THE DISINHIBITOR

Brent Cunningham's unabridged SPT Introduction

2012-02-07T01:45:00.000-08:00

Brent Cunningham gave a spectacular reading from his new Atelos book Journey to the Sun last week, and I asked if I could share the text from his rambling and brilliant introduction here. Brent read with Lyn Hejinian, Tyrone Williams, and Travis Ortiz for Small Press Traffic, and each made the attempt to discuss their "aesthetic commitments or imperatives" in a manner that avoided what Lyn called a kind of "aw shucks" devaluation of what they're trying to do in their work.

Brent read around the following notes as a preface to his reading, but I wanted to present the text here in its entirety for those unable to attend. Here's Brent:

To start tonight we decided we would each spend five minutes or so talking a bit about the proposal we see our writing making, what Lyn called our “aesthetic commitments or imperatives,” with the idea that if we talk in a serious way about our concerns that some of the affinities will be obvious. I especially appreciated Lyn’s sense that this shouldn’t be in a kind of “aw shucks” way, as she put it. At the same time I do find it tricky to make serious statements from within a marginalized art—it can easily look like pomposity or delusion. It can be a lot easier to just play it down, lower the claims. But at a certain point, while it’s true you don’t look full of yourself with that approach, and that’s great, then you can have the other problem: if what you’re doing is just a trifle, what are you doing spending so much time and energy on it. And why should anybody care?

One thing I think about a lot, in relation to my work, is the way my poetry has often been written in simple, relatively clear, ordinary language, and in somewhat normative patterns—normative to daily speech. Yet a lot of the poets I admire don’t always do this (parts of Tyrone’s work could be an example of this). I do think it’s generally important not to be *frightened* of saying things that your self-doubt might tell you everybody already knows or that seem too simple, for instance because you’re afraid of sounding stupid (which is very different from saying things complexly for other, more intentional reasons). At the same time I feel like I understand why some people have problems with simple language and see it as deceptive. Certain kinds of rational, summarizing tendencies tend to ignore the nuances that exist in the lived experience. A flat, simple statements can feel like a denial of the actual confusion it took to arrive at that flat, simple statement. In some strange way, what gets elided in a summary is precisely the effort it took to arrive at that summary.

I’ve been thinking, especially, of a kind of language that seems to want to cleanse itself of the history of its own production—like the very lucid-seeming language of politics, journalism, debate. While I embrace colloquial speech patterns and concise, crystallized expressions, I feel I’m also—along with writers of much more oblique poetry—mistrustful of a language so stripped down it seems to be yearning towards the ahistorical.

I was trying to dream up a metaphor for this idea of ahistorical language so that I could explain it better, and I was thinking about archeological artifacts. What would an artifact look like if it didn’t carry evidence of its own history in itself, in the cracks in a cup, the signs of age? Picture an ancient coin, except it has no markings, it’s just smooth metal. It wouldn’t be an artifact, right? Even if was thousands of years old it would be a metal washer from a hardware store. I like to think I’m attracted, in my writing, to comprehensible, processed acts of language that still manage to retain historical specificity & some evidence of their making.

I admit I might be hyper aware of the underlying problem here, this paradox between the experience (confusing, shadowy) and the way we tend to frame the experience in retrospect (clean, clear, lucid)—or, put more broadly and more in the language of philosophy, the tension between the spatial, object-like qualities of knowledge and the temporal qualities of the psyche as it goes through an experience—between knowledge and time.

This tension, I think, runs through much of Journey to the Sun, and really a lot of my daily thinking as well. I feel a gap between the models we carry around to understand life and living life. I keep returning, in this book especially, to the simple & experiential fact that before you know something you don’t know it. So you don’t really know whether you are going to know it, and you also don’t know whether you should want to know it. Then as soon as you know it you only have a memory, not a direct sense, of what it’s like to not know it. You cross over.

I’m not talking about some floating abstraction with this tension. These are things that seem directly relevant to daily life to me. So here’s an immediate example of how it affects political thinking in a practical way: on the one hand many of us involved in Occupy and similar political gestures have a model of people where they are being manipulated by power, by the servants of capital and capitalist ideology. We tend to think of people as being, to paraphrase Marx, opium addicts, and the opium is religion, or more broadly capitalist ideology. Some of us get really furious about capitalist power manipulating people, twisting them, hooking them on lies and a limited sense of possibility. Yet a lot of us also think of people, even and especially very poorly educated oppressed people, as having tremendously flexible abilities to re-appropriate the propaganda of capital. So there’s an ongoing tension between the model, the addict, and the living reality, which is that people often get how they’re being manipulated with great clarity, and when you talk to them they are often less like drug addicts than just folks who maybe made a decision to play along in certain ways while subverting things where they could, or maybe they get the true brutality of it better than you do but express it differently, or else maybe they have some chain of logic that starts from some different premises than yours but certainly isn’t something the capitalist enterprise fed to them as a talking point.

I’m trying to describe a tension here. It’s not that the opium addict model is a mistake but that it simply falls short when compared to people in their actual diversity. It’s not a matter of replacing the model of capital brainwashing people with some other model—really it’s not a terrifically false model, and has great usefulness. The problem is just that it’s always still just a model. So I like to think maybe there’s a role for poetry in trying to find ways to hold on to a given model while also being aware of its falsity and limitations in the actual situation. And as I’ve thought about it—after the book’s publication—I felt like the idea of traveling, in time, to the very thing that most obviously marks out time for human—the Sun—has a lot to do with the knowledge/time tension, which is partly this tension between models of the subject and actual, breathing subjects.

But let me also say that I couldn’t have said any of this about it prior to writing it—that it was very much guided by intuitive suspicions, by irritations at contradictions, and by the feeling that something’s always being abridged even as something else is also getting said. In other words the process of writing didn’t come from but rather led to—I hope anyways—some greater lucidity. I sure wouldn’t write this thing again.

To put it into summary form: in my model of the psyche we might be best described as ever-evolving idiots turning into slightly lesser idiots (who still don’t know a whole lot), yet the fact that we might be able to recognize ourselves as idiots is, for me, all the justification people need to keep fighting the idiots out there who don’t even know they’re idiots.

Aaron Shurin's Citizen

2012-02-02T02:01:00.000-08:00

Aaron Shurin is reading tonight (Thursday, 2/2) at City Lights to launch his totally flawless new book Citizen. As it promises to be a totally triumphant reading, you should probably be in attendance; however, if you're like me and you have to teach a night class, you can catch Aaron a second time reading with Micah Ballard at University of San Francisco on Valentine's Day (2/14, Fromm Hall, 5pm). Both poets will read from their City Lights volumes, and I will certainly be in attendance with my class of awesome USF poets. Hope to see you there!

Where Eageles Dare

2012-01-31T01:09:00.000-08:00

Poet Steve Orth joins the magazine game, and right on time! Where Eagles Dare is super cleanly produced, with a focus on less writers and more work. The first issue features stunning short numbers from Lindsey Boldt, John Coletti, Andrew Kenower, and Tyrone Williams, and, according to Steve, this baby's coming monthly. Get a copy from Orth directly at steveorth25[at]gmail.com, and thank god for Bay Area small press magazines!

Another peek at David Brazil's Economy

2012-01-26T00:08:00.000-08:00

David Brazil and I will start working on the full-length version of his Economy for my press Compline near the end of the year, but for now, David Abel has printed a little leaflet mailer of a poem from the project for his "Envelope" series (click image above for full-screen). Also, if you haven't spent time with Brazil's Little Red Leaves e-book, get it here. I'm totally looking forward to making this material available in book form, especially as it will constitute David's first widely-distributed book. Keep yr. eyes peeled!

Inebriate Debris

2012-01-25T00:47:00.000-08:00

Rich Owens is killing it over at Punch Press: first, Frances Kruk's excellent Down You Go or Negation de Bruit (which I pointed to briefly here), and then Francis Crot's Hax and Sean Bonney's Four Letters, Four Comments (which I hope to post about soon). AND NOW, this amazing new chapbook by Rosa Van Hensbergen, Inebriate Debris. I've come to depend on Owens for his sharp editorial eye, and this little chaplet is no exception. And it's is only 4 bucks at the website, so you should scoop it up before it's gone! Totally essential. I've included the last three pages from Three Fragments From Octagon above as a teaser. Click to zoom...

Alex Rieser's Emancipator

2012-01-24T00:05:00.000-08:00

San Francisco poet Alex Rieser has a pretty fantastic new chapbook out on New Fraktur Press, awesomely titled Emancipator. I read it a hundred times in a row on a plane to Alaska over the holidays, and I promise that it's more than worth the $4 admission! Five poems on loose cards in a portfolio cover bound by string; get it here...

Snapshots from Poets Theater

2012-01-23T00:15:00.000-08:00

Thanks to everyone who made it happen, especially Samantha Giles, Camille Roy, Sara Wintz, and Lauren Shufran

David Brazil, Michelle Ty, Yedda Morrison and Brandon Brown in Bob Gluck and Jocelyn Saidenberg's play "Precious Princess, or, Pig Speak"

Wendy Kramer in "The Morton Salt Girl Monologue: NaCl and the Meaning of Her Mark"

Stephanie Young, Kelsa Trom, and Ronald Palmer in "Utopia and Other Drugs: Tales of a Pharma-whore, written by Ronald Palmer, Cynthia Sailers, and Stephanie Young

Jocelyn Saidenberg, a volunteer from the audience, Clive Worsely, and Zack Tuck's mom (?!) in Brent Cunningham's "Times Machinery; OR the Stopwatch"

Jack Frost and Brittany Billmeyer-Finn kicking Zack Tuck's ass in his "Idioterne"

Marcello Sousa and Tom Comitta in Ryan B. Funk's "Barber Shop or Butch Realness Meets Real Butchness"

Lindsey Boldt and Steve Orth making out behind David Brazil and Monica Peck in "What She Said" by Rodney Koeneke & George Albon

Laura Woltag, Anne Lesley Selcer, and Megan Breiseth downstage; Lauren Levin, Melissa Mack, Carrie Hunter, stage center; Melissa Peck as judge on right in "Debt Play"

C.S. Giscombe's "Lycanthropes, loup garoux, 28 nov, lean and mean"

Chuck Stebelton's New Year's Poem

2012-01-19T00:48:00.000-08:00

Favorite Things 2011: Eleni Stecopoulos

2012-01-15T00:46:00.000-08:00

Dear Michael, here are just a few favorite things of 2011....random list of what's in memory and attention at this point (caveat: need to catch up on a lot of poetry books.)

Here's to the pleasures of 2012!

New Year's Day Poetry marathon @ St. Mark's

Fireworks in Prospect Park, over snowy banks and under the August moon

Swimming under eucalyptus trees at Golden Bear pool in Berkeley

Claire Denis's film L'Intrus, inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy's essay

Having Peter Trachtenberg as a neighbor in Berkeley for spring, and his generosity in talking with my students about his Book of Calamities and research in Rwanda

Qi Gong at Lake Merritt in Oakland with Margit Galanter

Yunte Huang's Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, Yunte in the NYT, the New Yorker, on screen, everywhere...plus Yunte's visits to SF, drinks and high-rise glass elevator rides

Stacy Doris reading and Pindaric dances at Sara Larsen and David Brazil's A Muse Meant series

Movement, Somatics, and Writing Symposium at the University of Michigan, led and gathered by Petra Kuppers - communing, moving, sounding and incubating writing with some of my favorite poets and people

Will Alexander and Maria Damon visit to SF and readings at The Poetry Center

The music (more like cosmological engineering) of Cloud Shepherd (Andrew Joron, Brian Lucas, Joe Noble, Mark Pino) - even more so when joined by the likes of Will Alexander on piano and India Cooke on violin

Handel's Xerxes at SF Opera

Subterranean Arthouse in Berkeley

Bhanu Kapil and David Buuck reading at the Condensery

Thom Donovan's The Hole

Breitenbush Hot Springs in Oregon with Linda Russo

Visiting with David Wolach and Elizabeth Williamson, reading and talking to the wonderful, engaged students of Evergreen State College

Teaching in the Summer Writing program at Naropa, joining for a bit this amazing community Anne Waldman and many others sustain

Laura Mullen's performances at the SWP, including her romance novel sampling parody ("he buried himself within her") and garbage bridal dress

Meeting Melissa Buzzeo

Meeting Tyrone Williams

Meeting George Quasha

Meeting Amy Sara Carroll again after more than 20 years

Talking and learning with super smart younger (mostly) women writers working on the political and somatic, ecopoetics, healing, performance...including Liz Latty, Sarah Heady, Aisha Sasha John, Aurora Prelevic, Kimberly Alidio, Ari Braverman, Kristen Park, and many others, some of them students: thank you

Reading with David Wolach in Philly in the c/c reading series (thanks Jamie Townsend and Nicholas DeBoer!) with great audience including Carlos Soto Román, CA Conrad, Asher Lewis, and more. Add to that: staying up all night at Bard College eating sandwiches and writing an essay on empathy, workers' comp and pain management, Silvia Federici, Kafka, Frans de Waal, Antigone, and red foxes...with David popping into the kitchen to visit and encourage me

Robin Coste Lewis, "Fable" in Encyclopedia Volume 2, F-K: amazing piece of writing I want to read and re-read

Stephen Cope's Conference of the Birds

the full moon

& eclipsed eclipses

Favorite Things 2011: Laura Woltag

2012-01-15T00:36:00.000-08:00

2011

Occupy

Alice Notley’s Alma, or the Dead Women summer reading group. We (often: Lauren Levin, Carrie Hunter, Amy Berkowitz, Erin Morrill, Lara Durback, Sara Larsen, Yosefa Raz…) were visited by a hummingbird. Getting witchy. Dreaming owl tattoos.

The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus – Brandon Brown. About ½ hour after BB gave me a copy, I was sitting in the SF State student center reading Erika Stati’s contribution and a 4.0 earthquake (origin in Berkeley, I think) shook the building. When things started to wobble, I was reading the sentence, “I caramelize the situation.”

This Can’t Be Life – Dana Ward. I’m going to need all of 2012 (&beyond) to think about this book.

Marching

Marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans at SFMOMA.

Poetry For the People

Ports

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge reading at USF on November 9th. “My pulse falls through subtracted space.” Very blissed for days after this reading, as if the reading spelled me into bliss space. Though home after reading to learn of students beaten at Occupy Cal.

“The Acoustical Prehistory of Poetry” – Brunella Antomarini (trans. Susan Stewart)

Monica Peck & Jack Frost reading at A MUSE MEANT

The Cake Part – Stacy Doris

Trys

Poetic Labor Project Labor Day event at the Niebyl-Proctor Library

Song – Lauren Levin

“Air Rights” – Helen Mallinson

Don’t Afraid!

Sonic Warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear – Steve Goodman

“Taxonomy of a Landscape” – Victoria Sambunaris (@ Albright Knox)

Introduction to Sanskrit, Part 1 – Thomas Egenes

Reading with Yosefa Raz & Melissa Mack at Lauren’s house

Dimensions of Panini Grammar – Kapil Kapoor

A, a, a, a, a – Sara Larsen

“Bird Identification by Song” with David Lukas, SF State Sierra Nevada Field Center

The Incompossible – Carrie Hunter. Carrie gifted me a copy while we were eating undermade curry somewhere on Telegraph Ave. This was after DZB’s Hauntology reading at the Berkeley Art Museum. I wrote a poem to Carrie after having some time with her book, and she wrote a poem with a line from my poem, which you can find in her Angel, Unincorporated, also out this year. Monica was mentioned in the poem after Carrie’s poem and after I sent this poem to Monica, Monica wrote a poem, which she read at Bird & Beckett, where Carrie happened to be in the audience. They had never met.

Lauren Berlant’s blog

Capital for the Crisis reading group

yo! eos! – David Brazil

Danzon – Pina Bausch @ Zellerbach

Economy – David Brazil

Fifty Verses of a Love Thief – Bilhana

Lysistrata & Birds – Aristophanes

Deepa Natarajan’s Arangetram performance at the Humanist Hall, Oakland, 11/5

Mercury – Ariana Reines

Winstanley: ‘The Law of Freedom’ and other Writings, ed. Christopher Hill

Will Alexander playing the piano & reading at the Subterranean Art House

The Grand Piano Reading at SPT

Western Medicinal Plants and Herbs – Peterson Field Guides

Favorite Things 2011: Dan Thomas-Glass

2012-01-14T00:07:00.000-08:00

2011

Started 2011 reading through old correspondence with Stephanie Young about 880 project for Deep Oakland, for Thom Donovan’s Other Letters project. That was awesome… Remembering how much Stephanie helped me extend & improve the writing & thinking there.

Being Dana Motherfucking Gioia at Poets Theater 2010, screaming “Can Poetry Matter?” as jeremaiad on the streets, burning that book, drinking CA Conrad’s water as deputized by Samantha Giles—very energizing start to the year too.

Juliana Spahr & Stephanie Young’s A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism
(Chain Books) really shaped lots of my thinking in that early part of the year, as did talking through a lot of ideas with Lauren Levin subsequent to reading her chaps Not Time (Boxwood) & then Keenan (Lame House).

One random sunny Tuesday afternoon reading Ash Smith’s Watersheds (Dos Press) while drinking a beer in my house; the feeling as it stretched my brain out into my environs, run-offs, the Bay. A beautiful book & day.

Monica Peck reading “Centaur Family Tree” at With + Stand 5 release party at Zughaus Gallery in May (& @ the end of the poem, something along the lines of “What? It’s true.”). & of course the whole reading & process of editing W+S 5—forever the humblest & happiest of my poetry moments each year.

Lyn Hejinian reading to close out the Gertrude Stein marathon at SF MOMA in June—old ones & circles death in her section, a happenstance (?) meditation on mortality, & all these poetry & art communities in one big-ass expensive room.

Talking on the phone with Dana Ward about The Great American Beatjack project in June—helped me understand my approach to that project, which is ongoing.

Brian Ang started Armed Cell, a new print journal for our experimental/avant/political Bay poetry community—that happened in late summer, I think. Had a very interesting conversation about the journal & about the relationship between poetry & politics over beers one night at the Albatross with Charlie Legere.

Occupy Everything was the chant, ongoing. Taking Sonia down to Occupy Oakland was super interesting & informative—the contrast between her toddler sense of things & the violence & energy of that space continues to provoke writing & thinking. & of course the poets are together around Occupy in a much different way, loving & caring for each other in new forms & modes, which is a very hopeful thing.

Anne Boyer’s My Common Heart (Spooky Girlfriend Press). She has a genius for titles, & for writing with great courage & compassion about things that are true & difficult for many of us.

Susan Briante’s The Market is a Parasite that Looks Like a Nest (Dancing Girl Press). Saw this via Anne Boyer, on Facebook. In which my ongoing wondering about poetry & parenting & capitalism gets an injection of brilliance.

This was also kind of the year of Dana Ward for me—The Squeakquel books, Typing Wild Speech, “Things The Little Baby Likes” & other poems sent in an email—& I haven’t gotten to SPD to buy This Can’t Be Life, but will, & soon.

Continuing my Roberto Bolano fascination, along with much of literary America. Antwerp was my favorite of the five or so of his books that I got to this year.

Little Red Leaves #6, The Ephemera Issue. Holy crap this thing is a beautiful absurd beast of an object d’art. I am tempted to say something about pushing the logic of the handmade to its logical conclusion—the impossibility of LRL6 is enchanting. It is impossible, & yet there it is. Each poem there, its tiny or huge incredible physical self, has been churning around in my brain since the whole magical mess arrived in the mail a couple weeks ago.

LRL had a huge year in general. The e-edition collective response to yr Haecceities was like being in a room with a bunch of smart friends; super helpful. & David Brazil’s Economy was great, as Rob noted earlier in this list of lists. (I also loved David’s piece on rhythm in W+S 5; one of my favorites in that issue.)

Still haven’t received my Displaced Press subscription, so still salivating in anticipation of Brandon’s book, Samantha’s book, Thom’s book, Taylor & Rob’s book…

Favorite Things 2011: Sara Wintz

2012-01-14T00:03:00.000-08:00

2011 totally stream of consciousness!

Paul Thek's show at the Whitney

Cecilia Corrigan and Mac Wellman's reading at Segue

Occupy Wall Street/Oakland

West Coast Port Shutdown!

Going to see the very first showing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at midnight at the movie theater in Chelsea with Kaegan Sparks then taking the L train home at 3 in the morning

Staying up until the sun came up in Williamsburg with Matvei, Cori, Macgregor on my birthday

Going to a dance party for the NYU ITP program in Bushwick with Kareem and boogying down

Tricycle racing with Brandon Downing at Poetry Time

Learning to ski in New Hampshire on New Years and then Bolt Busing to read for the first time at the Poetry Project Marathon

Artistic Directors of The Poetry Project reading with Anne Waldman at the podium and lightning crashing behind her

Hanging out with Dodie, Eileen, Thom, Dottie, and Bethany all having drinks at Scratcher

Reading for Kristen Gallagher and Chris Alexander at Segue with Tan Lin!

Sleater-Kinney breaking up: epic sadness

First visiting artist classroom visit, for Evan Rehill's English class at Pratt

Donald Judd, Marcel Dzama shows at David Zwirner

Robert Whitman at Peak Performances @Montclair

Discovering Of Montreal all over again

Favorite Things 2011: Dana Teen Lomax

2012-01-13T00:08:00.000-08:00

My father, Daniel Norman Lomax, died 11-11-11.

