ELDERLY

Jamie Townsend & Nicholas DeBoer are launching a brand new collaborative effort, Elderly (which is, incidentally, ALSO the name of my one-man black metal band!), and this first issue features some of our best Bay Area practitioners

Issue One

featuring:
STEPHANIE YOUNG
DAVID BRAZIL
ALLI WARREN
BRANDON BROWN
SARA LARSEN
EVAN KENNEDY
LINDSEY BOLDT
JOHN SAKKIS
JACK FROST
STEVE ORTH

You can download the whole thing at their tumblr, and the curators are asking folks to help with distribution: "post anywhere, print out, leave at bus stops, etc."

Check it out...

Producing Poverty Won't Be A Crime Until Poets Make It Illegal (And The Interrelated Matter Of the Unformed Field of Prosody)

Thanks Stephen Novotny for the video of Robert's launch above. Enjoy!

And don't forget to join us this evening (Monday, 11/25) for Robert's last Bay Area apprearance of the season:

"PRODUCING POVERTY ON’T BE A CRIME UNTIL POETS MAKE IT ILLEGAL (AND THE INTERRELATED MATTER OF THE UNFORMED FIELD OF PROSODY)" 

The Bay Area Public School
2141 Broadway, Oakland
Mon. 11/25 7pm

Here's Robert's description of the event:


I’d like to discuss these two concerns particularly as possible implementations, as a way of proposing further focused collaboration.

law as creative writing along with shared productivity as poetry medium

What’s the best way to provide goods and services directly to the greatest needs? What should the labor share of national income be? Should the finance industry be turned into a public utility? As deprivation of liberty and property, isn’t a nonliving wage unconstitutional? By posing a national security threat, was not the risk taken by investment banks with depositor funds a revolt against civil authority (and therefore unconstitutional)? Is money the commons misconstrued? Should specific conditions be attached to our basic income guarantee? This is a call to collectively research, write and pursue the enactment of model legislation, resolutions, ordinances, bills and initiatives in favor of an all-inclusive economy. We could at least begin to write the book on banking, corporate and finance law for poets.

the missing artscience of prosody (untended poet-province?)

What constitutes prosody? What does prosody constitute? We’d be staring blankly at each other without it. It is the link, by the way, between physics and biology. Bodies formed around the ways in which we’d express ourselves. Does morphology follow prosody? Why try to delineate the area of prosody (it may well be amorphous?) I’d like to discuss prosody as a way of gauging interest in creating an open access exchange, a web workspace, where anyone working with or wondering about prosody can post her or his impressions, papers or findings. More experientially, I would eventually like to set up a sort of lab or anechoic darkroom for carrying out qualitative and quantitative testing of the effects of tone, beat, frequency, silence, darkness, color and other prosodic phenomena on various bioprocesses. Of course, prosody is also, at any point, performable research. What could possibly be more practical, practicable? The ways in which this field organizes itself will necessarily be integral to what it is.

Cross/Sutherland/Xu

This reading is going to be SUPER FUN, and it will act as a kind of going away party for Keston, so you should come. Also, since most of the rad stuff in the Bay Area is happening at the Public School, it shouldn't be a suprise that Tyrone Williams will be giving a talk there tonight (Friday, 11/23) at 7 pm. Hope to see you there...

David Brazil's Gerundive Song

The "Gerundive Song" was Brazil's contribution to the Kocik launch. Word on the street is Eleni Stecopoulos, Margit Galanter, and maybe Chris Nagler will perform at the Long Legs event on Sunday. Don't miss...

Some Pictures from the Kocik Launch (and Something Completely Different!)

Supple Science arriving at Small Press Distribution

John Sakkis in the warehouse modeling

The Brick!

It's nearly 500 pages!

Ezzy on BART

Getting ready for Robert's arrival

Sara Larsen, Alana Siegel, and Stephen Novotny

Robert and Daria Fain performing a choral piece

David Brazil's signature move of climbing on things and singing (usually about God)!

Thank you to everyone for stopping by the Kocik launch yesterday. Hope to see you at his talk at the public school next week (Monday, 11/25). Preorders go out tomorrow, and the book is officially available through our website now; otherwise, you can pick it up through SPD sometime next week?

