New Hearts Desire

Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

Divya Victor's new book is out through Les Figues, and it's badass

See you at AWP?

Folks are probably totally sick of hearing about AWP already (and it's only just beginning)! That said, if you happen to be in or around Seattle this weekend, come say hello at one of the following events:

Leslie Scalapino Tribute Panel
Alicia Cohen, Michael Cross, Judith Goldman, Carla Harryman and Maryrose Larkin
Thursday, Feb. 27, 3-4 pm
Washington State Convention Center
Room 606

Compline/Cuneiform/Further Other Book Works/Textile Series reading
Charles Alexander, Sarah Campbell, Michael Cross, Julia Drescher, Paul Klinger, CJ Martin,
and Eleni Stecopoulos
(following a pretty stellar translation lineup from 4-5: see poster above)
Thursday, Feb. 27, 5-6 pm
Seattle Hilton, "Makani Room"
1301 6th Ave. 

Compline/Cuneiform/Further Other Book Works/Textile Series at the Book Fair
You can find us at tables K-19 and K-20. PS: I'm giving away a ton of stuff!

4 New Articles at ON!

Thom Donovan and I are pleased to announce four new articles in ON's PDF Archive series. Don't sleep: these are killer contributions to the project. 

Here's the lineup:

David Buuck's Converted Storefront: A Performance for cris cheek
Stephen Collis's Poetry in Protest
Elisabeth Workman's Fakefurcraft Versus Statecraft: Towards a Bardo Poetics
Jeanine Webb's "Weak Intimacy," Celebrity and Bay Area Poetics

And if you missed the last round, check out this constellation:

Dodie Bellamy's The Feraltern
Andrew Durbin's "The Only Way I Know U Is From a Screen": on Justin Bieber's Beauty and a Beat
Norma Cole's "A Formal Type of Work": Rereading Emmanuel Hocquard
Andy Martrich's Deaccessioning the Mansionstream: on brnt ghst vlnt
Brett Price's The New York School: on Naming

Cross/Compline at AWP

If you happen to be in Seattle for AWP this year, maybe we'll have a chance to see each other? This is my first (and probably last!) time attending, so I'm trying to get a lifetime of AWP activities into a single weekend (which is the M.O., I guess!):

• I'm giving a talk on the work of Leslie Scalapino for a tribute panel including contributions from Alicia Cohen, Carla Harryman, Judith Goldman, and Maryrose Larkin, probably on Leslie's use of the image and her interest in hand-drawn African movie posters. The event takes place on Thursday, Feb. 27 from 3-4 pm in Room 606 of the Washington State Convention Center.
• Compline will "table" at the book fair with some of our favorite presses: Kyle Schlesinger's Cuneiform, Julia Drescher and C.J. Martin's Further Other Book Works, and Dawn Pendergast's LRL Textile Series. We're located at K19 + K20 if you're wandering around. I'll probably give away goodies for folks who stop by and show some love, along with (maybe)some new postcards for your refrigerator!
• Finally, I'm participating in a pretty great off-site reading (one of, like, a million!) sponsored by our friends at Small Press Distribution. Anna Moschovakis, Alan Bernheimer, John Sakkis, Jen Hofer, Ji Yoon Lee and Brent Cunningham will share recent translations during the first hour, and a roster of readers from Compline, Cuneiform, FOBW, and the Textile Series will hold it down during the second. Scheduled readers include Charles Alexander, Sarah Campbell, myself, Julia Drescher, Paul Klinger, C.J. Martin, and Eleni Stecopoulos. The event takes place on Thursday, Feb. 27 from 4-6 pm in the "Makani Room" at the Seattle Hilton (1301 6th Ave.). I know there's tons to do (like 4 distinct off-site readings every hour) and the icky promotional machinery / smarminess of the conference makes me a bit nauseous, but this one should be super low-key: friends reading poems to friends. We hope you'll stop by and be our friend!  

Slow News Day

Crane Giamo's Drone (Vigilance Society)

New one from CJ Martin

Overheard on campus today...

"...I mean, she's just creepy. It totally makes sense that she teaches literature..."

No Comment

Warren on Mayer: SPT's 40X40@40

ALLI WARREN
MADE IN A FACILITY THAT PROCESSES SPILT MILK

“I had an idea to write a book that would translate the detail of thought from a day to language like a dream transformed to read as it does, everything, a book that would end before it started in time to prove the day like the dream has everything in it.” – Bernadette Mayer