In 2011, Nicole Brodsky gave me Anne Carson’s Nox

And Elana Dykewomon handed me "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone" by W. H. Auden:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

In Nelson Graff’s C & I class, I read

"In a Dark Time" by Theodore Rothke:

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

My friend Sarah Anne Cox said to me, “It’s just the worst thing in the world. Nothing anyone says can make you feel any better.”

Sweet said, “Nothing dies, silly. Look at your daughter.”

And on the holiday, my twin sister, Danna, just looked over and said, “I gotta get my mojo back…”

Favorite Things 2011: David Buuck

2012-01-13T00:02:00.000-08:00

25 or so new(ish) things that made me rethink art and culture this year:

Occupy Oakland!

---

Urs Allemann, Babyfucker, trans. Peter Smith, Les Figues, 1992/2010
Karl Holmqvist, WHAT'S MY NAME?, Book Works, 2010
Horacio Castellanos Moya, La Díaspora, trans Christian Nagler, in MS, 1987/2011
NaoKo TakaHashi, Not So Too Much of Much of Everything, Book Works, 2007
Laura Kipnis, "Marx: the Video: A Politics of Revolting Bodies," video script, 1990
Dana Teen Lomax, Disclosure, Black Radish, 2011

---

Glenn Ligon @ the Whitney
Luis Camnitzer @ Museo del Barrio
Charlotte Salomon @ Contemporary Jewish Museum
Casteneda/Reiman @ Bear Ridgway & Yerba Buena Center
Theaster Gates @ LA MOCA
Pacific Standard Time, esp. "Asco: Elite of the Obscure" @ LACMA, "Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-81" @ MOCA, "Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles, 1960-80," @ the Hammer, "Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface" @ San Diego MCA, & "State of Mind" @ the Orange County Museum.

---

Faustin Linyekula/Studios Kabako @ Yerba Buena Center
Miguel Gutierrez @ The Garage
Sarah Michelson @ ODC
Yvonne Rainer @ Baryshnikov Arts Center
M Norbese Philip @ Mills College
Black Took Collective @ the &Now Festival

---

Nostlagia for the Light, d. Patricio Guzmán, 2010 @ PFA
The Arbor, d. Clio Barnard, 2010 @ SFIFF
The Complaint of an Empress, d. Pina Bausch, 1990 @ UbuWeb
World on a Wire, d Fassbinder, 1973 @ PFA

Favorite Things 2011: Samantha Giles

2012-01-12T00:08:00.000-08:00

Some Books:
A Megaphone, Juliana Spahr & Stephanie Young, ed
Inter Arma, Lauren Shufran
The Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin
Green-Wood, Allison Cobb
The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein
Saborami, Cecelia Vicuna
Sherwood Forest, Camille Roy
I Love Dick, Chris Kraus
Out of Oz, Gregory Maguire
I Hotel, Karen Tei Yamashita
Pinko, Jen Benka
It, Inger Christensen
In the Stitches, Erika Staiti
False Intimacy, Brian Whitener
Well then, There Now, Juliana Spahr

Some Events:
the march on the Oakland Port, Oakland, CA
a night with How(ever): Kathleen Fraser, Bev Dahlen, Susan Gevirtz at SPT
staging of The Dust by Michael Gottleib by the Relationship at Poetry Project
Durutti Free Skool, Berkeley, CA
all of the Pop Up Poet presentations at SFMOMA
swimming with mating manatees, off the coast of Caye Caulker, Belize
Ronaldo Wilson reading at Judith Goldman's house
Bob Gluck and Bruce Boone memories (with Kaplan Harris) at SPT
petting live jaguar paw, outside Belize City, Belize
human microphone, Occupy Oakland

and

conversations with Erika Staiti
conversations with Frank Brash
conversations with Stephanie Young
reading Bhanu Kapil's blog
conversations with Erin Morrill
conversations with Suzanne Stein
reading CAConrad's Facebook posts
conversations with Brent Cunningham
conversations with Brian Whitener
conversations with Yedda Morrison
conversations with probably someone/s really important I'm forgetting

There are so many things I wish I'd read and seen this year! I'm jealous of everyone else's list.

Favorite Things 2011: Adam Fagin

2012-01-12T00:02:00.000-08:00

Left Having—Jesse Seldess
That This—Susan Howe
The H.D. Book—Robert Duncan
A Map Predetermined and Chance—Laura Wetherington
the buddhist—Dodie Bellamy
Radical Coherency—David Antin
Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom—Abbott Thayer
Where a road had been—Matthew Shears
Money Shot—Rae Armantrout
Metropole—Geoffrey G. O’Brien
How Phenomena Appear to Unfold—Leslie Scalapino
Book of the Given—Rusty Morrison
Repetition Island. A Mental Melange of Melodic Memories—Kevin Killian

Movies:
Meek's Cutoff. Drive. Melancholia. Tree of Life.

Places:
Grand Bakery. Connie’s Cantina. Farley’s East. Oakland, California.

Music:
The Promise—Bruce Springsteen

Favorite Things 2011: Divya Victor

2012-01-11T00:07:00.000-08:00

1. A Young Girl’s Diary, by Anonymous, with a preface by Sigmund Freud. Seltzer, New York, 1921

“It was lovely. Father was awfully Jolly and we pelted one another with pine cones. It was jolly. I threw one at Dora and it hit her on her padded bust. She let out such a yell and I said out loud ‘You couldn’t feel it there.’”

A rarely read, difficult to find diurnal autobiography written by an unnamed girl born into the most privileged of classes. Like a lawnmower over freshly pinked toenails, it runs over what we’ve learned about the emergence of pre/post pubescent longing, the clumsy exit from girlhood, and the warm, sticky pleasures of adolescent narcissism through other diaries like Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank, in English, 1952) and Bonjour Tristesse (Françoise Sagan, 1952).

2. I Am Love (Io sono l'amore), Milan, Luca Guadagnino, 2009.

Because, in the words of Tilda Swinton, it works outside its tongue.

3. Don’t Look Now, Nicolas Roeg, 1973.

Laura Baxter: One of your children has posed a curious question: if the world is round, why is a frozen lake flat?
John Baxter: That's a good question.
Laura Baxter: [flipping through book] Ah, here it says that Lake Ontario curves more than 3 degrees from its Eastern end to its Western end. So frozen water really isn't flat.
John Baxter: Nothing is what it seems.

Because, in the words of user mocpacific, “I was afraid to swallow, to make any noise. The unspeakable was all around me”

4. The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law, Vanessa Place, Other Press, 2010.

“In Dante’s Inferno, one of the damned, a friar, describes how he counseled his Pope on how to betray his enemies, but only after the Pope absolved him of this treachery before he committed it. When a devil came to collect the friar at his death, the devil pointed out that it was impossible to repent and sin concurrently. ‘Perhaps you didn’t reckon I’d be versed in logic.’”

In the case of collective or individual guilt, like the Scream franchise taught us, the call is always coming from inside the house. Or, in the words of my mother, “Don’t make me tell you what you know you won’t want to hear from anyone but yourself.”

5. American Psycho, Brett Easton Ellis, Vintage, 1991

“Once out of the shower and toweled dry, I put the Ralph Lauren boxers back on, I apply the Mousse A Raiser, a shaving cream by Pour Homme, I press a hot towel against my face for two minutes to soften abrasive beard hair. Then I always slather on a moisturizer (to my taste, Clinique) and let it soak in for a minute. You can rinse it off or keep it on and apply a shaving cream over it—preferably with a brush, which softens the beard as it lifts the whiskers— which I’ve found makes removing the hair easier.”

Because, as Amy Taubin, in Sight and Sound, puts it: “With just 5 per cent of the world's population, the US is believed to have about 75 per cent of the world's serial killers.”

6. Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes, published posthumously, translated by the tireless Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, 2010.

When his mother died, Barthes returned home, cut up squares of paper roughly the size of index cards, and wrote once each day on one scrap of paper. This constraint based project, spanning 330 squares and days, overspills its own procedure every time composition falls short of intent—which is, always. In notating a mourning, “I’m trusting myself to the banality that is in me.”

“October 29
How strange: her voice, which I knew so well, and which is said to be the very texture of memory (‘the dear inflection . . .’), I no longer hear. Like a localized deafness . . .

October 29
In the sentence ‘She’s no longer suffering,’ to what, to whom does ‘she’ refer? What does that present tense mean?”

7. The Lazarus Project: Alien Vs. Predator, Joey Yearous Algozin, Troll Thread Press, 2011

“The Alien’s bio-mechanoid body is an intense white light, an orange light, sunlight, blinking blue lights, shafts of light, a portable neon light, ceiling light, first light the next day, twin searchlights, exterior lighting, yellow pools of light, numerous rotating coloured lights dotted around the platform starting to blink on-and-off.”

Because the only thing more arrogant than claiming to bring the dead back to life is doing it over and over and over and over again. Yearous Algozin does what everyone else claims to want to do but is terrified of doing. In his own words: “I used to make poetry, but I stopped. Now, I make pages.”

8. Poems For Baby Trilogy, Holly Melgard, Troll Thread Press, 2011.

Because it does to Vis-Po what the Rubik’s cube does to Rothko. Because Melgard’s ideal audience is post-fetal, like most of us. And because poetry needs to be at least as funny and redundant as geometry.

9. The Collected Tapes of “Criminal case 40/61” or The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, begun in April 1961 in Jerusalem before the Jerusalem District Court, now up on You Tube.

Because it is worth watching how Eichmann adjusted his spectacles and how Hausner created his.

10. Night and Fog, Alain Resnais, 1955.

In the final scene, as the camera pulls away from the camps, the eye pores over a sunny field replete with summer flowers swaying in the breeze, and Auschwitz-Birkenau retreats as the frame takes stock of the “crematorium ruins; twisted wires; broken watchtowers; crumbled chambers; slabs of cracked concrete; abstract figures of stone,” the narrative voice lingers, pointing at us: “Those of us who pretend to believe that all this happened only once, at a certain time and in a certain place, and those who refuse to see, who do not hear the cry to the end of time”

11. Neighbour Procedure, Rachel Zolf, Coach House Books, 2010

In 1937, Adolf Hitler wished for a volkloser Raum—an empty space, a state-free space, or a space without people of a state. It was one of Hitler’s first wishes to resignify geographical space as a purely biopolitical one. He wished for neighborhoods that would allow for people to pass into populations and for populations to pass away into corpses. It is thus that we may admit today that a death camp has no neighbors.

12. Tragodia: Statement of Facts, Argument, and Statement of the Case, Vanessa Place, Blanc Press, 2011

In transcribing, re-appropriating, and performing her own appellate briefs, Place witnesses innumerable testimonies without testifying her own place in them. She continues, carries over, and transfers instances of discourse from other mouths into her own. She speaks in the disguise of being non—pure representative, a zero that is also a vocal O, an open mouth, a sifr, a laughing Medusa who finds nothing hilarious—a witness. The nom de guerre and the nom de plume that pertain to the combative position of an appellate lawyer destroy each other, carrying forward only a signature of a voice into this emptying of the speaking subject in the scene of legal enunciation.

13. The Field, Martin Glaz Serup, Les Figues Press, 2010.

“The field sometimes thinks it’s unhappy in a mild and ordinary way that makes it happy because it thinks that it’s probably perfectly normal, and that makes it happy because it thinks things could be much worse, which makes it afraid because it thinks things could still get much worse, so it tries to think of something else.”

This can be paraphrased as the wonderful failure of Simone de Beauvoir’s wish in Ethics of Ambiguity (1955):

“I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where I slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession.”

14. Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, Tzvetan Todorov, Holt, 1997.

Because of unforgettable details such as the culinary diary entry of one Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, surgeon at the Auschwitz Medical Corps, Sep 6, 1942: “Today an excellent Sunday dinner: tomato soup, one half of chicken with potatoes and red cabbage [20 grammes of fat], dessert and magnificent vanilla-crème.”

15. Model Homes 4, Lil Norton, 2011, eds. Marie Buck and Brad Flis

Featuring Vanessa Place, Brian Whitener, Carol Mirakove, Matthew Gagnon, Josef Kaplan, Michael Casey, Diana Hamilton, Gordon Faylor, Sara Wintz, Amy Berkowitz, Brandon Brown, Sean Casey, Chris Sylvester, Brian Ang

Because it interrupts your sentimental armored car ride with a Molotov cocktail and nurses your wounds with some generic brand Himalayan pink salt. And because Buck and Flis have the editorial stamina of wildebeest.

15. P-Queue Journal 8: Document, Buffalo, NY 2011, eds. Joey Yearous Algozin, Holly Melgard.

Featuring David Buuck, CA Conrad, Thom Donovan, Brad Flis, Lewis Freedman, Lawrence Giffin, Josef Kaplan, Ish Klein, Jena Osman, Chris Sylvester, Andrew Topel, Divya Victor, Anna Vitale, David Wolach

Because of its bold departure from and continuation of P-Queue’s magnificent editorial history (Andrew Rippeon, Sarah Campbell). To quote Melgard quoting Acconci: “If, as Vito Acconci says, ‘the function of public art is to de-design,’ then we found design was most active, despite continuity, in its resistance to and withdrawal from assimilation.”

16. The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony, Denise Riley, Stanford, 2000.

“So exiled, I fell for Narcissus.

I had no voice to plead so I'd pursue.

He called ‘I’d die before I'd give myself to you!’

I shrieked ‘I'd give myself to you’ and ran nearer.

If he'd cried ‘I'd rather die before I'd fuck you,’ at least I could have echoed back that ‘Fuck you.’

Sorry—I have to bounce back each last phrase. Half petrified, I voice dead gorges."

17. Item Numbers, Shiv Kotecha, Gauss PDF, 2011

This poetry is a much ado about the song and dance of infinite difference and repetition in the biggest industry of desire located in the biggest democracy on Earth: Bollywood dance sequences or “item numbers.” Because to be an object looking at a subject is way better than being a subject looking at an object. Way, way, better. Except not

Favorite Things 2011: Erin Wilson

2012-01-11T00:03:00.000-08:00

Dana Teen Lomax's Disclosure

Lauren Shufran's Inter Arma

The Marvelous Museum, Mark Dion's project at the Oakland Museum

The Loose Change and Killer of Sheep double-feature at the Pacific Film Archive

Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts at YBCA

Silke Otto-Knapp's exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum

'Does the Secret Mind Whisper,' the Poetry Center's symposium on Bob Kaufman

Meek's Crossing at the Roxie

Performance screening at the Small Back Room

Omar Souleyman at the Mezzanine

Daughters of Houdini's show at 2nd Floor Projects

Favorite Things 2011: Jennifer Scappetone

2012-01-10T00:06:00.000-08:00

I was in Rome for the better part of the year, surrounded by an unusually broad series of astonishments; this list reflects that, with many neighbors included whose works I was lucky enough to witness in the making. Glosses of the astonishments largely found at oikost.com.

Giuliano Mesa, Poesie 1973-2008 (La Camera Verde)

Janet Cardiff, Forty-Part Motet, at the Biennale di architettura di Venezia

The reinforced-concrete domes of Pier Luigi Nervi

Luigi Moretti's studies of Borromini at the Academy of Saint Luca

Andrea Zanzotto, "The Carnival of Venice"

Karen Yasinsky and Huck Hodge, Pools of Shadow from an Older Sky for 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescope

Paul Rudy (various) and Erika Eckert (viola, in window of the Casa Rustica), duet in rain for At Rome Around Jovian Moons for 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescope

Aparna Keshaviah, various bharatnatyam compositions

William Kentridge, studies and storyboards for Norton Lectures and for William Kentridge & Peter Galison, The Refusal of Time

Marvin Trachtenberg, Building-In-Time (Yale)

Caroline Bergvall, Meddle English

The so-called Dea di Morgantina, returned to Aidone by the Getty after long controversy

Il Cretto di Alberto Burri

Emilio Villa, notes toward an etymological dictionary of the Italian language and a dictionary of myth

Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, Editors, A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism

Patti Smith, Just Kids

Wolfgang Scheppe & the IUAV Class on Politics of Representation, Migropolis: Venice/Atlas of a Global Situation

Fausto Romitelli, Professor Bad Trip, performed by the Ensemble Dal Niente

The Grand Piano, choral reading at Small Press Traffic

Charles Bernstein, Attack of the Difficult Poems

Federico Fellini, Le notti di Cabiria

Pamela Lu, Ambient Parking Lot

Occupy Wall Street, various instantiations

Contrasonic protest through “Ode to Joy” at the Royal Albert Hall, 9/1/11

Marco Giovenale, Storia dei minuti

Favorite Things 2011: C.J. Martin

2012-01-10T00:03:00.000-08:00

What made it possible for me to focus for extended periods in a very distracted, preoccupied 2011, in no particular order:

Susan Howe's That This & the most recent Grubbs collaboration, Frolic Architecture. They make that poem shockingly legible.

Howe's Pacifica Radio shows on PennSound, especially the interview w/Helen Adam.

Helen Adam's correspondence w/Robert Duncan.

Sarah Campbell's Words with Dürer (blog).

Norma Cole's 14000 Facts & To Be At Music.

Robert Gluck's Denny Smith.

Barbara Guest's Collected.

Larry Eigner's Collected.

Bruce Boone's Century of Clouds.

Duncan (variously, but this year esp. the HD Book & Caesar's Gate).

Jess's paste-ups.

The CUNY Documents series.

Beverly Dahlen's A Reading, as well as her 1st 3 books (so, her whole work).

The How(ever) online archive.

Susan Gevirtz's Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger.

DuPlessis's Pitch & The Collage Poems of Drafts.

Bergvall's Meddle English.

Your Haecceities, around which one of the most fruitful conversations I've had in a long time.

Thom Donovan's The Hole, Others Letters, & his unstoppable generosity.

The films of the Kuchar brothers.

Brenda Iijima remaking the question mark (in If Not Metamorphic), & her Glossamatics, Thus & Mondo Bummer pamphlet.

Ted Greenwald's Clearview/LIE. Also any audio of Ted reading his work.

Laura Moriarty's A Tonalist & Rondeaux.

Pam Rehm's The Larger Nature.

Lauren Levin's Keenan.

Try.

Mimeo Mimeo.

Leland Hickman's Tiresias.

Michelle Detorie's Fur Birds.

Dawn Pendergast's Off Flaw, Sea Quills & conversations w/Dawn & Paul Klinger re LRL & environs.

Dawn's LRL textile series, which is some of the most underpriced publishing I can think of. As a publisher, she's a fucking surgeon.

Ash Smith's Come Such Frequency & Tuesdays w/Ash & Rob O & Max.

Rob Halpern's person & (this year) his prose (the articulations of his music for porn project & his writing through new narrative).

David Brazil's Orphica & Economy.

Jamie Townsend's IM account & borrowed car conversations.

Emily Abendroth's work, who flips my lid.

Any English translation of Henri Meschonnic (my French stinks).

Kyle Schlesinger's print shop & all of his new books.

A hippie education at BookLab II.

Julia Drescher's Bark & Birds of Paradise, & a life engagement.

Favorite Things 2011: Rob Halpern

2012-01-09T00:05:00.000-08:00

Just a few of the things I loved during 2011:

Peter Linebaugh, commons talk @ the first Occupy Ypsilanti teach-in. A 14 minute quietly rousing rehearsal of Linebaugh’s Magna Carta Manifesto tuned with visceral urgency and humor. “Our labor has been stolen. Our wealth has been taken…Let’s go back to honey and to warmth!”

Chto Delat? (What Is to Be Done?) Between Tragedy and Farce @ SMART Project Space, Amsterdam. This expansive set of installations and films drawing on 7 years of work by the Petersburg based radical arts collective Chto Delat? transformed my sense of what a collective can do.

David Brazil, Economy (Little Red Leaves). David’s prolegomenon to an ontology of money is also an ethics, a semiology, and a politics. Crucial reading, foreshadowing the larger work to come.

Paul Thek, The Diver @ the Hammer Museum, L.A. Being at the Thek retrospective was probably the closest I came last year to being in a place of worship, or rather to feeling like I ought to be.

Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte. The only film I paid to see twice in the theater in quite a long time, another symptom of my spiritual hunger. All goat bells and wind and totally Pythagorean.

Pamela Lu, Ambient Parking Lot (Kenning Editions). I had been eagerly awaiting this novel for so long, and devoured it lovingly, and then began reading it again. Lu agnostically narrates the vicissitudes of art’s social function for our post-Cage, post-punk, post-ambient moment.

Thelonius Monk, Straight, No Chaser. Finally got around to seeing this documentary and it was like having my audition reawakened. I can’t get enough Monk now, and have been listening and re-listening to everything I can get my hands on, as if for the first time.

Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry fresco cycle @ Detroit Institute of Art. Mom and Dad’s visit to Michigan provided the occasion to be awed yet again.

M. NorbeSe Philip, Zong! Philip’s book length poem irrupts in a space otherwise voided, conditioning the possibility of a community where what would be shared is what is not here to be shared, our deepest meanings lost to both experience and sensation.

Jai Ravine's presentation @ SPT's Bay Area Asian-Pacific-Islander American Poets and the Avant-Garde event. This event introduced me to Jai Ravine’s projects and left me deeply moved and excited to read and then entwine (Tinfish). I’ll no doubt use Ravine’s multidisciplinary work in the class I’m about to begin teaching called Transgenre: Genre, Gender, Sex (A Queer Poetics).

