PP site (http://poetryproject.org/resources/books-received), you'll see what we've got. They can always shoot me an email." (Write me & I'll send you her address.)

Submitting reviews

2009-06-08T09:14:00.000-07:00

This is for the grad workshop -- for all of yall that wrote reviews of poetry books last semester --

Here are some places to try sending your revised reviews. It's honestly not impossible to imagine you guys being published in these places. Read some sample reviews and get a sense of the style and aesthetic and standard length before you send, and check over any guidelines. Anyone want to add some other review venues?

Rain Taxi, all-review magazine edited by Eric Lorberer. 500-word reviews. See guidelines.

Boston Review -- see submission guidelines. Microreviews are probably what you should try for with BR rather than the bigger essay-reviews; they're 300-350 words long. Sample microreview.

Galatea Resurrects, edited by Eileen Tabios. See guidelines. Contact Eileen by emailing her or commenting on the top post. Also scan the list below the guidelines to see whether there's anything there you'd like to review.

Jacket, edited by John Tranter. See guidelines. The home page says: "If you’d like to submit a review, article or interview, send a half-page synopsis with your return email address to "

Poetry Project Newsletter: I have written to Corina Copp, who's now editing reviews there, to ask about your submitting there. Will get back to you.

Manifest

2009-06-07T19:03:00.000-07:00

“In geology, subduction is the process
…at convergent boundaries…
one tectonic plate moves
under another”(Wikipedia)

Recording Earthquakes

The trench forms volcanoes above
the subduction and water sweats out.

I think behind the face which called
from Japan (and brought back the coasters).

I told her love can interfere
where it’s hot; then injury and absence

are igneous corridors of wronged heat
extending down trenches--no dopamine.

--------

"Lorenz…developed…fixed action patterns….
a fixed action pattern is…instinctive…
indivisible …and runs to completion…
invariant and…produced by
a neural network…in response to…
(a)sign stimulus…from one individual
to another" (Wikipedia)

It’s not how you do it it's what you do,
because how is what.
--------

War Chest
(Inner Demons)

Inner demons unify a poet’s target enemy,
And guerrilla work is work done on what’s left,
Of the cheating, awkwardness, and lethargy.
New utterance changes our fortitude into
A trembling adrenaline of being.
The age of despair is a loosening void
Now renewed towards a more current seeing.
And all that’s uncanny from old sublimations
Is now in a spoil-chest from an earlier war,
all that commotion from un-imprinting
oppressive tongues and their hallowed lore.
It’s a difficult age minus aged that’s become,
which leaves little room for the sum of before.

The Memorial

She no longer talks of how he refused
her father's help with the building a fire.
An arrow arcs then lingers below
water in its wake: the fire
internment.
Always quieting, a return that's different:
no bedsores, no womb swish, no sea lights at the synapse;
and smells electrical soften me
over to some sort of dimming; more dimming.

The failures of interdisciplinarity

2009-06-06T23:01:00.000-07:00

or, Why ecocompositionists are IMHO missing the boat (in their own words):

Many of us working in ecocomposition have moved to this area of study through careers in composition studies. That is to say, ecocompositionists are, for the most part, compositionists who have brought their concerns for environmental protection and ecological literacy to composition classrooms and composition research. We have yet to identify the ecologist whose interest in writing has led him or her to ecocomposition.
--Sidney I. Dobrin and Christian R. Weissner, Natural Discourse: Towards Ecocomposition (SUNY Press 2002), page 58.

True interdisciplinarity reciprocates!

2009-06-01T18:23:00.000-07:00

Warren Ellis on pretentiousness:
'We're deathly afraid of that stabbing word "pretentious," the word that students use to curse each other's ambition. It's a young person's word, a shortcut-to-thinking word.

I'm a big fan of pretension. It means "an aspiration or intention that may or may not reach fulfillment." It doesn't mean failing upward. It means trying to exceed your grasp. Which is how things grow.'

Publishing big and small

2009-06-01T13:15:00.000-07:00

In "The Long Goodbye? The Book Business and its Woes," Elisabeth Sifton gives a compelling account of the book industry's accelerated demise, one that makes me wonder how small press poetry has responded and will respond in the short-to-medium run.

Herself a senior VP at FS&G, Sifton writes as a bibliophile who nevertheless spares no stern gaze upon her own industry; she is no technophobe but also clearly gets that we are subject to our technologies, and that change to the human species is being exacted in our move from print to screen and beyond:

for centuries books have been intimately woven into our
sense of ourselves, into the means by which we find out
who we are and who we want to be.... Books have had a 
kind of spooky power, embedded as they are in the very 
structures of learning, commerce and culture by which 
we  have absorbed, stored and transmitted information, 
opinion, art and wisdom.

She recounts the consolidation and increasing monopolization of the book industry dating back to the 1960s, the more recently manifested "truly vast corporate fecklessness, which has brought us a world-historical economic meltdown that dwarfs everything," and the wretched business models with which mainstream publishers have limped along even before the now imminent collapse of print journalism.

Here I want only to stress that the loss of so many 
book-review pages nationwide is crippling all aspects 
of  our literary life. And I mean all. Book news and 
criticism  were fundamental to the old model of book 
publishing and  to the education of writers; Internet 
coverage of books, much of it witty and interesting, 
does not begin to compensate for their loss.

And here I start to wonder how divergent our small press publishing practices really are. Surely, efforts by Rain Taxi, the Poetry Project Newsletter and the online Galatea Resurrects notwithstanding, our indy reviewing practices are also suffering -- as some 32 poets and critics (including yours truly) discussed in a recent online roundtable.

Sifton then points to the sheer glut of published product, pointing out how "Every week the trade bulletins report hundreds of new books being signed up, sometimes for absurd amounts of money, by dozens of publishers." Clearly money is rarely if ever at issue in the small press world, but one wonders what the stats would look like if all the small press product being published below the radar of the trade journals were included! "Self-indulgent excess doesn't go away," Sifton continues. "This exorbitance in the book sector, as in the gigantic financial and housing sectors, has been weakening our culture for decades." And again I can't help thinking, while her analogies to finance and housing are probably accurate in some respects but tenuous in most, that our alternative, avant-garde, experimental, innovative and non-mainstream publishing practices ought not even draw the remotest parallels to these rapacious megacorporate blunders.

Sifton goes on to the traditional gruntwork of a mainstream publisher (sexism duly noted, perhaps intentional on her part):

the editorial and advocacy work his staff did on behalf
of the nascent books, building an audience for them, 
preparing the ground; the copy-editing, proofreading 
and legal checks; the typographical designs devised 
and manufacturing quality achieved; the efforts made 
to get attention paid to, and sales consummated of, 
books that might otherwise go unnoticed in the 
noisy, trivializing, inattentive world where readers 
live.

Who among our small press publishers would refuse the same diligence (and relish a paid support staff) for similar notice from that small market segment of "the noisy, trivilizing, inattentive world" otherwise known as the national or even international small press poetry audience?

When her history of the book industry's ongoing demise arrives at the present, Sifton continues to pose interesting questions even if her outlook remains bleak at best:

In this dystopia, one can scarcely get attention paid
to new books except those that fit in with the flora and 
fauna already found there. True, you can easily reach 
niche audiences and specialty communities for your 
oh-so-unique book, but what of the general culture? 
How is your book being read? And in what manner might 
you try--say, ten years from now--to write something 
new? How will you know if it's any good? How will it 
become known? Will it be a book?

But the bleakness of her outlook is predicated on some assumptions I do not share: that widespread attention to our work is not only desirable but necessary, that "niche audiences and specialty communities" are somehow less desirable in and for themselves than some presence in "the general culture" (whatever that is), that values and judgments of quality are best derived from sources (presumably "the general culture") outside the locality or the region of production and consumption, that notoriety is important, and that writing is somehow contingent upon and even exclusive to the form of the book.

I am most recently compelled by Lewis Mumford's 1967 call for efforts "that have been initiated by animated individual minds, small groups, and local communities nibbling at the edges of the power structure by breaking routines and defying regulations. Such an attack seeks, not to capture the citadel of power, but to withdraw from it and quietly paralyse it."

2009-05-31T19:07:00.001-07:00

back in our minds (again)

there was a word here
last resort
portent
'portant as it was
my gosh
build your source on the bauble of rice
in a plaxo-taxic marriage vow
uncleplasty
more on, that later

his own lights on means mild feathers
marry me boychik
don't force my synapse
barge again and again
i lil'
i's lil' a lil'
muh muh muh muh mumm
there was a word here
repeat ad naughtium

