Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Xtina Strong and I read this Sunday, June 4 starting at 2:00 at Out of the Blue Gallery, 106 Prospect Street, Central Square (opposite Whole Foods). Last chance to say bye to Xtina who is packing it up and moving to Park Slope. I'll be reading from a crazed new pile of poems I'm calling Post-Twyla.
posted byJack 12:55 PM
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Writing poetry can bring on serious behavioral problems, like wandering, delusional grandeur, and combativeness. Now a new study suggests that the symptoms may be worsened by the personal characteristics of people caring for poets. Researchers have found that when those providing care are less educated, older, depressed or more burdened, the poets in their care exhibit more behavioral problems. Another curious and fairly hopeful finding was that poets who had younger, extremely well-educated, and cooler looking caregivers had no problems whatever.
The study, led by Dr. Kaycee Sink of the Wake Forest Graduate Program in Lit and Life Experience, appears in the current Eco-Pony: Journal of Environmental Therapeutics and Poetics Society. Researchers surveyed more than 5,700 poets and their significant others, some with multiples providing care for them -- mostly "legal" family members, but also attractive "live-ins," unpaid interns, and many hired hands -- in eight all-American cities and New York and San Francisco. The interviewers were sent to the homes to assess the poets and the people providing the care.
Those providing care were given surveys to measure problems like depression, career stoppages, and stress. Families were asked, for example, "Do you feel you have lost control of your life since your relative has taken up poetry?"
The providers were also asked to report on poets' behavior. Younger providers reported no behavioral problems in poets. While difficult poets "undoubtedly contribute to caregiver burden and stress," Dr. Kaycee Sink claims, the relationship works both ways. "Poets just dig younger caring people and these kids are returning the favor. Or maybe the troublemakers have a hard time getting attractive people to care," Sink said.
posted byJack 8:11 AM
Monday, May 29, 2006
Bathos is a state of mind connected to pink, green, or blue
hairstyles and other life practice as degrees of
Success in the pathetic life, some failing it completely,
nonetheless part of it.
Others striving but attaining it narrowly or not at all. Bruce
Willis's Xmas.
posted byJack 9:29 AM
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Form follows $. Just get by the comic bits.
Each is a lone entity
In a world dominated by luxury groups.
posted byJack 6:43 AM
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Etc.
posted byJack 12:34 AM
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Last Sunday Bay Poetics came out at New Yipes.
Better than half the contributors showed.
Police estimate 120-150 in total. (Police are Stephanie.)
Rather than fancy intros, Stephanie "obsessed" on mixing CDs of Bay Area music for the night. The music was rated radically danceable, awesomely so.
Dennis Somer was carried to the podium (further details, from Stephanie, below).
Who read whom:
Ron Palmer (reading Del Ray Cross)
Aja Duncan (reading Summi Kaipa)
Kit Robinson (reading Nate Mackey)
Barbara Jane Reyes (reading Jean Vengua)
Micah Ballard (reading one each from Tanya Brolaski and Cedar Sigo)
Cynthia Sailers (reading one each from Norma Cole and Maggie Zurawski)
Dennis Somera (reading a collage of pieces mostly around the date "August 21" and carried to the podium by Dillon Westbrook, a gesture discussed many ways but certainly in terms of being held up or supported by one's community...)
Jocleyn Saidenberg (reading Yedda Morrison)
Kevin Killian (reading Parker Zane Allen -- not in anthology but recently passed away and his memorial service was the night before the reading -- and then a poem by Chris Sullivan)
Who flickered whom -- three sites so far:
Tanya Brolaski's: O!!!
Ron Palmer's (backing into a Madonna concert!): OO!!
Stephanie's (more to come, I think): OOO!
Finally, Stephanie writes on the day of the party, "I woke up an hour before my alarm went off this morning, like Christmas when I was little!"
posted byJack 6:53 AM
Monday, May 22, 2006
Poet as Stephen Holl's frustrated client. This is ambience.
posted byJack 5:12 AM
Friday, May 19, 2006
posted byJack 6:41 AM
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Another must have it right now experience.5:306:15 pm Saturday May 20
Final reading in the spring series at P.A.'s.