Tyrone Williams’ talk on Wendy Kramer’s visual poetics at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. I’ve been loving Wendy’s work for years, and listening to Tyrone discussing her collage poems with his characteristic care and attention was pretty marvelous.

Taylor Brady, For I Know Not What I Did Last Summer (Trafficker Press), and Taylor’s reading @ Eastern Michigan University in November to an audience of 300+. How does one go about accounting for oneself in our affective debt economy? Taylor makes the argument for lyric, of course. I’m still cursing myself for having allowed my recorder’s batteries to fail before Taylor’s Q &A, which was an event in itself. Already anxious for the forthcoming In the Red. Soon please!

Matthew Stadler, Chloe Jarren's La Cucaracha (Publication Studios). This is Stadler’s “cover version” of John Le Carré’s A Murder of Quality. Faithful to Le Carre’s plot, character, and syntax, Stadler’s virtuosic page turner is all about the devastation of neo-liberalism as it manifests in Guanajato, Mexico. A great alternative to many current conceptual writing practices.

Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's Made in U.S.A. What can I say?

Favorite Things 2011: Kevin Killian

2012-01-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

Dear Michael,

Thanks for this opportunity to look back at 2011. I wanted to do a good job for you so went through my diary from the beginning. Alas, as I finished up with March, I grew tired and had to quit! Thus I've left out many, many wonderful things that I saw and did in the last 9 months of the year. But I hope this will give you an idea of the sort of things I enjoyed most during this past year.

Of all the rest I don't mention here, the most important for me, was the 25th anniversary of me and Dodie's wedding in July 1986. We had a wonderful celebration and I can still say, with all my heart, I'm the luckiest son of a bitch to ever walk this valley. Love from Kevin K.

So here's my list from January through March—sorry it's so partial.

New Year at Steven Wolf Fine Arts and Rumi from the Cockettes singing, Baubles, Bangles and Beads

Meeting Peter Berlin and Travis Jeppesen with George Kuchar

Meeting Mike Kitchell thanks to D-L Alvarez

GB Jones retrospective at Tanz gallery in Los Angeles.

Poets Theater panel at the MLA organized by Patrick Durgin

Hanging out with Fiona Templeton and Kaplan Harris at hotel bar

Alysia Abbott coming by to talk about her dad

Meeting Rebecca Quaytman and talking Spicer with her and Apsara DiQuinzio on stage at SFMOMA.

Belgian artist Kris Martin drew a picture in my book at CCA.

Meeting Scott Treleaven and Paul P at the W Hotel.

Poets Theater festival and the angel costume Matt Gordon made for Dodie.

Rencontre with Lisa Samuels looking younger than ever before.

Reading with Lonely Christopher at City Lights and at Moes.

Katya Bonnenfant's show at Haines Gallery

Paul Graham's lecture at CCA Timken Hall.

Meeting with Gareth Long and with William E Jones one wet weekend in February

The Oscars and cupcakes with little Oscars on them.

Terence Hannum music performance at ATA

"We Were Here" opening at the Castro, crying my eyes out.

Participating in "Big Joy," forthcoming doc about James Broughton

Kobe Leah's drawing for the story "Too Far" from Impossible Princess.
Wilde Boys style salon for visiting NYC based poet Alex Dimitrov

George Kuchar strips off and poses naked for my camera.

Book launch for me and Dodie and our new books at Camerawork, dinner at Fang.

Meeting Robert Pinsky (!!!) at Arion Books and seeing Raymond's Jim Thompson's drawings there.

Participating in Linda Geary's "colors" project

Attending SFMOMA revival of Christopher Maclaine's THE END with Wilder Bentley II in attendance.

Favorite Things 2011: kathryn pringle

2012-01-08T00:07:00.000-08:00

actions:
occupy oakland & helicopters
general strike November 2, 2011

performance (mostly dance):
dances for non/ficitional bodies jess curtis/gravity at YBCA
shinichi iova-kova at Mills
Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Zellerbach
Axis Dance Company Home Season 2011
Marc Brewer w/ Axis
Zeropoint at Z Space
Chris Vitiello et al's Puppets in the Heliosphere

film:
Fassbbinder's World on a Wire at the Roxie
Herzog's Heart of Glass (if only because it gave me so much to say)

readings/poetry:
Judith Goldman at Holloway Series (she kicked ass)
Judith Goldman l.b.; or, catenaries
Samantha Giles Works in Progress reading group (awesome group of people and work)
Dayana Fraile Paisaje zin (Zinc Landscape)
Tim Vandyke, Topographies Drawn with a Divine Chain of Birds
Erika Staiti, In the Stitches
Joe Donahue, Dissolves Terra Lucid IV-VIII
Conversations at the Wartime Cafe reading at DNA lounge
8 x 8 reading at Headlands
Variety Show at Viracocha
David Wolach, Laura Elrick, and Lara Durback at SPT
Erin Morrill at Condensary

prose:
The Fate of Place, Edward S. Casey
The Pale King, David Foster Wallace
Crossing the Expendable Landscape, Bettina Drew
Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York
Freeways, Lawrence Halprin
2666, Roberto Bolano
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
Detroit

i know i'm missing things. biochemistry and statistics definitely got in the way of my art life last year. happy new year!

Favorite Things 2011: Brent Cunningham

2012-01-08T00:06:00.000-08:00

In poetry & fiction books there were many great titles this year, thru and not thru SPD—it really did seem like a banner year for our corner of literature. Off the top of the brain: Brandon Brown's The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus, Rosmarie Waldrop's Driven to Abstraction, Anna Moschovakis' You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, Renee Gladman's Ravickians series (& actually all five of the first five Dorothy titles), Julian Brolaski's gowanus atropolis, Joseph Mulligan's translation of Cesar Vallejo's Against Professional Secrets, Mimeo Mimeo (Issue 5 was an especial revelation), Bernadette Mayer's Studying Hunger Journals, Steve Farmer's glowball, Samantha Giles' Hurdis Addo, Cedar Sigo's Stranger in Town, Ed Roberson's To See the Earth Before the End of the World, Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater, much much else.

In nonfiction, it was the year of David Graeber for me. Both Direct Action and Debt: The First 5,000 Years have been tremendously enjoyable and clarifying guides during this Season of Occupy.

In tv, which took up much of my 2011, I can't vouch for much as I generally use it to turn my brain off. But, if you can take extreme humor, Louie C.K.'s Louie is a special show with some real artistic merits.

In movies, I mostly watched things appropriate for 4 year olds. Hence I am expecting the Muppets to win best picture of 2011. Apparently they did make films for grown ups this year, I hear tell.

In art, it was a lovely summer discovering & exploring hanne darboven's work; also spent a lot of time thinking about Twombly as he shuffled off the coil.

In bicycling, I discovered gloves are a good idea.

Favorite Things 2011: Robert Dewhurst

2012-01-07T00:08:00.000-08:00

art:
Paul Thek show at the Whitney

books:
Where Art Belongs by Chris Kraus
Of Lamb by Matthea Harvey and Amy Jean Porter
Humiliation by Wayne Koestenbaum

magazines:
Jupiter 88 (ed. CAConrad)
The Swan's Rag (ed. Evan Kennedy)
Creep of Light / c_L (ed. James Yeary)
Division Leap (eds. Kate Schaefer and Adam Davis)

music:
Jonathan Richman at Mohawk Place, Buffalo
Xiu Xiu at Mohawk Place, Buffalo

reading:
Bernadette Mayer at Karpeles, Buffalo, April Fools' Day

quote:
"This is for all the people who have been here all day. You're the ones living artistic lives. Being an artist, who gives a shit. But to live an artistic life means something." -- Penny Arcade on stage during the finale of the St. Mark's marathon, 1/1/11

Favorite Things 2011: Jared Schickling

2012-01-07T00:03:00.000-08:00

12.27.11

Dear Michael,

Hmmmm… a list of my favorite paper things read this past year (what is or was or will prove to have been or be 2011). I’ve never made such a list so maybe I went a little overboard, and looking at the small stack here, I’m wondering if any were published this year. The criteria I made for inclusion was simple: the enjoyment I received from the work, that it was actually read during or after January 2011 (this ruled out many great works I would otherwise have included), and perceived forms of contemporary relevance. I’ve included some notes here and there. Most of these were new to me, but some keep re-occurring; most were read during the first six months of the year, go figure.

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault, illustrated by Lois Ehlert (Simon & Schuster, 1989)—an almost mystical consideration of sound and noise in the form of a melodic introduction to linguistics for pre-linguistic learners (i.e. a kid’s book).

Bacacay, stories by Witold Gombrowicz, trans. Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books, 2004)

Ideas in Context, ed. Joseph Satin (The Riverside Press, 1958)
Paths to the Present: Aspects of European Thought from Romanticism to Existentialism, “Readings chosen, discussed, and edited by EUGEN WEBER” (Dodd, Mead & Co., Inc., 1960)
British Poetry and Prose vol. 1: From Beowulf to Blake, ed. Paul Robert Lieder, Robert Morss Lovett, Robert Kilburn Root (The Riverside Press, 1950)
A Children’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated by Alexander Dobkin (The World Publishing Company, 1946)
[All four of these books were found on the bounteous free shelf at the town dump in Farmington, Maine, next to an unused pair of aluminum crutches.]

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt (Harcourt, 1978)

Flux, Clot & Froth by John Bloomberg-Rissman (Meritage Press, 2010)

So It Seams by Chuck Richardson (BlazeVOX [books], 2010).

The 60’s and 70’s from “The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick” by Deborah Meadows (Tinfish Press, 2003)—I’m a sucker for great works on Melville.

Shaved Code by Frances Richard (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008)

“A” by Louis Zukofsky (U of California Press, 1978)

Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis by Abdellatif Laâbi, trans. Nancy Hadfield and Gordon Hadfield (Leafe Press, 2009)

Field Work: Notes, Songs, Poems 1997-2010 by David Hadbawnik (BlazeVOX [books], 2011)

Poems of Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova, trans. Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward (Mariner Books, 1973)—I’m not sure how close Kunitz and Hayward’s English is to the Russian but based on their translator’s note and the alternatives available online I can safely say I prefer reading them this way.

Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes, illustrated by Quentin Blake with photographs by Jan Baldwin (Scholastic, 1995)

Paper Waste Shooting by Luc Fierens (“le Sud du Nord Editions,” Belgium, 2007)—tremendous book art.

A, a, a, a, a by Sara Larsen (Berkeley Neo-Baroque, 2011)

The Unparalleled Adventure of Hans Phaall and “Pure Imagination” by Edgar Allan Poe (Sea Urchin Editions, 2001)

Heroisms by Dan Beachy-Quick (Poor Claudia, 2011)

Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute, trans. Maria Jolas (George Braziller, Inc, 1963)

The History of Violets by Marosa di Giorgio, trans. Jeannine Marie Pitas (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010)

RENEGADE by Andrew Topel (unarmed chapbook, 2010?)

Two Books by C. J. Martin (Compline, 2011)

John M. Bennett’s poems and ephemera (Luna Bisonte Prods, ongoing)

Following Ghosts Upriver by Marc Pietrzykowski (Main Street Rag, 2011)—a perfect blend of vividly anarchic avant sensibilities with formalist concerns and procedures. In short, brilliant poetry and thinking.

Maribor by Demosthenes Agrafiotis, trans. John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis (The Post-Apollo Press, 2009)

Rainbows Are Made “by” Carl Sandburg, selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins, with wood engravings by Fritz Eichenberg (Harcourt BJ, 1982)—a compilation of Sandburg lines and passages, extracted and re-situated within the themed chapters of this book, geared towards the eyes and ears of children. Also found at the town dump in Maine.

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb (Norton, 2009)—Crumb includes an introductory note on his translation, describing the process by which he has “to the best of [his] ability, faithfully reproduced every word of the original text, which [he] derived from several sources…” With his alternative read and his graphic depiction of the first book of the bible, “adult supervision [is] recommended for minors.”

A WRITER I WISH TO EXPLORE MORE CLOSELY IN THE COMING YEAR:
Eileen Tabios

Favorite Things 2011: Crane Giamo

2012-01-06T00:04:00.000-08:00

Music

Yr Iliad, Welcome to Concrete
Tim Hecker, Ravedeath, 1972
Youth Lagoon, The Year of Hibernation
Peaking Lights, 936

Films

Dark Days (Marc Singer)
Santa Sangre (Alejandro Jodorowsky)
Gasland (Josh Fox)

Artists

Alex Kvares' drawings
Glenn Ligon's text paintings
Kelly McQuilken

Books

0 to 9 The Complete Magazine: 1967--1969 ed. by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer
Writings of the Vienna Actionists
Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line by John Baldessari
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Favorite Things 2011: Andrew Levy

2012-01-06T00:02:00.000-08:00

Favorite Things 2011: Angela Hume

2012-01-05T00:24:00.001-08:00

Thanks for this opportunity to contribute, Michael.

Poetry:

Harm, Hillary Gravendyk (Omnidawn, 2011)
Everything riots and
unspools, the whole room on one side and all the sound winking out.

Birds of Tifft, Jonathan Skinner (BlazeVOX, 2011)
the stem's left to rust
in stagnant water, twists
of matter, dust and lanes

Personification, Margaret Ronda (Saturnalia, 2010)
There was a tiny pain then, stab of glass catching sun-glare. It shuts you up. To think of it as a wall, too steep to scale, and someone on the other side shouting.

Styrofoam, Evelyn Reilly (Roof Books, 2009)
& plastic.plasticity
in.magnificent . unscrupulous . quantities

Other important poetry discovered in 2011:
eccolinguistics 1.4, ed. Jared Schickling (Delete Press, 2011)
Correct Animal, Rebecca Farivar (Octopus Books, 2011)
From Unincorporated Territory [Saina], Craig Santos Perez (Omnidawn, 2010)
If Not Metamorphic, Brenda Iijima (Ahsahta Press, 2010)
Armies of Compassion, Eleni Stecopoulos (Palm Press, 2010)
Shaved Code, Frances Richard (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2009)
Here, C.S. Giscombe (Dalkey Archive Press, 1994)

Theory:

The Distribution of the Insensible, Nathan Brown (http://distributioninsensible.tumblr.com/)
...another Iraq War veteran suffered a ruptured spleen from being beaten with batons.It seems the domestic army of the American Empire is now tasked with destroying the bodies of its imperializing counterparts the moment they come home from war, disenchanted. (From “On the Night Before the Morning, All Power to the Communes.”)

The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton (Harvard University Press, 2010) and “Some Outlines for Art in the Time of Hyperobjects,” Morton (http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/).
Hyperobjects invoke a terror beyond the sublime, cutting deeper than conventional religious fear…

[“Hyperobjects”] loom uncannily towards us, getting stranger by the minute. All our representations are inadequate.

Introduction to Civil War, Tiqqun (Semiotext(e), 2010)
the becoming-real, the becoming-practice of the world…each act, conduct, and statement endowed with sense—act, conduct, and statement as event—spontaneously manifest its own metaphysics, its own community, its own party. Civil war simply means the world is practice, and life is, in its smallest details, heroic.

Corpus, Jean-Luc Nancy (Fordham University Press, 2008 [English])
Bodies don’t take place in discourse or in matter… They take place at the limit, qua limit: limit—external border, the fracture and intersection of anything foreign in a continuum of sense, a continuum of matter. An opening, discreteness… The body is a place that opens, displaces and spaces phallus and cephale: making room for them to create an event (rejoicing, suffering, thinking, being born, dying, sexing, laughing, sneezing, trembling, weeping, forgetting…). (From “Aphallus and Acephale.”)

“Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin (Schocken, 1986 [English])
[In] the exercise of violence over life and death more than in any other legal act, law reaffirms itself. But in this very violence something rotten in law is revealed.

Other important theory discovered in 2011:
“Thou Art My Sister: Physico-Theology and the Peopling of Nature,” Joanna Picciotto (unpublished paper).
“Misery and Debt On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital,” Aaron Benanav and Endnotes (Endnotes 2, April 2010).
Active Boundaries: Selected Essays and Talks, Michael Palmer (New Directions, 2008).
After Finitude: An Essay On The Necessity Of Contingency, Quentin Meillassoux (Continuum, 2008).

Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Alain Badiou (Verso, 2002)

Things heard (said):

“The lived world is not a nice world to be lived in. It’s a highly disputed world to be in. Once we get our materialism back, we also get back war, because the lived world…is uninhabitable.”

—Bruno Latour, 20 October 2011, “Is It Possible to Get Our Materialism Back,” Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany (I am happy to share my notes from this Latour talk; write to me at angelamariehume@gmail.com.)

“The kind of subjectivity I am interested in is that of the underground pool, the wild mess, the common water from which we all draw. That’s where the poet’s relationship to the materials goes in. Ecopoetics is not just about individual lives. It’s about a collective unconscious—the coming together of all the sentences and images we have experienced.”

—Brenda Hillman, 20 March 2011, on “ecopoetics,” Point Reyes Station, California.

Favorite Things 2011: Gloria Frym

2012-01-05T00:24:00.000-08:00

These wonderful things have made 2011 more than it might have been:

*The Occupy Movement and my photographing handmade protest signage. The Movement is the most exciting and important phenomenon to hit democracy since I've been alive.

*The beautiful cover of my new book, Mind Over Matter; the simple, elegant design of the text
*Teaching the 19th Century Novel and getting a midterm paper entitled "Occupy Pemberly" (Darcy's country estate)

*Discovering the novels of Stefan Zweig

*Listening to Los Munequitos de Matanzas, an Afro-Cuban santeria orquestra

*Living in Havana for two months

*Reading novels and essays in Spanish

*Attending a performance at the Gran Teatro Nacional, Sala de Garcia Lorca in Havana of Lucia di Lammermoor by a North Korean opera company with a beloved friend of mine and Kit Robinson's, Lucy Rodriguez

*Swimming in a warm lagoon near the Bay of Pigs

*Being kissed by a docile pitbull named Johnny Sue

*Reading Lydia Davis' translation of Madame Bovary and talking about it with her

Favorite Things 2011: Andrew Rippeon

2012-01-04T00:09:00.000-08:00

Music (on repeat):
Alan Lomax’s 1962 Carriacou recordings
Big Freedia
The Dirty Projectors
El Guincho
Man Man
M.I.A.
Ornette Coleman (especially Science Fiction, Dancing in Your Head, Skies of America, and Town Hall 1962)
Sleigh Bells
The Stark Reality
Three Trapped Tigers (just what it sounds like)
The Very Best
tUnE-yArDs (just, just just found her—why not sooner!?)

Books (critical)
Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems ("Around 1880, poetry becomes literature." Ok.)
Iain Anderson, This is Our Music (incredible history/sociology of avant garde jazz in America)
Alex Weheliye, Phonographies

Books (poetry)
Kamau Brathwaite, Elegguas
Bhanu Kapil, Humanimal
Tyrone Williams, The Hero Project of the Century, Howell
Beauty is a Verb

Film
Basquiat (dir. Julian Schnabel)
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (dir. Tamara Davis)*
*Watched both in one sitting while stitching Vanessa Place’s book. Davis’s film is far, far better than Schanbel’s myth, if only for the studio footage of Basquiat in action. N.b.: J-M B’s estate wouldn’t allow Schnabel to use actual J-M B paintings in the film, so Schnabel painted imitations himself…

Favorite Things 2011: Brian Ang

2012-01-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

Writings are my aids to my memories of crucial favorite things in 2011.

I worked on three books of poetry:

* Communism (Berkeley Neo-Baroque, 2011) came from studying contemporary philosophy, especially Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Giorgio Agamben and especially Badiou’s Being and Event which I used to rewrite Louis Zukofsky’s “‘A’-9,” and Michael Palmer who I consider to be an exemplary “philosophical” poet which enabled me to make something severely different.

* Pre-Symbolic (Insert Press, forthcoming 2012) came from studying Zukofsky’s “A” 22 & 23 and repeating it with my own form and materials, a reverse crash course through 2500 years of history.

* The Totality Cantos (in progress) is the sequel to Pre-Symbolic, a poem conceptually and interchangeably about everything, the synchronous archive of present knowledge, emphasizing the unprecedented access to knowledge enabling the construction of the most encyclopedic poem ever written. In addition to researching hundreds of subjects in arts, economics, history, law, philosophy, politics, religion, and science, the poem’s studies include Bruce Andrews’ The Millennium Project, his most recent major work with brilliance on each of its thousand pages; Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ ongoing Drafts, masterful “weak” poetry enabling me to do something severely different and monumental; and Barrett Watten’s criticism especially concerning differential poetics and knowledge, concerns that my poem investigates to connect, from Poetics Journal 10: “Knowledge” and in The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics.

Criticism:

* I delivered my paper “‘Quindecagon,’ Alain Badiou, and Strict Constructionism” at the Alphabet Symposium at the University of Windsor which motivated me to finish Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet and study right-wing judicial theory to undermine it.

* I reported on the “Can Art and Politics Be Thought?” conference, the Durruti Free Skool, and Occupy Oakland for Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion which helped me capture their experiences and better understand them. I wrote an essay called “Poetry and Militancy” published in Lana Turner 4 which helped me self-reflect and figure out how to proceed in my work.