An awkward song draft from the Caliche Poems

2009-05-30T18:26:00.000-07:00

The Vertebrate Shuffle: or Mule Grinder’s Song

out on the Llano

short faced Arctodos simus

great shelled Geochelone

and teated Adelobasileus cromptoni

are doing it

Dicynodants and Aetosaurs

dancing in our dreams

Xenacanthus moorai — Leptostyrax macrorhiza

didn’t have’em and couldn’t do it

Creccoides osbornii

had ‘em but didn’t

while Capromeryx minimus was dainty

and good at it

the vertebrate shuffle

all the kids are doin’ it

all over the Llano

from the Pliocene to the Triassic

from the Cretaceous to the Pleistocene

come on now and do the shuffle

Borophages diversidens — Colognathus obscuras

Paleorhinus scurriensis — Tecovasuchus chaterjeei

Malerisaurus longstoni — Leptosuchus crosbiensis

sediment n’ effluvium

all softly fossilized

Paleorhinus bransoni — Koskinonodon prefectus

Rileymilleru cosgriffi — Rutiodon megalodon

Trilophosaurus buettneri — Latiscopus disjunctus

all hoofing the shuffle

Turseodus dolorensis — Hemicalypterus

don’t got ‘em and don’t do it

Canis lepophagus

crepuscular or not

ate what it wanted

while squadrons of Platygonus bicalcaratus

did it in the brush

the vertebrate shuffle

all the kids are doin’ it

all over the Llano

from Muleshoe to Slaton

from Hale Center to Slide

come on now and do the shuffle

Palo Duro Canyon

Adobe Walls

Quita Que

White River

the Little Tule

Llano Dogtown Fork

it’s gonna be a vertebrate party tonight

Pachygenelus milleri

Adelobasileus cromptoni

Colognathus obscurus

Libognathus sheddi

Malerisaurus langstini

they are all vertebrates

and they’re doing it in Texas

Residents vs. inhabitants

2009-05-29T09:58:00.000-07:00

"To a great extent, formal education now prepares its graduates to reside, not to dwell. The difference is important. The resident is a temporary and rootless occupant who mostly needs to know where the banks and stores are in order to plug in. The inhabitant and a particular habitat cannot be separated without doing violence to both. The sum total of violence wrought by people who do not know who they are because they do not know where they are is the global environmental crisis. To reside is to live as a transient and as a stranger to one's place, and inevitably to some part of the self. The inhabitant and place mutually shape each other. Residents, shaped by outside forces, become merely 'consumers' supplied by invisible networks that damage their places and those of others. The inhabitant and the local community are parts of a system that meets real needs for food, materials, economic support, and sociability. The resident's world, on the contrary, is a complicated system that defies order, logic, and control. The inhabitant is part of a complex order that strives for harmony between human demands and ecological processes. The resident lives in a constant blizzard of possibilities engineered by other residents. The life of the inhabitant is governed by the boundaries of sufficiency, organic harmony, and by the discipline of paying attention to minute particulars. For the resident, order begins from the top and proceeds downward as law and policy. For the inhabitant, order begins with the self and proceeds outward. Knowledge for the resident is theoretical and abstract, akin to training. For inhabitants, knowledge in the art of living aims toward wholeness. Those who dwell can only be skeptical of those who talk about being global citizens before they have attended to the minute particulars of living well in their place." -- David Orr, Ecological Literacy (1992) [article version]

Afield close by

2009-05-29T06:39:00.000-07:00

Tyrone Williams interviewed by Brenda Iijima

On bioregionalism

2009-05-28T19:04:00.000-07:00

"We must create in every region people who will be accustomed, from school onward, to humanist attitudes, co-operative methods, rational controls. These people will know in detail where they live and how they live; they will be united in a common feeling for their landscape, their literature and language, their local ways, and out of their own self-respect they will have a sympathetic understanding with other regions and different local peculiarities. They will be actively interested in the form and culture of their locality, which means their community and their own personalities. Such people will contribute to our land planning, our industry planning, and our community planning the authority of their own understanding, and the pressure of their own desires. Without them, planning is a barren externalism."
-- Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (1938)

2009-05-28T15:45:00.000-07:00

from "Roaring Spring"

I will not be available so late
I’m suspicious, and I am darling you
holding your head, so sweet on you.

Sweet pomander. Salt your mouth.

Tell me no jughead ronnie’s gone

I was checking out books from the
inside of my head oval
room light at one end

A book about kiting

To make the banner language flap
on a long string
That will be
there/their, beautiful.

2009-05-05T12:18:00.000-07:00

Jade Hudson

Poetic Manifesto Draft 2

The Out of World Poet:

Must, 1, be willing to embrace the poem as both dissonant truth and beautiful lie-- the truth/lie being the poem's leniencies outside of its design, where its patterns yearn for destruction of patterns, where its self-destruction signifies its yearning for order, where its call to order is its own and its disobedience is its purpose.

Must 2, contemplate the following:

If I am the poet, I am the poem I write,
in that
my maker earnestly made me not as I can make myself

and I desire to make myself, in the absence
of how I am designed to be, truly

what I am meant to

Must, 3, view himself/herself as a creator incapable of designating poetic function; one can initiate the process, participate in eventual reapplication of the initiation (imitating the previous method of initiation), but cannot possess the process (manifested poem) itself.

In accordance with its nature, a poem cannot be controlled. This is because the poem must leave the realm of the artist's control to be considered written. A poem is recognized as a written (or at least executed) form. Therefore, one should not attempt to merely make poetry serve a personal objective, as poetry will belong to itself in its being executed.

Also, to impose a purpose onto poetry, after it has become such, robs it of its unique authority. The act is much like giving someone freedom, while enforcing quite contradictory sets of authoritative parameters. If it's controlled, it is not a poem (at least not yet), as "a poem" mandates a loss of control.

To create a poem with a function is to remove from the poem the function of the poem.

Must 4, realize that the poem exists as an alternate space, neither comprised (completely) of its initiation or its reception. It is capable of delivering initiated inclinations, but delivers them in accordance to its unique extension off of or upon its initiated path.

While a crate of unavoidably damageable goods can be carried from one continent to another, it is neither purely the packager of the goods nor the receiver of the goods that contributes to the shape of the goods. The vehicle in which the goods traveled from one destination to another is not merely a distance, but something of material. If the poem is an object handed from creator to reader, there is a moment where the poem is completely its own. When in transit, it belongs to neither hand. It is at this moment where it is under its own control (its design somewhat determines how its transfer is accomplished).

Poetry undeniably reflects a great amount of poet's inclination while, at the same time, reflecting attributes completely individual. These individual attributes are encapsulated in the extending half of the poetic form: which results from the poem's separation/ completion. Once a poem is beyond control, it gains an authority in its being a completion. This is much like a clone of a person. At the moment of separation, the clone is no longer a one, but a second, capable of being seen as a sum of attributes (both containing and) beyond those housed in the original.

We can call this poem an "Out-of-Poem" versus a "From-Poem," as the poem is not a product, but a whole new being.

Must 6, realize the poetic entity as neither the pure externalization of the internal or an externalization, but a construct of both (while neither completely). To say that a poem could exist without a poet would be ludicrous. Yet, to say that a poem could be received in strict adherence to the poet's wishes would be equally as inane.

A poem must remain ambiguous enough to call upon certain intended interpretations. A poem without ambiguity, at least in the poet's motive, suggests a comprehensiveness contrary to a poem. As readers of poems, we search for meaning. Though, more, we search for hidden meaning. When a poem is intended to mean nothing, we make nothing mean what we need it to (the poem loses all authority). When it means too much upfront, we don't see it as a poem (thus, it cannot function as such).

What is accomplished on the poetic stage is not merely what was intended for the stage or the acting out of what was intended. Instead, because of a poems ambiguity (a result of its essential purpose) a third area is created (the meaning of the show is not in its script and not in its being acted, but in the viewing of both simultaneously [still, neither in entirety]). The poem changes in relation to how it was let go, like how a bowling ball follows the curve of a hand when thrown down a hill. However, the bowling ball's reactions with rocks, further down the hill, have only a bit to do with the hand and a bit to do with the rocks. The shape of the ball as well as thrower and obstacles are what designate the course of the ball.

The conscious materialization of poetry is not materialization of poetry, but the synthesis of material that materializes itself.

Michelle Boisseau

2009-05-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

I too attended Michelle Boisseau's reading, and I too found her work interesting and thought-provoking. Perhaps more interesting/provocative was her between-poem banter-- but onto the poems.

I respectfully disagree with Ellie's claim that Boisseau is interested in theology ("I don't believe a big mind regards all sparrows" [Monstrus]) or creating a "wholesome remembrance of the past"-- in fact, I'd say just the opposite is true. Boisseau does search for meaning, but that search is sidelined to a purpose for creating a mythos, an explanation of things she can hold onto. She puts herself in the role of God[dess] or at least prophet by exploring her family's geneaology then creating the (hi)stories from there. For instance, as Stepha and Steph pointed out, her extended poems about Gibson, a runaway slave owned by Boisseau's great-great-grandfather, ventriloquize both the grandfather's voices and Gibson's, in addition to using found language from the slave notice Boisseau senior posted. Boisseau crafts these poems carefully, but as Gibson says in his eponymous poem, "though you try to puppet me, what happened/ is not for you to know."

But that's the thing about poetry: "you play with the facts." So Boisseau continues her myth-making, from the creation of the world with "Hawaii's nipples steaming in the ocean" in "Elegy to Titanumus" to an exploration of both physical and psychological borders of "mountain ranges, threadbare frontiers" in "Across the Borderland, a Wind." It is here, outside of Boisseau's invented world-- here, reality-- that her authority falters; her position changes from god to observer. But it is here, for me, that her work is the most interesting; what Stepha calls confessionalism, I call apt description: "childhood is a nicked dark trunk/when you move, you move" ("Time Done Is Dark"), "full of petals-- feathers to the asphalt" ("Birthday") and smart wordplay: "spring snow sparking" ("Time Done is Dark"). Either way, Boisseau doesn't over-complicate or overstate; in "Ruminator", her narrator states plainly, "don't misunderstand/I am a cow...don't continue to misunderstand/there is a cow/there is a field."

Which seems, more than elegance, or spare beauty, or myth, to be the connecting thread between her poems: legibility. Whether making legible her own part in the responsibility of ancestor's sins or her place in this world, she plays with the facts but tells her stories straight.

Bill Howe's Dickinson translations

2009-04-29T19:51:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since the S(W)OP partay, but I've been meaning to comment on Bill's Emily Dickinson translations... You all know I've been trying to figure out how to deal with this issue of violence that a poem (and poet) commits in its reconfiguration of materials taken from the world -- I think Chris was also talking about this in his presentation today, the question of what to filter out (the violence involved in choosing and/or rewriting history)... Anyway, after going to the translation lecture, I realized a lot of what I've been doing to "tribute" or "honor" the texts I'm rewriting is based on the same ethical dilemma many translators face. That is, while I'm not translating between languages, I do feel like I'm translating between texts. I suppose the only difference is that I often translate texts that are not (in my opinion) effectively communicating what they mean to communicate (or could communicate with a little tweaking :).

SO -- back to Bill. After the reading he talked about his rewriting of Dickinson's poems as translations "from English to English," at which point I was like "yes!" Then I started to think about how (or whether) Bill "honored" Dickinson's intent -- and I think I said this in class, but Bill's performance of the translations emphasized a lilting rhythm that echoed the iambic meter of Dickinson's poems. In other words, while Bill's translations weren't in iambic pentameter (I don't think), his reading of them emphasized a ghost of that meter. It was lovely. And I appreciated Bill's process more because it added that extra layer -- a conversation between the "new" and "old" texts.

