Tonight's SPT Event Cancelled // Divya Victor moved to Sunday!

I'm sorry to report that tonight's much-anticipated SPT event featuring Brian Kim Stefans, Divya Victor, and Meg Day has been cancelled due to unforseen venue conflicts. However, we promised the world Divya Victor, and we're giving the world Divya Victor! Local hero Erin Morrill is hosting Julian Brolaski and Lindsey Boldt at her crib this Sunday, and she gratiously added Divya to the bill! Now the proper-ness of this reading has exponentially increased, adding additional grandeur and radness to the East Bay's already grand and rad legacy. Which is to say, you should totally stop by Erin's house on Sunday for the event (more info to follow at the end of this (slightly hysterical) missive!).

AND, as if this lineup weren't enough, AMAZING PRINTER and all around awesome dude Aaron Cohick of New Lights Press printed a kind of sublime (and really hard to describe!) broadside for Divya which we're selling for only $5 (!!!) to raise monies for SPT (detail above).

With more energy, I would extol the virtues of all three of these wunderkinds. But because I haven't slept in awhile, here's the short version: if you were planning to go to Timkin Hall tonight for the reading, you've already made your first mistake. If you were planning to go to SPT's Mackey Hall in Oakland instead, you were on the right track, but now the reading's been cancelled. As such, you should go to Erin's on Sunday instead and see the truly unimpeachable lineup of Julian Brolaski, Lindsey Boldt, and Divya Victor. THEN, you should buy Aaron's badass broadside for Divya to support Div. and Aaron and SPT. Then you should go to New Lights Press and learn all about Aaron and his press, and then you should find everything by Divya you can, including SUTURES which you can download for free over at Little Red Leaves.

And then you should catch up on all of this info below:

Julian Brolaski, Lindsey Boldt, and Divya Victor
The New Front Row reading Series
1445 Lakeside Drive #202 Oakland
Sunday, 3/20
5pm doors (homemade soup)
6:30pm reading

Come hear poetry and some sing along style in this laid back lakeside house reading. There will be soup. BYOB (for real) BYOB

Julian T. Brolaski lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches in New York.
gowanus atropolis=new book from ugly duckling
Juan and the Pines=new band

Lindsey Boldt lives in San Francisco, CA but will soon be migrating to the East Bay, does work with Post Apollo Press, runs Summer BFF chapbooks w/ Steve Orth.

AND NOW INCLUDING DIVYA VICTOR:

Divya Victor lives in Buffalo, where she is a doctoral candidate at SUNY Buffalo’s Poetics Program. She has two new chapbooks: SUTURES (Little Red Leaves Press) and Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place (ood press). Recently, she was invited by Les Figues to perform and install her work HELLOCASTS, based on transcripts of the Eichmann and Nuremberg trials, at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E), where she was artist in residence.

yo! eos!

I was very excited to learn that Chris Daniels is knocking out the chapbooks again, especially when I received David Brazil's new yo! eos!. These are Brazil's morning poems, odes to dawn and thinking at dawn and writing and thinking at dawn. There's something really comforting about the conceit: waking up, wiping the condensation off the windows, looking out into the world, onto the street, into one's books. The poems open as the mind calibrates, allowing what's happening in the world to suggest correspondences with memory, books, friends...But it's also a mourning poem, a sustained response to the loss of a father: part eulogy, part poetics, part naked observation, the lines move fast and ring in the ear with the wit and brilliance of Brazil's real-time conversation, in which sparks lead to correspondence, lead to correspondence, lead to correspondence, thinking through loss by thinking through...