* Since October I’ve been writing a commentary series for Jacket2 called “PennSound & Politics.” I’ve long considered PennSound’s materials as a personal advantage as poets surprisingly don’t study it as much as they might, and I produced PennSound’s Fall 2011 Featured Resources. The labor of writing about PennSound’s materials has strongly sharpened my sensibility.

Editing: * I launched my journal ARMED CELL. Its influences include Try! and With + Stand for their DIY aesthetics, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and THIS for their polemics, and Lana Turner for its poetic engagement with contemporary philosophy.

Favorite Things 2011: Stacy Szymaszek

2012-01-03T00:05:00.000-08:00

BOOKS:
Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Series 2
Thomas Meyer, Kintsugi
Hans Faverey, Chrysanthemums, Rowers
Gail Scott, The ObituaryNathalie Sarraute, The Use of Speech
Edouard Glissant, Poetic Intention
Robert Crosson, Daybook
Jacqueline Waters, One Sleeps the Other Doesn't
giovanni singleton, Ascension
Dana Ward, This Can't Be Life
Ted Greenwald, Clearview/LIE
Anne Waldman, The Iovis Trilogy
Tim Dlugos, A Fast Life: Collected Poems, edited by David Trinidad
Will Edmiston, Effie
Mike Decapite, Creamsicle Blue
Jamie Townsend, Strap/Halo

READINGS (all at The Poetry Project)
Charles Bernstein & Maggie O'Sullivan
Doug Lang & Ron Silliman
Hoa Nguyen & Jesse Seldess

MISC.
The Cultural Society
Public Access Poetry: this one in particular
Flying Object
Etel Adnan tribute at SPT, on it's way to book form

Favorite Things 2011: Beth Murray

2012-01-03T00:02:00.000-08:00

Favorite Things 2011 Asterias Rubens (remedy made from Starfish – is healing my cancer!)
Bon Tibetian Meditation of the elements

Books:
The Language of Emotions – Karla McLaren
Healing with Form, Energy and Light: The Five Elements in Tibetian
Shamanism, Tantra and Dzogchen - Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch – a cookbook, but he writes
beautifully about his vegetables

Films:
Biutiful – Inarritu
Show Me Love – Moodysson
Being Caribou by Karsten Heuer and Leanne Allison – I downloaded this
2004 documentary from Hulu when I was very sick from chemo – it
follows this Canadian duo as they trek across Northern Canada,
following the Caribou migration to their calving grounds in the Arctic
Refuge, where Bush wanted to drill. I was so moved by this
documentary; the land, the Caribou, and this couple's persistence as
they followed them for 900 miles on foot through the snow; shortly
after watching this I decided to stop chemo and heal myself, which has
been happening ever since!

Favorite Things 2011: John Sakkis

2012-01-02T00:11:00.000-08:00

Here are some things I liked in 2011...

Music

1. By The Fruits You Shall Know The Roots- Various Artists
2. The Caretaker- Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom

3. Veljo Tormis- Litany To Thunder

4. Isao Tomita- Snowflakes Are Dancing

5. La Monte Young- Theater Of Eternal Music

6. Scott Walker- Climate Of Hunter

7. Delia Derbyshire- Music From The BBC Radiophonic Workshop

8. White- White

Books

1. A Toast In The House Of Friends- Akilah Oliver

2. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, And Government Officials Go On The Record- Leslie Kean

3. The Kenneth Rexroth interview in Golden Gate: Interviews With 5 San Francisco Poets- ed. David Meltzer

4. Mimeo Mimeo #5

5. The Poems Of Gaius Valerius Catullus- Brandon Brown
6. House Of Leaves- Mark Z. Danielewski

7. Locas: The Maggie And Hopey Stories- Jamie Hernandez

8. "6 Writers On Eshleman" section from Temblor #6

Life

1. Mosswood Park, Oakland, CA
2. boxing
3. running Lime Ridge Open Space, Concord, CA

4. The Poetry Center at SFSU

5. picnic table beers at Lake Merritt, Oakland, CA

6. my new Bianchi "San Jose" bike

7. making music with friends

8. getting stuff done

Favorite Things 2011: Laura Moriarty

2012-01-01T00:08:00.000-08:00

Mostly 2011 BOOKS (not a complete list or in any order)

David Brazil, yo! eos! (Berkeley Neo-Baroque)
Tyrone Williams, Howell (Atelos)
Dana Ward, This Can’t Be Life (Edge Books)
Norma Cole, To Be At Music: Essay & Talks (Omnidawn)
Julian Talamantez Brolaski, gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse)
Alan Halsey, Even if only out of (Veer Books)
Kazim Ali, Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice (Tupelo)
Joseph Donahue Dissolves (Terra Lucida IV-VIII) (Talisman)
Leslie Scalapino, How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (Litmus)
Leslie Scalapino, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom (Post-Apollo)
Robert Duncan, HD Book (UC Press)
Rusty Morrison, Book of the Given (Noemi Press)
Renee Gladman, The Ravickians (Dorothy)
Allison Cobb, Green-Wood (Factory School)
David Graeber, Direct Action (AK Press)
David Graeber, Debt (Melville House)
David Harvey, Enigma of Capital (Oxford University Press)
David Harvey, Marx’s Capital (Verso)
Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution (UC Press)
Thom Donovan, The Hole (Displaced Press)

music:
Tim Hecker, Dropped Pianos (Kranky)
Nico Muhly, Speaks Volumes (Bedroom Community)
Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal Danzón at Zellerbach

film:
Randy Vasquez, Thick Dark Fog

Favorite Things 2011: Kyle Schlesinger

2012-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

1. Anna Moschovakis’ You and Three Others are Approaching a Lake (Coffee House, 2011)

2. Dagoberto Gilb’s Before the End, After the Beginning (Grove Press, 2011)

3. Ted Greenwald’s Clearview/LIE (United Artists, 2011)

4. Tom Raworth’s Incomprehensible Things (Infolio, 2011)

5. Anselm Berrigan’s Notes From Irrelevance (Wave, 2011)

6. Bill Berkson’s Repeat After Me (Gallery Paule Anglim, 2011) Watercolors by John Zurier.

7. Dana Ward’s This Can’t Be Life (Edge Books, 2011)

8. Gregg Biglieri’s Little Richard the Second (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011)

9. Craig Dworkin’s Motes (Roof, 2011)

10. C.J. Martin’s Two Books (Compline, 2011)

Favorite Things 2011: Susan Gevirtz

2011-12-31T00:07:00.000-08:00

Impasse of the Angels, S Pandolfo

Mycelium Running, P. Stamatz

Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, E. Grosz

HAECCEITIES, M. Cross (seriously)

TWO BOOKS, C.J. Martin (also seriously -even if it wasn't you asking)

Rude Girl, John Sakkis

The Horse, The Wheel and Language, D. Anthony

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Alone with the Alone, H. Corbin

Cities of Salt, A Munif

UNSOUND, Jennifer Martenson

Animals In Translation, Temple Grandin

ΚΙΒΟΤΟΣ THE ARK, Old Seeds For New Cultures, (Catalog) 12th International Architectural Exhibition La Biennale Venezia 2010. Commissioners- Curators: Phoebe Giannisi (poet and architect) & Zissis Kotionis; catalog text by poet Katerina Illiopoulou

Dwell magazine, issue on Prefab

and I'm sure I'm forgetting extremely important things that will occur to me as soon as I hit send

Favorite Things 2011: Craig Dworkin

2011-12-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

Here's a Top Ten for 2011:

1. Gregg Biglieri: Little Richard the Second (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011)–deservedly luxurious production for verse that recognizes the plush caresses of lexical excesses.

2. Clark Coolidge: The Human Bond (Some New Bond Sonnets), Fell Swoop Issue 115 [New Orleans: Fell Swoop, 2011]. The first of the Bond Sonnets were published in The Insect Trust Gazette No. 2 (Summer, 1965) – who ever thought there would be sequels over 40 years later? To be read alongside Michelle Disler's new book, [BOND, JAMES]: alphabet, anatomy, [auto]biography (Denver: Counterpath, 2011)

3. Baroness Elsa (von Freytag-Loringhoven): Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings, Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo, editors (Cambridge: MIT, 2011). At long-last, a book to set the record of modernism straight (or, rather, set it rightly askew)

4. Spenser Goar: Red Ink (Salt Lake: Paper Noise, 2011). A procedural writing-through of the footnotes in a scholarly edition, poeticizing the paratext.

5. Dana Teen Lomax: Disclosure (Lafayette: Black Radish Books, 2011). The most confessional poem ever.

6. Pamela Lu: Ambient Parking Lot (Chicago: Kenning Editions, 2011). Finally! A book I've been looking forward to for a dozen years now.

7. Joseph Massey: Another Rehearsal for Morning (Guilford: Longhouse, 2011). Poetry perfectly matched to the small-format, highly-crafted mode of the fine-press chapbook.

8. Mimeo Mimeo, ed. Jed Birmingham and Kyle Schlesinger. Hands-down my favorite journal – the only disappointment is that it doesn't come weekly (but the related blog makes up for that: http://mimeomimeo.blogspot.com).

9. Vanessa Place: Factory Series (more information here: http://stores.lulu.com/store.phpfAcctID=4215175). The most daring work on authorship to date.

10. Jonathan Stalling: Yingelishi: Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics (Denver: Counterpath, 2011). A perfect example of Walter Benjamin's concept of the translator's task.

Favorite Things 2011: Cynthia Sailers

2011-12-30T00:07:00.000-08:00

*Lars von Trier's Melancholia

*Julian Brolaski's gowanus atropolis

*Dana Ward's This Can't Be Life

*Brandon Brown's The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus

*A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism, Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, Editors

My list is short. But my very first thoughts! xo

Favorite Things 2011: Jamie Townsend

2011-12-29T00:03:00.000-08:00

Music:

Laurel Halo - Hour Logic
Autre Ne Veut - "Drama Cum Drama"
Dev (featuring Kanye West) - "Dancing in the Dark"
Zola Jesus - Conatus
Ford & Lopatin - Channel Pressure
Rhianna - "We Found Love"
Grouper - A I A
Jay-Z & Kanye West - "Who Gon Stop Me"
Cuddle Magic - Info Nympho
Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact
John Maus - We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves
Big Sean (featuring Nicki Minaj) - "Dance (A$$)"
Forma - s/t
Destroyer - Kaputt
Thurston Moore @ the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia

Poetry:

Rob Halpern's "Becoming a Patient of History: George Oppen's Domesticity and the Relocation of Poetics" (Really a capstone to 2010, but the beginning of my rethinking poetics in 2011; many thanks to Rob for sending me the manuscript of the lecture as it was the event in recent memory I most wish I could've attended).

Erica Kaufman - "Instant Classic" (Least Weasel); Erica never fails; you can read her work over and over and over and find new, incredible tripwires of language every time. This chap knocked me flat, it's precise, balanced, and conceptually wild all at once: extreme humor, music, and scholarship, pulling together equally.

CJ Martin - "Two Books" (Compline); I think, the most unique new(er) voice in poetry and critical writing today. CJ is mapping terrain that feels domestic (in the sense of being solidly enclosed) and completely alien at the same time. I kinda think he's Duncan reincarnated.

Brenda Iijima - "Untimely Death is Driven Beyond the Horizon" (unreleased); Brenda's work is always infinitely restless and exciting, but this particular collection, with its subtle lyricisms and bone straight left hand margin, really solidifies the fact that she can write in any form (visually wild or mannered) and still be unmistakably Brenda. I love these poems.

Tyrone Williams - "Pink Tie" (Hooke Press) & Dana Ward - "Typing Wild Speech" (Summer BF Press); two chaps that helped me to rediscover the central place of writing in the middle of the most emotionally trying summer of my life, at a point when I had almost given up; Dana's chap is a 2010 joint, but they have such a repoire with each other, and they came to me around the same time (I had to wait for the 2nd printing of Dana's), I feel as though they form two parts of a essential treatise on the integration of an art practice and day-to-day life (especially around issues of grief), eliminating any doubt in my own mind as to why there should be any barrier between the two.

David Brazil - "Orphica" (Lew Gallery); what a beautiful and singular object, which arrived in the mail precisely at a moment of extreme personal loss in my life. David seems to have a prescience for sending correspondence/poetry when it's needed most.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee - "What the Heart Longs for When it Only Knows Heat" (unreleased); Juliette performed from this manuscript at c/c, indulging me by reading my favorite section (and really, one of my favorite pieces of writing lately), a gorgeous, devastating prose poem about intimacy and arctic horses (not in the Equus sense)

Geoffrey Olsen - "Not of Distends *Address Panicked" (minutesBOOKS); Geoff's a good friend and fantastic poet, and his chap through minutesBOOKS this year delivers on all fronts; a sparsely dense mixture of cinema verite and Brakhage-esque visuals in verse, informed, in part, by an intense engagement with Scalapino's writing. Stunning, challenging, and something I found myself returning to often throughout the year.

Stacy Szymaszek - "Hart Island" (ongoing) - Without a doubt my favorite thing being written right now. I've been trying to write an essay about it for over a year and a half now and (like the poem feels in my head) I am hard-pressed to contain it or to wrap it up. I hope it keeps unfolding forever.

Nicholas DeBoer - "Red Night Antimatter" (Potlach Discordian Network); Nick's a beast - he's written enough material this year for at least 2 full-length books - but this chap on the new Potlach Discordian hydra symphonically images a correspondence between an aging Pound and Burroughs in a landscape of Russian Futurist structures. Email him and he'll send you a copy and a friendly hello, he's that kind of guy.

Julian Brolaski - "Gowanus Atropolis" (UDP) - This book is so good, and so inimitable, I don't feel like I have anything semi-witty or erudite to say about it that would do it justice, so here's a quick, bizarre, off-the cuff impression; at times it feels like Dickinson bathed in mead and sprinkled with Jolly Ranchers.

Julia Bloch, CJ Martin, Rob Halpern @ Fergie's Pub April 2, 2001 & Joseph Bradshaw, Thom Donovan, Dana Ward @ Fergie's Pub, July 9, 2011 (really, all the c/c readings this year, but much thanks to CJ, Rob, and Dana who traveled so far and gave tremendous performances)

some things that came out this year that I haven't gotten to yet but can't wait to:

- Thom Donovan - "The Hole"
- Dana Ward "This Can't Be Life"
- Renee Gladman - "The Ravickians"
- Brandon Brown - "The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus"
- Ariana Reines - "Mercury"
- Tyrone Williams - "Adventures of Pi" / "Howell"
- Mark Scroggins - "Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles"

Favorite Things 2011: Miranda Mellis

2011-12-28T00:02:00.000-08:00

These are some special events that stand out in my mind from last year...

3-11 – Thalia Field at SPT
5-15 – Meredith Monk at the JCC
6/4 – All day reading of Gertrude Stein's The Making of the Americans, & exhibition The Stein's Collect at SFMOMA
6/9 – Trisha Brown at Mills College
7/2 – SF Mime Troupe free performance in Dolores Park
9/9 – Commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Attica Prison Rebellion, Freedom Archives, featuring ‘Attica,’ the restored 1974 film
9/10 – Bradley Manning fundraising dinner organized by Sarah Fran Wisby
9/17 – FEEL TANK at Little City Gardens, SF
9/17 – first day of OWS nation-wide
10/13–10/16 – &NOW Festival of New Writing, UCSD
11/2 – General Strike
11/3 – Conversations at the War Time Cafe anthology launch & reading at DNA Lounge
12/3 – Marianne Morris house reading, Berkeley
12/12 – West Coast Port Shut Down

Favorite Things 2011: Camille Roy

2011-12-27T00:05:00.000-08:00

Discoveries for me this year... (many came out in years past, but I am slow.)

Poetry... Brandon Brown's Catullus, Paul Foster Johnson's Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms, Mina Pam Dick's Delinquent, Ronaldo Wilson's Poems of the Black Object, Judith Goldman's l.b.; or catenaries, Shanxing Wang's Mad Science In Imperial City, Will Alexander's Compression & Purity, Cedar Sigo's Stranger In Town, Jen Hofer's One, Dawn Lundy Martin's Discipline.

Prose... Gail Scott's The Obituary, Tisa Bryant's Unexplained Presence, Eileen Myles' Inferno, Carla Harryman's Adorno's Noise.

History... Caliban & the Witch by Silvia Federici. Loved this! It changed my frame. Looking forward to: Debt, The First 5000 Years by David Graeber.

Movies: Melancholia.

Politics: Occupy! Occupy! Occupy Oakland!! ( A cheer.)

Poetry Movements: Occupy Poetry! Occupy Readings! All the fabulous poetry activists, I love you all....

Journals. My favorite is the one you gave me, On: Contemporary Practice 2. Smart and juicy and lotsa bold. I hope you reject modesty and include this!

Favorite Things 2011: Tyrone Williams

2011-12-26T00:05:00.000-08:00

Much of what I read is not "new"—ditto for music, so here are the things still rattling around in my head...

books:
Noah Eli Gordon, The Source
Eleni Stecopoulos, Armies of Compassion
Lorenzo Thomas, Don't Deny My Name
M. NourbeSe Phillip, Zong!
Kazim Ali, Bright Felon

zine:
sous les paves

and the retro music of The Carolina Chocolate Drops, the neo-Motown of Nikki Jean, and the stark pop of Eliza Rickman

Next year: looking forward to reading your book (!) and new work from Evie Shockley, Thom Donovan, Judith Goldman and Rob Halpern.

Favorite Things 2011: Michael Cross

2011-12-25T00:02:00.000-08:00

Chapbooks:
Kyle Schlesinger: What You Will (Newlights Press)
Brenda Iijima: Glossamatics, Thus (Least Weasel)
David Brazil: Economy (Little Red Leaves) and Orphica (Auguste Press)
Jamie Townsend: Matryoshka (Little Red Leaves) and Strap/Halo (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs)
Lauren Levin: Keenan (Lame House)
Brian Whitener: False Intimacy (Trafficker)
Taylor Brady: For I Know Not What I Did Last Summer (Trafficker)
Sara Larsen: A,a,a,a,a (Berkeley Neobaroque)
Frances Kruk: Down You Go or Negation de Bruit (Punch Press)

Books:
Camille Roy: Sherwood Forest (Futurepoem)
Kathleen Fraser: movable TYYPE (Nightboat Books)
Thom Donovan: The Hole (Displaced Press)
Judith Goldman: l.b.; or, catenaries (Krupskaya)
Samantha Giles: Hurdis Addo (Displaced Press)
C.J. Martin: Two Books (Compline)
Alastair Johnston: Hanging Quotes: Talking Book Arts, Typography & Poetry (Cuneiform Press)
Taylor Brady & Rob Halpern: Snow Sensitive Skin (Displaced Press)
Leslie Scalapino: How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (Litmus Press)

Magazines:
Mimeo Mimeo
Sous Les Paves
Eccolinguistics
With + Stand
Both Both
Yellow Field
Try!
Rag Tag

Christmas!

2011-12-24T23:13:00.000-08:00

Favorite Things 2011

2011-12-24T00:30:00.000-08:00

Last year I asked a handful of friends and colleagues to send me year-end lists of their favorite things to share here at The Disinhibitor, and the response was vibrant and totally interesting, and it left me with tons of new music and poetry and art to investigate this year.

I'll start posting this year's lists from individual contributors over the holidays as they come in, and you're welcome to submit your own list of favorite things (movies or books or music or art shows or happenings or achievements: anything you were particularly excited about this year) by emailing me here: michaelthomascross{AT} hotmail com. You're also welcome to add commentary if you have the time and/or inclination, but this is certainly not necessary!

To get us started, here are the records I listened to the most this year while commuting to and from classes. I listened to a lot of music this year, really A LOT (I often commute upwards of two hours a day!), and these were the records I most often returned to...

Alexander Turnquist: As the Twilight Crane Dreams in Color (VHF)
Andy Stott: Passed Me By / We Stay Together (Modern Love)
A$AP Rocky: LiveLoveAsap (self-released)
Atom TM: Programmiert Den Scheiß Aus Sich Raus (Rather Interesting)
Battles: Gloss Drop (Mute)
Blackout Beach: Fuck Death (Dead Oceans)
Blut Aus Nord: 777 Sect(s) / The Desanctification (Debemur Morti Productions)
Drake: Take Care (Young Money)
Gil Scott-Heron & Jamie XX: We're New Here (XL)
Harpoon: Deception Among Birds (Seventh Rule)
James Blake: Enough Thunder (Universal Republic)
Jamie XX: Essential Mix (BBC)
Julian Lynch: Terra (Underwater Peoples)
Klaus: Tusk (R&S)
Kuedo: Severant (Planet Mu)
Machinedrum: Room(s) (Planet Mu)
Marsen Jules: Nostalgia (Oktaf)
Marsen Jules Trio: Les Fleurs Variations (Oktaf)
Nguzunguzu: XLR8R Mix
Sepalcure: s/t (Hotflush)
Thundercat: The Golden Age of Apocalypse (Brainfeeder)
Tim Hecker: Dropped Pianos (Kranky)
Trash Talk: Awake (True Panther)
Vladislav Delay: Vantaa (Raster-Noton)
Wavves: Life Sux (Ghost Ramp)
The Weeknd: House of Balloons/Thursday (self-released)

"To become one with Christ, that means also to become with him the destroyer of the law; to have died with him, that means also to have died to the law"

2011-12-21T03:44:00.000-08:00

"In this way, the cross or the message concerning the cross must be distinguished from what we have been enabled to see regarding the exposure of the violence of law through the great criminal or the general (proletarian) strike. For in these cases the violence of law seems to be exposed through a counterviolence, or what can at least be readily redescribed as a counterviolence. Thus the situation indicated by these examples may be (mis)read as the countering of one violence by another in which the powerlessness of justice relative to law does not really or clearly come to expression. What Paul is driving at, it seems, is a more clarifying instance in which it is the weakness of the messiah (perhaps of God or the divine as well), in the being overcome by violence--the violence of the law--that exposes the violence of the law and so is more powerful than the law and indeed really overpowers the law (which is also to say, the state, the empire, and so on)."

Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice,
Theodore W. Jennings, Jr.
(Standford University Press, 2006)

More movable TYYPE

2011-12-16T01:20:00.000-08:00

I first saw Kathleen Fraser read in an underground basement or bar (or something!) back in (I guess?) 2000, at the book launch for her A+ Bend chapbook 20th Century, reading along with, if I remember correctly, Cole Swenson. I fell in love with her work at that reading, especially the poems in 20th Century, and I was reminded of their power while recently reading her new volume movable TYYPE. The book opens with a remastered, reordered selection from 20th Century, beginning with the unimpeachable couplets of "Orologic" which I present in full below:

Orologic

Delay'd the—what was it? —leftover, almost said mainspring
locution—off-putting—lifting's effort of red-wire modest stratagem.

Gem's Spa (Ninth & 2nd) chocolate folio under which egg cream air,
he told you—sutured with tape and geranium rose—his secret

stutterer scrapheap—"...if only we'd...". Said he wasn't spiritualbut could feel the awe—that little Yes material—script pierced (& pierces)

sleep's end of it, rose geranium whistle-stop nape of neck thistle.
Down fallow mind of page—delay'd, early sphere theory.

Margins: Stella begins rebuke: torn shirt Stanley's & white
silent movie-talk ending, a few blue decals.

in the projection cabinets. Abuse of reliable matter (embossed),
how "A" connects to its wire. One glance—marron glace; when

she talks about "frame theory," the game-bird's heartbeat under
glass (fluttery to her as a pamphlet or flock of blank ink), wings tied-off.

Song rebuke rescinds the variable. You often measured
pretense between face and thread, when you demonstrated

linen. Corner understood (unsafe on-camera) reading him:
delay'd erasure, giving him 0 or 1. Syllabic temptation

of yesterday's waving particle. Lawd low Atlantis shallow.
Wrong obsidian lesson & axis ladder & hairpin do not "hold sway."

Kid integer dot picture folds up playground early, witness pulling
her inviolate back a'shine as effacement mirror not seen.

What passed in dark's sidereal cloud chamber festoon'd with giddy
scars is past & perfect. You write "Dear Sir: whereever you be,

please map us there..." (open side of resilient moon yawn

—for J.H.

The Hole

2011-12-15T01:42:00.000-08:00

I am very happy to report that Thom Donovan's incredible first book, The Hole, is finally available at Small Press Distribution thanks to Brian Whitener and Displaced Press.

Thom and I began designing the book over the summer, and I have to say that I'm pretty excited about the final product! And while the book harbors all kinds of design surprises (take a look at the teaser above!), when you dive into the poems themselves you'll realize pretty quickly that Donovan is a force to be reckoned with.

It's pretty rare for a book to drop with the magnitude and gravity of a real event, and to my mind this is certainly an event! Don't sleep...

Somatic Engagement this Thursday

2011-12-13T00:38:00.000-08:00

Book Launch for Somatic Engagement: The Politics and Publics of Embodiment: with editor Petra Kuppers and contributors Amber DiPietra, Georgina Kleege, Denise Leto, Christian Nagler, Katherine Sherwood, Eleni Stecopoulos.

Thursday, December 15 // 7:30 PM
The Green Arcade, San Francisco

Here's the press release from Chain Links:

Somatic Engagement: The Politics and Publics of Embodiment: edited by community artist, scholar, and dancer Petra Kuppers (author of Disability Culture and Community Performance), the book opens with Arnieville, a Californian protest camp of disability, homelessness, and poverty activists. From there, a series of enactments welcome trespass and incursion in the name of survival. Amy Sara Carroll on the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a GPS phone that uses poetry to lead the disoriented and thirsty to water caches and safety sites in the US-Mexican borderlands. Devora Neumark on washing Tali Goodfriend’s hands in Lebanese olive oil outside the hotel where Colin Powell speaks to the Jewish National Fund, hands gliding over one another in the middle of an angry public protest. Christian Nagler on writing an experimental novel while conducting an oral history of agricultural labor practices and migration patterns at the site of the Panamerican Highway in El Salvador. Georgina Kleege on touch and blindness as she discusses Katherine Sherwood’s paintings of magic and the human brain, paintings that Sherwood began after her stroke ten years ago. Eleni Stecopoulos on the healing quest as research and the complexities of cultural appropriation. Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto on the collaborative connections of breath, body, pause, pain, and form. Somatic Engagement is an exploration of how relation and support play out in breaths, steps, and touch.

Cha Archive & movable TYYPE Launch

2011-12-09T00:07:00.000-08:00

I'm taking my USF class to the Berkeley Art Museum this Saturday to view the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha archive, and interested poets from the community are welcome to join us. We'll meet this Saturday, December 10th at 1:00 pm in front of the B.A.M. for the tour, which will include artist books, visual art, and video installations they're screening just for us. We worked on Dictee this term, so I asked curators to show material directly related to this particular project.

And later in the afternoon, poet Hazel White is generously throwing a book launch in the city from 3-5 pm for Kathleen Fraser's gorgeous new book movable TYYPE, fresh out from Nightboat Books. If you'd like to help Kathleen celebrate, send me an email at michaelthomascross[at]hotmail(dot)com, and I'll send you directions.

Look What I Found...

2011-12-06T00:06:00.000-08:00

Benadette Mayer, Eruditio Ex Memoria, Angel Hair (1977)

Bruce Boone, Karate Flower, The Hoddypoll Press (1973)

Larry Eigner, Cloudy All Right, tel-let (1990)

Dennis Cooper, The Missing Men, Am Here Books/Immediate Editions (1981) [cover by Tom Clark]

David Antin, Dialogue, Santa Barbara Art Museum (1979)

A Voice Box

2011-12-05T02:28:00.000-08:00

Andrew Kenower recently posted an audio recording of a reading I did for Artifact back in '09 with Erika Staiti and Matvei Yankelevich. It's just under 20 minutes, a perfect length to listen to while you eat lunch! Find it at A Voice Box along with a trove of additional audio treasures.

And speaking of Kenower, check out this video of him playing drums with his band The Horns of Happiness at the Uptown here in Oakland last month:

Bernes, Clover, and McClanahan in the Los Angeles Review of Books

2011-12-01T00:04:00.000-08:00

Percentages, Politics, and the Police
Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, and Annie McClanahan

The generally inclusive and indefinite nature of the politics behind the Occupy movement has been both its virtue and vice. Or, to put it in less moralistic terms, the ideological flexibility of the occupations — in New York, and beyond — has generated extraordinary opportunities while at the same time presenting real limits to a serious challenge of capital’s domination.

A mutation of both the university occupations of 2009 (where the slogan “Occupy Everything” was brought to life) and the “movement of the squares” in Egypt, Spain, and Greece, these American occupations have managed to draw forth a variegated crowd of generally anti-capitalist character in city after city: Anarchists and socialists, disenchanted liberals and trade unionists, teachers and teenagers, street kids and college kids, the entire motley crew growing rather than fading away, moving from novelty song to popular genre with a breadth and rapidity that would have commanded utter disbelief in August. And it is apparent that the refusal to decide in advance on the exact political content of this movement — and instead suggesting that such a content will emerge through the process of struggle — is very much part of what has allowed for this sequence’s unfolding and brought so many people out into the plazas of our cities. The notion of the 99 percent is part of this inclusiveness, but it’s also an emblem of the real limits here.

Central among these limits is the incoherent stance often taken toward the police by the occupiers, or, more specifically, the organizers of the occupations. It can only be of the greatest significance that this issue has emerged as the central matter of debate; it secures the suspicion that the question is at the center of the occupation movement’s politics, and its fate.

But this hypersignificance remains opaque. Again and again, these occupations have featured scenes in which protesters beaten and pepper-sprayed by the police have insisted that their oppressors are also, in their way, part of the 99 percent. Occasionally, in New York, there is a more complicated fantasy in which the only truly oppressive cops are the supervisors — “whiteshirts,” after the white (rather than blue) shirts they wear, but also because obliquely referencing class status — whereas the blue-collar cops are only reluctantly doing their jobs.

At the same time, there has been more and more criticism of collaborationist policies toward the police, and an increasingly acrimonious debate within the movement, initiated in many cases by its anarchist and anti-statist wing. Occupy Oakland, for instance, has refused to cooperate with the Oakland Police and its General Assemblies feature long lines of people who speak eloquently and bluntly about police violence in the city. So there is a debate within the movement, one that the brutal police repression of Occupy Boston, happening just as Occupy Oakland was getting under way, has in some regard brought to a head.

In an ironic turn, on the same day as the repression of Occupy Boston, n+1 published Jeremy Kessler’s “The Police and the 99 Percent,” a virtual compendium of the fallacies, apologetics, wishful thinking, and historical misprisions assembled to defend the strategy of police compliance. Alas — and curiously enough for a journal with a brief but consistent record of critique — the article sides decisively with compliance and complicity. In doing so, it misunderstands the character of the occupations; the recent history of the movement of the squares; the role and history of the police in relation to antistate and anticapitalist movements; the position of non-violence; and accepts exactly what is most problematic and disabling about the formulation of the “99 Percent.”

Kessler approaches the issue of the police not from a moralistic position – he does not insist, for instance, that we must approach the police with loving kindness, lest we produce bad vibes or bad karma – but from a strategic one. He thinks that confrontations with police dissuade a putative “middle-class,” including union labor, from joining the occupation. The only possible recourse is to live up to the Occupy movement’s promise of including the superplurality of the “99 Percent.” The movement must, therefore, establish links with the police by appearing more like the police themselves, in cultural terms. It should establish itself as, well, kind of normal-looking and non-threatening. This might encourage the police toward a quiet insubordination once the call to crack down on Liberty Plaza eventually comes.

The first thing to say about this is that what Kessler proposes has already been contradicted by the very situation he describes. The occupation in Zuccotti Park began as a relatively small encampment, and the initial police response was, as Kessler himself observes, “brutal.” Videos quickly surfaced of police grabbing, tossing, macing, batoning, barricading, and arresting protestors without provocation; one video showed an officer telling another that he hoped “his nightstick would get a workout tonight.” It was precisely the spread of these videos that drew the crowds, that made it impossible for the media to continue to ignore the protests; it was precisely the unmistakable images of a violent state apparatus mobilized to protect financial interests that revealed the nature of the present moment. The October non-surprise that JPMorgan Chase had previously donated $4.6 million to the NYC Police Foundation (the largest gift in the foundation’s history) gave this relationship between the police and the financiers a headline, but the earlier images of police brutality at Occupy Wall Street had already presented more powerfully the same material fact, and it was these images that began to draw more protestors to Zuccotti Park. We can dispense with the notion that the specter of police violence is the real limit to participation by some phantom “American middle class.” But we cannot dispense with the notion that police are violent and threatening, and that they will be — have already been — levied to break the occupations.

It is hard to imagine anyone denying that it would be a good thing if the police were to take the side of the occupations. This is a far cry, however, from the belief that such a thing could reasonably happen. We must distinguish between analysis — an analysis of the concrete situation and accompanying historical record — and wish fulfillment fantasy. The latter tends, after all, to lead toward quite disastrous strategic and tactical decisions. In Tahrir Square — a place and idea toward which the Occupy movement swears fidelity — there was, despite some folks’ hysterical amnesia on this score, no commitment to non-violence, no gesture of complicity with the police, and no hesitation in resisting the government’s armed thugs. The Egyptians understood with clarity who their antagonists were, what their relationship to them was, and what would be needed to prevent the movement from being crushed by the folks with the guns and clubs.

The argument that “the cops will eventually come to sweep us away” may seem to open onto the conclusion “thus the cops must be befriended” — but only if one somehow suppresses the very reasons that the cops will come in the first place, and the long history of the police in relation to popular militancy. Cairo is one such example; others multiply throughout history. On the other side of the ledger: few entries indeed. It is true that armies and navies have been known to take the side of the people in revolutionary moments, but they are in the business of taking and holding territory, a portable trade. Police are charged with disciplining populations. Were they to take the side of the population, they would be without a trade. Any serious reading of history suggests that the police everywhere maintain their fidelity to the task of performing as bodyguards for money, property, and power.

Kessler offers a paradigmatic example of what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism,” which always takes the form of something like the following: OK, kids, utopia sounds great, but let’s let the serious people take over and work within the given limits of the world before us. The problem isn’t simply that this involves quitting in advance of struggling, it’s that Kessler’s historical vision doesn’t even follow the principle of realism, or, even better, of reality. History is not on his side. One of his assumptions is that the ultimate goal of the Occupy movement is to animate a new political majority, a new hegemonic force. There is no discussion, however, of the kinds of force such a majority might exert, of what it might do. There is simply the assembling-in-place of the great 99 percenters and their processual assemblies; these, Kessler assumes, are slowly, somehow, supposed to arrive at an actual political stance. Though this movement might go in any number of directions, it seems clear that if everyone follows Kessler’s recommendation and agrees that the one thing they shouldn’t do is alienate the “middle-class” — if the goal of the movement is simply to assemble and increasingly resemble the already extant social order — then it seems likely that the demand arrived at, eventually, will suffer from the tyrannical logic of the lowest common denominator. It will most likely take the form of a demand that everyone join the Democratic Party immediately to ward off the threat of Rick Perry or Mitt Romney.

Perhaps it’s true, as Kessler notes, that only through agreeing to play by the rules and not offend the delicate sensibilities of the middle-class will the occupations become a true political majority. But it’s not clear what’s to be gained from such growth, if in exchange we make sure to refrain from doing anything that disrupts the smooth reproduction of the status quo. The filling of U.S. plazas and parks with millions of people doing little but complying is unlikely to bring even mild reform. No, to do that we’ll have to resort to the old strategies of the strike, the blockade, sabotage and — one hopes — the occupation and expropriation of private property.

Though numbers are, in many regards, decisive, they are not everything. This suggests there is another way we might interpret the Occupationists’ deferral of content and emphasis on process, that it indicates a focus on what these occupations intend to do, and how they intend to do it, rather than what they say or what proclamations they release. This would bring them back to the ideas that emerged out of the original California and New York occupations, which insisted that an occupation was not a bargaining chip but an act of claiming the things we need to survive. Such occupations were not, therefore, about asking for concessions from the state, nor were they simply a launching pad for a new political discourse or a new hegemony. The sign “I am the 99 percent” retains its ambiguity; signs like “Capitalism Cannot Be Reformed” and “It’s Class Warfare and We’re Losing” less so. Such stances, still lurking beneath the slogans on Wall Street, might be one way to think about what is happening (or what could happen) in Zuccotti Park: people learning to provide for each other, now that it is quite clear that capitalism can’t provide for them.

Sean Bonney in Fiery Flying Roule

2011-12-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

[ 5 August 2011 ]

Letter on Riots and Doubt Sean Bonney

Anyway, I’ve totally changed my method. A while ago I started wondering about the possibility of a poetry that only the enemy could understand. We both know what that means. But then, it might have been when I was walking around Piccadilly looking at the fires, that night in March, my view on that changed. The poetic moans of this century have been, for the most part, a banal patina of snobbery, vanity and sophistry: we’re in need of a new prosody and while I’m pretty sure a simple riot doesn’t qualify, your refusal to leave the seminar room definitely doesn’t. But then again, you are right to worry that I’m making a fetish of the riot form. "Non-violence is key to my moral views," you say. "I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill," you say. But what about that night when we electrocuted a number of dogs. Remember that? By both direct and alternating current? To prove the latter was safer? We’d taken a lot of MDMA that night, and for once we could admit we were neither kind, nor merciful, nor loving. But I’m getting off the point. The main problem with a riot is that all too easily it flips into a kind of negative intensity, that in the very act of breaking out of our commodity form we become more profoundly frozen within it. Externally at least we become the price of glass, or a pig’s overtime. But then again, I can only say that because there haven’t been any damn riots. Seriously, if we’re not setting fire to cars we’re nowhere. Think about this. The city gets hotter and deeper as the pressure soars. Electrons get squeezed out of atoms to produce a substance never seen on Earth. Under such extreme conditions, hydrogen behaves like liquid metal, conducting electricity as well as heat. If none of that happens, it’s a waste of time. Perhaps you think that doesn’t apply to you. What inexhaustible reserves we possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms, in the nightmare of their lives as slaves to the rich. Don’t pretend you know better. Remember, a poetry that only the enemy can understand. That’s always assuming that we do, as they say, understand. Could we really arrive at a knowledge of poetry by studying the saliva of dogs? The metallic hydrogen sea is tens of thousands of miles deep.

What You Will

2011-11-29T00:41:00.000-08:00

After approximately two years of waiting, Aaron Cohick (and his Newlights Press) has finally released Kyle Schlesinger's What You Will. It will be immediately clear to readers why it took so long: Aaron wasn't being lazy; he just decided to make the most difficult book he could imagine!

When poet/printer Andrew Rippeon and myself used to make books together in Buffalo, we would joke about how our ideas were often impossible to execute, mostly because we'd think big first before thinking through the consequences of our decisions! Aaron (more than any printer I know, actually) is a conceptual printer. He takes on projects that are often incredibly difficult to execute, and he does so by taking the long road (even if he could simulate similar effects using shotcuts!).

What You Will was printed entirely on the letterpress, and, to make matters worse (for Aaron, that is!), most pages are printed a number of times to create an overlay effect. In total, Aaron completed 202 print runs on this book, which means, given an edition of 100 books, that he pulled the handle 20,200 times to complete this book object! To give some perspective for nonprinters, the most complicated Atticus/Finch cover I ever printed required approximately 5 runs; I don't think I've ever attempted more than that for a given book.

Above and beyond the sheer obsessiveness of this project, however, Aaron's design manages to retain a grace and simplicity that never seems overdesigned (and this is true of all Newlights projects, actually). What You Will is immaculately executed, and the book totally compliments Kyle's compact, tightly wound poems.

Here's Kyle's poem "I'm Always Being" as a sample:

I'm Always Being
Split in half rip-
Ripe film patterns the
Conspiracy normalcy
How to get to bottom

Looking into smeiotics
Really like syntactics
It makes the least sense
I need a job but dont really

Want one I need inspiration
But my stomach keeps this
And why there and how my
Brain says shut up I say

To my brain and the
Whirlwind continues to
Get frozen I care but I
Cant be sure

Sorry for the lack of
Punctuation right now
I do not care Ifeel good
For 7 minutes today

[And, because I can't help myself, here's "Just a Thought" on the recto:]

Just a Thought

Whatever ideas
I used to have
About a counter
Culture got shot
A long time ago
Like in the sixties
Or something

[Okay, one more little one because I hear Kyle's son Alasdair in the last few lines:]
There's Nothing More

To it
Than that

The sky is
Broken and

It's making
A mess

I'm sort of shocked that Aaron is only selling these for 20 bucks (some of his broadsides are going for upwards of $300), so if you have any interest in book arts or if you'd like to see what Kyle's been up to since Hello Helicopter, you need this. Pick it up here, and stay for a while to read through Aaron's meticulous documentation of the printing process.

Fiery Flying Roule

2011-11-28T00:09:00.000-08:00

Here

and

Here

MIMEO MIMEO

2011-11-22T01:31:00.000-08:00

Jed Birmingham and Kyle Schlesinger have brilliantly edited Mimeo Mimeo since 2008, "a forum for critical and cultural perspectives on artists' books, typography and the mimeo revolution," and it's fast becoming the forum for research and critical thought around small press activity in the poetry world. Issue #5 is just out and chock-full of all kinds of interesting material, beginning with a "lost and found" essay on mimeo culture by the great Paul Blackburn, followed by an essential interview with Lyn Heijian about her seminal poetry press, Tuumba (Kyle and I conducted this interview at Buffalo back in 2006, though the transcript proves that I simply listened as Kyle carried the conversation!). And then, James D. Sullivan on Edward Budowski's "The Gallery Upstairs" (Budowski was owner of the Student Book Shop, just across the street from SUNY Buffalo's South Campus, and editor of Fubbalo, a critical figure in Buffalo poetry in the late sixties who seemingly disappeared from collective memory after his untimely death in 1971), Steve Clay on Robert Creeley's library (Buzz Spector's cover photograph features "Creeley's Creeleys"!), an interview with Larry Fagin, and much, much more.

My favorite piece in this issue, however, is Stephanie Anderson's comprehensive article on Alice Notley's CHICAGO Magazine, which I knew next to nothing about beforehand. The real revelation for me is George Schneeman's incredible work on the covers:

Future Mimeo's include a special number on Lewis Warsh and "The Curator's Choice Issue," in which special collection curators (including David Abel, Mike Basinski, Nancy Kuhl, and others) write about their favorite items in their collections.