A Performance Review of Rodrigo Toscano's "Collapsible Poetics Theater"

2009-04-29T03:26:00.000-07:00

A Performance Review of Rodrigo Toscano's "Collapsible Poetics Theater"

Jade Hudson

After having read Toscano's "Collapsible Poetics Theater" for my book review, since which I have worked on with Rodrigo himself, I was eager to see a performance of it. During the Latino/Latina festival, my wish came true. However, the performances were much different than I had expected. When on the stage, the pieces change drastically. It will be the task of this short essay to examine how the performance of these pieces altered them.
When reading the book, I hadn't really thought about what Rodrigo's holding up the side of the stage would look like. Yet, in the first performance, when he came out and did this, it was interesting to see the franticness of this action. I immediately began thinking of the wall as an unbearable weight: Rodrigo put his back against it, suggesting that it was falling. There were also elements of Atlas coming into the piece. There seemed to be a jumping and picking of golden apples.
When it came time for Rodrigo to be the scarecrow, I realized a difference in this as well. While reading, I had not realized the importance of body positioning. The scarecrow is a figure manipulated by other entities. This is important, as a scarecrow isn't just a pair of clothes and straw: it is suggestive of a person.
Later, when I saw all four figures on stage with arms locked, I realized that bodies and positions of bodies were even more crucial. There were four interlocked entities struggling for their own way while succumbing to the directions of others. None of them were able to move either way. For my review revision, I further considered that the extent of bodily function and a desire to move beyond the limitations of the body suggested what was a greater theme of inflexibility.
In a sense, the movement of these figures on stage became an alternate text. The poetry in the book, as Toscano told me, is not meant to act as mere poetry. He desired for me to call it "poetic activity." With this in mind, it is especially easy, upon reflection, to see the movements of bodies to be crucial to the work.
The third piece, "Ecco Strato Static," was one that I wrote about in my review. How it differed from the other pieces, was in its immobility. I realized after the performance that this was the piece in the book I understood most. This is likely because it is more book based. But then, I thought, what was the purpose of its being acted? My answer to this question is that there was a need for the conversation to be witnessed. In other words, there was an absurdity in no movement. Moreover, even an immobility was highly suggestive.

Michelle Boisseau's Reading April 23

2009-04-28T19:42:00.000-07:00

On Thursday evening while the sun was still up and Miami University students were still lounged in lawns enjoying an unusually pleasantly warm day, Michelle Boisseau’s performed many poems from her new book A Sunday in God-Years in Leonard Theater. She began her reading evoking the sweet fresh smells of the spring day with her poem “Birthday” which Michelle explained is “about a day like today”. Although not all the poems were like the pleasant budding spring day we enjoyed many engaged a fresh view of the poet’s world through their nature imagery. Hardly any of her poems escaped without a naturalist image. Even her poem “The Sad Book of Fun” which Boisseau with a humorous tone described as “sorta a view of the Bush Administration” didn’t escape without a “sunset” in the opening line. Boisseau’s commentary between poems made the reading quite enjoyable. She had a wonderful sense of humor that was both dry and witty but managed to honor the hard work of her poems and never was apologetic. Boisseau poems were frequently funny and she read them carefully without manipulating the tone of her written words.

Her long piece “A Reckoning” received many of these introductions that maintained seriousness rather than so much humor to honor their subject matter. In these poems, Boisseau raises questions about identity and her own feelings of guilt by confronting her ancestors’ participation in slavery. The poems are haunted by the voices Boisseau attributed to her ancestors and even by those they afflicted. Boisseau had just finished reading a poem that is in completely Gibson’s, a runaway slave, point of view of his recapture, when she explained her approach to mitigating the speakers of her poem. Through her poem Gibson she recognizes her part in speaking for a person who was already oppressed in his own time. Her poem “Gibson” confronts the problem of speaking for another when one of her poem’s speakers, Gibson, confronts his author by saying “though you try to puppet me/ what happened to me is not/ for you to know.”

Boisseau shared that she was once from Cincinnati and now lived near the border of Kansas and Missouri. One of the last poems Boisseau read was “Across the Borderlands, the Wind”. To introduce the poem, Boisseau discussed her hometown Cincinnati as a borderland, claiming that to her growing up “Columbus always seemed safe, because you’re surrounded by other Ohioans”. Although, her introduction was light hearted the poem is quite serious about it’s subject matter. Occasionally though she let in a little humor like when she writes “By war, treaty, algebra and surveyors in knee britches.” Her line starts off so serious with war then the poet smartly leaves of with the silly surveyors just doing their job in knee britches. For Boisseau the issue of boundaries is a curious one and one worth pondering as I did in the following days of her reading.

Michelle Boisseau

2009-04-28T18:53:00.001-07:00

In her latest book, A Sunday in God-Years, Michelle Boisseau writes of her family’s personal legacy in the Southern tobacco plantation and slave trade of Pre-Civil War Virginia. Though there are short digressions, her work is mainly concerned with genealogy and her ancestors’ direct involvement with the trafficking of human beings. Perhaps most interestingly, she plays with monologue and point of view, writing from both the persona of an escaped slave a distant relative actually owned in 1834 and the point of view of various Boisseaus of yesteryear.
Due to her overt abolitionist stance and the guilt she seems to feel for her family’s transgressions, much of the work comes across as a sort of lyrical tirade with a painfully self-aware Boisseau at the center of the shame. She quite literally seeks to embody the voices of centuries past and in doing so, manages to shoulder the moral responsibilities for the Boisseau bloodline. But why are we, the audience, meant to care about the poet’s familial ties to the antebellum South? Why should we relate to her guilt and grief? Would a confessional reading of Boisseau provide insight as to the value and merit of what is perhaps shortsighted work when it comes to a topic that historically takes itself very seriously?
Confessional poetry is characterized by its intimate, personal, and often, embarrassing, ties to the poet’s life. Typically frank and full of self-loathing, this genre addresses difficult subject matters (such as mental illness, suicide, sexuality, and relationships) and chaotic cognitive patterns. Confessional poetry, could, on an extremely basic level, be described as the poetic airing of dirty laundry.
In the poem, “The Subscriber,” Boisseau writes from the point of view of the aforementioned relative who has just violently assaulted a man whom he has mistaken for his runaway slave:

…I’m on him and he’s hollering, Mercy,
Mercy as my cane snaps across his back,
my foot greets his head. When I go to turn
him over, his arm feels too beefy, too slack
the skin around his neck

This violent recollection is reminiscent of a confessional passage, yet it is a persona that Boisseau has created based on some historical documents she has discovered in her genealogical endeavors. While this scene did not occur (that we know of) and is therefore not personally connected to Boisseau’s immediate life, she positions herself as an extension of her predecessor. We are therefore able to glimpse Boisseau’s remorse and emotions surrounding slavery through the retelling of this scene. She is, after all a sharer of the Boisseau surname and the medium through which this tale is told.
The slave owner-Boisseau most likely would not feel remorse for his case of mistaken identity, yet at the end of the poem, he stands wistfully back to reflect rather ambiguously on his misguided attack. While he does not overtly condemn his own brash behavior, he certainly doesn’t overtly respect or revere it either:

…Something like
Gibson’s coat. Two boys loading lumber in a cart
catch me looking around and style
themselves reading the grain in a board.
Sleeping in the day. This one was a laggard.

While the last passage is open for interpretation, one thing is for certain: Boisseau serves as mediator and manipulator of history.
In tingeing the historical with her personal belief system and writing of infamously “confessional” topics, Boisseau writes from a confessional perspective. While this personal involvement is what might be analyzed as an unjust rewriting and thus redirecting of the past, it may serve as more of a poetic vehicle for the personal airing of grief and the long-suffered implications of patriotism and the ways in which the past informs the present in terms of both national and personal identity. Boisseau may deviate substantially from the tradition of confessional poetry on the surface, but at the root of the poetry is the inherent desire to confess to sins she has committed through association with distant relatives. This, in turn, renders her “confessional by association,” allowing for audience acceptance of the domestic nature of her work.

Boisseau's Reading

2009-04-28T15:01:00.000-07:00

After attending Michelle Boisseau’s reading of work from “A Sunday in God-Years” one of the most interesting aspects of her poetry was her combination of theology and history. While theology may be self-explanatory with the title, the history is a little bit more intriguing. Boisseau often references her own personal relatives (usually greatly extended) and from this creates stories that entertain a “wholesome remembrance of the past.” While Boisseau’s poetry is heavily weighted in the past, she also appears to have taken a critical look at the present and the future. One of her poems includes a reference to 9/11 in which she states “the future isn’t what it used to be.” Boisseau’s inclusion of history is interesting in respect to her choice of titles. “A Sunday in God-Years” was meant to be in regards to a “universe transpiring in a nodding nap in God’s mind.” I feel that perhaps Boisseau’s uses this metaphor of “a universe” in order to express her ideas about the past and her wariness about the present and future. By including “Sunday” and “God” she is also able to attach her themes of theology which run through many of her poems.

Poetry Manifesto

2009-04-10T17:15:00.000-07:00

Joe Hess/ Poetry Manifesto/ 4-10-09

Grey Lamp:
a name of “function”, given a descendent of a lost race,
who lives in a time lost of function.
This time is a beginning

imagined to be void of function;
in our imagined time
“They Lion grow.” -Philip Levine

The Good Stuff!
The space (metaphorically speaking) between a poet’s creation of textual artifice and the audience’s sudden sense of the poet voice(or other) textually processing human emotion, for my purposes here—what happens in that space is the good stuff!
However, how much of the good stuff in a poem is the artifice of creative control, and how much is emotional honesty, without the reins of personal design?

Does the poet’s human fear of permanent silence, finally outweigh the poet’s self-censoring craftsmanship in the name of control?
Is the poet finally forced to face, process, and produce from exposure to loss--
suddenly knowing
suddenly having
loss simultaneously.

A poem is
unannounced, yet observed
outside its time and place,
clarifying the blurring of an
overrated melody

Sasha Steensen's The Method

2009-04-01T00:14:00.000-07:00

Method is a life. A valuable child corrupted, animal at times, an apathetic old man. In this way, Method is “his own his/ And no one else’s,” but he isn’t always. Rather, he begins as The Method, an ancient manuscript written by Archimedes and having something to do with infinitesimals, a lever, and the center of gravity. In other words, Method is an object until Sasha Steensen comes along, gives him a heart in her latest.

In MORROW-HEARTED METHOD DREAMS, The Method is introduced as a beached whale, “stuck and nudged/ into each side / by curious vacationers.” Recently awakened, he recalls fragments of a life seemingly dreamt.