Take this one from 12.9.2010:

Walled up by mists & with
a typewriter hot to the touch from its
seat atop the steam-heat radiator,
water is the fact no matter how you slice it,
as I wrote to Alli on the postcard, as I
realized when the Philly poets did a
salute to Niedecker, who was coming up all
year, and why, well, water for one thing.
The crisis in water.
And let me incise on the lintel
ARISTON MEN HUDOR.
Which I wrote, accidentally transposing the first two words,
(which I should know better than to do since MEN's postpositive),
on a scroll of receipt tape I tacked inside my
office door on Ellis St., after hearing Norma Cole read a poem called
"Water is Best" at Moe's, I
said "It's a teaching," & she said
"yes," we
were sitting in the rooftop garden of the
SFMOMA talking about how we always got stuck
reading the first chapter of Genesis over &
over again & she said, "like, what's ru'ach?"
And we sat there for a moment in the silence
opened up by absence, I
notice eidola of trees which
lived inside of paces of glass like
facts that you can't touch.
506504.
In no wind or little smoke ascends
in a straight line toward heaven, I
open up the window to
give it an outlet.

And this from 12.25.2010:

"the saintly Vail of maiden white," the
sky a solid wall of cloud like
armies massed against our vision,
which obstruction wrecks how
we would live among each other &
within, I can see individual drops of
the storm that is coming, not a metaphor or else
itself but a metaphor also, & we
find ourself a stray in that abyss of
figuration, by which one's made what, an
intercessor among men, "the
Greek alphabet was the real trojan horse,"
you study all your life to make some
bare conclusions via which you maybe
shrive yourself, it's
nothing fancy after all, a "bare
common," a roadway, this morning, some
little ditty no overhearer would
understand as prayer, we offer to
whichever second person might be
auditing our plight, "gay
transports soon end,"
"for if such Holy Song
enwrap our fancy long,"
we give to them what our hands got
pure enough to hold without them burning,
"false priest that I am,"
& this the warning song, "there,"
Would that all God's people were prophets,
and the christmas morning storm starts up,
A cough, Charpentier, a little white in
bottom center "like a rushlight," go's
in the imperative, "GO!"
And these three things alone remain,
rattling around the bottom of my backpack.

In some ways, yo! eos! beautifully captures the process of mourning: getting up, establishing a routine, working through it by writing and thinking and spending time with friends. So morning poems are mourning poems. As Brazil puts it:

I'm going to write a book about you and this is
going to be the last thing in it.
But the last thing always echoes, dont it,
like the clatter of this typewriter, and
meantime picture me here, out far past where you are, I'm
stirring the porridge,
just like you said.

TONIGHT IN OAKLAND!! FIELD/COBB/MORRILL

Just a reminder that tonight's SPT event is in OAKLAND (booya!), so don't drive to the city. Macky Hall is comfortable and intimate and welcoming, so be excited. While there isn't a special broadside for this event, we'll have copies of the broadsides for Sueyuen Juliette Lee and Laura Elrick for only FIVE BUCKS (!!) so get 'em while their still available!! And of course the line-up is piping hot, too, so you'll want to be there. Here's the rub:

The Document: an investigation in the remains
with Thalia Field, Allison Cobb and special guest Erin Morrill
Friday March 11, 2011, 7:30 p.m.

Macky Hall, CCA OAKLAND
5212 Broadway at College

____________________________________

Thalia Field has a new collection of interlinked stories: BIRD LOVERS, BACKYARD (New Directions) and a new book-length essay, A PRANK OF GEORGES (co-authored with Abigail Lang and published with Essay Press.) Her other New Directions titles include POINT AND LINE and INCARNATE:STORY MATERIAL, and she published her adaptation of Berg's Lulu, ULULU (CLOWN SHRAPNEL), with Coffee House Press in 2007. Thalia teaches in the Literary Arts department of Brown University.

Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press, 2004) about her hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Green-Wood (Factory School, 2010) about a famous nineteenth-century cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Her work combines history, personal narrative, and poetry to address issues of landscape, politics, and ecology. She was a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow and received a 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship award from the Oregon Arts Commission. She worked for many years for the Environmental Defense Fund in New York City. She now works for an energy conservation nonprofit in Portland, Oregon.

Erin Morrill was born in Tennessee. She currently lives in San Francisco where she received her MFA in writing at California College of Arts. She has worked with Wolverine Farm Publishing and Kelsey Street Press. She currently co-produces chapbooks for Trafficker Press with Andrew Kenower.