I read all of issue #5 in one sitting the moment I pulled it out of the mailer (no hyperbole, this is the real deal!). Mimeo Mimeo is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of small press poetry. Pick it up here, and take a look at the Mimeo Mimeo blog for additional reading!

Some lines from The Katechon

2011-11-09T01:56:00.000-08:00

I'm slowly crafting some new lines for a long poem I've been writing called The Katechon, and I thought to share the short section I read at the Occupy Oakland reading a few weeks back. The blogger editor will certainly break the lines (most are pretty long), so please read each couplet as a single line! This is the first section of the poem I've made public since I started it last year, and while this is still in draft, I'm eager to show what I've been up to!

***

This sift bore lard—hist laminar tunc the war way crests fat fast forever

hist laminar, sure, remediates incognizable, primal light, cf. sweating plastic sacks of grease grave

vestments of lesser subtlety a vesture of what comes inside throne ((inside throne) (inside throne))

watch me close up the whole face of the ground with the open side of my body—this weepy

maturating show I know I’d peel flame into febrile antecedents how we manifest according to similitude

alone: our breath line according to capacity—press pearls in the open holes in our cheeks can’t shake

the dust off denim—silted lungs—even two-grade-gateways (mercy/grace) cut me back to the world,

come compass me back to this world, strung phylacteries plant quilting points phat corpus,

compliance (little stars) poigned once the guys at the taqueria were shot in the chest,

plugging compulsory quilting points, arms wrapped unwillingly around the waist of resurrection;

I bundle fibrous glands from your midsection, construals, gnostic recidives, these fucking dogs

underfoot around the house or something the surface peels from resurrection—tumid, insolent—

“men” is not wolves, "man" to men arrant, something sacred: men is man’s wolf or something;

availability is also a kind of work or something: “social gelatin” sacrificed as content to survive as form

(Beuys?): the rule (software) is sense-less (the soldier’s body) sense-less “deodand”

(forgetting and/or inventing sense brings rules into existence?) desuetude, finally, to enervate the social gelatin

if ox gore be stoned flaccid, depending on the adjective to live no meat ever came

to her arms, we are abandoned by the meat we know: all this panting young tender saying short

More Paul Foster Johnson

2011-11-07T23:20:00.000-08:00

Between teaching and occupying, I haven't had a ton of time to read the many poetry books stacking up on my desk, but I wanted to share some of my favorite poems from Paul Foster Johnson's Studies in Pavilions and Safe Rooms, a book I've been carrying around in my bag for weeks.

Folk Education
Their singer suffered breakdowns. In their work
there was a sense of what it was to live there at that time.
One song described the dark around the military
vehicles between them and the cocaine waiting
in Gramercy. It was about the sepsis that followed love
or love repeated as farce, the neck neck neck
damaged by an anonymous hand unstringing guitars.
They got away with it and worked to abolish youth
by knitting and paying half-attention. I thought I was
in love because my sentiments were matched
by a generic, abiding sense of unfreedom. Nothing
survives lovers descrying the red flags of old flames.
Nothing is more relatable than an unreasonable person
operating subtractively, indulgently, out of exasperation.

[and another one]

Monument to the Plough
My head and life lines are invisible
but the plough fills in the blanks.
The plough is a frantic reproduction
in aluminum and I am a clown
tipping it toward oblivion.

In a program of self-study the brain
may suggest a formula for industrial weirdness.
In the tourism of crap jobs a brain
abets bad planning, the hand
grasps a glossy red handle, the brain
an isolated piece at draughts.

My job is to remind everyone
that spontaneous order is not natural
and to bus figures to their habituation.
In transit they stretch under layers
that deform their silhouettes
and smoke.

Undispersed among other gamepieces
the brain in a program of self-study
looks into a series of situations in space
amoral virtual homogeneous
much like garbage dumps.

[and another one]

Palace of Arts
In condemning Mount Parnassus as a joke
I am bad, dissolute, literally dissolved, unwilling
to be seduced by curatorial prowess, by rows
of bushes appearing as ground-glass opacities
in the lungs of the dead space. My bad unblocked
approach overruns it. I thought it was impenetrable
and should have known it was not not not from what
it exuded. I.e., the surrounding sky aflame with truth
receding to invisibility. Once in the booth I look out
through a one-way glass. The space was killed
by the lack of spontaneity of you-know-who.
His hidebound vision could not not not foresee
our being thwacked by hanging wires, our being
scarred for life in disassembled exhibition halls.

Pick the book up at Portable Press at Yo-Yo Lab if you know what's good for you. And watch this awesomely psychedelic video in which Paul chats about the book.

Steve Abbott @ SPT (and become a member!)

2011-11-07T00:05:00.000-08:00

Early Sunday evening, Robin Trembly-McGaw and Alyshia Abbott (with the help of Kevin Killian and Bruce Boone) delivered a moving tribute to the late poet Steve Abbott, a crucial and often undersung participant of the San Francisco poetry community throughout the 70's and 80's, whose contribution to New Narrative writing is remembered in half a dozen books of poetry and fiction and his magazine SOUP. The presentation was totally moving, and I wanted to suggest that, if you missed it, you might head over to the Steve Abbott webpage that Alyshia set up to learn more about Abbott and his work (that's where I found the amazing comic above!).

And now that I have your attention, I wanted to remind you that it's time to re-up your Small Press Traffic membership! This season, SPT is focusing on the essential contributions of a variety of local poetry movements in the 1980's, and this sort of programming simply wouldn't happen without venues like SPT. If you generally make it a point to support our organization, it's time to re-up your annual membership. If you've never gotten around to becoming a member, this is your chance to demonstrate that SPT's programming is meaningful to you! And if you don't live in the Bay Area, you can still become an SPT Ambassador! Go here to show your support for one of the west coast's single most important literary resources!

National Bank Transfer Day...

2011-11-04T15:22:00.000-07:00

is TOMORROW, Saturday, November 5th! Please consider closing your bank account and transfering to a local credit union!

Victory!

2011-11-03T00:52:00.000-07:00

And to celebrate, here's a great video from Democracy Now featuring Boots Riley from The Coup and labor organizer Clarence Thomas. Either of these guys would make a better mayor than Jean Quan...

GENERAL STRIKE, TODAY!!

2011-11-02T00:02:00.000-07:00

I think it's pretty clear to most that today promises to be a big day for Oakland. If you're able to leave work, please head down to Oscar Grant Plaza and join one of the many marches beginning at 14th and Broadway (there are currently four planned at 9 am, 12 noon, 4 pm, and 5 pm respectively). The late afternoon marches promise to draw the most significant police presence as protesters make their way to the Port, so please be careful! In addition, if you feel safer on a bicycle, there's a Critical Mass bike ride leaving the plaza for the Port at 4 pm. If you can't leave work, please show your solidarity in other ways by spreading the word and joining the movement to recall Jean Quan! I'll be dropping in and out of the plaza between classes, so I hope to see some of you there!

Here's my go-to chant of the day: "Shut down OPD! Not the Public Li-brar-y!" Find other chants and a General Strike checklist here.

Transmissions from the Front

2011-11-01T00:02:00.000-07:00

Occupy Oakland General Strike, November 2nd

2011-10-31T02:06:00.000-07:00

Converge on downtown Oakland on Wednesday, November 2nd in solidarity with the worldwide Occupy movement! Help to stop police brutality! Join marches at 9am and 12noon starting at 14th and Broadway to shut down local banks! AND THEN, join the march at 5pm to shut down the Port of Oakland!

As a tax-paying citizen of Oakland, I refuse to accept police brutality as a viable political model! Recall Jean Quan!

Haecceities Group Review and Sourcebook

2011-10-27T02:10:00.000-07:00

I'm still struggling to express my gratitude to the participants of the massive review and sourcebook of my Haecceities (Cuneiform 2010) just published by Little Red Leaves. A sprawling 76 pages, this project sees some of my most valued contemporaries—David Brazil, Thom Donovan, Brenda Iijima, C.J. Martin, Kyle Schlesinger, and Jamie Townsend—thinking through Haecceities in a series of email exchanges between September 2010 and February 2011. It's available for download as a free ebook here and can also be purchased as a physical book from Lulu here.

I never imagined my writing would earn such attentive, generous readers, and I am forever grateful for their engagement. And as an experiment in collective, community-based thinking, this project is peerless!

Listening to Stephen Ratcliffe

2011-10-25T01:04:00.000-07:00

Jacket 2 has consistently curated some really spectacular features since its launch at the beginning of the year, but this new spread on Stephen Ratcliffe, edited by Julia Bloch, is really something to behold!

Featuring critical contributions by Vincent Broqua, Norman Fischer, Ariel Goldberg, Carol Watts, and myself, along with interviews instigated by the likes of Linda Russo, Jonathan Skinner, and Jeffrey Schrader, the feature offers a plethora of perspectives on this crucial (and often overlooked) body of work. "Listening to Stephen Ratcliffe" also features some of Stephen's thinking on his own project, including crucial "critical" interventions such as "Words as 'things' ('actions'/'events')" and "Reading 'sound.'"

My own contribution, "Stephen Ratcliffe's Hamlet," focuses on Ratcliffe's Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet (Counterpath Press, 2010), a remarkable book about the play, the poetics of off-stage action, and the labor of poetry. Here are the first two paragraphs of my contribution in hopes you'll stop by Jacket 2 and read around the feature:

In the early 1990s, Phillip Foss and Charles Bernstein coedited a special double issue of Tyuonyi ostensibly addressing contemporary tendencies in late twentieth-century poetry. To do so, they distributed a short survey asking participants to address what they called “patterns, contexts and time,” shaping (sharpening?) a praxis of the present by investigating the social and political factors influencing (both positively and negatively) tendencies in contemporary writing. In response to the question “What patterns, if any, do you see developing that are presently influencing habits of reading or readership within poetry?” Stephen Ratcliffe curiously addressed his contemporary scene by invoking none other than William Shakespeare: “The writing of today that most engages my attention reminds me of Shakespeare’s plays; one doesn’t so much want to ask ‘What is the meaning?’ but rather ‘Where does the meaning lie?’ — which is to say, ‘How does the work make meaning?’”

I’m immediately reminded of a dictum adduced by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben that “the contemporary … must firmly hold his gaze on his own time,” in order to stare squarely into darkness — to face the aporias, the crucial absences that all but define one’s contemporary scene (despite the glare of the popular, the fashionable — the bellicose glare of what comes to stand, for better or worse, for an age and our participation in it). For Ratcliffe, however, Shakespeare offers the possibility to read what a text does rather than what it says — to stare into the darkness of meaning in order to meditate more intensely on how it works. He writes that Shakespeare’s words “send a current my way, through the ear by way of the syllable, whose sense so to speak won’t hold still, isn’t easily tamed, caged or made in any way to fit the pigeon-hole paraphrase would set to trap it, chew it up, digest away the play.” Shakespeare, then, is Ratcliffe’s closest contemporary, for he is precisely the poet (to use Agamben’s terminology) who knows how to see this obscurity — “who is able to write dipping his pen in the obscurity of the present.”

Click here for more...

Bob Grenier on Etel Adnan

2011-10-18T00:51:00.000-07:00

Small Press Traffic just posted a rich festshrift of work in tribute to Etel Adnan, featuring writing by Ammiel Alcalay, Cole Swenson, David Buuck, Jen Benka, Michael McClure, Stacy Szymaszek, Thom Donovan, and many others. You can find the project in its entirety here (and while you're there, you should become a member!). The following is Bob Grenier's contribution in full...

FOR ETEL

Straight from the heart (from the character for ‘Heart-Mind’ that possibly exists in Chinese (?)), a transformative/ ‘rocklike’/ unrepentently ‘naïve’ & ‘downhome-perceptive’/ playfully ‘logical’/ sternly educated/ fully knowledgeable/ ‘simple-steady’ Socrates-like person who goes about her work (painting, too!) & (without giving up on this Earth) teaches (in her writing, & by ‘personal example’) Embodied Intelligence & Fairness In All Matters (rarer & rarer), while passionately advocating for certain causes in which she believes (like the Rights of Multiple Kinds of Beings/Almost Anybody on Earth to Be Alive) . . .

A Whole Personage / Etel . . . I would like to walk with (& look round) and talk & walk with & sit down with (Anywhere, maybe in a street café), and speak together in order to try to know (living) what was Going On Around with (books &) the behavior of people, indicating/together what . . .

OR we might ‘explore’ together the World of the Dead (as Lawrence did the ‘parallel’ to Tarquinia) / City of Tombs (with such affecting rendition of lifelike features & faces that the (faded) colorful portrayal on the walls ‘rivals life’) on the opposite hillside . . .

Or we might go immediately to Greece, & revisit ‘grounds’ Henry Miller celebrates in his Colossus of Maroussi together, & try to ‘physically fathom’ what we should do . . .

Or we might be in Paris, When It’s Naked, and Etel might lead me to a brothel of her own choosing . . . for ‘pure Aventure’ . . . (doubtless we would Cling to Each Other, in part in order to avoid having to associate with Strangers !)

A Consummate Writer with an ‘advanced interest’ in real life & its mysteries . . . ! I really remember looking at a Cezanne with Etel (at the MOMA in NY) from afar—speaking to & with each other ‘about it’—then walking/pushing together closer to it, to look & talk some more (as people do) ‘about it’—to See It (& Be In Relation With It) from that spot . . .

An utterly-different-from-myself ‘Human Being’, with whom I feel an immediate Kinship—a ‘Stranger’ (like myself), and yet a ‘Native’ operative—with whom I wish to communicate, ‘now & forevermore’ . . .

Robert Grenier
May 19, 2011

Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms

2011-10-17T01:09:00.000-07:00

Here's the proem to Paul Foster Johnson's new Portable Press number, Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms, just to give you something to ruminate on as you start your week! PFJ punctuates what he calls "Panic Rooms," "Safe Rooms," and "Pavilions" with these "I did something" poems, and they have consistently proved my favorite extensions in the collection. I'm especially digging the caesurae here! Here's Paul:

I did something emblematic of a life in the Aughts
several of us narrated, twitching to repeat a song
encapsulating one feeling. In a hunched posture,
clicking furiously, I was shocked by the self-idealizations
of my enemies. Knowing their limitations I noted well
the eloquent strands of one dressed like a box jellyfish.
An outfit defined the contretemps and form
drew it out forever. Pathos in the guise
of a repeating song buffeted indifferent objects.
No one made tea or borrowed from my life
of beauty. In this life I dedicated myself to deciding
whether I was offended. Here I reenacted something
trying not to look bored because I was not bored
but deeply interested in preserving a record
of all transactions if only to fling it into the ether.

Blood Counts

2011-10-14T00:49:00.000-07:00

I stopped by John Taggart's "Mixed Blood" lecture this afternoon, a talk he dubbed "Blood Counts," organized by Cecil Giscombe at UC Berkeley. The talk connects Billy Strayhorn's last composition "Blood Count" to Taggart's "Henry David Thoreau / Sonny Rollins" from Pastorelles (Flood Editions, 2004) and the current work he's undertaking on Robert Duncan, but I couldn't stay for the whole event so I'm not sure he made it to the Duncan material. All the same, here are my kind-of-incomprehensible notes from the afternoon:

*Blood can be language also / Language can be blood also
*Jazz is America's "classical" music
*Blood news: birth, death; news that stays news
*Blood counts in beginnings and endings / Blood is relation
*Drought is an absolute condition / Drought is blues: you may wish you were never born
*Blood ratio needs to be balanced, as does the poem
*Taggart played Duke Ellington's (Billy Strayhorn penned?) "Blood Count"
*Bridge [AABA]: B statements cut and lift and improve the A statements: recomposition within old composition: this is where the solo happens
*Taggart wrote an essay as an undergraduate comparing Thoreau and Sonny Rollins; he then assigned himself the same project as a poem [see "Henry David Thoreau / Sonny Rollins" in Pastorelles]
*Your blood is autologous
*AB count [see bridge!]
*At least two nurses must watch a blood transfusion [by law]: cf. Duncan in H.D. Book reading Joyce to two muses / two nurses on UC Berkeley Campus!

And then I had to leave (lame!).

However, Taggart will be reading with Cecil Giscombe at the Meridian Gallery on Saturday (535 Powell, SF, 7:30 pm), so maybe I'll see you there?

And here's the entirety of Taggart's "Thoreau/Rollins" poem from Pastorelles (if you don't have the book at hand):

1.

Two years and two months
alone in the woods
where he had vast range and circuit

his nights black kernels
never profaned by any human neighborhood
Rishyashringa
and no courtesan with a wound to be rubbed and to be kissed

who heard sounds in his nights
and no courtesan who heard the sounds of owls

sounding like

like that I had never been born
like that I had never been born.

2.

Who rejoiced that there are owls
who rejoiced in reading
in reading the classics "the noblest recorded thoughts"

having spent youthful days
costly hours
learning words of an ancient language
an ancient language of perpetual suggestion and provocation

me phunai nikai
three little suggestions

perpetual

singing if it can be called singing
to sing along with the sounds of owls.

3.

Cut of the slash
which cuts
which cuts and which connects

mark
of the cut of
time itself

which leaves a blue mark
black and blue mark
which can be read as a kind of bridge

connecting black and blue and
the abstract truth of
time itself.

4.

Fled the clubs
nightclubs meccas of smoke clatter
and chatter amid smoke murmur and murmur of assignation

hegira

for two years
alone with the alone

alone with the alone saxophone
in the air
alone in the night air and high above the East River
heirmarmene and black water of the river

without a you to do a something to a me
without a song in the air.

5.

In the night air
the seven planets in material orbits
so huge and moving at so great a speed must produce sound

harmonia of heimarmene

ringing and roaring sound the sound of a grinding down
"heavenly harmony" in waves and particles

in the air in the ear in the heart
since birth
in the heart there is a melody of heaven's harmony
ringing and roaring

alone with that
without a song with that.

Hanging Quotes

2011-10-13T00:09:00.000-07:00

I'm very, very eager to read this one! I received this notice in the mail today from Kyle Schlesinger at Cuneiform Press. Here's the press release:

"Cuneiform Press announces the publication of Hanging Quotes by Alastair Johnston. In this book of interviews with book artists, typographers and poets, Johnston discusses the transition from cast metal to digital type with the prime movers in the field: Matthew Carter, Sumner Stone, & Fred Smeijers; he takes stock of the field of artists' books in wide-ranging conversations with Sandra Kirshenbaum and John & Nathan Lyons, while his ground-breaking interviews with Nicolas Barker, Robert Creeley, Dave Haselwood, Holbrook Teter, Bob Hawley, Walter Hamady, Graham Mackintosh and others shed new light on the history of the book in the 20th century."

This book promises to be totally essential reading, especially the interviews with Teter, Haselwood, and Mackintosh. And I still haven't had the time to read Johnston's "..." which was released on Poltroon last year, but I hope to address both here once Hanging Quotes is in my hands...

Recalibrating and Poetry Activities This Week!

2011-10-12T00:04:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've chosen sleep over blogging, which is probably not the right decision, I know, but my body's been super slow to recover after that bout of pneumonia. Rather than push through and feel even sicker, I've been pacing my commitments, which means less blogging, sadly; however, I hope to return to a regular schedule, like, starting now! (we'll see!)

I've been reading Paul Foster Johnson's excellent Portable Press number Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms, which I hope to think about more concertedly here, and then, any number of other books and projects on the desk to sing about (including Joseph Bradshaw's George Oppen book, which I've been slowly reading, like, all year: reading and putting down, reading and putting down; how to talk about this project?).

In the meantime, while I muster enough energy to pull myself back on the horse, I thought to mention a few of the bazillion super interesting events on the immediate horizon:

* John Taggart is in town this week to make a few rare Bay Area appearances. He'll be at UC Berkeley this Thursday, October 13th to give a reading and lecture (lecture at 4 pm, reading at 6:30 pm // 315 Wheeler Hall, Maude Fife Room, UC Berkeley) which I hope will detail some of the work he's currently undertaking on Robert Duncan, and then he returns to give a reading with the mighty Cecil Giscombe at the Meridian Gallery in SF thanks to the Poetry Center (535 Powell Street, reading at 7:30 pm).

*Small Press Traffic is presenting an early show of Kevin Killian's new play with Karla Milosovich, DANCE WORLD GYM, this Sunday, October 16th at 5:00 pm. While SPT's been trying out new digs at Artist Television Access in the Mission, this event will take place at its tried and true venue, Timkin Hall at California College of the Arts, SF.

*My student, Alex Rieser, a super interesting young poet at USF, will be reading from his new chapbook Emancipator at Troung Tran's house in the Haight on Friday, October 14th at 8 pm (email for directions).

*And then probably other stuff that I'm already forgetting.

I'm looking forward to seeing living bodies out in the world this week...See you at one of these maybe?

HOW(ever) Celebration

2011-10-05T00:12:00.000-07:00

Small Press Traffic hosted an intimate celebration of the foundational feminist guerrilla poetry mailer HOW(ever) this past Sunday at Artist Television Access, featuring Kathleen Fraser, Beverly Dahlen, Susan Gevirtz and contributions from the audience by the likes of Robin Tremblay-McGaw, Camille Roy, Yedda Morrison, and Norma Cole (thanks to Camille for sharing the pictures above). It was fascinating to hear Bev and Kathleen discuss the genesis of the project: their early meetings with Frances Jaffer (who was certainly present in spirit (Kathleen saved her a chair!)), how they settled on a name for the project, the way the magazine morphed over time, etc. And great, too, to hear Susan Gevirtz talk about getting in touch with Bev and Kathleen as a graduate student at UCSC in the early eighties, searching for a cohort using the words "feminist" and "poetics" in the same sentence (as she had it); finding out later that her advisor, Donna Haraway was already a subscriber! And to hear Kathleen address her own changing consciousness in the early eighties: "I wasn't a feminist, I was a poet!"