Ganging to remember

how he ate stars

how his liver escaped out his anus

and the sun rose through his genitals

Here, The Method remembers himself as the mathematician’s manuscript, an object with human parts. And so continues the first half of Steensen’s book in its attempt to relate the history of a living text. The Method is made into a “he,” a character-object with memories and emotions but without agency. Left to the will of others, the Method is written on, abducted, stolen from, corrupted, and eventually made indifferent.

While The Method’s history is not necessarily presented in chronological order, Steensen’s characterization of Method as both child and man suggests that the the object-as-character moves through time. UNDER THE LEA OF THE SPANKER describes the relationship between the Method and his early master, how “Archimedes took the Method to his knee/ until his bottom half resembled a raging fire.” Similarly, he is stolen from a museum by a “nightly visitant” who “lifts his teddy bear from his grip, gently.” However, as the Method is exposed to the violence of genocide, war, and present-day “methods/ of torture,” he is morphed from a child into a dangerous animal-man, “slinking down some alley/ back to some second century, licking his chops.” In this way, Steensen equates the creation of an object to the creation of an identity.

In THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION, this equation is complicated when The Method becomes Method, a character created by Sasha Steensen. Surprisingly, Steensen acknowledges the complication, shifts from verse to prose and suggests, “Perhaps I could use my own words just this once and make Method mouth what I desire.” In the same poem we learn that “Method had to eat his relatives during a long winter lost in the mountains...used his own pages to kindle the fire.” Here, Method seemingly scraps his identity in order to survive. However, the following section beginning “There is no reason to return home” suggests “memory becomes a cord connecting us to this house, feeding us, and we recognize that we will probably die here.” Perhaps this is why, in METHOD INTERVIEWS A MONK, the Method asks, “What tools are used for the Liturgy of the Catechumens?” and the monk responds, “The asterisk and the disc, the spoon, the spear, and the oblation.” Despite the history separating Method from his original creator, Archimedes and his symbols resurface every now and then.

Steensen's assertion of this eternal, umbilical connection to “home” is a seeming comfort until it becomes clear Archimedes would turn in his grave if he saw Method today. In his old age, Method is lazy and apathetic. “From his beach blanket, he sees great distances of lives, a mass of withering lintels & wattles & lemmings. Luckily, the tide rises and pulls it all under. He rolls over, sunning his other side.” Method, “scratching himself slowly in solemn spots,” is “rotten and stinking up the world’s libraries” while his master has become the powerless one. In this way, Steensen equates the relationship between creator and object to that of parent and child, and, despite her assertion that “Everyone insists that I will write about pregnancy, but I won’t,” implicates herself as a parent hesitant to cut the cord.

That Method is the child becomes clear in STRANGER AT THE GATES which describes a relationship between master and servant that ends in bitterness.

I say what you want me to say.

I say how brave.

I say how clever.

I say how we went together

happily.

How you loved me.

How we became a we

and I died and you lived on

restored and pretty.

Here, “I” begins as the servant, object, or identity to be instructed by “you” and ends as the disempowered creator who is no longer able to influence her creation. Accordingly, in WEST EATS MEAT, Method becomes “Master Method,” a monster unrecognizable to “We” who end up eating his carcass. And so we are left to wonder how we might protect our creations if we do not recognize them as our own. The separation must happen, though, as is suggested by Method’s beheading in ME THEE ODES.

He is himself about the ground,

rolling and wild

with his

own

heart

pounding

And while bits of Method’s past or past lives might filter through from time to time, his connection to those fragments is never completely restored. In THIS PLAIN PLACE Method empathizes with a bandicoot searching its empty pouch.

He understood the animal’s sorrow

to find plainly and without denial

emptiness where a relation ought to be

Just as Method cannot simply have his hair follicles transplanted in order to restore his “old self,” and just as a rag baby is no substitute for “her bare foot from the inside,” The Method is irreplaceable.

Poem According To World

2009-03-29T23:16:00.000-07:00

I’ve been asked what each poem and world are made of and might start here

and might end they are made of the same thing which is text

Poetry should avoid using that should avoid accusation as a poem is the guiltiest thing there is. Poems are cannibals, but they’re sorry.

You might be worried I think poems aren’t made of language.

No worries. Poems are made of language.

Do you think you’d know a cranberry seeing it for the first time without language? I’d say no. Then I’d gather all the red things and crush them into paint to show you and feel sorry. Because the cranberry would be gone.

At least you’d recognize the color. Do you think a cranberry intends to be a cranberry?

Let’s say Mother made the cranberry. Now what? Let’s say I’m writing this.

If we assume everything is simultaneously mother and mothered, how might a poem made of language indicate that without upsetting its conscience? How might a woman

You might be worried I think women are poems.

While women were once made of poems, most have realized poems are cannibals and are asking for their parts back.

But like I said, poems have consciences now.

A poem with a conscience realizes it shares material with the world and does not take without giving back. A poem with a conscience acknowledges the mother while rearranging the mothered’s skins on its back. A poem might spare the heart, a lymph node for instance.

I, Jade Hudson, have been labeled Daedalus

2009-03-29T22:01:00.000-07:00

I don't know why, but yeah...

The previous post is mine.

The Out of World Poet:

2009-03-29T21:58:00.000-07:00

Must, 1, be willing to embrace the poem as both dissonant truth and beautiful lie-- the truth/lie being the poem's leniencies outside of its design, where it's patterns yearn for destruction of patterns, where it's oblivious self-destruction signifies its yearning for order. Where its call to order is its own, where its disobedience is its purpose.

Must 2, contemplate the following:

If I am the poet, I am being the poem I write,
in that
my maker earnestly made me not as I can make myself

and I desire to make myself, in the absence
of how I am designed to be, truly
what I am meant to

-OR-

reject what the writer is to the poem
and care not.

Must, 3, view himself/herself/itself as a creator incapable of designating interpretation; A beginning of a process, a participant in eventual reapplication of the process, but not the process itself. The provider, a one provided for, but never the providence. To construct art "to be for the sake of institution" is no more creating "institution" than simply creating being. To create art with a function is to remove from the art the function of art.

While art can serve a function, its function neither exhibits the purified intention of the creator or the intention of the perceiver. While a crate of unavoidably damageable goods can be carried from one continent to another, it is neither purely the packager of the goods nor the receiver of the goods that contributes to the shape of the goods. The vehicle in which the goods traveled from one destination to another is not merely a distance, but something of material.

Must 4. See poetry as an opportunity in which the material intended (in relation to material understood) predestines the creation of counter ground. No matter what a poet seeks to employ in his/her poetry, success or failure (as it is wrongfully sought out) can only be witnessed from a moment separate than both creation and re-perception. The poem, when existent on the page, has become a separated clone of the writer's intention (an Out-of-World) (a construct of both its replicated half and a new half gained though its separate existence).

Must 5, realize the relationship of what was internal and what has become the externalization of what was internal, as neither the pure externalization of the internal or an externalization, but also an alternate "internal" based upon its exhibitionist quality. What is accomplished on a stage is not merely what was intended for the stage or the arena (the stage) where what was intended happened. Instead, a poem has the capability of being a third area (one which is created through the unavailability of a solid transfer). The concept of "the poem" becomes more or less, less in the more, more in the less, more in the more, or less in the less "the poem" when it becomes "the poem." The conscious materialization of poetry is not materialization of poetry, but the synthesis of material that materializes itself.

Thus, the Out of World poet, who seeks to better understand the inner world of poetry as an outsider, must 4, allow the poem to materialize itself. How the poem materializes itself in the minds of multiple others (though direct relation or through relationship) must be upheld as the creation of a successful, organic, self-sustaining creation. An act as simple as denying the poet's self is not the correct course of action, as this negates the poem's ability to relate to its creator.

Yet, understanding the poem as a mere relationship between artistic consciousness and page is restrictive to the unique relationship the poem comes to obtain through being perceived. The Out of World poet should not merely produce to understand self, as the poem is an opportunity to create an alternate self much more easily understood, and thus, of much more consequence.

Poems in Pockets: Poem Among World

2009-03-29T20:09:00.000-07:00

1. The world is personal. It is composed of the environment that immediately surrounds us. The Poet may pretend that the world as a whole concerns her, but any and everything that amuses or inspires the Poet can be traced back to the spaces she has temporarily inhabited or continues to inhabit. This is not to say necessarily that the Poet is self-obsessed, only that she writes his spaces most comfortably and accurately. The Poet’s World is not interchangeable with her experiences. All experiences take place in some sort of space, whether that space is physical, metaphorical or figurative, and a Poet’s space is thus her World.

2. A Poet who aspires to be “worldly” (that is, one who consistently chases a profound idea in her own work or who expects to discover infinite horizons in every poem she encounters) is a shallow Poet. By always defaulting to the universal ideal, this sort of Poet doesn’t even manage to scratch the surface; the extent of her poetic aspirations is simply too broad. The successful Poet does not resist her inclination to write about her spaces and thus, she write more genuinely.

3. Poems are eventually suspended among the Poet’s World in pockets. These pockets are invisible and are akin to an isolation of sorts, (an incident, perhaps, but not consistently). Pockets are found everywhere among the Poet’s World, but the Poet’s entire World is not a pocket in and of itself. Pockets are comparable to vacuums, but instead of holding Nothingness, they accommodate a Something. These Somethings can be objects, people, concepts, and events, but they are ultimately limitless. Pockets and the Somethings inside them are always informed by the Poet’s World or atmosphere. Two Poets may inhabit a similar World but the ways in which they navigate and interpret it will always vary.

4. A pocket with a gripping (to the Poet) Something inside is fodder for a Poem. This phenomenon should not be confused with inspiration in the traditional sense of the word. Inspiration is too often associated with the romantic, the positive, the uplifting. The inspiration that is derived from the Something is comparable to a stimulus of some kind. This stimulus is always able to be traced back to the Poet’s World. It is up to the Poet to take the Something and shape it into a Poem in whatever way she sees fit. In this way, the Poet acts as negotiator of the Something. The Poet places her aesthetic upon the Something and readies it for turning back out into her World as a Poem. A Poem is a Something that is manifest, but not fundamentally blatant. A Poem is not always “wordable.” Because Somethings are limitless, it can be assumed that a Poem is not always a word.