A New 7" Single by Dan Thomas-Glass

More Thoughts on Keenan

I've been struggling to articulate for myself the quality that makes Lauren Levin's writing both propulsive and disorienting. Something seems to slip in the predicate, like the sentence is trying to recalibrate or defrag due to a repurposing or unhinging of grammatical affect. I'm reminded of Stein in "Poetry and Grammar": "Verbs and adverbs and articles and conjunctions and prepositions are lively because they all do something and as long as anything does something it keeps alive." Take the following, the first poem in Keenan:

So, the vertiginous energy of the poem is certainly related to the speed of the lines, but also, too, to the mobilized verb tenses. Here, a weirdly passive construction "You know your thoughts, believed inside," next to "you shout and are to be": the third-person plural indicative "are" next to the infinitive "to be." The language gets really interesting, however, in the off-kilter verb/preposition phrases such as "to become upon every person" or "basis starts, permeable into death" or "a hose you've heard presented about."

My favorite poem in the chapbook is also its most sustained (though it's not always clear where one poem ends and another begins): here Lauren perfectly marries her tightly wound grammatical constructs ("I think we should be serious and be people") with a really moving, elegiac softness:

I can't get the scan clear due to the saddle-stitch (don't want to break the binding), but I'm sure you get the idea: that is, you probably need this...

Rob Halpern's Somatic Excercise

I guess Rob was sick for much of the Somatics, Movement and Writing Conference in Michigan, but he sent on the following directions for his somatic exercise nonetheless. Here's to imagining an organ together, dear Disinhibitors. May our collective imaginings send ripples through the shapelessness of Monday:

"Imagine an architectural structure: any building or designed social space will do. Within that imagined space as it appears in yr sensorium, imagine an organ from within yr own body. Imagine placing that organ at the center of the architectural space as you imagine it. Align the position of yr organ so that a north/south axis runs through it, and so that the magnetic field oriented around northerly and southerly exposures within yr architectural space is slightly disturbed by the presence of yr organ. This slight disturbance in the electromagnetic field is important, so do not proceed until you are able, by virtue of yr chosen organ, to perceive this minimal rift, ripple, or fold in the imagined architectural surround. Allow yr organ to conduct sensory impressions. Note how the architecture stabilizes or destabilizes the stream of information. Note how yr organ is conducting, and whether the impressions are registering on the surface or the in the depth of yr organ.

Now imagine a limb from the body of a contemporary war zone casualty suddenly situated in the same space as yr organ. Record, with copious detail, the distractions this limb creates in yr imagined space."

Erik Waterkotte and George Albon

Check out these beautiful prints by visual artist Erik Waterkotte in response to George Albon's classic Brief Capital of Disturbances. To call them "Dantesque" is a bit of an understatement!

Some Murmurs from The Somatics, Movement, and Writing Conference

I've been desperate to hear word from the Somatics, Movement, and Writing conference organized by Petra Kuppers and Thom Donovan at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor weekend before last. Rob Halpern, Eleni Stecopoulos, Robert Kocik, Brenda Iijima, Brian Whitener, Bhanu Kapil, Petra, Thom and others gathered together to "engage in experimental writing and art practice at the sites/cites of the moving, living body and the moving living text." While it sounds like participants are still reeling from the experience, Thom's posted a suite of photos here and Bhanu has a series of really beautiful notes here (which include the following: "Rob Halpern said: 'Imagine a part of your body, an organelle, placed in the center of a social space, a space you bring to mind.'" Boy, do I miss Rob!). Eleni promises to post notes at Poetics of Healing soon, so hopefully we'll hear more about this crucial conference...

Norma Cole at Open Space!

I ran into Norma yesterday, and she confirmed she'll be posting at Open Space for, like, many weeks (I think she said 14?!). Anyway, she's just posted her first contribution here, so you'll want to tune in...and I can't get enough of this photo: she looks poised to school a busta!

Also, if you haven't seen my review of her selected, Where Shadows Will, please take a second to read it here.

And finally, while I'm on the topic of reviews, I'd be happy to turn over the reins of this blog to anyone interested in saying a few words about Norma's crucial new "essays" collection To Be At Music. Just wanted to put that out there in case someone's sitting on some reading notes...

Laura Moriarty at the PBS Newshour!