“alone in the dream’s dressing room trying on / different styles” “to be conversant with the actual view” “we’re standing directly in the dream’s line of fire” “like all songs’ versions of all loss of love” “Or thirty-four soon my life is at least half over”— I’m thirty, I read Midwinter Day again, an annual tradition, this time it’s in a little tin roofed shack in a high desert ghost town east of Los Angeles. What remains? junk shop, general store, Catholic Church, City Jail, and saloon. At the junk store I buy a disc of some blue rock gem and on a fake gold chain a block of tiger’s eye which now rests as I write upon my breastbone. I’m in the dressing room trying on the outfit of someone who believes in charms. I know what I know which is not a lot but my body my body, sometimes it’s too open and I wind up diseased and emotional on a tossed bed, other times I intuit a coming scar and hole up where nothing can catch me. It’s the end of December, the end of the year in which I learn my love must be a kind of blind love, that alterity is (duh) always already, despite appearances, despite promises, despite love. I can hear hills and the occasional wheeze of an ORV engine, is it a calming or eerie silence. How will I ever retreat to the country if I don’t know how to feel about its sounds. So much quiet I could begin to think the only axiom’s lived expression in daily action. The trees seep with what I think are quail and the dry basin’s tufa spires are monuments we climb. Many stars and one’s perpetually shooting. I pay someone to tell me I have a habit of working hard at love. Am I brave enough to earnestly relate my dreams? Or the towns erected in their stead? Call the spirits from their dens. Johnny hearts Jasmine is etched into the blue formica, marking the rolling bolder of any freely given love. The sun will cling to those hills a few hours longer then the hidden suns will reveal their ripe mugs, a shining means of one foot follows the next and trust in breath made flesh. I’ll stand knee deep in it, a porous vehicle of despair slash hope that I might through some miracle or dumb luck never bow to those who say care’s for crows. I carry these limbs around get so attached to any ripe kindness or opening gift I break when it frays. Should I be more or less circumspect as we lean into the coming disasters. Hand in hand in the enrapt night. Together in the same trough. I’m rooting for the pirates. “If we’re all wrong about everything, the life so short and the craft so long to learn, the assay so hard, so sharp the conquering, the dreadful joy that passes so quick and then being left alone again, what I mean is love astonishes my feeling with its wonderful working so ardently so painfully so that when I’m thinking about such certainty I don’t know like the earth if I’m floating or sinking.”

All kinds of good things happening in celebration of Small Press Traffic's 40th anniversary! Check out workshops, events, etc. here...

Also, it's worth mentioning that Station Hill is trying to raise money to reprint Mayer's first books. Check out this video and support the cause if you can:

Robert Kocik's Book of Protections VI

Robert Kocik's Book of Protections V

More Anne Lesley Selcer

 

Four more new ones from the Hearts Desire event...

 

New poems by Anne Lesley Selcer

Anne Lesley Selcer gave a killer reading at the last Hearts Desire and handed off the manuscript so I could share it with folks who missed the event. You've got to check these out. This is part one...

Keston Sutherland's Hearts Desire

Keston's Hearts Desire reading was one of the major highlights of 2013.  I was honored to share the stage with him, but more honored, perhaps, to announce that his next chapbook is coming out through Compline (sometime?). Thanks, Stephen Novotny, for filming... 

Elderly 2

Elderly 2

Issue #2 of this killer journal edited by Nicholas DeBoer and Jamie Townsend. This one features Joseph Bradshaw, Laura Jaramillo, Ted Dodson, Krystal Languell, Michael Nicoloff, and Erika Staiti.

My Hearts Desire

Reading, here, across The Katechon. The last sections are from Katechon 3, forthcoming from the Vigilance Society (though, in this case, I'm not sure what forthcoming means? It might arrive on your doorstep?!)...Only twelve minutes, so I suppose you could do worse with your time! Thanks, Stephen Novotny, for filming...

2013 DISINHIBITIONS: ROBIN TREMBLAY-MCGAW

Standing in front of Amy Trachtenberg’s Stripes/Sutras at her studio and the Brian Gross Gallery in January 2013. I just love this piece!

Anne Carson reading in the Holloway Series at UC Berkeley in April.

Fred Moten talking about 12 Years A Slave and reading his poems at SPT in November. 

The two reading groups on Fred Moten & Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons—one at the Bay Area Public School and one at Artists’ Television Access (ATA)  in SF; also reading Moten with Emily Abendroth in August.

Simone White & Allie Warren reading at SPT.

Photo Credit: Kevin Killian

Emily Abendroth and Francois Luong reading in the Mission in SF.

Emily Abendroth’s Exclosures from Zumbar Press.

James Turrell—particularly some of the older works—at the Guggenheim with Marie Regan.

Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet at the Cantor Center for the Arts, Stanford with Jim Brashear and Amy Trachtenberg.

Carrie Mae Weems Retrospective at the Cantor Center for the Arts, Stanford with Jim Brashear.

Can’t believe I just read Gail Scott’s My Paris for the first time and was THRILLED, awe-struck!

An August summer swim at Bash Bish Falls with Jonathan Skinner, Hoa Nguyen, Bethany Ides and New York lake swimming with Emily Abendroth, Marie Regan, and Bill Dixon.

Not new, but new to me this past summer--This is Not A Film, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (2011)

The republication by Ithuriel’s Spear of Bob Gluck’s Elements

Yedda Morrison’s Darkness

While I think this lecture was given in 2012 at Naropa, I recently listened to it online and loved it: Joan Retallack’s “Writing on Rim:Poetry’s Alterity.”   

Vacation, and as always, hanging out with the lovely Clay and Alex!

Lots of books from 2013 await an interval for reading. I’m looking forward to Chris Tysh’s Our Lady of the Flowers Echoic,  Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt Norton, Stephanie Young’s Ursula or  University, Evan Kennedy’s Terra Firmament , Alli Warren’s Here Come the Warm Jets, and more.



Robin Tremblay-McGaw lives in San Francisco, teaches at Santa Clara University and is an associate at the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College. She writes poetry, reviews, criticism, and various and sundry. Her writing has appeared in HOW2, Little Red Leaves, Mirage, digital artifact, and elsewhere. Her first full length collection of poetry is forthcoming from Ithuriel's Spear. She's the editor of xpoetics.blogspot.com.