Kimberly Lyons & Michael Carr
P.A.'s Lounge
345 Somerville Ave.
Union Square, Somerville
posted byJack 8:33 AM
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Two readings this Sunday. If you've got Jetsons'jet packstransporters, try both.
1)
7 pm Sunday May 21
at 21 Grand
416 Twenty-fifth St @ B'way
Oakland, California
FAUX PRESS
SMALL PRESS TRAFFIC
and NEW YIPES
warmly invite the San Francisco Bay to gaze into
the magic mirror of
BAY POETICS
Faux Press, 496 pages
ISBN 0-9765211-3-X
Readings by contributors Micah Ballard, Aja Duncan, Kevin Killian,
Ronald Palmer, Barbara Jane Reyes, Kit Robinson, Jocelyn Saidenberg,
Cynthia Sailers & Dennis Somera BUT whose work they'll choose to read
is a mystery. Beer | Wine | Congenial Alley. No Cover Charge.
6 blocks north of 19th St BART
2)
5:30 pm Sunday May 21
Third event in the Plough & Stars Poetry Series
Joyelle McSweeney & Mark Lamoureux
The Plough & Stars
912 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge
Central Square stop on the Red Line
posted byJack 6:13 AM
Monday, May 15, 2006
Dennis Cooper's eponymous blog operates as a salon, travel diary, art scrapbook, memoir, and porn portal. That sounds messy, yet everything functions tidily within aesthetic sets, no bullshit, heavy advocacy. A frequent flyer throughout Europe and especially between Paris and Los Angeles, in his travel and other entries Dennis often opts for honed prose that is comparable to what you find in his stories and novels, a narrator that hangs back as seasoned observer until prompted into grateful reporter by a pink patch of cheekbone or some other humane windfall. In April when he attended a confab at the University of Cork organized around his writing, Dennis the blogger stepped aside: "There's no way for me to talk about a conference on my work that doesn't make me feel too self-indulgent, but here are some photos from the event and the schedule of what transpired." Such de-emphasis of self comes across as hardly coy; it leaves room for him to stress other things and for others to join him; and it's extremely sexy to his large, interactive readership who flood his comment boxes with gab about topics he introduces but also about things they generate among themselves. That's the salon part. Or part of the salon part. I noted earlier Dennis is editing Userlands, an anthology of short stories by his readers. This strikes me as salon attitude bumped up to advocacy that's actionable.
As a writer who knows his beat, everything he comes across is fair game for examining, appreciating, and learning. Photos and notes from New York literary parties in the 1980s. Short surveys of male escorts, present day. Art shows web-curated by his readers. In both the range of interests and his urge to collaborate, it's not likely that Dennis is unaware of his responsibility as a teacher; he's just not going to turn to boilerplate or even theoretical constructs to score points; like any of my best teachers he'll make what he understands stick -- seductively -- as in the following on Alex Walsh, composer of the graphic I've stolen to accompany this paragraph:
Alex Walsh is a young Irish artist, creator of delicate, unnerving, complex, deeply insinuating photography-based work that is one of the contemporary art world's secret pleasures. Art this superb doesn't get to be a relatively private treasure trove for long, but for now Walsh is something of an artist's artist, his work sneaking through the world on the whispers of his smitten admirers, say me and a number of you out there.That Dennis is an accomplished writer who's earned more than a wishbone of fame relaxes the stakes, but no matter. Retrieving people and events from the past, introducing and encouraging new artistry, sharing a full life populated with others' talent, Dennis Cooper's blog traces a forward movement into unconventional cooperation and espousal; no other blog from a writer's writer shows as much care and assumes as much responsibility for what it advocates.
posted byJack 2:52 AM
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Grant you, page 55 in The Post is an ok follow up to Jim's TV stints. But when is he going to break onto Page Six?
