Monday, November 13, 2006

Ten poets read here over the weekend. Yesterday I took notes on Ange Mlinko and Dan Bouchard at the Plough and Stars. Saturday I got to three readings. 1) Adam Clay, Kate Greenstreet, Matt Henriksen, and Jess Mynes at the Lily Pad performance space in Inman Square. Earlier, 2) a book signing and readings by Jimmy Behrle and Del Ray Cross at Suffolk University's new poetry library. And earlier Saturday 3) Peter Gizzi and Rosemary Waldrop at P.A.'s in Somerville. Just a few days ago Clayton Eshleman read at MIT and Lyn Hejinian at Harvard, reported below. I also have notes on Fanny Howe's reading Thursday at BU. I'll be getting to some or all of these within the next few days, beginning in reverse order, I think, with Ange and Dan's reading. So, more soon.

posted byJack 7:37 AM

Friday, November 10, 2006

Clayton Eshleman
November 9, MIT

It's been Clayton Eshleman week in Boston; he's given three public readings, one on his translating Cesar Vellejo, among other things. (His complete translations of Vallejo will be released next week by UC Press in a bilingual edition.) I caught up with Eshleman last night at MIT where he read from his 2003 Wesleyan Press hybrid, Juniper Fuse. Over the last few years, it's safe to conclude, Wesleyan has shown a penchant for releasing poet-project books, that is, poetry and poetics that not only focus on a thematic but also spell out the writer's procedures and 'life investment' in the work. Prose, part personal narrative, part historical and theoretical speculation, verse and verse-prose combinations, heavily captioned drawings, color plates -- Juniper Fuse is a humdinger of the type. By the time his research for Juniper Fuse was completed, Eshleman, along with his wife Caryl, had made more than two dozen sojourns over as many summers to the Upper Paleolithic caves in southwestern France. His obsession is charged with the aim to return to "origins of image-making...the early days of soul-making." These caves are flooded with images, some dating to over 30,000 years ago. I found Eshleman's opening thoughts about what's inside the caves extremely informative, as any foundational statements would be to one uneducated in specialist domains such as Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon aesthetics. I have to say Eshleman sustained my curiosity throughout even while downsizing the role of poetry. Process explanation is Eshleman's forte. Try this passage about visual intake affected by crawling on hands and knees and squirming to move into and through the caves:

if one were to film one's posture through this entire process [...] it might look like a St-Vitus dance of the stages in the life of man, birth channel expulsion to old age, but without chronological order, a jumble of exaggerated and strained positions that correspondingly increase the image pressure in one's mind --

Conversely, the poems are often as high-sounding as the last stanza from "Cemeteries of Paradise":

Packed with perpetuity's
negation, with swaying wordflora,
the alpha veil still refuses to unravel.

There is something of an alpha veil about the poetics here. If I can concoct a meaning for alpha veil, it might refer to a self-engaging, world-builder impulse, a throwback to the XIXth century, one which indeed resulted in great expansions in natural and applied sciences. To accomplish tasks, a self-study will often rush on while she or he continues speaking to himself, recognizing "wordflora" is a make-it-do term for cave drawings and glyphs, maybe, not stopping to examine fully or further explore the semantic mobius strip entwined in "negation" that is "packed" inside a filigree of veil. Eshleman's material, stones impregnated with horse heads and vulvae, clay bison with cracked torsos, images of Gods with bird-beaked stanchions, these are fascinating, soulful topoi that await even more project work and poetry.

posted byJack 9:55 AM

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Lyn Hejinian
November 8, Sackler Museum, Harvard

Lyn Hejinian says she finds it hard to write nonsequitur. I believe her, though in one sense Hejinian has been composing nonsequitur, seemingly with ease, from the first published diaries.

I was reading several books at once, usually three.
If faster, then more.
The typewriter at night was classical.

This snippet from My Life -- which Hejinian did not read last night -- indicates, in another sense, we're leaping ahead in a narrative flow, moving cohesively from reading to the typewriter, musing about the very instruments that occasion writing, desiring more. In the first of three long works that Hejinian read, a piece titled notably "The Unfollowed," she attempts, as explained in her preliminary remarks, a series of elegies "built of nonsequitur to refute death as a logical outcome." The premise strikes me as wishful or mock-naïve. Yet, Hejinian's tactic of deploying nonsequitur is more in doubt, as the result is more leaping narrative following its peculiar logic, surely, while hardly inexplicable or nonverifiable or unexpected. Here are some run-on notes from the first minutes, with a few patches missing, transcribed as fast as I could capture them.