I didn't get a chance to ask the many questions I'd stored up in anticipation of the event, mostly because folks were super tired by the time we made it to the Q & A; however, I was hoping the panel would specifically address the intimacy of production and distribution: how this particular model led to further collaboration and direct action and community building. I asked at the very end of the evening if they made the magazines together, in person, which seems crucial to the project (they did!). I was also interested in how anxiety positively factored into the inception of this project: Kathleen spoke at length about the different anxieties that served as an impetus to start the journal, including anxieties about being heard, about "legitimacy," about women "performing" inside and outside of the academy. In some ways HOW(ever) is a direct product of this deeply-felt anxiety, and the editors deserve endless appreciation for filling the enervating void with so much energy and vibrancy and LOVE (in Zukofsky's sense: "the desire to project the mind's peace," but in a tragic sense; that is, love as tragic hero, suffering a passion that is often not reciprocated).

I am infintely grateful to the editors for their service to the community, and my thanks, as always, to Samantha Giles and SPT for making this event happen!

What Lyric Itself Thinks

2011-09-23T03:27:00.000-07:00

I'm finally getting around to reading Andrew Rippeon's brilliant take on the Dan Beachy-Quick/Srikanth Reddy collaboration over at Jacket 2. Sure, the collaboration is interesting, no question, but it's really Rippeon's treatment that takes center stage here for me. Essential reading if you're interested in how to write a "review" that's not really a "review": http://jacket2.org/reviews/what-lyric-itself-thinks.

The Hole...

2011-09-22T02:19:00.000-07:00

...is coming! Thom Donovan's highly anticipated first book of poetry is on the horizon from Displaced Press, and I'm very proud to report that I've spent the last month or so designing it. Take a look at the cover above (intriguing, no?). This book promises to make real waves, and it promises to be in your hands SOON!

More Wax World

2011-09-21T01:11:00.000-07:00

My favorite poem in Mittenthal's Wax World is the very last piece, "Afterword." (which I'm reading as both a "poem" and a statement of poetics). Here it is, in full, to pique yr. interest:

Afterword.
The simple register misplaced whenever forgetting is in ascent. It's a short walk home. The body wants to forget - but becomes a victim of the involuntary. It collects itself as it falls, tumbling forward.

Proprioception of the dash - a pause longer than a comma and
less than a full stop. Don't be fooled by the appearance of prose -
something lurks in the pudding. Remember how the boat in the bottle
stays there.

It's a mystery or betrayal, where stasis partners with the virtual.
Instinct remains a control - as if it were a preserve of the actual, an
internalized contradiction.

Marriage is a machine that talks back - but its revolution was too late.
Each song boils down to one phrase. An algorithm that forced value
into serial form. As if it simply harnessed a blind spot for authority.

No, he is the unstoppable author, the Stephen Spielberg of structural engineering.
No, we can only pray for failure.
Yes, time is deserted in quantified segments - in the modular engines
that debase labor.
Thesis: We need to own our own prosthetics. My hand in relation.

The machine was No's other lover
What was once conveyed is now lost
At the innovation station locusts lift the landscape
A network of exemplars abandoned the family store
Urban planning as fear of Detroit

Ok. Take a brief look at the star structure. A face emerges from
the assembly line. Neither materially grounded nor aloft. What a
beautiful ass it has. Forget you.

Labor produces its own aliens. For example, the Pinkertons were
agoraphobes who voted against themselves. Trenchcoat libertarians
adrift in the flows of capital.

The urge is to worship our own abstraction from labor. Just wait for
the return to lotto tickets, the next round of unfiltered cigarettes.
Realizing the body's capacity to absorb even more savage value, I took
my daily constitutional. Prozac and a single malt.

Sentences because to get inside beneath attention's filter, one must
build a kinescope that holds the scene together, where the viewer enters
lost in wonder as the whiplash of thought carries it to the end.

Wax World

2011-09-19T02:04:00.000-07:00

Robert Mittenthal is to Seattle what Kevin Killian is to San Francisco or David Abel is to Portland. He's the guy you want to track down immediately to catch your bearings, to see what people are up to, to find out what folks are reading and talking about, and, like Kevin and David both, he's super generous and super, super smart to boot.

I lived in Seattle for a tiny window in 2008, and the highlight of my time there was getting to know Robert and Will Owen and Nico Vassilakis and Joel Felix and Jeanne Heuving, etc., etc. PEOPLE! Living and breathing people making poetry in a town that isn't exactly known for its huge poetry scene.

Upon moving to Seattle, it was clear that Robert was the guy to talk to about plugging in to local activity. And given the interest around his work up north (he's something of a FIXTURE), it seems impossible that Wax World could be Mittenthal's "first book," but, yep, I think it really is the first widely available edition of his work, and we owe Charles Alexander and his Chax thanks (once again!) for making it happen! [On a side note, I think it should be publicly said that Charles and Chax deserve a ton of props for printing totally crucial first books from tons of folks, highlighting Charles' interest in supporting lesser known writers. Thanks, Chax!]

Anyway, the first thing I noticed when I opened Wax World is Mittenthal's use of verbs. Take a look at the first poem in the book, "Skill Set":

Skill Set

Today, the usual money vectors as events describe me

This rhetoric describes how failure holds
To rewrite what cannot be renamed

Monday verbs as lunch then snip snip
Day eats at cloud until its tooth clips and records

Tuesday sleeps with cirrus cumulus
And hands off what in sleeveless flight
Corpuscles an engine to styrofoam white

Wednesday's soup alone clouds
What tied together disjuncts
Any shape at all

Tomorrow, animated - shorter, cut off
Darkness all the way back to land
A little image engraved upon it
Shadow of sea - calm a very narrow
Sockets revolving, swollen

[end Mittenthal]

Here, "money vectors" and "Day eats" and "tooth clips," which are admittedly pretty surprising and interesting twists in the line, but even nouns are verbing here: "Monday verbs" and "corpuscles" might be the verb compliment to "flights" and maybe "styrofoam" is used as a verb in the phrase "an engine to styrofoam white"?

I'm interested in the way Mittenthal's lines slip out of recognition at the moment they seem most familiar. He's playing with recognition and misrecognition here, like a figure in a wax museum. It's not so much how a wax figure "resembles" its subject, but the ways it doesn't. Camille Roy pointed to this idea here on the blog back in May when she wrote: "as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong revulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels. The moment of revulsion, where the robot is recognized as non-human, is called the uncanny valley." Part of the interest in wax figures is this revulsion: the complex reaction we have when we recognize that a representation IS a representation trying not to be a representation. In other words, when the mimetic shows its seams.

Take the phrase "Until yes thanks you" from the poem "Diseconomy of Scale." Most readers will hear "Until then, thank you" while their minds are wrestling with the shift from "thank you" to "thanks you" which means, of course, that "yes" is the subject: "yes thanks you."

There are so many examples of this creeping misrecognition that it's difficult to choose a representative poem. However, I'm partial to "Gag," which begins with the following epigraph from Agamben: "...indicating first of all something that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech, as well as...improvisation meant to compensate for a loss of memory or inability to speak."

Gag

Permission to approach the yellow disk at a distance.

Enclosed in the gesture, a man twists an orange into his mouth.

If appearing not said is lost, memory a speech defect comes with it.
Hand holding hand - no engine of taste forgiveness.

Can't get enough difference - a concrete antenna to balance the sky.
Liar! You glisten beneath narrow cast frequency arrays.

A pun riveted until punched - until its pencil of light cannot be
contained. The sculpture says nothing. It harvests only the gray
grain & cackles when a crow swallows.

Silence is its stupid thing. A body English out of words - out of
names. It fights the flicker of stunted dots - up-screen of erratic paint.

In this school of other import, against the sterile comforts of unbound
life, contagion springs a monster. Its original revolt was too jealous -
earth flattened in the eccentric threads of that one thing.

We removed the grass, the ants and the words - leaving the precept
in a vividness of dirt. Thumbing its green at you - no sweat in relation to time.

A cinema whose separate vacation withheld the steady state.
Investigating the awkward between, fact as boundless self-organized.
History's order - less the crowd.

At the end blossoms go white - tyrant steam to flame. A copyrighted
face on the list of names.

In order of appearance, physical traits empty out - barefoot but fast.
It's a euphemism for the poem - a horror of thought. A parade of
names scrolled out in the colored lights.

Sensitive Correspondence

2011-09-12T01:38:00.000-07:00

This from Thom Donovan at Others Letters:

"The following PDF contains Taylor Brady's and Rob Halpern's 'Sensitive Correspondence,' a pamphlet distributed during their November 2007 reading at New Yipes series in Oakland for their book Snow Sensitive Skin, first published by Michael Cross' Atticus / Finch press in the fall of 2007, and recently republished by Displaced Press. (You can read Cross' introduction to the reissue here.)

'Sensitive Correspondence' offers insight into the process of the two collaborators as they reflect, via email, upon the particulars of their collaboration, with special attention to the role of time and duration in their writing, engagement with source materials, and to what Rob calls 'patiency,' a condition in which one becomes susceptive to the thought and affect of others, a mutual subject of prosody emerging through the work.

The correspondence culminates with Brady's 'Trumpet Notes,' a short essay considering the place of non-European musical composition with regards to US military history since the Civil War."

Download the PDF here, and much love to Donovan for posting this material!

A, a, a, a, a

2011-09-09T01:32:00.000-07:00

Chris Daniels has produced a clutch of essential chapbooks with his Berkeley Neo-Baroque imprint (only one of his MANY projects!). Of the recent chapbooks, however, one has left an indelible impression on my reading: Sara Larsen's A,a,a,a,a (the title of which begs comparison, of course, with Zukofsky's big "A" but this one begins less ostentatiously again and again and again with more interest in chance, imperfection, imbalance, and a disunified speaking subject in flux).

I had the pleasure of seeing her read from this work over the summer, and I was struck by how powerful these poems are in person, in the air. She read with David Brazil in this lush garden, like a scene from a Pre-raphelite painting, but the aura was disrupted by her super fierce delivery, like Corin Tucker from Sleater-Kinney as the subject of a Rossetti painting: part riot grrl, part earth goddess, part post-Marxist militant. Larsen's one of the few poets of her cohort carrying the torch of poets like Diane Di Prima and Anne Waldman, but she's channeling their energy without "reproducing" anything: this project might have "spiritual" antecedents, but her line is her own.

In A,a,a,a,a, Larsen makes pointed reference to Wallace Berman and his Semina (including the punctuated image of the aleph: see Semina #7), which leads me to read this as something of a homage, but there's so much more at play. Here's one of my favorites (though I won't get the spacing right using Blogger's editor):

HALF-TONED ABRAXIS

love the savior     true nature of spermaceti     grace
joy     sorrow have not seen you,     wavecrest     tranced
between yr boots     whitewashed transit comes kohl-eyed of
the crown and bethinks thee of the albatross.

behind these frets, pioneers. a pupusa that speaks of travellin
g, i no longer forogt this sleep, send me free i remain but
a letter,
     aleph, the one on your hand.

i do not know what to bring to tophet, nor what is sacred.

i can only hit at darts of a Great Whale that has shown
up in a material dream

the hells are everywhere we are empty-handed with
emptiness of their innards
     the despot eye that follows their forms

[end S-LRSN]

Needless to say, this chapbook is worth your time. Don't sleep...

Communism

2011-09-07T00:24:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Armed Cell, I've been reading Brian Ang's new Berkeley Neo-Baroque chapbook and it's straight up audacious, no doubt about it!

It's called Communism and it begins with a poem entitled "Third Part of "A"-9" (BOLD!) which runs "Donna mi prega" through the ringer yet again (w/ all the appropriate pyrotechnics, etc.) using Badiou as his interlocutor (rather than, say, Marx or Spinoza). Brazen!

THEN Ang has this suite of poems that's meant to "resonate dimensionally" as you read across four poems at once (a simultaneity Zukofsky was fond of, for sure, and which, according to ME, was inspired by reading James Clerk Maxwell's science textbooks!). Ang calls this form "Late Dialectics." I call it going big or going home!

Here's "Inaesthetics" (Badiou!):

of truth-value before silence-speech
which subtracts from their alternation

a crushing victory for democracy
unthinkable by terror-virtue

nothing but takes and editing
mathematical correspondence

imperial democratic phraseology
atoms by degrees of existence

the virtual spies with hats
a tsunami of avant-garde rats

what are numbers
the relation is total

entirely nothing than one riven
after a delay of varying length

below the encyclopedia of the situation
a moving division forever tangled

sexuated topology
hard-working between differences

kinds of inscriptions
pieces of the game

a symptom too little too much
intuitive universality variable

politics thought traversed
requirements of the epoch

masterplan as drawn
as implemented existence

to think change in being
intellectual racist blustering

no concessions to democratic debate
production by the finite of an infinite

the international moribund creeds
the exceptional stable paradox

the slow repressive inversion
not good-bad but is or is not

a transcendental algebra for the evaluation
necessarily

imperative and immobility called masculine
wandering and story called feminine

the affirmation of chance
the possible objects at once pure and solid

[END ANG]

A tsunami of avant-garde rats, indeed! You'll have to get the chapbook yourself to read this baby in the context of its suite. Head over to Berkeley Neo-Baroque here for the hook-up.

ARMED CELL #1

2011-09-06T00:49:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Brian Ang's new magazine Armed Cell while in bed with pneumonia (pneumonia! people still get pneumonia?!), finding all kinds of interesting stuff like David Lau's "Tiqqun" poem ("We are in a civil war, irremediably there") and Jeanine Webb's theses ("In the future, dolphins will no longer own stocks or attack drones."). According to Ang, Armed Cell "seeks to publish what is urgent and necessary in poetry and poetics" but it does so by very specifically situating itself among the big dogs like Badiou, Zizek, Agamben and others. He continues:

It insists on militancy "working for the emancipation of humanity in its entirety" (Alain Badiou) to confront the notion of there being at present "too much anti-capitalism" (Slavoj Zizek) and not enough direct action against "capitalism (or whatever other name we might want to give to the process dominating world history today" (Giorgio Agamben). Armed Cell seeks relationship with those engaged in research and practice with this matrix of concerns, in order to be, like Lenin's pre-revolution withdrawl to study Hegel, a site for the study necessary for executing political actions.

There's plenty of interest here, for sure, like Dan Thomas-Glass's "100 Partial Theses on Beauty," but I think I was most won over by Wendy Trevino's "Phalanstery for Imaginary Friends" which I reprint here in its entirety to pique yr. interest:

Phalanstery for Imaginary Friends

"In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations."
-David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital

Bloo was like a hippy telling a Buddhist to shut up
Becacuse he wouldn't stop telling people to shut up
Because throughout the war they'd been so

Quiet Eduardo was like Cesar Chavez and Che shaking their heads
Like Pinky mirrors Firefly in Duck Soup like who wore it better
Frames dresses and action figures the last that nobody

Comes in Wilt lost like most of his arm was imagined tall
Father stay at home like a Coca Cola-iced tea taste test
Grandma sister's husband's brother &

Still alive Coco could do slapstick but only at podium like Harpo
Like that was a curse contingent with credit the university's call
For jihad against the Cotillion PTA the criminalizing of

Slapping Mr. Herriman fought in one of the wars worried he enjoyed
Shopping for his girls too much sent them all to college
But was mostly tired always between meetings a

Communist Cheese was post-Dr. Strangelove pre-something id shaped smudge
Spread around the eyes of Jackie Kennedy in the commonest
Of dreams the passports & degrees counterfeit

Armed Cell is free and can be had from Ang directly here: armedcell[at]gmail[dot]com.

Snow Sensitive Skin

2011-08-31T00:07:00.000-07:00

I've somehow neglected to officially announce the reissue of Rob Halpern and Taylor Brady's Snow Sensitive Skin, orginally published by my Atticus/Finch in 2007 and now available as a trade edtion thanks to Displaced Press. The new edition features a plethora of supplemental material, including workng texts by both Taylor and Rob and an afterward, "Collaboration, Gesture, and Improvisation," collaboratively written by both authors. In addition, I was asked to contribute a preface, which I append here as an introduction to the project. Here goes:

I first discovered Taylor Brady’s work after a memorable conversation at Small Press Traffic circa 2002. Brady made some trenchant comments about the work of noise—how distortion too falls prey to the whims of capital unless it succeeds in reconfiguring the frames of legibility around it: that to be noise it must remain noise. I was struck then by how decisively Brady honed in on the value of the negative, especially because, post-9/11, everyone wanted to make noise but nobody seemed to know how against the din of rhetoric and sophistry and predator drones washing over our impotent negations in waves of terror and abjection.

After our discussion, I immediately located and devoured Brady’s first volume, Microclimates, and while I must have registered Rob Halpern’s name on the back cover, I didn’t thoroughly investigate his work until after leaving the Bay Area to enlist in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo, which seemed like the logical place to ferret out the riddle of praxis. I invited Taylor to visit once settled, a trip roughly coincident with the publication of Halpern’s first book Rumored Place, and Brady’s praise of the project was so effulgent that he sent me fairly breathless to the bookstore down the street, where I found it rhyming with the concerns of Microclimates, an autonomous critical ecology—a rupture (rapture?) of possibility by which reader, writer, and (coming-)community could imagine a critical engagement that will have been the conditions for a possible future.

Both poets seemed to write, in the words of Fritz Breithaupt (after Walter Benjamin), an “empty space (as) the condition of possibility of (their future) arrival,” and both offered an impassioned model of praxis translating perfectly into the material practice itself, an engagement gleaned from the New Narrative mentors they share, and where, no doubt, they learned to deftly move between poetry, prose and critical exegesis.

So perhaps my interest in commissioning what would become Snow Sensitive Skin was more conspicuous than I imagined at the time. I was curious to learn how their voices would coalesce—what of shared aesthetic concerns, political commitments, and countless hours of conversation would find its way into the work. But in the end, I was interested in what I (and Rob and Taylor) would learn from it (and each other) and how we might “occupy” the foreclosed “now” as artists and thinkers—how we might use invitation as a model to engage. And this is precisely, in my estimation, what Snow Sensitive Skin offers its readers.

I invited Rob to visit Buffalo not long after Taylor, in September of 2005, and after his return to California I asked the two to collaborate. The terms were simple: commit to a project together—no deadlines, no injunctions as to form or content; I committed to print the collaboration with Atticus/Finch sight unseen, if and when it manifested. It seemed to me then that such a communal endeavor would test the stakes of collective engagement, and I wanted to take Breithaupt at his word that emptying the space of possibility “is all that is needed.” I’m not sure when they began working in earnest, but throughout 2006 I received emails in fits and starts while both worked on other writing projects and dissertations and maintained relationships, and then, suddenly, in the spring of 2007 the project had a title. By November, two years after the invitation to begin, the book saw publication.

The complexities of this particular collaboration are difficult to suss out, even for those intimately involved, so I can’t speak to what happened when Brady and Halpern sat down to work (though it is crucial that they did so in person). Even in close communication, I couldn’t decipher who wrote what and under what circumstances, though I certainly have some hunches. My guess is the project truly found its legs with the addition of a fourth collaborator: the Lebanese musician and visual artist Mazen Kerbaj, and I suppose, by default, a fifth: Israel’s aerial bombardment of Lebanon in the summer of 2006. During the “July War,” a 34-day siege that left over 1,000 residents of Beirut dead, Kerbaj met the “summer rain” of missile attacks with the kind of anxious inefficacy we all felt (feel) under the reign of the industrial military complex. Through the barrage he began a blog, posting cartoons and music in an effort to document his rage, vitiation, and guilt. He posted his own collaboration, “Starry Night” a “minimalistic improvisation” for trumpet and bombs in which he played his horn with, between, and against the percussive explosions of Israeli artilery. In a way, it is precisely this sense of “collaboration” (collaborating with and against), that informs Snow Sensitive Skin, this improvisation with a summer rain we both precipitate and endure.

Through Kerbaj’s daily practice of attending to the violence of the present using the tools at his disposal, Brady and Halpern ask the question (in “City Made of Boxes”) “can we even be here now?” What can a writing look like in which “a thing records the conditions of its own inscription” (Rumored Place) in order to see itself seeing? What kind of time will have been the moment of rupture in which the possibility of a future is not coincident with its own destruction? In some ways, the terms of engagement and the consequent space produced through the very existence of these terms allows for a tentative response. By working closely together, we created a space to let our thinking exist in a state of inoperativity. We didn’t know what this project would be, and as such we allowed it to become what it will have been, without deadline or marketing interests or the more practical exigencies of publication. We decided to let the project develop on its own, despite the contingencies of everyday responsibility, and the outcome did more for my thinking than I could have imagined in the most optimistic of scenarios.