5. There is no such thing as a small Poem or a small-minded Poem. No Poet or person otherwise is equipped to judge a Poem as such because they do not have the same knowledge of the author-Poet’s space. Criticism is encouraged when it comes to Poetry, but only if it is acknowledged as basically arbitrary. There is no such thing as a Master Poet in the sense that a Master Poet supposedly masters the entire spectrum of past, present, and future Poetry. A Poet can only master his own Poems and these Poems are forever changing. A Poet’s World is always evolving and not always by the choice of the Poet, particularly when it comes to the mind space. The Poet is hardly in control of the majority of these changes, therefore any Poet’s attempt to guide or influence another Poet’s work will ultimately fall flat or derail the Poet’s work from its natural course. Poetry-writing can be learned, but it is also a natural inclination and a natural process

Beyond a Poetic Manifesto

2009-03-29T19:47:00.001-07:00

To determine what defines one’s poetry is not a simple process. Creating a series of guidelines in which to write is a difficult endeavor. In order to create said set of manifesto ideas it is necessary to question what is important in one’s poetry and from this importance define clear characteristics that are applicable to one’s method of creating poems. As a poet you must go beyond the simple ways in which humanity lives and search for meaning through different mediums and in the world beyond the actual.

My Poetic Manifesto

Appreciate all forms of artistic expression and actively engage yourself in experiencing these forms. Attend plays, view art, listen to music, go to museums, read books and in the end synthesize these experiences and let them affect your life and your poetry.
In all forms of poetry we must push our limits and live artistically to our fullest capability, exploring and realizing every element that we encounter and making use of its’ utility.
All failure in poetry is subjective. Even when one feels that failure is unavoidable, one may have just succeeded at creating something greater than one could have ever have imagined.
Respect all the poets and poetic movements that have come before you, regardless if one feels that the poetry does not warrant high esteem. Learn from previous works; learn from other poets’ mistakes.
Do not be afraid to take risks and chances in your poetry. Write poetry that you don’t know if it will work out in the end. Make mistakes, appreciate the mistakes and then learn from your mistakes.
Everyday try an experiment or attempt to discover something new. Do something you have never done before and let your work reflect the element of discovery.
Question the choices that you make and try to understand why these choices will eventually have a specific impact upon you and your poetry when all is said and done.
View life and your surroundings as if today is your last living day. Breathe your last breath into your poems. Let this outlook consume you and your poetry in a positive manner. Shine your own light into everything that you do.

-Ellison Hitt

The Poem Between World Manifesto!

2009-03-29T16:34:00.001-07:00

The Poem Between World Manifesto is a call for poems that revels in their Betweeness! As the World moves ever closer (because time as humans know it is linear) to oblivion, everything in it has been defined to radical poles. Every object and thought has received a name, a place, a symbol, an ideology. The new radical is the space in middle that is at neither end of a pole, but where the poles mingle among each other and are muddled. This is not to say that between poems do not take stances; they do! They take stances that recognize themselves as transitory and without absolutes, except in the fleeting moment. Because as we (the human race) move forward in technology and thinking we somehow only move towards chaos and destruction. The only poetry that makes sense than is the one that captures and exposes this entropic state’s energy.

A Between Poem’s characteristics:

1. It enjoys and plays in liminal spaces. It attempts processes that elicit the liminal and forms that invoke it.
2. A Poem Between World’s medium is language. Language is what resides between the World and the mind. It is one step of removal from the world as object. It is the Meta-World waiting to be heard or read. Because Language is the symbolic system for defining the object-ness of the world it is the perfect medium for Between Art.
3. It exists in middle of the world and attempts to hold the energy of its subject in place with language. The language must demonstrate the energy of the world. The world on the edge of oblivion has a great deal of energy and a long history for the poem to reside in, so it must find a way to jump off the page into an even more Between place.
4. Its favorite subject is anything that may be considered liminal (dream, the apocalypse, dates, time, airports, engagements, pregnancies, walks, conversation, the internet, etcetera).
5. It holds a high regard for conversation. Whether it’s putting several seemingly irrelevant “things” (objects, ideas, subjects, voices, disciplines, or ways of thinking) in conversation with each other, the meeting of voices, or only conversing with itself and its reader—The Between Poem enjoys the exchange of ideas and sentiments. It believes that the exchange and process of the conversation is more important then the results or thought that follow.
6. It is not necessarily polite conversation (Although it does like to talk about the weather). It is preferably anything but polite conversation. It looks to throw completely opposing or unrelated “things” in the ring together to box it out or just stare each other down and surprise the audience.
7. A Between Poem’s purpose is not necessarily a didactic one. The point of the conversation is for it’s own sake. It’s not interested in teaching its reader anything. It’s only interested in the exchange—the moment that the brain begins to process just before it creates reactionary or complacent thought and it’s buzzing with the energy of the poem itself.

PoemUnderWorld: The Death of Poetry and Its ReBirth

2009-03-29T14:39:00.001-07:00

The Poem is dead! And so are its Poets. The great historical promenade that has overshadowed to overtake us is no more. Poets turned mythic by time, that great alchemizer, who created once-fresh, once-new works are gone! But still we are haunted by them. We are told to marvel at their works, cadaverous poems propped up in rotting anthologies and musty journals, untouchable & immutable in their agedness to the pedestrian reader—we are told. After a poem is born, if it ages well, it is killed by the Academy of Undertakers, plucked & stuffed, then displayed in the Graveyard of the Canon. They stare at us with glazes from gassy eyes, the life sucked out of them, taken down sometimes to be dusted off then beaten senseless with questions: What did you mean when you said—Who are your accomplices—Explain yourself!
A curious thing, admiration; a curiouser thing, vengeance: for those who can’t do punish those who did. The time has come to off them all. The Poems, the Poems, in musty old tomes, we’ve come to settle the score. No—we’ve come to kill you once more. No! We’ve come to feed on your gore. The Poems are dead, but there’s life in them still—it is our job to give them the proper burial and let their bodies decay into the soil to be sucked up into budding new life that gives birth to new poems. Do we embalm our ancestors and esteem their tombs more highly than our children’s houses? No! We pay tribute to them by living and (pro)creating—therefore we will acknowledge from whence and from whom we came and birth new children that may resemble them (a nose here, the curve of the lip, unfortunate ears) but they will be of our own creation.
But we will not merely wait for the soil to suck nutrients from their decayed corpses to feed the Poetic Rhizome, we will suck the flesh from the fingers themselves. Chop old Poems, stripped of their fat, and bake them into new poem pies, splatter their blood on the walls and eat their hearts and intestines. We must be irreverent! For this is the reverence they demand. Rotting in the realm of High Art is no tribute, and coffins of books are no Afterlife. For life is cyclical, and the death of a poem is not to be mourned but celebrated, for new life will spring from it!
We must remember that a poem is true as a life is true—it is part artifice, part reality, and at its best, true to itself. Perhaps in its later incarnations, a poem will come closer to Truth, though surely the Truth it seeks will be different. The form it takes will be different, as well—it might be found useful to mimic the earlier forms, but newly birthed poetry will not be bound by form or genre. The birthright of this new poetry is all genres, all forms, the past and present, looking to the future—for we will not cannibalize old meat exclusively. The poem will be fed from many sources—namely new sources unavailable to our predecessors; we will mine everything from the quotidian to the most advanced technology, and create life from death before we become shadows ourselves!

Jade Hudson's Review

2009-03-18T05:07:00.001-07:00

"Collapsible Poetics Theatre"
Rodrigo Toscano

To say that Toscano’s “Collapsible Poetics Theatre” is a mere reflection on what has become an all-consuming Globalism (in poetry, art, industry, and the society mirrored by the interconnectivity of these arenas) would be a vast understating of what appears to be the book’s objective. Instead of mere polarization into rejection of what is (for an acceptance of what can be) or an acceptance of what is and a satire of where we seek to change, Toscano’s work is a marked attempt at defining the inner relationship driving our decision either way. While there is a concentrated aim to modern art, which results from the experience of the past, Toscano means to create a counter institution or counter ground. The “Collapsible Poetics Theatre” is a theatre/poetry anti-school-conversation, a side-perspective from which we can see all sides tugging and how we have been tugged.
Toscano opens his book with an interesting statement: “Alienable Dividuals. Entities. Seek a freedom in, not from.” As suggested by “Alienable Dividuals” Toscano is toying with the idea that we are portions of a whole acting in (an almost geometrical) relationship with each other:
(1) How’s it that we’re four distinct entities here?
(4) How’s it that we’re singular and one-at-a-time ?
(2) How’s it that we’re each one quarter of a whole?
(3) How’s it that we’re each four times more than the other

For an explanation to why we are in Geometry with one another, according to Toscano, one need only look as far as our unconscious, daily activity. As Toscano opens “TRUAX INIMICAL,” there is a distinct mechanization in what seems to be our computer usury:
(1) Scrolling
(4) Pointing
(2) Clicking
(3) Selecting

The poem builds upon this concept. These options/ anti-options become more overwhelmingly inclusive of personalities and people. Until, in eventuality, externally, we see this mechanical structure to represent ourselves and what we expect out of art.
The ways in which Toscano means to reveal the mechanical mold of the modern artist are perhaps even more clear in (within the context of “Eco-Strato-Static”) needing to read “Group B” and “Dance” “In the approximate rhythm of their twinkling” or by drawing out a “spokesperson” (accomplished through dangling “…a giant mic from a giant crane” [as though fishing out the means to stardom by hooking others on the self]). Indeed, the creation of this counter or perhaps actual reality is reflective of the poets plight, that he/she must sell himself/herself (at times, regardless of worth).
In general, worth or the attaining of this worth is something pivotal in “Collapsible Poetics Theatre,” as in every differing piece the poetic voices are unnamed. While they are referred to in the introductory piece as numbers (which almost makes them seem like mechanical components), they are later referred to as equally ambiguous “players” (as though they are simple components of a mathematical calculation). Additionally, different characters are indicated by left alignment or right alignment (which in the case of “Eco-Strato-Static” may signify a mirroring artistic leniency) and Bold, Italic, or normal text (which might again be a signal to archetype). The relationship between voices and their ambiguity (the created space) become a yearning for identity that often reinforces their ambiguity (as well as greater points about it [another alternate area of discussion]).
While this worth is something that Toscano is directly concerned with, he is also content to point out the function of modern art. In “BALM TO BILK,” voice 1 counters counter voice 2 “you can’t… ‘blick’ that.” Mainly, this is because
“…any formula
based purely on affect
outside the realm of
objects, object’s origins, relations
logic, counter-logics
nth degree determinations of—” [cannot be regarded as poetry]