posted byJack 9:43 AM
Saturday, May 13, 2006
I agree.-- Guillermo Juan ParraI often feel fated, or drawn, to a permanent state of migration, returning to certain cities but never to stay...A mushroom-induced millenary awareness of the historical and present-day violence that undergirds Boston...I feel lucky to have met and heard John Wieners read a few times while I was here. I think of his work as representing the parts of Boston I've been able to admire and learn from.
posted byJack 1:22 PM
Friday, May 12, 2006
Peter Ganick and Adam Dotson at Demolicious, Cambridge, May 7. Peter Ganick has never lost sight of a single principle, work. For several decades he's been laboring under a strict regimen of energy-sapping medications and therapy that keep him going but at times render him asocial. I have to laugh at myself, some of my colleagues and their colleagues who project that our lives and fame revolve within social nets. What capacities for social interaction Peter possesses have been concentrated for decades on book production, enabling him to print hundreds of others' books and, happily, having dozens of his own books published by others. Work.
There's a weird parallel I like to draw here. While Frank O'Hara stands a learned, peripatetic model of poet-as-schmoozer, and we love him still for standing so, it's his work, the variations, the intra-attitudes, the encompassed understanding, the sheer volume of it that is his signature. Frank O'Hara is a work model, for me. And in a completely different construct, so is Peter.
Last Sunday Peter read from his two most recently published texts, Tarsals (xPressed 2005) and Structure of Expression (Blue Lion 2005). The work in Tarsals was originally hand calligraphed in watercolor on 11" x 14" paper. The texts incorporate some axioms from Peter's spiritual study, and as an on-again, off-again agnostic I found these pieces a little grating. Structure of Expression, on the other hand, is a massively spiritual outpouring in nondenominational clumps, 124 prose sections in 528 pages. Phrases pop out, "looking through material's schemes ... [to] shrink to relate nothingness's columbine." Better to cite a longer passage:
...indexical thought to amount exactitude's present-in-age for mist agony retinue. slit with budded nature oddly aerial node to crumble where sophistry's escapade knots down wiles the manager, steadfast nomenclatures, each definition.Peter, like so many of us, speaks backward and forward, attempts as he decries a precision in language that all but 'crumbles' in wide ranging human consciousness. No doubt Peter struck sour notes, "dreams eked over a shred of pittance," but the work also soars to a "tangible, verifiable nowhere," a place made up of "engorged occasions [where] repetition is Mardi Gras."Adam Dotson, who is finishing up studies at the New England Conservatory, played moody collages, slicing familiar tunes on a high-pitched jazz euphonium. Adam followed up with some rousing text experiments after Gertrude Stein. Terrifying lines: "reason sits around her waiting, tracing all the writers." A sure voice in total concert with Peter.
posted byJack 8:00 AM
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Magazine Cypress 4
Edited by Dana Ward 2006
As though to offset the anaesthetic, Dana Ward collects work from thirteen correspondents who are thickly describing aestheses of the preferable, implausible variety, that is, highly charged second-order romances as self-witnesses to narrativity and overt confection. The collection is led by Brandon Brown whose "The Real Iliad" shoots things straight: "Yes, I am the real Iliad. Not the one / by Fagels, Fitzgerald, or even Lisa / Jarnot. No, I am the real thing, untranslate- / able, and essentially I am made of / numbers..." You wish. Kerri Sonnenberg goes next with a suite of five lyrically imagined prose occasions, the second titled, aptly after Brown, "Misreading the translation of world into worlds." In this, as with her four other pieces, Sonnenberg meditates around / up to a place beside the point: "I do not / return the call because I don't know the words worlds are fond of that coat of St. Louis / catching fire you politely alarm our weekends beyond --"
Brenda Iijima mixes time zones the most with selections from a manuscript called "Animate, Inanimate Aims," a title that signals how easily implausibility cum ersatz historicist acumen is made to squirm:Homeric hymn homeIijima might have left fit seamen to their undisclosed location, but she fills their down-low with a "palanquin / in Babylon," a "Serpent's skin," and a javelin that "Speaks language." What's going on in "the big picture"? She's hating our crudely shopworn, overdetermined present day, retrieving past imagination, "This tease is on view at the / American Folk Art Museum," and later, "O pupils / Of oppression / Destroy your want of big things..." and, as kicker, Iijima's final stanza reads, in part, "Oh / Yah; / Yah, yah yah yah / Yah yah yah (with / Heritage)."