David Wolach's notes on SPT

David left these notes in the comment stream a few posts back, but they're too good to bury, so I'm exhuming them here for yr. pleasure!

Here's David:

*Driving in the rain with Tanya Hollis and Elizabeth, Tanya deciding in a moment of being slightly lost, to rebel against and shut off the gps and go by instinct. Conversation about labor history and her archival finds, really exciting stuff. We arrive in plenty of time.

*Walking in from the most dreary weather and seeing you, Brazil, Samantha, Lara. Michael's embrace plus the cozy room plus the immediacy of friendship counter-weighs and then erases the night previous: E and I huddled in MOTEL METROPOLIS without heat enacting the Hegelian object-displacement fight: bickering at one another instead of at the faceless company that just took over the place and decided basic necessities like food and worker safety were too costly.

*Buuck arriving out of the darkness. A great sudden hug. A sweater that should be given the props it truly deserves. I turn to tell him this. He's mysteriously disappeared inside.

*Smoking outside with Laura's awesome brother -- who is a geographer, discussing Laura's poetry, its geographical and topographical lyricism, its desire to poke holes in maps a la Katz.

*Nice, cozy and clean bathroom. Small. Good lighting.

*Samantha's gorgeous introduction once the room--miraculously, this wound not happen out my way--fills up and we sit down with, as Lara called it in an email (paraphrase) a quiet intensity and a looseness / lightness that (my thinking) has a lot to do with SPT and Samantha et al's (eg your) approaches to poetry as lived, intensely dialogic, humorous, inclusive, familial, undefinably salubrious.

*Wishing I'd written that intro down. Wishing I could ask her to forward it to us without sounding icky.

*Wondering whether, half way thru the stress position sound composition, I'd fall. Hurting afterwards for the duration of my part of the reading, so blind to what came out of my mouth, or that I was bowing. That back and forth, tho, I am told I do when I read. A student from one of my classes said it reminded him of the incantation prayers from the Tanakh: the silent rhythmic chanting from Lamentations, etc. I am, by birth, Jewish...

*Andrew & Rich's broadsides, beautiful. The story above: resonating with my experiences (goofy/untrained) with the letterpress, my comparative lack of dedication. My comment that book artists are a strange breed. YOUR response that you aren't a book artist!

*Lara's reading. A revelation. Releasing pressure in the room at beginning. Building it back up as she reads over her recorded voice--the economy of clothing/wearing--and my thoughts towards end: is she going to run out of surfaces to stick her poems on?

*The prosody and precision and raging calm of Laura's reading. The room becomes intensely quiet. The room gets smaller. The feeling of being inside someone else's head or body, drawn in, as it's cut over and over.

*Laura, in response to someone's comment (I forget the context), that the ass-hole is often sexy... (I applaud).

*Reading with E, thinking that her voice is beautiful and I wish I had a voice that could register different colors.

*David handing me a TRY magazine. These appear frequently, as if by magic, or hidden assembly line (the former is true). It occurs to me this is one of a few zines I look forward to reading as one looks forward to seeing old friends--what HAVE they been up to?

*Michael talking dry-wall. Commiserating on the excitement and stress of moving. Elizabeth looks at me like: "you see, some people DO fix things up without immediately thinking outsource." I'm imagining a new house (congrats!) that now has walls covered in typography--Centaur in the dining room.

*E: "the swaying branches casting shadows thru the big bay window during Laura's reading."

*Dispersing into the evening refueled.

Leslie Scalapino Memorial Reading @ UC Berkeley

Lots of great stuff throughout the nearly 3 hour presentation. If you're interested, my contribution can be found near 2:02...