Voice one additionally asks “where are the imbedded social demands; in this stuff.” Yet, down the page, voice 1 begins to speak with the terms of voice 2 (as voice 2 speaks to the logical yearnings of voice 1). What results is a counter artistic ground where one can see both functional sides of the artistic self. The reader is led to think about themselves as one voice or the other and (upon re-examination) to think about themselves completely differently.
There are more overt ways that Toscano seeks to create a combined alternate ground. In certain portions, differing voices depend upon each other to syntactically construct the meaning of the whole:
(1-2) I
(3-4)Fly
(1-2)In
(3-4)The
(1-2) Deep
(3-4) Of
(1-2)The
(3-4) Night
In other cases, the voices interact with the perceptions of one another. “Eco-Strato-Static” is a poem where a voice mentally drives the actions of the different voice, as though one voice is the process of thought and the other the externalization of that thought. This internal relationship gets cloudy, as at one point there is a complete disconnection:
Start acting like you have an innovative product.
Okay.
What’s happening?
I’m acting like I have an innovative product.
It seems that even the disconnection of one aspect of a person to another creates a complete counter conversation. After losing track of the mental portion, the previously quoted poem regains its bearings and argues with itself.
As the continual creation of a counter-ground, Toscano’s “Collapsible Poetics Theatre” is just that. It continually stresses its own demands and then demands more. Theatrical components of “Clock, Deck, and Movement” become a purposely over-demanding poetry of direction. Where directions might previously be conceptualized as simply inclinations, exhibited in performance, it seems Toscano means for the performance to exhibit the intricacy of the cues. Moreover, Toscano means to create additional counter-ground in how we are meant to take this predestinated material and construct the play on the page.
Eventually, what results in the “Collapsible Poetics Theatre” is a collapse of the known world into itself (much like a curtain [surrounding us at all times] bunching up as it streams to the ground). A vision is made available through newly gained perceptional ground. We see things about culture, politics, society, economy, and identity we’ve never seen (or have, in hopes of retaining certain delusions, refused to see).

The Body: An Essay by Jenny Boully

2009-03-17T22:55:00.001-07:00

Jenny Boully’s The Body: An Essay is an exercise in the stripped-down economics of the page and the poem: filled with mostly-blank pages, the only text present appears in the form of footnotes. Annotating a nonexistent text, The Body’s form immediately disarms the reader: with no “body” to speak of, the narrative happens solely in the non-sequential asides at the bottom of the page. Boully leads us, blindfolded, through the underbelly of the poem; sensing our unease, she responds, “2. Let it exist this way, concealed; let me always be embarrassed, knowing that you know that I know but pretend not to know.”

Okay, but what can we know? Certainly that this is pushing genre boundaries to their breaking point: like Thalia Field’s Point and Line, Boully’s Body incorporates the song and the stage, the privacy of internal monologue and the clamor of polyvocalism; like Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, Boully empties the book and the narrative of all convention, yet manages still to paint pretty pictures and make them dance; like Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the dominant narrative happens, however disjointedly, in the annotation; and yet, in the wake of all of these tricks, Boully manages to perform one final sleight of hand—the “actual” text has disappeared, and the reader is left, somehow, to identify her narrative card in the footnotes. It’s worth speculating, however briefly, what the invisible text might look like—a text footnoted with stage directions and personal anecdotes, snatches of journal entries and brusque editorial remarks—for what such text could feasibly exist? But the daydream is mostly folly; Boully is not concerned with what the text might be doing, but what it is doing.

Boully’s footnotes shift in and out of first and third person, nearly always focusing on a woman—easily read and often directly referenced as Boully herself. (“14. Ms. Boully must have been confused, as it was actually_______, not _______, who uttered ‘_______’.” or, “33. All the same, how sad and strange that I, Jenny Boully, should be the sign and signifier of a sign, more-over, the sign of a signifier searching for the signified.”) Spliced with quotes from Joyce, Derrida, and Dante, Boully guides us through the hell of the loss of a lover (“35. I was the lonely tripod. I was the cup of tea left behind”) down the right road lost to memory’s gaps and conscious erasure.

In Boully’s under-text world, everything’s gone awry: “100.n. In the morning, the doves cooed their fuck-yous. And she departed, taking the wrong baggage, the wrong flight of stairs. Over the fire escape, the dress fluttered in the misdirected wind. Because he never said the word, the bits and pieces of her: lipstick and rose petals, sugar-spoons and pink envelopes, ended up in the wrong pockets. And damn-it-all-to-hell if someone didn’t, overnight, uproot and replant the road signs in all the most-traveled but wrong intersections.” Another character in the notes, Tristam, tries to orient himself in these accounts, “…curious as to which papers the footnotes corresponded” and discovers that “…the ‘footnotes’ were actually daily journals of the author’s dream” (143). Boully adds, “143.z. Dreams themselves are footnotes. But not footnote to life. Some other transactions they are so busy annotating all night long.” But these notes are not just a recording of fantasies, for dream, like its twin, memory, is a meaning-maker, and although she’s not left with much, Boully usurps control: “106. After all, in the editing room, the editor often wields greater control than the director.” For it is Boully herself who has been left on the periphery: perhaps writing there, then, “will provide something explanatory for later, while gaps of time when one failed to write would mean that one had no record of the affair—love with no proof of purchase, and therefore, no hopes of redemptions or exchanges” (94); perhaps she is embodying the residue like Alice Notley’s lonely protagonist of In the Pines, living in “grief stripped to shape alone.” Regardless, this distillation is given on her terms, to her end.

Though clearly preoccupied with its protagonist’s own loss and subsequent erasure, The Body is also playing a seductive withholding game in its relationship with the reader: a fissure exists between what Boully knows/is and what she’s revealed to us in the text. Boully is herself the departed lover, stringing us along with just enough of the right words to keep us baited. This coyness often feels delightfully earned: “98. ‘You will never find the life for which you are searching.’ 99. Except, perhaps, for poets and prostitutes”; other instances are simply cloying: “87. To properly protect one’s hard drive, one should take great care not to open attachments (k) from unknown users. k. Consider love here.” These moments, well-executed or less-than, salvage the poem from the graveyard of elegy and propel the reader through the fragmented text.

Which isn’t to say that The Body isn’t elegiac; however, though it mourns a death, it offers hope: “115. Everything I do, I do because I know I am dying…Poetry is an instant, an instant in which transcendence is achieved, where a miracle occurs and all of one’s knowledge, experiences, memories, etc. are obliterated into awe. Is anything I say real? And by real, I mean sincere—or is everything an attempt to procure love? I know now why the line breaks: it is because something dies, and elsewhere, is born again…” Perhaps here lie the answers—the only meaning to be made isn’t meaning at all, but awe; the experiences must be suffered to be transcended after in poetry. The Body delivers: in its resurrection of the dead, it transcends mere annotation to take its place on the page and in the mounting number of provocative new voices.

Monica de la Torre between "Public Domain

2009-03-17T22:33:00.000-07:00

Monica de la Torre’s book, Public Domain, is a crowded express train ride where only the most important stops are made and viewed momentarily before the individual is propelled into the next shared space with new riders. While on the train ride that is Public Domain the reader enjoys the narrative voice’s unique perspective and wit on her personal life while throttling toward the larger public space. Like a public transit ride the reader encounters many voices with different destinations. The voices are in many forms, they are multi-lingual, and have various agendas while simultaneously funneled through De La Torre’s unique perspective and wandering eye.

The opening poem, “Is to Travel Getting to or Being in a Destination,” establishes the books as a liminal space. De la Torre throws us in the mix with a captivating opening line “the next poem was inspired by something I overheard” (7). Through the line she immediately establishes the players as an individual entangled in a world of others where everything is open to the possibilities of poem. The poem “travels” by stating what “the next poem” is “called” or “about” and then moves to the speaker’s observations of others while side stepping the poem’s self-proclaimed subject matter.

The rest of the book chugs along by shifting gears into different poetic forms yet continuing to explore the space where identity is caught between the individual and public realm. The next long piece, “The facts”, plays in prose and lyric, the space of the page, and bilingualism to establish the speaker as an ironic Confessionalist through her admittance of being told by her “therapist” that if she “could only put down her obsession” in her work she would “be much happier” (13). One of the speakers “obsessions” is of her “crush on a musician” known as “Blank” (15). Through “The facts”, De La Torre continues to examine the theme of people as public objects in list poems. The speaker plots ways in which to discover more and more out about her crush, Blank. As a celebrity, Blank becomes an object subject to the public domain. Meanwhile, at the bottom of each page the reader finds more out about the speaker’s obsession with “lists”. De La Torre is allowing the speaker to have a kind of identity crises on the page as her opinion on lists changes and seems to suggest the poem as another kind of “list”.

The book continues along its path from the public to private sector and begins to pull out all the formal stops. De La Torre examines erasure as a vehicle in which political information is withheld from the public. And for this non-Spanish reader, even the language becomes a gap in understanding between members of the public space. Her multi-voiced piece, “The March Papers”, begins to turn the power back over to the individual while also keeping the reins on it through editing. Voices gathered from the editorial sections of The New York Times merge together while De La Torre tells the reader “texts can be read in any order” and “circular reading and repetition is encouraged” (45). Of course much erasure was performed while treating the texts, but De La Torre has left the rest of the performance up to the reader, allowing for his or her own bit of agency while en route.

Finally, De La Torre steers the reader to the more familiar but liminal space of the World Wide Web. Here identity is up for grabs in the form of an email conversation between many Monica de la Torres and at selfhood.com. In “selfhood.com”, De La Torres pokes fun at poorly written websites and the self-help culture. By continuingly repeating the word “self” in the piece, De La Torre suggest the lack of meaning in the word and possibly in identity itself. In “Doubles”, one woman’s attempt to understand herself better through a lost mother (Monica de la Torre once of Argentina) is the catalyst for an email correspondence. Thus each new Monica de la Torre contacted is left to disclose her identity aside from her name and stake claim in her identity.