Spun [...] Two sailors seek
Eulalia. Sandpipers, plovers, terns
And gulls retreat inland avoiding
A gale wind. The gods of Tuat
See this coming...
More wishful false narrative and meta-goodness from Matvei Yankelvich ("Whenever Boris was alone in his room he wasn't"), Michael Cross ("lisa jarnot [again!], this is apostrophe"), K. Lorraine Graham ("We are free and beautiful and assertive and we have a nice bike and nice bike gear"), Drew Gardner ("Chicks Dig war (especially chicks on the pill)"), Ange Mlinko ("the rain falls like bananas on the car alarms"), Chuck Stebelton ("I divorced my own orchid"), Christina Strong ("think ritual special"), Stephanie Young ("Here she is bound to her own word"), Stephen Vincent ("The fluted dresses, the combed marble"), and Larry Kearney. Kearney is senior here, I believe, and his selection from a manuscript titled "Rolling Stock" appears most dependent on 'lived experience': "the one glass eye / is in the lucid / drink // a pale blue / frosted // rolling thing / a joke to live with in the curl // of ice / and creation." This may be literally so, "the house / is not a house but apartment." But Kearney masters how experience, a "very old ... house brought down," also can be subject to confection, as in the last poem in the sequence:to rather not die
with things that were simple
unsaid,
is a kind of grace,
no?
to not want to empty
head and heart
ahead of ample black and doorway lap
of death is not
to understand.
posted byJack 9:30 AM
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Ron has been running a marathon around Bay Poetics last three days. Glad he's found stuff to bounce off of, though couldn't he find a more ah joie to the world photo of Stephanie?
posted byJack 1:10 PM
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Gabe, are you ok? Just asking.
posted byJack 5:48 PM
posted byJack 6:10 AM
Monday, May 08, 2006
Bay Poetics is a big honking book of fine work by some of the best writers around. It also just happens to be a possible portrait of one of the United States’ two great literary communities. You need to own this book.
-- R.S.
posted byJack 7:05 AM
Maggie Zurawski named her blog Minor American (MA), a deflationary and certainly semi-constricting descriptor, the American part, anyway -- and yet this is a name that she has gone on to share with co-bloggers, Ange Mlinko from fall of 2004 thru spring 2005, and Kathryn Pringle starting March 2006. The minor part of the descriptor is key, I think, but to get to this, first, a couple of disclaimers. At the outset, if I may, I don't want to imply false intimacy by referring to all three bloggers by their first names -- I've not met Kathryn (aka Kate), for instance; rather, for me to use last names here would conflict tonally with the sense of openness and negotiable familiarity that Maggie, Ange, and Kathryn have upheld in their blogging. Second, with regard to MA's brief history, as much as I want to simplify it, that is, to say something like: let's concentrate on Maggie who's been the "thread" between Ange and Kathryn: I can't. At least not that simply. I can say that Maggie got everything rolling, but from the beginning, October 2004, she was engaging Ange as a responder to her posts about Bernadette Mayer, the New York School and language poetry. A month later Ange was a co-administrator posting to the blog, sometimes in a dynamic conversation with Maggie, at other moments following up different ideas. (After a few months of collaboration, as we know, Ange started her own influential blog.) But from the beginning and even during the year when Maggie was sporadically posting on her own, and most especially now when Maggie and Kathryn are posting as a team of "minor americans," the atmospherics of openness and negotiation are integral to MA's unique value.
As I said, though, Maggie got things rolling with questions, such as ones about the use of dailiness, one poet-generation to the next; clear distinctions, such as the one that differentiates between language poets who visually observe (Grenier, Silliman) and those who play (Andrews, Bernstein); and, most useful, readiness to change her mind! (aka thinking out loud). Here's one example of the latter, a paragraph from a post from October 2004 on Maggie's reading Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day.