Lauren Levin's Keenan

I've only heard Lauren Levin read once before, which, if I remember correctly, was with Susan Gevirtz at an apartment in West Oakland occupied (at the time) by Erin Morrill, Ted Rees, and Evan Kennedy (with a great fire pit out back!). Her reading Saturday night at the Condensery (with an "e" now I guess) reminded me of how interestingly frentic her lines sound in person: fast and clear and percussive as they fold in on themselves looping through strategically placed quilting points:

These lines visually capture the intensity of aural movement as the language cleaves and slips and tectonically grinds the sound out of each word. I remember being really curious to see what her poems looked like on the page the first time I heard them, and it totally makes sense that the lines here pull away from the left-hand margin as if in direct response to the percussive quality and frantic lilt in her voice:

"Keenan" is chalk full of lines I'm pretty jealous of and life on the level of the word that you can't fake! This one will be at the top of the stack for awhile, no doubt. Just published by Lame House and I'm sure these chaps don't last long, so get yrs here.

I remember awesome things...

from last Friday's SPT reading, and I thought to post them here before I forget (again)! Katja and I have been moving all week so I haven't had time to take notes from my notes, but I have been thinking about the reading since and I don't want to lose sight of how awesome it was. If it hasn't been said publicly, pairing Laura Elrick and David Wolach was totally inspired (great thinking, Samantha!), and then adding Lara Durback to the mix created a nexus of oscillating badassetry. [I should note that the SPT space in Oakland is perfect—intimate and cozy and easy to get to—and the brighter and friendlier environment is certainly reflected in my memories!].

Here's what I remember:

*Brazil and I discussing the "Lacerator of the Heart" in Agamben's essay "*Se" from Potentialities on the way to the reading—how metal the phrase sounds—only to be reminded of a conversation we had only a week or so earlier in which Brazil divulged his Carl-Schmitt-inspired metal band name "Nomos Basileus" ("The law as king") and then I tried to find him the right metal font in hopes of making a t-shirt or something...

*Durback sitting on the floor writing sentences on Post-It notes, explaining how she lost her wallet and how she'd have to cancel all of her credit cards after writing on said Post-It notes. Also how calm and smiley she was for someone who had just lost a wallet...

*Durback's super cool cousin explaining how there's no money in theoretical physics!

*Durback not being a "book artist"

*David Woloch's shaking knees while assuming a very uncomfortable-looking stress position...

*Woloch's vertical bowing motion he sometimes does when reading poems...also very metal

*Everyone admiring Rich Owen's beautiful limited-edition broadside of Laura Elrick's poem "Methane Sea"

*Explaining to everyone that Rich inked each broadside by hand in an unheated shed during an appropriately frigid winter night in Maine just for the reading...

*Laura Elrick introducing a poem about "speed" or "the compression of social space" or something, and then saying something else totally brilliant and too speedily for me to write it down...

*Imaginary/girl//Imaginary/girl

*The king is dead//pop//The king is dead

TONIGHT: WOLACH/ELRICK/DURBACK in **OAKLAND**

Which is to say, don't drive to CCA in the City! All the SPT readings this season are pretty badass, but this one promises to be a real dusie! David Wolach, Laura Elrick, and Lara Durback sharing the stage, with a special limited edition broadside of Elrick's poem "Methane Sea" printed especially for the occasion by (also badass) printer/poet/one-time-Jerseyian/current-Maineian Rich Owens.

Here's a detail of the broadside to whet yr. appetite:

And here's the rub:
Friday, February 18 · 7:30pm
Macky Hall, CCA Oakland
5212 Broadway
Oakland, CA
entrance: $8-10/members FREE

David Wolach is editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press and an active participant in Nonsite Collective. Wolach's first full-length poetry collection, Occultations, has just been published by Black Radish Books. Other books include the multi-media transliteration plus chapbook, Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox [books], 2010), the full-length Hospitalogy (chapbook forth. from Scantily Clad Press, 2011), and book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009). A former union organizer and performing artist out of New York, Wolach’s work often begins as site-specific and interactive performance and ends up as shaped, written language. Recent work appears in Jacket, Augfabe, Try Magazine, No Tell Motel, and Little Red Leaves. Wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and aesthetics at The Evergreen State College, co-curating the PRESS text arts & radical politics series there, and is visiting professor in Bard College’s Workshop In Language & Thinking. He's currently touring with his Olympia-based experimental performance ensemble, performing Kenneth Gaburo's opus Maledetto alongside original cross-media work from the eight full-time members.