In the meantime, here is a final, totally unrelated photo of Laura Woltag and Alana Siegel at their reading on Halloween at the Public School (w/ the great David Abel). Since I'm not on Facebook, this incredible image is new to me, and it's simply too good to keep to myself! Alana and I were planning an intricate birthday ritual involving birds (and driving everyone into the woods in a flatbed truck), but I ended up missing the event altogether. This image makes me regret that fact even more! (spirit animal breastplates by Brenda Iijima!).

Supple Science Launch Events!

“UBIQUITOUS DIVIDEND”
SUPPLE SCIENCE BOOK LAUNCH 
Small Press Traffic
Artist Television Access
992 Valencia Street, SF
Sun. 11/17 5pm
Spoken, choral and choreoprosodic selections from the ongoing libretto "Re-English," an investigative musical that treats our current ecological and inequity crises as consequents of the sonic and connotative qualities of english, calling upon forms and phenomena as diverse as neuroendocrinology, cosmogony, naad, triple bottom line accounting, optativity, dead languages, energy cauldrons, and even poetry to re-tune our tongues, imbuing them with unheard of inherences, moods, admixtures and admonishments.


PROSODIC BODY WORKSHOP 
Long Leg Series
New Arts Building Consortium 
1 Grove Street, SF
Workshops: Fri. 11/22 6:30-9:30 pm
Sat./Sun. 11/23-24 10-3 pm
Public Showing: Sun. 11/24 7:30pm

In this workshop we will practice the Prosodic Body, opening broader interoceptive, energetic connections. We will work with correspondences between phonemes and the neuroendocrine and somatosensory systems, sync our heart rates with danced poetic meter, involve cellular respiration in vocalization, perform phoneme puncture, embody cosmogony and become the direct experience of biophysics. We will integrate “choreoprosodia,” movement and language, fulfilling each other's expression.


"PRODUCING POVERTY WON’T BE A CRIME UNTIL POETS MAKE IT ILLEGAL (AND THE INTERRELATED MATTER OF THE UNFORMED FIELD OF PROSODY)" 
The Bay Area Public School2141 Broadway, Oakland
Mon. 11/25 7pm

We'll discuss two concerns particularly: 1) law as creative writing along with shared productivity as poetry medium: This is a call to begin writing the book on banking, corporate and finance law for poets. 2) the missing artscience of prosody: a lab or anechoic darkroom for carrying out qualitative and quantitative testing of the effects of tone, beat, frequency, silence, darkness, color and other prosodic phenomena on various bioprocesses.

Weekend Reading!

Suspense is not telling

Camille Roy with Michael Cross

CAMILLE ROY

MICHAEL CROSS

My interview with Camille is finally up at Jacket2. If you're not convinced that Camille Roy is a genius, this should do it for you. Everything she says here totally retuned my thinking. Check it out here.

Sam Ladkin just printed a super interesting piece on Rob Halpern's Music for Porn at World Picture. Check it out here.

'Perfect losses we can't mourn'

On Rob Halpern’s ‘Music for Porn’

LUKAS MOE

Another killer piece of writing on Music for Porn. The world is finally recognizing the genius of this book. Read it here.

David Brazil has (almost) left the building...

This recently posted interview with David Brazil reminded me to check stock of The Ordinary this morning. There are exactly 8 copies left, and Small Press Distribution is officially sold out. Get them while you can!

Supple Science is Coming!

Robert Kocik's Supple Science In Situ

Images from the photo-polymer plates we're using for the cover...All images by Kocik himself...This book is going to be HUGE!

CJ Martin on David Brazil's The Ordinary

CJ Martin's been posting an incredible serial review of David Brazil's The Ordinary on his Tumblr, Rhyme Eats the Words. Just in case you've missed an installment of this crucial critical meditation, here are the links:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

And while I have your attention, there are approximately 20 copies of David's book in existence. Get it while you can...

New New Lights Press

New New Lights Press from Aaron Cohick, one of the most original and talented printers in the country. 

No question about it. If you are interested in the art of the book in any capacity, you should establish a standing order here asap...

This Weekend!

and also this:

Rachel Levitsky & Heriberto Yepez hosted by Camille Roy

Please renew your SPT membership today! There’s no better time than now! You can visit our  website or drop your renewal in the mail and send to 1111 8thStreet, San Francisco, 94107.