The authors write in their acknowledgments “we want to give ourselves to a present that is something other than the debased ‘now,’ and to a future that will not have been terminal” in which “we find / ourselves still trying to link our language (what they call a “second language…taken up as an act of love”) to the / thing that happened when all our stacked vocal / harmonies tumble into public spheres.” It is this new historiography, not the “metal time we’re fed by others,” that allows us to exist next to how we find ourselves, embroiled and abject. It is no accident that the most frequently used words in Snow Sensitive Skin (after requisite prepositions and articles) are “we” and “our.” I am grateful to count myself part of this possible plural, even if we have yet to fully understand the conditions of our redemption.

One Last Note on Pornotopias

2011-08-30T00:01:00.000-07:00

In a follow-up email to the "Pornotopias" conversation, Rob Halpern added the following crucial notes in response to our questions regarding lyric function and the figure of the soldier. I thought to post them here as a compliment to Rob's notes (and as a way to neatly tie-up the "Pornotopias" thread!).

Here's Rob:

...I came away from the discussion grateful for several new insights related to Music for Porn, insights that will certainly feedback into the work. These came by way of yr questions regarding the importance of lyric and the function of the soldier. I’ll share these with you briefly here, if you're interested in reading on, as I’m trying now to bring these insights to articulation for myself.

As for lyric: I think the lyric impulse in my poems is a critical impulse to embody some sense of relation to things which have otherwise become entirely abstract. “To know” a thing in the sense of Oppen’s imperative--and in the case of my poems, this "thing" would be the body of a soldier--might mean nothing more than to restore that thing to some semblance of relation when relation has been otherwise suppressed or withdrawn. What might that relation feel like? And how might these feelings lend real shape to a obscured and mystified world. I think this kind of "knowing" is paradoxical. Sometimes it can only register real blocks or obstacles to relating, and requires amplified forms to push to the limit of that. At best, such impossible "knowing" can potentiate new forms of feeling, knowing, and relating, but it requires lyric’s commitment to arousing and mobilizing forms of subjectivity against the mirroring of dead things (abstract, alienated) whose mere reflections (as occur, say, in certain conceptualist writings) fail to relate. Acker's lesson is that subjectivity can’t be confused with “self-expression."

As for the soldier: I realize again how my "soldier" is working overtime at the level of allegory. His body only enters the poems because his representation--the way it circulates in both the social imaginary and the symbolic order--has been more or less severed from the real bodies of military men. My “soldier” really isn’t anything more than an exaggerated “type” in my poems, much in the way that gay porn film narratives of the 70s (before narrative was all but abandoned in porn films) are organized around familiar/generic/allegorical types, something that finds exaggerated pop cultural expression with The Village People: you know, the Indian Chief, the Construction Worker, the Cowboy, the Cop … well, the Soldier. It’s a figure that occupies a place in the cultural imaginary, but whose relation to us has been entirely mystified. The figure arouses desire while registering how our living relation to the thing it represents is blocked. Hence my poems’ obsession and frustration.

Specificity of a Gay Pornographic Subject

2011-08-29T00:23:00.000-07:00

We never quite discussed what a "pornotopia" might be during Rob Halpern's recent Nonsite Collective discussion about pornotopias because we dove into Halpern's figure of the soldier instead. As such, I asked Rob if I could post this section of his notes, provisionally entitled "Specificity of a Gay Pornographic Subject," to point toward what a "pornotopia" might be. Here's Rob:

At its limit, gay porn becomes its own perfected formalism where a social typology of marketable masculinities is celebrated as a pure construct, empty of any essential content. Identity becomes fictionalized as mere mask, and hypostatized as a lubricant for the circulation of bodies and pleasures, before being permitted to dissolve. Robert Glück addresses this in his essay called “Caricature” in issue #4 of Soup, that is, the way porn sets up character systems and social typologies “in order to tear them down” (23). In other words, porn exteriorizes character—de-psychologized persona—as nothing but a social artifice where absolute content and the pornotopia of degraded narrative converge with absolute form, so that the commodified body mediated by legible social “type” collapses into its opposite: the body shorn of stable social identity. Identity is nothing more than a social and economic lubricant; and when its exchange value is consumed, when the link is consummated, its usefulness is exhausted, if not destroyed. And here lies the beautiful contradiction of pornographic logic: just as Eros converges with “the death drive” in the dissolution of identity, commodified relations potentiate the dissolution self-preservation’s logic, identity’s reason for being.

While parodying society’s identity structures—so many of which are anchored in labor—identity as a job—from taxi driver to chauffer, secretary to businessman, plumber to architect—porn gestures toward a logic of disintegration, and the need to break up social reality if only in order to satisfy desire. And yet, as a genre, porn remains inadequate to alter the mechanistic relations that ensure the ongoingness of pleasure’s ‘bad infinity,’ insufficient, that is, to go beyond the limit of identity’s spontanaeity. Porn thus becomes yet another “negative imprint” of utopia as it simultaneously illuminates and contains the social promise of democratization that it stimulates. While porn may underscore the contradictions of identity and its negation at the limits of lived social relations, it remains complicit in reproducing the terms of a broken reality whose norm is precisely relational dissolution. Unable to transcend its own commodity status, porn can only gesture toward the utopia it blocks.

The objective system of exchangeable individuals made legible in porn lacks a corresponding subjective element that might challenge that system, for to challenge that system could mean to undermine the distribution of pleasure. Porn’s limit is in fact the absence of the “subjective factor” which, according to Ernst Bloch, is crucial for any utopian form to make a countermove against what he refers to as “the bad existence” of society as it maintains itself within predetermined norms (Utopian Function, 108). Overcoming the spontaneous status quo hardened in those norms “is impossible to manage,” Bloch argues, “without a subjective factor, and it is equally impossible to neglect the profound dimension of this factor, its countermove against the bad existence, its mobilizations of those contradictions inherent in the bad existence in order to overcome that existence, in order to bring it to the point of collapse” (109).

Pornotopias, then, not as a critique of the mediated quality of our relations: but rather an opportunity to saturate the social space of our bodies’ appearance with as many mediations as possible. The more mediations, the more enhanced our chances become of grasping the whole.

The promise of porn: to suspend the paradigms within which the body means this or that. Porn becomes the scene where the body as means for reproduction can contest the terms of its own predication by returning to the body as a means without an end. In other words, to activate, rather than limit, the profanatory potential typically associated with porn—the promise of porn to profane being a promise betrayed by porn’s simultaneous ability to eroticize the apparatuses that capture and control—identify and predicate—us.

Porn, then, as both the regime of representation that harnesses the potential of the body’s use value, while also conditioning the possibility of unleashing it. To profane what the apparatus seeks to resanctify—sex directed toward generic ends, futures (finance)—if only in the most amplified terms: i.e., the money shot as evidence of desire: the prescription of the cum shot as evidence of desire’s fulfillment: precipitation of capital’s dreams about itself.

Porn is fundamentally about temporality: the present as lubricant to a future that reproduces the present’s fantasies about itself.

But rather than reaffirming an end-directed sexuality determined by dominant paradigms of sex and gender; pornographic writing—writing that fucks with the border between visible and invisible, being and non-being, life and death—can undo those paradigms by learning to sense—to be affected by—the radical particularity of the untagged that has been excluded in the order to consolidate a normal sexual subject.

So while consumer pornography is a conservative and often nefariuous apparatus, and what it conserves, even as it exploits it, is a certain essence of aim driven sexuality, which participates in a consolidation of the human, what I’d like to propose is a way of thinking porn that arouses the potential to fuck with that essence: to fulfill porn’s promise to profane “the human”. To elaborate the unfulfilled place of the inessential.

To stimulate the possibility of an irruption into the apparatus of sexuality by perceiving something the regime of representation can’t account for—what is unthinkable within its terms. Pornography: being the limit of what can be seen and thought. To allow for what is fundamentally incompatible within the symbolic order. (Edelman). To render the private self as an improper self: [post-] porn as placeholder for everything excluded—withdrawn into scenes of invisibility—in the interest of consolidating dominant meanings of human being: to hold a place open “where value as such is lacking” (Edelman).

And also...

2011-08-25T10:10:00.000-07:00

CJ Martin's Two Books is now available at Small Press Distribution! Go get it...

Haecceities at Damn the Caesars

2011-08-24T23:37:00.000-07:00

Rich Owens just posted a super generous review of my Haecceities over at Damn the Caesars. Perhaps you'll take a look?

And I apologize for being so quiet this week. I've been really very sick, but I hope to be up and running by tomorrow...

Halpern on Acker

2011-08-19T00:56:00.000-07:00

In his introductory preamble last Sunday, Rob Halpern used the writing of Kathy Acker to frame how a conceptual interest in pornography could be used to understand his "own desire to write." My notes from the afternoon didn't quite captured how Rob subtly used Acker to frame his workshop at Naropa and his own work in Music for Porn, so I asked if I could post his notes. The following is Rob's opening gambit:

It may have been with Kathy Acker that I first began thinking about porn in relation to my own desire to write. One passage in Acker’s early novel The Life of the Black Tarantula in particular was extremely salient and I’ve been living with it for a long time now. In a chapter called “The Story of My Life” Acker assumes the persona of the Marquis de Sade, and pilfers, appropriates, collages, from Sade’s writings, together with passages from W. Lenning’s biographical Portrait of Sade, and in doing so, she constructs a meditation on the contradictions and impasses around what she calls “personal life”:

“I’m trying to get away from self-expression but not from personal life,” she writes, “I hate creativity. I’m simply exploring other ways of dealing with events than ways my lousy habits—mainly installed by my parents and institutions—have forced me to act. At this point I’m over-sensitive and have a hard time talking to anyone. I can fuck more easily.”

What the narrator here calls “self-expression” is one of those lousy habits, a bad fiction sanctioned by the institutions she’s resisting. Acker’s writing struggles against a range of institutions—gender, family, money, law—together with the division of labor, and the whole economic system whose interests these institutions protect. “Self-expression” implies a kind of spontaneity that fails to recognize the way expression is constructed and mediated by the institutions she most abhors. Within this framework, we might understand how Acker sees identity as yet another institution whose violent strategies themselves masquerade as “self-expression,” whereby identity appears natural and true. We might also begin to understand how her writing aims to undo that violence.

For Acker, identity and self-expression obscure something else, something even more “real,” something she refers to in this passage as “personal life,” which may have less to do my “my self” and more to do with the impersonal forces—those institutions— that condition our individual lives, and constrain our collective possibilities. In other words—and this is probably obvious—personal life is social life.

Acker’s language refuses to countenance the common sense assumptions that block our engagement with the real conditions of these lives and possibilities. Hers is a language of negation, a language “which describes yet refuses to be a language that is socially given” (that’s what she writes about Goya’s visual “language” in her essay “Realism for the Cause of Future Revolution”). This is a language that wants to get at “the connections between the ‘real’ events, and the holes, the silences…the interstices through which all of us fall.” Moreover, it’s a language that wants paradoxically to articulate “places where language cannot yet be,” like “chaos, or the body, or death.” (These passages come from “The Killers,” which appears in Biting the Error.)

I began thinking of Acker as a kind of realist insofar as her writing embodies the crisis of security. (If boundaries aren’t stable, how are we to distinguish between the valued thing to be secured—be it the self, or the nation—and everything else that appears to threaten it?) Her work shows how the boundaries upon which security depends are always the effects of various fictions. This realism makes the self legible as a mutable set of stories; and rather than disavowing these stories, Acker embraces and displays their mutability, as well as their ability to register the contradictions that make them what they are.

Finally, Acker’s work is not the record of an individual, but rather register the scandal of our own social pathologies: the determination of our tiny, fragile egos to keep otherness out by walling ourselves in; the way we reproduce social separations and divisions by immuring ourselves—taxonomies of identity and hierarchies of class, genres and genders, nations and rogues, etc.—all in the name of that “social good” called security. Acker’s work stages this so-called “social good” as social violence, and in doing so her writing goes where socially sanctioned language can’t go.

Years later—which was still some years ago now—and without consciously noting the connection, I decided to call the poems I was writing Music for Porn. Something I’m able to acknowledge now, without having registered it then: Acker’s insights informed how I was beginning to think about porn, pretty expansively, as any regime of representation where one’s most intimate relations – be it to one’s self, to one’s body, of to the body’s of others—are mediated by the most impersonal images and discourses: “and to see them / is to know ourselves”, as George Oppen might have said) that is, in order to begin sensing the social composition of a self—whatever that might be—requires that one reckon into one’s perception—or the very organ of sensation doing the perceiving (in this case, a lyric poem)—the most impersonal forces, social dynamics, images, discourses, whatever—all of which disable what we might think of uncritically as spontaneous expression.

Upon first reading Acker, I referred to this as the violence of identity: the forging of a self thru endless processes of subjection, or more quietly, subjectivization, a violence submerged in any expression of a self that disavows the social relations that make that self what it is.

I realize now, that my early invocation of Porn to refer to something my poems might be doing in relation to those social dynamics and processes is rooted in my reading of Acker, and these were whole apparatuses of representation I imagined my lyric both to be “accompanying” and “exchanging” itself for porn (Like Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness), but I also wanted to think about my lyric (music) as being also for porn in the sense of being in support of insofar as I think the “pornograph” has the potential to do a particular kind of critical work. For porn, too, in the sense of helping porn, transforming it, returning to it its power to profane.

As I’ve already suggested the other end of my thinking, there was a haunting specter Oppen’s Of Being Numerous: “There are things / We live among ‘and to know them / Is to know ourselves’” and somewhere in the thinking that my poems were just beginning to enable, there was another realization, and that is that those things Oppen says we must know in order to know ourselves are bodies, bodies reduced to the status of things, often dead bodies, bodies withdrawn from view, bodies that can’t be seen, the circulation of whose images has been proscribed and rendered taboo as a matter of socio-political policy.

In order to know myself, or whatever it is I might call myself—and in the case, the self as the subject of a lyric poem—I must “know” these things, these expendable bodies, having become things, reified and withdrawn, and yet ready to be used for ends not my own, like prostheses of a social body that is nonetheless of me, in me, for me, a social body whose organs of sensation have atrophied, seemingly beyond repair. But “to know” here might mean nothing more than to restore to subjective relation: to activate (resurrect?) whatever residues of living labor cling inside a thing seemingly void of subjectivity. To restore to relation requires needs lyric’s commitment to subjectivity against the mirroring of dead and “undead” forms, whose mere reflection fails to relate.

To write lyric under such circumstances and constraints, then, is to create organs so that these bodies might be perceived, located in (impossible, submerged) relation to my own.

Notes from Pornotopias

2011-08-17T00:04:00.000-07:00

Rob began his talk on Sunday by asking us to respond to a one-word writing prompt: "pornography." In response, I came up with the following questions for myself:

*In what ways is desire instrumentalized (or not) in pornography?
*What are we *seeing* when we view pornography?
*What is the role of abstraction in pornography?

Once we shared our responses, Rob began reading from a set of notes that drew from his recent Naropa workshop and his forthcoming third book of poetry (available later this year from Nightboat), Music for Porn.

Here's what I could get down(!):

*What is the relationship btw. what we imagine to be "pornographic" and what we're doing in our writing?

*How do we address the generic expectations we come equipped w/ when we confront "erotic" material?

*Life of the Black Tarantula, Kathy Acker
"Self expression" is a lousy habit, "identity" is another
So-called self-expression hides how "personal life" is "social life"

*Maybe the so-called "social good" is really a social violence?

*Rob's provisional definition of the "pornographic":
"A violence present in any social institution in which the most personal is mediated by the most impersonal"
(or something like that?)

*Oppen: "There are things we live among and to know them is to know ourselves" // what if these "things" are bodies? sexualized bodies, dead bodies, our own bodies, etc.?

*In order to know myself, I must know these things, these bodies, the apparatus of the social that mediates on behalf of? for? between? these bodies.

*Lyric as an organ of sensation: to register these things in the poem

*Apparatus of mediation determines what can be seen or known before we really know it // Poem as organ can "know" apriori?

*"Violence," as a concept, is working overtime: much too abstract a term to do the labor we ask it to do

*Whitman's Civil War poems: wealth of affect
What are are these poems asked to do?
Do they have a healing function?
Are they a healing agent for the nation?

*Jean Genet's Funeral Rites: How do I mourn the lost love without my mourning becoming instrumentalized or "useful"?

*"I get off on relating to invisible suffering and then eating what I produce" // from the proem to Music for Porn?

*Lyric, as an organ of sensation, draws bodies (imagined or otherwise) into relation // Music FOR Porn: as a stand-in but also as oorganized stress to frame/organize experience

*Organ of sensation: making coherent apriori to processed experience ("thought"): organs can do work we can't access

CJ Martin's Cosmetic Practice

2011-08-15T00:04:00.000-07:00

Thom Donovan just posted a totally essential Q & A with CJ Martin over at Wild Horses of Fire, wherein Chris says, among many other really astounding things:

"In part, why the term cosmetic appeals to me is that its critical edge highlights the profanity, the complete trashiness, of getting visible---the fucking faith lift is brilliant (as pun) but just completely terrifying (as principle)---dear lord, suck out the fat of my faith, lift it up & stitch me back! Suck out the nation fat (deport it, suppress it), iron any wrinkles & make me look young again. The proximity b/w faith & face is kind of astounding in its obviousness, but as anything more than proximity, I'm not entirely convinced. That interface would necessarily be interfaith is kind of a given after a certain point, but as program it's so UN ('In your faith!', might be more like it, in terms of an encounter in the world)."

Umm. You should probably read the whole thing...Find it here.

And while you're reading this crucial exchange between Chris and Thom, you should listen to Chris read from Two Books at the con/crescent reading series (thanks to con/crescent curators Nicholas DeBoer and Jamie Townsend for preparing this audio file!).

2011.04.02 CJ Martin at con/cresent by Michael Cross

And if you haven't heard this short bit of Chris reading on Dona Stein's "Poetry Radio" program, you should totally spin this while cleaning the house or something:

C.J. Martin reading on Dona Stein's Poetry Radio by Michael Cross

And finally, if you don't have Two Books yet, you need it (them?!). Seriously.

BIG MOVES!

2011-08-12T01:10:00.000-07:00

We're making big moves this weekend, and you're welcome to join us! Tonight, we'll celebrate the launch of Displaced Press' new suite of books with readings by Brandon Brown, Samantha Giles, Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern at Small Press Distribution (1341 Seventh Street, Berkeley). Doors at 7:00 pm, reading at 7:30.

Then, Sunday afternoon Rob Halpern will share his research on "Pornotopias" before he hops in a car and heads to Michigan. Email for directions: michaelthomascross[at]hotmail(dot)com, or click on the posters above for more information. Hope to see you!

SOUS LES PAVES #4

2011-08-10T02:58:00.000-07:00

There's a ton of super badass material in the new issue of Sous Les Paves, a "quarterly newsletter of poetry and ideation" lovingly edited by Micah Robbins out in Dallas. If you haven't seen this magazine before, it's probably because this one arrives the old-fashioned way, through the United States Postal Service. And like crucial mail interventions before it, say, like HOW(ever), it offers lots of room for correspondence, commentary, and poetry alike.

There's SO MUCH material here worth talking about: a new William Fuller prose poem, a short poem by John Beer, a piece called "The Gift: Globalism and Globilzation" by Tyrone Williams, some Petrarch translations by Tim Atkins, a really amazing piece by j/j hastain, Mary Burger on Robert Smithson and other stuff, etc. etc. etc. And, in order to help us catch up, Robbins has posted the three previous issues in full online here.

There's also a really interesting Frances Kruk poem here, which I've been reading with interest next to her new Punch Press chapbook. Here it is in full:

a circle comes at night and has
no reason for its borders
as it runs up the wall and leaves
a trail of cracks

from which the ghost
of some frayed politics leaks.
visits your face.
calls you gas.

welcomes you to
the equation
where you have no
fingers to count

and your mouth is force-fit
with a cylinder that cuts
circles into everything.
including the black hole

in the corner of the flat
where tiny social mouths
begin to burn during atmosphere.
pity theories, grey mouths.

or somebody says. so
you wrap it in a shell
of what they used to call brick,
and hair, the quiet

nerve nest. put then
as blood and left
a firework, a displease
to the responsibility of lights.

a Moment of geometry ends
in backdraft.
radius in ash.
supefied charcoal helix.

your face disappears but mouth
spills plasmic chance, the
If
arrives
the mouths bloom wide
[end Kruk!]

To get on the mailing list, send Micah Robbins a note at 3515 Fairview Ave., Dallas, TX 75223 or email: micahjrobbins[at]gmail(dot).com. And if you've never seen Robbins' Interbirth Books, you've got to take a second to educate yourself here!

Displaced Press @ Small Press Distribution

2011-08-04T00:32:00.000-07:00

Our friends at Small Press Distribution have offered to host a book launch in honor of the three monumental new releases on Brian Whitener's Displaced Press: Brandon Brown's The Persians by Aeschylus, Samantha Giles' Hurdis Addo, and the new edition of Snow Sensitive Skin, co-authored by Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern. We'll gather on Friday, August 12th at Small Press Distribution to celebrate the press and to hear all four authors read from their work. Doors at 7, reading at 7:30.

Click the poster above for details (and please feel free to spread the word far and wide!)...

And while we're on the subject, I'm currently designing a fourth new book for Displaced, Thom Donovan's crucial intervention The Hole (I'm actually finishing a draft in another window as I type this!), so keep yr. eyes peeled for an early fall release...

Rob Halpern's "Pornotopias"

2011-08-02T02:10:00.000-07:00

Click image for details, email michaelthomascross[at]hotmail{dot}com for directions...