...fog rolls in... someone follows me... the visible is rough... all kinds of words here... November 8, what kind of beginning is that? ... another kind of sphinx trick... up go the shades tonight... the sun is too coherent...

"The Unfollowed" is a work in progress, long enough to allow itself a little funk, rhyming at times (jam / ham; chairs / stairs), off-sounding in the obvious ("the here and now is always current, or is it?"). Hejinian also read from Slowly (Tuumba 2002), a "protest poem" that might encourage one to stop rushing and "regard the dark...finding unapologetically what painters have known for years." This work is more perambulatory, less personal account than urban desire, a walk-through with skyscrapers "outskirting" and, somehow, "intangible as futility." Bleaker moments suggest more unfulfilled desire, in which every inch is "premonition," just "look up cascade, see failure." Hejinian's third work was a selection from another project in progress loosely based on Sheherazade. One again feels force distributed between unscientific nonsequitur (dreams are internal criticism) and comprehensible narrative metaphor (every dinner table is a bridge). The persona here, the I, takes on a few other jobs, those of pilot, voyager, emergency technician, merchant's wife, sailor, "a poignant catalyst." Hejinian declares "I am self-taught shred" toward the end of her reading. That covers it, except for her closing lines, the night's most memorable, finding herself at the crossroads of "a great forest. I have just one memory of it, but I want two."

posted byJack 9:55 AM

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

It was always a long shot, but Harold Ford, Jr. will be the most missed Democrat in Washington. He acts a little wild. He lost to an extremely mean-spirited self-made mogul. Mean wins over wild in Tennessee. The mogul's photo appeared in national media a few days ago, shot below the mogul's waist, at brogan shoe / pant cuff level, mullet-coiffed tow truck assembly workers, all white, looking up, really pleased their good mean millionaire was whipping the democrat's ass. Of course the workers could have been just checking him out. Who knows? they were standing at the mogul's shoe level. Sir. Like a Philip Guston cartoon.

posted byJack 6:24 AM

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Annoying, repetitive, illegal Republican robot calls disguised as Democrats dialing for votes.

posted byJack 10:21 AM

Rodney Koeneke & David Trinidad
November 6, Tazza, Providence

Rodney Koeneke read almost exclusively from Musee Mechanique, half the time reciting sans text. This is verse shorn from detritus of search engines (Rodney's descriptor, one many disavow, "Google sculpture"). Delivering poems like pizza from memory sets up haunting tricks of spectacular dissonance. It's one thing to take bodily possession of word combinations that are "out there" in the public domain (a web page, say), that cohere by sheer happenstance (search data on the page) and will of the poet (reassembling the data). It's entirely a new feat of criminal merchandizing, though, to come off possessed of those word combinations -- that is, to invest a lyric inevitability and mechanized order in happenstance through corporal memorization. The affect is bug-eyed insincerity that demands to be taken in and fed until it implodes.

Our bags have several uses:
The Auto Club float (decorated entirely by Auto
Club members); carnation smoke that trails the plane; Kaffir lilies
with oblong tongues.

The purposes of corrupted innocence are many, of course, but Rodney's link to a) unhingedness thanks to what's happened to our belief systems since 9/11 -- suggested by Rodney in his brief intro -- and just maybe b) a much-needed poke in the eyes of ideologues who've forgotten to check their serious baggage at lyric's door. There are other purposeful subtexts, we know, because Rodney told us. Poems in the series titled "On the Clamways" toy with Clark Coolidge but are really concerned with sex and advertising, just like Coolidge! In addition, I'm sure Rodney wants to reinforce bad taste and spoil the eating experience. I spilt my Tazza panino when he read "Pizza Kitty." Wouldn't you? "'What turns you on, Pizza Kitty? / Mommy does not like to get kitty kisses... // 'Kitty, come down!' Pizza / all over our bodies."