October 6, 2013 Artists' Television Access 992 Valencia Street, SF 5pm, reading starts at 5:30pm $6-10 RACHEL LEVITSKY Rachel Levitsky is the author of a novel, The Story of My Accident is Ours (Futurepoem, 2013), two books of poetry Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003) NEIGHBOR (UDP, 2009) and a number of chapbooks including Renoemos (Delete, 2010) and Dearly, (a+bend, 1999). She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist avant-garde hub for interventions in writing, reading, engaged discourse and activism. In 2010 with Christian Hawkey, she started The Office of Recuperative Strategies (OoRS.net), a mobile research unit variously located in Amsterdam, Berlin, Boulder, Brooklyn, Cambridge, Governors Island and The Holland Tunnel in NYC and The University of Leipszig in Leipzig. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Pratt Institute. HERIBERTO YEPEZ Heriberto Yépez is a novelist, poet, and critic from Tijuana. He has published two dozen books in Spanish, among them Cuentos para oír y huir al otro lado, Tijuanologías, Made in Tijuana, El libro de lo post-poético, A.B.U.R.T.O and Al otro lado. He has also translated and edited into Spanish the work of Jerome Rothenberg and Charles Bernstein; and is currently co-editing the work of Ulises Carrión, the Dutch-Mexican experimental writer and artist from the seventies and eighties. Yépez wrore in English Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers and more recently his study on Charles Olson’s imperialist Mexican imaginary was translated as The Empire of Neo-Memory (ChainLinks, 2013). He’s currently studying a Ph.D. at the Spanish and Portuguese Department in UC, Berkeley.

Alli Warren's Here Come the Warm Jets

Speaking of Alli Warren, folks must know by now that Here Come the Warm Jets is officially in the world, but what you might not know is that the City-Lights-sanctioned launch is at the end of this month, 10/29 at 7pm (at the bookstore). It seems almost condescending to suggest you need this book as it must be so obvious already to so many people: this one's been anticipated for a long while; that said, I'll risk it anyway: you need this!

CAConrad vs. Evil, Part II

Alli Warren handed off the newest issue of her magazine Dreamboat the other day, just shortly after I'd finished reading Conrad's Albion number, and it contains this very-difficult-to-read (and certainly-difficult-to-write) (soma)tic ritual "Healing for a Pedophile." Despite its brutality, it highlights, for me at least, Conrad the shamen: our foremost "ethicist" (I'm certain he'd challenge this term) in a world in which "the good" exists somewhere between praxis and possibility. Whenever I hear folks challenge the efficacy of poetry, I think about what Conrad's writing does: that, despite this "villainous planet" (as he has it above) his poetry continues to pry open spaces in which language and thought recalibrate our biological temporalities and remediate the toxins in our bodies. While these poems are sometimes painful to read, I'm awed by where he finds himself, where he takes us as readers, and ultimately what he's able to produce as a result of these experiences...

As a side note, this new Dreamboat contains additional work by Marianne Morris, Amanda Nadelberg, and Alan Bernheimer (new installments from The Spoonlight Institute), and the prior issue featured new stuff from Anna Vitale, Jasper Bernes, Ara Shirinyan, and Jocelyn Saidenberg. If you're interested, contact Alli directly...

Jamie Townsend's Paradise Now

Jamie Townsend was in town over the weekend, and I was pleased to catch his exquisitely measured and moving reading at the Public School (I couldn't make his reading at Woolsey w/ Bob Gluck, sadly, but I've heard it was equally on point). He handed off this fantastic broadside (designed by Nicholas DeBoer, I think?), which captures the tone of his performance perfectly. Jamie supposedly has a long-player on deck, so, if there's any justice in the world, I hope to read more soon...

CHEMTRAILS Fact Sheet

I found this incredible handbill at the coffee shop the other day. I wish more people thought this way! And the flyer itself is really beautiful!

Judah Rubin's Phrenologue

I've been interested of late in what Kit Schulter and friends are doing at O'Clock Press, especially after Jack Frost's recent chapbook "You Have the Eyes of A Martyr." This one's by Judah Rubin, who's pretty new to me but seems to be one of the dudes around town in Brooklyn these days. Another part of this project just came out on Ugly Duckling, though I'm not clear on the sequencing... I'm not sure these pages are totally representative of the rhythm of the whole, but they were among my favorites. Pick it up here...