Laura Elrick’s latest project is a book-length poem, as yet untitled, that explores the relationship between speed (social time) and utterance; translations and affective condensations occur in the tiny caverns between the compulsion toward language and the patrolling of intelligible expressive registers. She also recently coordinated Blocks Away, a psychogeography of Lower Manhattan, some documentation of which will be displayed in The Skybridge Art and Sound Space at The New School in Spring 2011. Previous work includes the video/poem Stalk (“part dystopian urban cartography, part spatial-poetic intervention”), as well a set of 5 audio pieces for doubled-voice. She has also written two books of poetry: Fantasies in Permeable Structures (Factory School 2005) and sKincerity (Krupskaya 2003), and an essay “Poetry, Ecology, and the Reappropriation of Lived Space,” which can be found in the Eco Language Reader (2010) and online at The Brooklyn Rail. She currently teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Lara Durback is a notebook writer, using handwriting primarily, and that means walking around and writing. Public transportation is a big part of that city writing. You can find recent work with and without handwriting in WORK, Try, There Journal, etc. Also look for her work on Deep Oakland.org. She is also a letterpress printer, and manages the Book Art studio at Mills College. She has recently finished printing the book Picture Cameras with Ariel Goldberg using only repurposed materials (NoNo Press).

Meta-Discourse and the (Post-) Digital Book

The following is a short excerpt from Thom Donovan's talk "Meta-Discourse and the (Post-) Digital Book (How The Hole Is Still Being Made)" which he delivered this past Friday for Margaret Konkol's Small Press in the Archive lecture series at SUNY Buffalo. I recommend digesting this slowly! Here's Thom:

The book that I have in mind, contra a variety of recent conceptual poetry projects, wishes to destabilize the book not as a commentary on the book’s ontological transformation through digital technologies per se, or the cultural capital of poetry publications per se, or a network of institutions and technologies that undergird poetry as an institution per se. Rather, the cybernetic preoccupations of The Hole wish, like Dana’s work, or say those forthcoming by Suzanne Stein or Brandon Brown (which are being published by Displaced Press in the same series as The Hole), to evidence the book as an unstable object re/distributing affective, intellectual, and social materials (or events?) among an elective affinity of singularities. It also, via a kind of becoming archival, wishes to counter the effects of certain conceptual strategies taken up in writing after the work of 60s and 70s visual art discourse, a discourse often accused by its opponents and detractors of positing a “tomb-like” theatre for art via its archival tendencies.


How to instill the book with living presences that may bear witness to a set of social constellations and coordinates without doing harm to the participants/what has been offered through often unreflective and spontaneous forms of participation? How to resist this move as a gesture invested with cultural capital or as a move in a kind of art game while still being able to reflect critically upon it, or simply acknowledge its tendencies? The prefaces that I intend to include within The Hole, in this regard, reflect both the content of the would-be book, but also how the book is always a kind of performance within a discourse, and specifically as this performance is addressed to one’s peers, friends, and contemporaries (if only after the fact). How not to render lame (or dead) a process that one loves (or has loved) and wishes to further extend? How to circumvent the inevitable tendency for such ‘projects’ to become captured by staid forms of institutionalization, archivalism, or academic research; the negative forms of distribution and critical reception that pervade both commercial and academic culture (however much all of us work in relation to these cultural locations)?

Nor do I think that this kind of book is without precedent. In fact, can’t we read many of Jack Spicer’s books ‘cybernetically,’ as forming a kind of (negative and positive) feedback loop with his community. And can’t we read, as many Spicer scholars have done, Spicer’s reluctance to publish in certain formats and venues as an acknowledgment of the crisis that all authors face when they recognize the fact that their work is largely, if not wholly, socially produced, and that the book-coming-to-be-a-book threatens the very living presence or process of sociality the author would wish to presence through the book? Likewise could we not look to Larry Eigner’s circumstance or Hannah Weiner’s in a similar way, where their severe physical and mental disabilities gave form to writing practices radically reliant and porous to their social milieus, including the technologies that made the production and limited reception/distribution of their works possible (for Eigner, the typewriter and various assistants; for Weiner, a psychotic intermedia in reference to the practices and lifestyles of Downtown contemporaries)?