Of course by arriving at the end of the book with “Doubles” the reader is left to ponder who is Monica de la Torre? The author of Public Domain is a witty poet invested allowing the self to conflict with the public sphere and the other individuals contained there. She has the irony and play of any New York school poet but carries whole bag of new tricks. She’s invested in the additional layer the forms she chooses add to each poem but largely the writing holds up on its own with a playful but sharp voice. The writing is conscious of it’s poetic state at many times suggesting that one way to find the space where identity may reside in flux among an ever-growing public sphere is to poem it out.

The Landscapist, Pierre Martory

2009-03-17T21:11:00.000-07:00

The Landscapist comes from an interesting void. As John Ashbery, the collection's translator, points out, “French poetry in the decade following World War II was in a period of the doldrums”; of Martory's poetry he notes: “he seldom even showed it to anyone (myself excepted)”. So in reading Martory's poetry, it is often difficult to locate a style with which to associate it. The language is unobscured enough, and yet there is something deeply disconcerting when the relatively familiar deep images of stagnate bodies and dreamscapes turn on an article into fragmented musings on the troubled presence of the subject. The poetry collected in The Landscapist navigates a dizzying half reality that is interrupted each evening and morning, but it also straddles a desert of sorts, with on the one side, a profound interest in and respect for the classical plastic arts that both preceded Martory's writing by a chasm of years and figure into his work as its nearest possible contemporaries, and on the other, an Anglophilic and media saturated readership.
And then there is Ashbery's momentary quip in the Introduction, that “French poets must struggle to escape the crystalline tyranny of the French language” that seems at once a gesture at locating some of the aloofness of Martory's writing and a rationalization for the inclusion of the French originals of each poem alongside their English translation. Not to say that the writing is wholly without precedent: it is strongly grounded in the symbolist tradition of Baudelaire and its sometimes dense images are reminiscent of Hugo's Fuilles d'Automne, and its tone almost expressly conveys a profound douleur that smacks of Rimbaud in lines like “Was it me alive nailed to the trace of dreams / Weeping for my bound hands that a departure has cut of / Me weighted with mourning a forgotten happiness?”. Yet the poems manage a subtle but resounding freshness in the ways that they slowly turn in on themselves and implode, from the Ashbery-esque staccato revisions, “...the gesture of eternity / seized by the eye the hand the mind”, to its more frustrated auto-engineered disasters: “In this country how do you say Love? / Or does each word multiplying its power tenfold / Crush the ideas it expresses”.
At its worst, Martory's poetry is trapped in its attempts to be richly evocative and heavily meaningful. Blame it on the translation, blame it on a cultural misunderstanding, but the somber tone the poetry carries can't sustain the respect of the reader through lines like “The depth / Of closed eyes reveals the universe in its chasms” or the peremptory attempts at insight in endings like: “And with them the barely recognizable clown // Standing before the mirror cheeks dulled / Who looks with candor over his shoulder / At the ashes of the diamonds that vanished yesterday”. Its as if the figurative language game has been turned on its head and, rather than “ashes of diamonds” elevating a simple yearning for days past and bringing it into a new relationship with the reader, the flabby verse only makes the nostalgia expressed in the poem seem banal and a little funny.
And yet one gets the impression that the writing is somehow working to resurrect all of its own failings, the images that are lost to their own grandiosity, the snubbed quotidian that is bloated with classical references—it's best in “Prose des Buttes-Chaumont” : “A book begun in a manuscript by a monk / And finished on the screen of a computer terminal / In a bruised language like overripe figs / Where the perfume of a little-known alphabet stagnates...?”. So if the stumbling block in reading Martory's poetry is its overripeness of images then it's the sudden moments of frankness that bring the reader back into the work. It's best expressed in “Serenity”: “I let this rhythm beyond limits live in me, / And carry me beyond every resolution”. One gets a sense of this “serenity” in lines like “Bathing in th lights of a false past I unroll / Landscapes and faces, accidents and good fortune / To please the one who listens to me, and with him perhaps / To exorcise time”; the beauty isn't resurrected, but there's a conceptual frailty to the generalizations and the limitless negative spaces of the poetry that transports it outside of its own failings.
The lack of a literary milieu to contextualize Martory's writing returns to mind and I realize that what the poetry is really transporting me out of aren't the failings of the poetry, but the supersaturated landscape of anglophile literacy—the media that consumes and commodifies; as Martin Earl puts it, “the mediatic deity is, if anything, over-communicative, the big brother that never shuts up, drowning out any of the feeble piping we might muster”. Martory's work is breath of familiar but fresh air, perhaps resembling a long line of canonical French poetry, but only superficially. The poetry may not be sui generis, as Ashbery claims, but it is straining against everything it so closely resembles, and the result is a poetry that is negotiating a sort of purgatory, always drifting just to far from the discourses in which it ought to be involved; from consistently interrupting its own picturesque dream narratives with blood, fluid, and waking, to the very fact that Martory had few, if any, contemporaries, the poetry remains aloof. “It was from now on precisely too late for me”. And here we find the pleasurable, meaningful aspect of Martory's poetry—it never quite fits, and it's aware of this fact. This is especially poignant as it comes to an American audience in translation; the poetry is curiously foreign in its phrasings and choices, but only subtly so, noticed at a distance. It doesn't politely ask you to pause and consider the machinations of language, rather, it settles in the mind and disturbs it, haunts it, and forces you to try to correct it, to make it fit. The text is alone, it doesn't fit—and not for want of trying—and I'm resigned to not force it.

Renee Gladman's Newcomer Can't Swim

2009-03-17T17:59:00.000-07:00

Stephanie Carpenter
3-17-09
Review of Newcomer Can’t Swim by Renee Gladman

Renee Gladman’s 2007 release, Newcomer Can’t Swim, resists spatial binaries, forcing the reader to reevaluate “common ground,” to morph and change in both familiar and unfamiliar environments. Though Gladman writes in prose for the duration of this particular volume, we are forced to commit to the shifts in time and space that are just as likely to occur within a single sentence as they are within an entire paragraph. An unsettling anchor in reality is ever-present in these dreamy domains. While the poems fit in spaces both confined and broad, from the paradox of sexuality to a vast multi-cultural city to the seat of a folding chair, they are truly reminiscent of territories only a mind can go to thrive. Leave your body at the door.
Narrative and point of view play a dual role within the seven individual vaguely-titled “chapters” of the collection. These narratives are mind personas or forms rather than tangible bodies carrying out physical deeds in a concrete setting. We are taken from place to place (a city, a restaurant, a painting, a chair) all nonspecific where unique details are concerned. Gladman’s impressive use of somewhat cryptic and obscure description ensures that each word in every poem counts. From “Untitled, Park in City”:

Against the back, the mouth, when having to turn away from
It. Bodies move closer through the night, but remain sepa-
rate here in this park. The impulse hovers. Time makes the
long body short, small-waisted now: yellow skin, a brown tuft
of hair, you or I dreaming. With the back up.

Description is secondary. The subject of the poem links and thereby roots ambiguous, blobby people (small-waisted things with yellow skin, brown hair) to a generic, unnamed park. A separation between “bodies” or forms in this environment is crucial, but also allows for the impulse to draw nearer.
Similarly, in “Untitled, Woman on Ground,” Gladman navigates a habitat with her sketchy mapping. This time, the subject, a female form, is positioned on the ground, having been struck by a cab. Others perch on the sidewalks to catch a glimpse of her and to gain knowledge of her plight. This particular section is told in second person so as to invite the reader into her metamorphosing mind-over-body experience:

A woman bends down and wipes your forehead with a
cloth, perhaps a bandana taken off her hair. ‘The car that
hit you is parked around the corner,” she reassures. You
reach out for her retreating hand and bring it back towards
you. “Honey, you were crushed,” she whispers.

In the fourth section, “Untitled, Colorado,” Gladman’s sharp, dry wit is showcased as she sketches a scene from a restaurant in which two women (designated by letter rather than first name) leave their table to have a brief sexual encounter in a bathroom stall:

A. towers above me as we walk to the lady’s room. The restaurant is
working out fine, but the conversation we need to have can’t take place
at the table where we’re sitting. So we agree to continue it in the bath-
room. A. worries that her beer will be taken while we’re gone, and I’m
worried about my wallet, which I left in the middle of the table, under
a pile of napkins surrounded by hot-sauce bottles. The bathroom is un-
occupied. Once inside, I pull her tank top over her head and seize her
left nipple with my mouth. I have to stand on the toilet to do this. Well,
I have to kneel on the toilet. I tug on the nipple, and wrap my arms
around her waist. She does next what all day I’ve been hoping she
would do, and afterwards screams, “Re…!”

Time to go back to our table.

One gets the sense that the occasional body (form) in Gladman’s work is a wanderer and that we are merely invited to wander alongside them. In the “chapter,” “Louie Between Cities,” our chief subject is a dog whose understanding of the world both mirrors and contradicts that of a person-body’s and smudges the lines so that animal blends into human:

From the ship, as we made our approach, I watched the mud in dis-
belief. Something had happened to the sand, to the absolute blue of
the sky. When I was young, I stood between the two and burned. My
skin blistered and my ass wagged; I was excited. We called it “eating
heat.” We scavenged across the plains, like dogs, for the sun, and by the
end of the day, found enough to return home happy. This time, the
mud made everything brown, from the sky to the grass surrounding our
houses—yes my house was still there, just miserably brown—even my
family exhibited the cast.

Here, the reader is given disjointed clues as to the species of the speaker. While “ass wagged” would certainly suggest a canine narrator, “like dogs” challenges and disputes this theory. We recall the section, Untitled, Woman on Ground,” in which a speaker we can assume is somewhat human has a ground-level view of her surroundings. Here, too, we are back on the ground, this time as a dog-body, looking up at passersby. This is a fine illustration of Gladman’s literal attention to positioning, how it shapes and mold perceptions and informs environments.
Gladman doesn’t necessarily strive to fulfill specific goals in her work, nor does she attempt to operate in themes other than the overly general theme of disjointed dream-space. Rather, much like Thalia Field and Nicole Brossard, she blurs the boundaries between genres, expanding and tightening the perimeters of the traditional story with what I imagine is a great deal of ease and an enormous success. While her non-sensible (though, not at all senseless) outcomes may be somewhat standoffish, they’re always a surprise. Gladman, in writing Newcomer Can’t Swim, aims perhaps to challenge the conventions of prose, poetry, space, subject, and point of view. In this capacity, she doesn’t disappoint.