...I have this strange relationship to Mayer. I want to be hard on her because so many woman in my circle of friends tried to use her as a model for how to live as a poet and I don't really think she's the best model and of course it's kind of a cannibalistic use of the poet here. What can she do for us, the younger generation? It takes away a lot of sympathy I should have for her as a human being and makes her into a utility for us to use ... but that's a whole other story. But I already was willing to like this book before I began to read it and my only Bernadette before this was the Sonnets and The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters which I felt lukewarm about. There were moments where I thought the work was amazing but mostly I felt it sagged. It didn't amaze always. But the first section of this book by the time I finished this first section I was fucking blown away. The first section is this strange juggling of several dreams and the narrator's attempts at making sense of them and the way the figure of the mother haunts these dreams the way the narrator makes the mother haunt these dreams without the mother ever appearing as a figure in any of them and to watch this voice struggle with her mother and watching her mind dealing with this person in her imagination well it is so powerful that I could only put the book down and walk away and think that's what Ange admired so badly and I felt a need to apologize quietly in my heart to Bernadette. It was like if she never wrote anything worth reading after that section it didn't matter.If this isn't a first-rate line of provisional thought in process of correcting false impressions, misprisons, etc., then I'll give up. Fortunately, Maggie doesn't cave, but goes on to embrace everything that's bubbling up and pertinent. Notice how Ange's thinking enters Maggie's stream of mind-changing, and this was before Ange signed on as co-administrator. Notice too the implicit critiques in passing, cannibalistic use of older poets, feeling "lukewarm" about some of Bernadette's other work, and so forth. This set of daring observations results primarily and necessarily from Maggie's urge to move from her opinions to a more fertile base for experiment, that is, to proceed by keeping her thinking truly minor enough to change.
So the table is set, candles flaming, all the atmospherics to attract Ange first and then Kathryn to weigh in and reinforce more experiment and change. What worked with Ange and Maggie's posts from 2004 and 2005 was, among other attributes, their motivation to see things like household chores and other minutiae as a bedrock of poetry. Here's Ange: "Many things impress me about My Life, but the part where Hejinian describes laying down a clean towel to walk across the freshly mopped floor really impresses me, because it says here is a woman who was fastidious about her mopping in addition to having kids and writing a mountain of books." Domestic details are on the upswing these last few months; Kathryn and Maggie have moved into a new place; and they have become co-administrators of MA. Results from April are variegated. Kathryn complains about tight quarters, "the two of us in one room is just STUPID. it is more like a library with a bed in it than a bedroom at this point." She takes their dog "mr. poods" for a walk and winds up making a sad kid smile, buying one of his MAG / ZINES, a "local artist," according to Kathryn. These passages are inserted between Kathryn's posts on Orestes Brownson's Spirit-Rapper and an interesting research question from an e-mail: "is it possible to 'unintentionally obfuscate' something?" As if obliterating obfuscation were a theme, Maggie poses questions to Jim Behrle about his appearance on Can't Get a Date -- many domestic queries, and a couple even more personal (Kathryn was on Jim's crush list that was mentioned in the telecast) -- and then she posts full responses from Jim. Too early to know where entries from April and beyond will lead. The atmosphere is spreading. More voices are listened to. Minds are opening. Very minor, indeed.
posted byJack 5:15 AM
Friday, May 05, 2006
...a poem is a way to share a secret without telling it.
-- Kate Greenstreet
Only this week Kate Greenstreet wrote me to get contact info for someone she hopes to include in her new interview project at Every Other Day (EOD). I figure Kate has mastered the arts of coincidence, reaching me not knowing I'd just fixed on EOD to kick off an informal survey of bloggers and blogging. The coincidence, if that is what it is, seems redoubled, since Kate has now moved her proprietorship up a peg, so to speak, introducing her interview project last week, April 26. So let's start there. Kate gave herself a task of posing naïve-seeming, incredibly open-ended questions to poets about their first books, questions like How has your first book changed your life? and Did you find that you sold many books at a reading? and Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world? She varies the questions, and succeeds in getting good responses from Shanna Compton, Andrea Baker, and Stacy Szymaszek, so far. Good responses, because you can tell the poets are glad to jump into the open-endedness and let some things out.