The book I have in mind raises the specter of coterie, a dynamic that does not cease to replicate itself wherever cultural capital accrues on the outskirts of official communal-institutional formations. With this would-be book, I have asked only certain people to participate, and my procedure has always been (as much as I would like to have included many others) that I should only ask dedicatees and addressees of the poems to offer feedback. So if coterie appears at all, it functions through a constraint—the fact that certain texts were generated in a feedback loop with certain others texts, correspondences, and exchanges. Coterie, I would like to think, is something also potentially destabilized through The Hole.

Something else that this book responds to, which has been a kind of foil for me when I have written about the ‘task of the critic’, or simply about what criticism can do provided with a different function than it currently tends to have with regards to production/reception/distribution, are ways that a book, magazine, critical venue, classroom, poetry reading or other location for poetry’s production/reception/distribution can function through care. What, in other words, is the social-communal value of a book, rather than its value as an object which makes actual and visible unavoidable forms of cultural and real capital? How can the book extend dialogue, conversation, discourse rather than capital (real and imaginary)? How, in an age of Web 3.0, can the physical book engage the cybernetic tendencies of new media, in which participation is largely dependent on certain qualities of attention eroded within our current public sphere? The book I have in mind is a kind of model for forms of attention and exchange (i.e., distribution) that already exist and which can be dramatized and focused through a books’ form (something book artists have been aware of for a long time now, but which has also been a part of our Modernist heritage since the mid 20th century, if not from the very ‘beginning’—think of certain movements of Zukofsky’s “A” for example, or Williams’s Paterson). The book as a site for our sociality, our socialism. The book as a site for the examination of complicity, process, exchange. The book as a place where communal issues become shaped and reshaped. The book as a powerful circuit of mutual regard, conviction, and care. The book as a model of radical and extensive participation.

The Perverse Library

Craig Dworkin's brilliant new project, The Perverse Library (Information as Material), arrived by post a few days back, and the timing couldn't be more perfect as I face the daunting task of packing my own library for a weekend move.

The book begins with the essay "Pinacographic Space," a Benjaminian reflection on the library and its uses, including the following speculative gem:

"As the library reaches after that phantom shelf, accumulating and aggregating, it extends not only its conceptual scope but its volumetric expanse as well. The collateral effect of the concept of a library is architectural colonization. Left unchecked, a library will venture wall-space in an horizontal sprawl and a stratifying climb. It will annex any likely surface and even essay a stake to entire rooms. A library is print in its gaseous state, filling every available space and then increasing pressure—compressing, rotating, double-shelving—until, according to the constant required by Boyle's Law, either the current container breaks, loosing books onto new shelves and stacks, or else the volume stabilises, stabilizing volume."

Dworkin recounts a conversation with a colleague (who, upon investigating Craig's library claims, "This is a very perverse library...Very perverse") in order to meditate on what might truly constitute a perverse library (rather than, say, perverse content). His opening gambit is a rumination on the possibility that the library is defined more by its exclusions than by what's on the shelves, making it a kind of micro-canonical argument by association: "The Perverse Library, accordingly, argues for a particular canon. An architectural plan, it maps a set of shelves rather than exhaustively cataloguing every printed possession."

And Dworkin provides such a plan by presenting two separate possible libraries: "A Perverse Library" and "The Perverse Library," each a carefully selected glimpse into his own shelves, selected by a criterion left to the reader's imagination. I found myself examining the list exhaustively in an effort to create a possible taxonomy—something that might betray the commonalities of this seemingly arbitrary bibliography. Which got me thinking that, as organizational strategies go, even the stack on the desk betrays a kind of discrete series, if only as evidence of one's current obsessions.

While there's a lot to think about here, I admit that my favorite moment is Craig's brave admission to huffing binding glue (an activity for which we apparently share an enthusiasm!):

"I am particularly drawn, with a sort of morose delectation, to a certain British binding glue, brittling even when it's new, which fumes in a deliciously overwhelming aerosol of kerosene and industry: first, a fugacious heady hydrocarbon rush of sinus linings flushed, mucus and natural oils vaporized in the vacuum flash of a chemical desiccant, and then, a long finish leaving the tingle of brain cells dying out along the fringes of the temple."