Renee Gladman's Newcomer Can't Swim

2009-03-17T17:53:00.000-07:00

Warhorses Reviewed

2009-03-17T15:17:00.000-07:00

Brett Strickland
3.17.09
Review of Yusef Komunyakaa's Warhorses

Like Aphrodite rising from the foam of Uranus’s severed genitals, the poems in Yusef Komunyakaa’s most recent volume, Warhorses, begin in violence and birth a warped sort of love. Komunyakaa draws heavily from stories of ancient war for the first section, “Love in the time of War,” referencing the Gilgamesh Epic, Greek heroes Achilles and Odysseus, and biblical characters such as Samson and Cain and Abel.

The first poem begins with the juxtaposition of two phrases, “The jawbone of an ass, a shank” a line which recalls the biblical story of Samson, who used a donkey’s jaw to kill one-thousand Philistines. But this first line also illustrates one of the major themes of Warhorses—the nature of humanity is intertwined with violence, and people will twist everything around them—animals, objects, and even emotion—toward violence. A jawbone in itself is not naturally a weapon. Perspective created a shank, just as it is human proclivity for violence that molded an animal—a horse—into an instrument of war.

Each poem in the first section is written as a sonnet, and although Komunyakaa breaks the stanzas differently in various poems, the first eight lines consider war, and the final six are devoted to the breed of love that exists in wartime.

The separation between the two is clear in poems such as “They swarmed down over the town,” which begins:

They swarmed down over the town
& left bodies floating in the ditches
& moats. Bloated with silence,
blue with flies on the rooftops.

The second half concerns the manifestation of love that arises after the violence:

On the wild forgetful straw beds,
they created a new race, a new tongue
to sing occidental prayers & regrets.

Once readers understand the way Komunyakaa is organizing the stanza’s, however, he begins to erase the boundaries between the love and war. No longer at opposite poles, the two become, at times, inseparable. Constant warring surrounds love, and as a result, love retains qualities of violence, such as in the first section of “Hand-to-hand: the two hugged each other”

Hand-to-hand: the two hugged each other
Into a naked tussle, one riding the others back
locked in a double embrace. One
forced the other to kiss the ground.

Although this stanza begins the poem, it just as easily could have ended it according to Komunyakaa’s method of organization. The two men are locked together “Hand-to-hand.” Whether in combat or in love is unclear, and because of the way that Komunyakaa chose to separate the stanza, they could well be the same thing. This blending continues into the final four poems of the section, which depart ancient warfare and offer brief meditations on modern battle.

Humans continue to bend nature in “A bottle-nosed dolphin swims midnight water”, in which a trainer and his wife make love in their water bed, while “A bottle-nosed dolphin swims midnight water/ with plastic explosives strapped to her body.” In “Someone’s beating a prisoner”, an interrogator beats a prisoner until he “makes him piss on the stone floor,” then “orders the man/ to dig his grave with a teaspoon.” This immersion in violence is not without consequences. In the final poem, in an unidentified place of war a name is called during role, someone who is both a son and a lover, and there’s no response. The soldier has hung himself, “his name hangs high in the rafters,” and all that’s left are “his propped up boots & helmet” one man’s leftover tools that “refuse to answer.”

In the second section, “Heavy Metal”, Komunyakaa steps away from any sentimentality he’s begun drifting toward at the end of the first section and returns to scrutinizing humanity’s obsession with turning objects toward war. The first poem in the series, “The Helmet,” is an imagining of how men first dreamed up basic tools of war during a time “before/ bronze meant shield and breastplate…”

Perhaps someone was watching
a mud turtle or an armadillo
skulk along an old interminable footpath
armored against sworn enemies.

As the poems once again progress toward present times, Komunyakaa devotes more lines to exploring humanity’s obsessive relationship with weaponry. In “The Catapult”, men struggle to turn back the winch and use a catapult for their own gain. After loading the rocks, however, the warriors “bowed at the foot/ of the cross,”—though they created the object they worshipped it, believing that the weapon they created had the power to save. The theme of weaponry-as-god surfaces again in “Grenade”, which begins with the line, “There’s no rehearsal to turn flesh into dust so quickly,” a reversal of the Genesis passage about the creation of man.
The final section of Warhorses, “Autobiography of my Alter Ego” is a long memoir poem spanning Komunyakaa’s childhood in Louisiana through when he returned from the Vietnam War. The same themes from the earlier two sections are revisited, as Komunyakaa remembers back to “the first person I ever loved,” a “tall black woman/ named Roberta.” After he’s drafted, he seems startled to encounter love even in the thick of the violent jungle, writing that, “I felt as if I were falling/ in love with the wives, daughters,/ & sisters of the dead NVA/ & Vietcong.” Still, this strange love never alters Komunyakaa’s actions, and he returns home a haunted individual.

The final section of the poem transitions to a new theme: forgiveness. It’s what Komunyakaa’s troubled father begs for at the end of his life, and it’s an idea that begins to weigh on Komunyakaa as well. We get the sense that it’s not simply personal forgiveness he’s concerned with, but all of humanity’s, who as a race are never far from potential violence. Ultimately, he seems to believe we don’t deserve it, having resigned himself to the idea that by nature, we are a violent race. “Forgive my heart & penis” he pleads at the end of the book, believing them both to be faculties of instinct, “but don’t forgive my hands.” The human heart may be a mysterious force, but our hands—our tools—are not subject to every desire, a belief that Komunyakaa spends all of Warhorses trying to explain and atone for.

Ellie's Review

2009-03-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

Best Thought, Worst Thought
By Don Paterson
Graywolf Press
Ellison Hitt
03/17/09

Scottish poet Don Paterson, winner of the 2003 Whitbread Poetry award and the T.S. Eliot Prize impresses audiences once again with his most recent book, Best Thought, Worst Thought. This interesting and profound addition to Paterson’s prolific written works provides an entertaining and engaging way for a reader to go beyond the typical form of poetry. Paterson is already an established poet, dramatist, composer and musician, as well as being a professor of English at the University of St. Andrew. And while the creation of new poetry in Best Thought, Worst Thought is an important conception, the book has less of a focus on this creation and more on the importance of poetic ideals with the construction of aphorisms. For anyone unsure of what exactly an aphorism is, an aphorism is a short sentence or statement that concisely contains a subjective truth or observation of the world, quite often through the author’s own point of view. Aphorisms are usually poignant and quite clever in their reflections and considered to be a constricted form of the poetic genre. Paterson can already be considered to be somewhat of an established aphorist with the publication of his other books of aphorisms, The Book of Shadows (2004) and The Blind Eye (2007).
Though Paterson has produced this current book of aphorisms to reflect different parts of poetry, he goes beyond the general subject and explores it’s relation to four key ideas; art, sex, work and death. Paterson takes on this subject matter from his own viewpoint, weaving in personal experiences and memories to demonstrate the importance of specific moments in his life. The moments that he chooses however are often general enough to hold substance to individual readers (break-ups, friendships, work-related dilemmas, etc.). Paterson’s aphorisms may seem simplistic, but in actuality they go beyond the reader’s initial perceptions.
“Whenever we return with music from our dreams, it retains its beauty; the beautiful line of verse, through, oxidizes on its exposure to daylight, and turns to gibberish before our eye. No better proof that music pays its line far more deeply into the unconscious. Poetry is the music of consciousness.”

A basic reading may lead the audience to believe that the aphorism is simply an interesting statement about the beauty of music in our lives. Yet Paterson’s resounding ending, “Poetry is the music of consciousness” demonstrates the beauty of art in our lives and especially its importance and necessity to the genre of poetry. While Paterson explores ideas of beauty in connection to his four ideas, he also expresses opinions of irony and sarcasm in the book.
“Such is E.’s need to be loved, he experiences the casual indifference of a stranger and a snub from his closest friend as the same torment.”

Paterson demonstrates via the language of his aphorisms of the pettiness of the need to be loved that we can encounter in certain people. Through the aphorism Paterson demonstrates the pain that individuals may undergo with love, but mainly the irony he perceives when someone places such an emphasis on needless love. This aphorism also contains personal references which Paterson disperses throughout his aphorism, using only the abbreviated initial of his acquaintance’s name.
While Paterson focuses much of the book on the four key ideas of art, sex, work and death, he also treats some of his aphorisms as direct guidance to his audience. Quite often Paterson’s aphorisms appear to be written like they are part of an entry from his diary in which he reflects on happenings and occurrences in his life and offers up advice to his audience.
“Forty next year. Excellent; that’s broken the back of it. Officially, time will be short. I can stop pretending that I will ever read George Eliot, that one day every woman will love me, that I will find Mozart anything but a huge bore…”

The reflection on the significance of the loss of time in one’s life that Paterson discusses here is often repeated throughout his advice-aimed aphorisms. And while aphorisms like these may come across as condescending educating lecture, the statements seem to read more like a meditation than an instruction in which Paterson is simply cautioning his audience to be aware that life is short and time is precious.

Although the content of Paterson’s aphorisms possesses cerebral qualities, the form is much barer. The book is created in a simplistic manner. The aphorisms occasionally occur in paragraphs, but normally are two to three sentence statements. The promptness of the aphorism is beneficial to the audience because it allows for Paterson to get his point across in a direct manner. Paterson’s construction of the form also includes cleanly listing the different aphorisms on the page and separates them with the section sign (§).There is no specific order or segment that divides his four key ideas; rather Paterson chooses to combine different aphorisms from the groups. The reader jumps from an aphorism about a sexual encounter, to an aphorism about the loss of one of Paterson’s friends. The combination of Paterson’s minimalist form, as well as the scattered placement of his aphorisms reflects how life occurs. There are not just sections of life pertaining to art, sex, work and death; rather these events are interspersed throughout our lives.
Best Thought, Worst Thought may not be a conventional way of looking at poetry, but it is an entertaining and witty foray into a reflection of life. Paterson is able to capture his reader’s attention and use his words to make the aphorism new and pithy.

Goetta reviews

2009-03-06T11:38:00.000-08:00

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