David Trinidad goes to memories to tell us how it's doing today. One of several pink poems recycles 60s lipsticks. Polar bear pink, pussy willow pink, daredevil pink, Jupiter pink, E. S. pink, snuggle pink, helpless pink. Today for David, as for most poets, is the writing presence; more, David includes memories as emphatic, forward-moving parts of a dynamic technology of the now. In a poem that mentions regret, the persona loses the boy, but "drove home and put him in a poem...later it rained. I know from the poem." Memory, then, the writing presence, fellow poets and, yes, Poetry are primary data, with elegies for Tim Dlugos, James Schuyler (with a "popsicle blue sky"), a memorial for Loraine Niedeker and another piece for living poet and friend Elaine Equi (about a doll memorial!). David's last piece excerpted three sections published in Combo 14/15 from the 20-part "A Poem Under the Influence." It's poetry about composing itself, its constraints, its repetitions, its initial design as a 20-day project taking up to two years to pull together its human connectedness to "pink threads": "Poem / which became, some time ago, as much about what I can't fit in / as can. All those / memories..." Memories and feelings, hard to express credibly, so more memories first of the famous, the Dali Lama and Sylvia Plath, and then they "drive in a circle" to recall a Bob, a Henry, an Ed, "another old friend who died during the / writing of this / poem." When feelings emerge they go to essentials: "What's the point of all that intense / foreplay if it / doesn't lead / to acute core-reaching fucking?" This is a question reflecting on a sexual encounter, but could easily apply to the poet inquiring after his own presence-as-foreplay that requires total E. S. pink daredevil helplessness to move forward writing the now.

posted byJack 8:18 AM

Monday, November 06, 2006

James Cook & Ric Royer
November 5, Demolicious, Cambridge

James Cook read his "projections" for The New Cartographers series, now in pamphlet form, first appearing this summer at the New Arts Festival in Gloucester where James is based. His piece, titled "Cartoglossographia," has two sections similarly subtitled in graeco-cognates: cartopedegraphia and cartoglossolalia. Charles Olson's self-as-teacher influence is obvious, James's beginning with snips from The Maximus Poems, an epic that derives from Olson's formula "about a person and a place." James calls his piece "a draft," and I think that's accurate. I find open stretches in the draft exposition, which after the Olson citation, asks "Where the hell am I?" but marches on in the fourth sentence, "Walk the boundary of your town." If some self or person will be examined here, we'll benefit from knowing how and why he or she shifts from I to you. Admittedly, several paragraphs or stanzas in, James declares, "I am not on the map. I exist but marginally." Then, "You are here. I am not." This insistence on only "you" is contradicted again and again by I-headed propositions -- I swam; I am eager; I have mapped, etc. So the person part of Olson's formula is up for grabs. The place part (Where the hell am I?) is clearer if many times more abstract (on the surface) than Olson's (or James's) Dogtown. It's a word map that unfolds as it merges physical and political attributes (the tree by the foodstand; the coastline for the taking) with appropriation (from William Blake, Italo Calvino, Fanny Howe, others). I especially like it when James plays along with citation. Jorge Luis Borges's "abominable" mirrors with copulation are countered by James's "The menu is not the food." Even better, after citing Robert Duncan three times James is reminded of Dunkin Donuts, a Gloucester mainstay if there ever was one.

Ric Royer organizes Baltimore's Transmodern Performance Festival and works with the Performance Thanatology Research Society. A University of Buffalo grad, Ric combined or, better, doubled performative and linguistic acumens for hilarious theater of the eat-your-reflection variety. The set-up goes like this. Dressed normally, almost blandly, Ric takes to the podium as expected, doesn't even trip over a gaggle of computer and projector wires, speaks at a super conversational level on his interest in a Doubles Museum out of Calgary for goodness sakes. He introduces through narrative Museum curator Dr. Armand and his vain pal Jill. They seem to miss opportunities to get closer to one another, Ric relates. He's about three minutes into this "intro," lifting up exhibit pieces, Q-tips, Doublemint gum, a two-headed nickel, and so forth, and one realizes one is trapped, "helpless," looking at the "face of one's face reflecting as if translating" one's body "contorted" by (drum rolls, please) secrets revealed -- one is co-equal, co-blown away with the performer, "twins, one more like the other." It's a downlow deadpan tongue in one's cheek. Get it out of there! Don't get any closer than the black-and-white slides (for that archival feel). Turn down the lighting -- there's a glowing Macbook from which Ric could read occasionally, but the monolog is extemporaneous, mostly, breaking into a growl at one point, arms overhead: "If you throw up your own hands it means you have eaten them," Ric said. It was great.

posted byJack 9:08 AM

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Late October U.S. internal audits of military caches scheduled for delivery to Iraqi armed forces disclose large numbers of weapons are missing; the numbers are in the 1,000s, possibly 100,000s.