Essential for anyone interested in the possibilities of the archive...

Inquire Within

Jocelyn Saidenberg and Tanya Hollis will be performing at the Right Window Gallery in the Mission today (Saturday, 2/12) from 2:00-4:00 pm.

Here's the description from Right Window:

An epistolary performance—repository composition—indexical installation

How the Citizen subjects herself in front of the Bureaucrat who states the formularies, (the files that table her subjection), only to find therein the Archivist filing her rubrics of emancipation.

Performed and created by Tanya Hollis and Jocelyn Saidenberg with the help of Wendy Kramer. Table handcrafted by Mari Collins.

Open hours: Saturday, February 5, 12, and 26, 2011, from 2:00PM to 4:00PM.

Please inquire within.

Tonight: Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Maxi Kim, and Jackqueline Frost // NOW WITH LIMITED EDITION BROADSIDE!

Please join us tonight (Friday, 2/11) for the second Small Press Traffic event of the season: "At the Borders: Intersections of Politics and Practice" with readings and discussions by Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Maxi Kim, and special guest Jackqueline Frost.

Word on the street is Juliette is a powerhouse on the stage, and Jackqueline promises to provide a "spectacle" of some kind! Don't sleep!

Additionally, I'm happy to announce that most SPT readings this season will feature a special, limited-edition broadside printed especially for the event! The Small Press Traffic Printer's Corps is a loose collective of printer/poets who've committed to designing and printing something specifically to help support SPT! I'll unveil the first of these broadsides tonight (teaser detail above!), Andrew Rippeon's totally masterful rendition of some lines from Juliette Lee. This broadside features no less than 5 runs through the press along with some tricky printing on the backside of type and a hand-carved wood block! Andrew is the editor of P-Queue and Queue Books and a brilliant poet in his own right. If you'd like a copy of the broadside (while supporting one of the most important reading series in the country!) but can't make the reading, we hope to have some available through the website soon. Collect them all!

Here are the details:
Timken Hall,CCA SF
1111 8th Street
event begins at 7:30pm
entrance is $8-15/members FREE

Sueyeun Juliette Lee grew up three miles from the CIA. She currently lives in Philadelphia, where she edits Corollary Press (www.corollarypress.org), a chapbook series devoted to multi-ethnic experimental writing. Her books include That Gorgeous Feeling (Coconut Books) and Underground National (Factory School). She is a contributing editor of EOAGH and is at work on her doctoral dissertation examining the nexus between visual arts movements, critical theory, and Asian American poetry.

Born and raised in Kwangju, a then-revolutionary site of the 1980 South Korean uprising, Maxi Kim has a master’s from USC’s Rossier School of Education and a master’s in Critical Studies from California Institute of the Arts. Author of One Break, A Thousand Blows, Kim’s forthcoming book Did Somebody Say North Korea? confronts one of the pervasive myths of our time: that North Korea is a Confucian-Communist regime led by a Stalinist dictator that will, with time, disintegrate like the Soviet Union. In fact, North Korea, in our standard ideological spectrum is much closer to Nazism than to Marxism. Much like Hitler’s Third Reich, Kim Jong-il’s North Korea can’t be understood without understanding its racial worldview and “fascist” aesthetic principles. Debunking the current “end of history” model of international relations promoted by both humanist academics and the current political establishment, Maxi Kim offers Art as a new road map for “returning to history” by confronting East Asia’s totalitarian slave state.

Jackqueline was raised in Lafayette, Louisiana and has lived in five southern states, (and Indiana.) Her poetry and fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Try!, Big Bridge, Swan's Rag, Adios Pelota! and Peach & Bats. She co-curates the Condensery Reading Series in Oakland. With the art-collective, Hail, Jackqueline collaboratively scripts and choreographs multi-media performances and has played in the East Bay bands The Delicate Situation and Pine. She is a student of creative writing and philosophy at Mills College.

Tan Lin's Seven Controlled Vocabularies

"Everything that is beautiful is a code for something that is already known. Nothing should be unknown."