Kate's self-tasking here is tactical. On the face of it, Kate says she came up with the project to help prepare for her own first book to be released this fall. It's a purposeful way to reach out to poets she likes, she knows, or she'd like to know. And while the interview format has been used in other blogging, her particular focus is new. So Kate's latest project is a socially dynamic way to put together original content that shifts the spotlight, if only a bit, moving beyond the blogging ego (and its usual manifestations as craft, opinion, and learning). It's hard to say it's selfless, since Kate decides whom to interview and what to ask, but she's giving so much room for others to answer, it seems generous as well as interesting, two rare qualities hard to sustain in blogging. Kate sets up other tasks that she shares with readers. First, she fulfills the macro promise of posting every other day. She's been right on schedule, as far as I can tell, for nearly a year. Another task is a collaboration called 14 Sentences that started last February, with this prefatory note: "Max & I have been doing a diary experiment: 7 sentences a day. At the end of the first week (yesterday), we read our entries to each other, to compare what we'd taken from the days." As of the end of April there have been 10 entries and the project looks to be ongoing.
This externalizing of routines, regular postings, quotidian projects, fits with Kate's background as a painter and graphic designer. It's a secret many in art schools pick up to make stuff visible and pliable, and when you superimpose the temperament of a poet and a blogger, you begin to capture / document ebbs and flows of your varied experiments and life, not exactly diaristic, more a record-keeping of ideas and works in the making now or in the future. That said, Kate's blog is a folio of beautiful achievements to look at as well as a good read. In EOD Kate maintains a decorum between art making and the artifact that seems research-based, all the more so with these new interviews, but it's her showing us assorted methodologies "taken from the days" that is most instructive and most like poetry, sharing without the weight of too much telling.
posted byJack 2:59 AM
Thursday, May 04, 2006
What does it say when you don't have a penchant left in your solutions, beading, ruche, rickrack, or fringe? Monologues of burning lightning, noiseless migration, the whispering overlord, honey refusing natural flame, tooth and bosh, sublime Zongo. Sorry, honey, I'm just plain awkward. Sorry, leech, my aural pheromone is too diverse to sex, buddy. Before undertaking image-free philanthropy, the week proceeded -- I'd have to say faith-based, snippy, half-baked -- one of the worst dumping chutes of it all, my life. What's relational? You'd have to guess. I stuck in a little yoga. Then I ran after you a complete idiot. I dropped 12 pounds and restructured the deal. Feeling like watching the second half first.
posted byJack 7:48 AM
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
posted byJack 1:07 AM
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
2 shirts, zipper cardigan, barbour. Layers in May. Ah, coastal New England!
posted byJack 2:45 PM
Stephanie's peekaboo shots with her sole copy of BP.
posted byJack 1:09 PM
Hey, rich kid, loose the jet background.
Forrest Gander's gentleman's A.
New poems at Otoliths, and thanks to Mark Young, ze editor. Geof Huth, Jordan Stempleman, Sheila Murphy, a chap from Jean Vengua -- if it's weighted toward "e" types, the work is still unexpected. Lines from kari edwards: "...mercury poisoning / abandoned to loading docks / door prize / all well meaning / track homes." See for yourself. Your portal.
Apocalyptic gadgetry. Latest stuff (fall out) for (in) advances of the comedically tasteless happening everywhere (your earrings?): Here's a plastic bag.
Brenda Hillman opens so strong in BP you almost want to stop there, page one.
One sided. How come nobody shouts back at the approving critic / reviewer / mentioner whose reasoning is stuck in high school cafeteria?
There's a place at McLean, I think it's well decorated, called the Pavilion, failure's serious side.
posted byJack 7:03 AM
Monday, May 01, 2006
posted byJack 6:05 AM