A week ago Muqtada al-Sadr succeeded in breaking up U.S. checkpoints around Sadr City where an American service man is thought to be held hostage.

House Majority Leader John Boehner this week cites generals on the ground for failures in Iraq.

Detailed instructions for building a nuclear bomb were taken down from a U.S. government website a few days ago.

"What are you smoking?" Tony Snow responds to a reporter's question whether timing of Hussein's verdict and death sentence were coordinated by the White House.

ABC News reports the polls are now tightening.

posted byJack 7:03 AM

Friday, November 03, 2006

Ok. YouTube not needed. Visit Fox's O'Reilly Index, click on Bruce Andrews's pic -- you'll get a pop-up with another Bruce Andrews's pic on the far left (nudge, nudge). Click and hold on a minute or two; the wait is pure tedium, there's a commercial up front, but the clip finally engages. Bruce holds up, but I wish he threw a curse and hiss in O'Reilly's direction half as much as O'Reilly interrupts. Why pretend you know what goes on in a class you never attended, Mr. O'Reilly? Your final solution for critical thinking is to offer two views? Yes or no, Mr. O'Reilly? Speakin of two, wassup with Haggard and you, huh, huh?

Bruce is a video star.

posted byJack 5:14 PM

How does Sharon Mesmer's blog link turn into "laundry room ideas"? Who's doing this?

~~

And how does Erica Kaufman's lead to "how2"?? How?

~~

While we're at it, netty, could some good guy kindly re-do the Fox clip of Bruce Andrews and put it on YouTube so we can all see it?

posted byJack 7:59 AM

Andrei Codrescu
November 2, BU School of Management

Paul Violi is the only poet I know who went to BU (undergrad), the only BU grad I know, period. This is odd, given that the megaplex literally hovers down the street. I taught there for a couple of years before Harvard. At the time, president John Silber's iron will in evidence, the place felt spooky. (It still does.) (Echo effect.) Turns out my teaching went all right, and the collegiality there was no more ironic or unsympathetic or vapid than at MIT, Harvard, or the two national universities where I taught in Japan. I just disliked the mall cleavage. Or too many still-adolescent guys, with no features, who couldn't stand out even if they wanted to -- they didn't. It feels like a crowded prep school that mom, along with dad, who owns a dealership or something, ships you off to to get processed so you can compete better. The School of Management intensifies that feeling. Shiny, expensive 595 Commonwealth Avenue might stand tall across from a Goodyear plant. Lobby-wise, pablum-hued marble floors reflect lovey's panties and the social democracy statues, watered down from models in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."

I go on about megaplex atmospherics, because they affect Andrei Codrescu deeply, I'd guess. He read, or maybe I should say he showed up, in a fourth floor meeting room of some paneled veneer sort. This is a newer big-bucks building, remember, but the carpet was glazed with soda and foodstuffs -- maybe that's why they chose an Orlando hotel pattern? to mask what buildings and maintenance miss? Let me get to the ugly parts. Suited audience. At least one gum chewer. Late arrivals, with briefcases, walked into the middle of the reading, prancing from the back to the front, scouting out the 'best' seats. (Future management types.) An audio-visual bitch (I'm sure she's a very important A-lister in another life) opened and re-opened a door, up front next to Codrescu, to adjust knobs at the lectern as Codrescu was reading. Oh, what? both times she's holding a conversation with someone invisible on the other side of the door.

Codrescu claimed to like it. "It's nice to be interrupted twice." Then, he was interrupted often by his discursive preludes to and commentary on a handful of poems. His NPR stints notwithstanding, he's not filled in the Big Personality, not this evening, but he ad-libbed a half-amusing tale of the Romanian American "convert to the old faith of poetry," whose "vocabulary is smaller than my feelings." Based in New Orleans, Codrescu finds his city "the most spiritually interesting," even before Katrina (cheap rents), but now more so: "Poetry is doing well there -- no health care, psychological devastation," etc. Certainly his earlier poems deliver on his standard of "poetic terrorism," but Codrescu lets time and his academic work turn down his heat. Last night he argued that a poet's only geography is Greyhound, but notably he was rushing to make a flight back to teach in New Orleans. Still, Codrescu remains an acute self-critic and poetry observer, mentioning he heard Alice Notley read last week in New Orleans. "She is America's most interesting poet now," he said.

posted byJack 6:46 AM

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Alice Notley
October 21, MIT

Alice Notley read from two books released in 2006, Grave of Light and Alma, or The Dead Woman. This was her first Boston showing in 24 years, speeding through a bounty of poems as if to make up lost time, but not so; she had a lot to convey in her brief hour of perpetual experimentation. Her reading communicated more than an appetite for experiment and something else necessary but rare in poetics, trance. Beginning and concluding with pieces from Grave of Light, her new and selected, Notley sung in constructs spanning beyond three decades, remarking that when looking at poems of the 70s and 80s she discovers "a person I don't recognize anymore. I find that interesting." Lack of self-recognition is conditioned by living pragmatism that compels diminution of enculturated forms of thought and language, such as self-regard and short-term memory, in favor of more aestheticized idioms. The larger, hipper impression, I believe, is that the Notley who read to us last week is as unlikely to remember the person writing from the day or night previous as the person who wrote decades earlier. More like Dante tuning up through Whitman, but also like Dickinson, Wieners, and several New York poet-colleagues, Notley in her selected poems is pointed relentlessly against simple self-satisfaction and minor stance: "I am the people," Notley proclaims, and we need to stay alert, "That's how you get to be yourself thinking of Frank O'Hara." (If her logic escapes you, just try.) When Notley read from Alma, or The Dead Woman, the trance state was cinched. Clinched. The texts are as dark, twisty, and encrypted as any Inferno in American English. This isn't fair, no snippet will do it, after all, but taste all her moves in just these six lines.

we were all this is
they were that too.

the spy instantly freaks. what does that mean? what can those words mean? Carmen says but i never have to know i only sing.

we were all this is
they were that too

The passage cited is from a page titled "The Spy Appears." We are welcomed as text-conscious spooks (what does that mean?) within a labyrinth where Carmen is, among other entities, a song. Alma (a spy's spy, always there though unnamed, often) is a god, a junkie, a dead child, so many things. What gives? The texts are about researched fear and what chirps beyond terror. Other titles might help. "The Coming War"; "Negative Space"; "They Are All Dead Today"; "The Dead Are Not Happy." The first few lines of the poem "Terror," may also help. Notley read this to great affect:

as fate i don't feel it but i do the research Moira says. terror is allowed in. and then, the fate shape is made. as if you must feel it for it to be your fate.
i, i have none now -- terror, except at being here at night sometimes. or is it at what has happened to me.

Until I heard Notely enact her new poetry I had not uderstood why I am unglued, had not recognized my own need for a language and method for understanding, as I had not yet confronted a credible personal account -- no, a personal insertion -- within a globe full of tedious badness, full of the now. These poems and Notley's performance of them are miles over the top. It's been more than a week now. I have not recovered.

posted byJack 11:28 AM

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Non-Saxon Europe is widely preached against. Christ demoted the Netherlands and Belgium for their cultural lag. Or perhaps we could say they were pieces of nonsense, their cities negated, their verbs rounded off randomly. Rain there was so blatantly filled to the brim with nonsense that it spread everywhere completely negating its purpose, drops on the edge of interpretation, competing, dancing at the edge of the Flemish world, starlight, a pre-interpreted departure from what is present in the original experience of beings in being.

[I should add here that I am being serious.]

Bharati becomes something about our demise -- Bharati as a mobile phone service subscriber, unnoticeably an ulterior motive fashioned into a user profile. My own motives aren't the least bit ulterior, redirected from fragmentary and lost sources (rain).

[Spot had just turned 'about' from a trip to Thunder Bay with Lance. Spot discovers and contacts Keesha and me. These should work for most men with Lance problems, says the expert panel co-chairman ... So which fox drug is best? The expert won't say. Barb? Spot?]

Why make so much of fragmentary blue in here and there a bird, or butterfly?

A surrogate image is corroding on the field, its emptied refraction dancing on the taillight of aural preclusion of experience for syntactical beings (in a sentence).

The cliffside depends on weather, on the power grid, on the rust fabric of walls about to be torn down, on the danger of falling cornices (they did).

[The first Keesha, a 13-yr-old, accidentally applied an enema containing lye. But she also had Donald Sutherland's bio on her. Does or did he mention lutefisk -- fish jellied in lye? Not sure.]

Rain is widely construed as inaudible tendencies toward plundering of contexts in relation to the body's asymmetry and neuropsychology.

Rain can only be descrewed during dry spells. Fever, ague, intemperance, railroad spine, neurasthenia, all emerge otherwise, the flu, the common cold, silenced.

How do I threaten a referent on the Could page? I'm writing this for one reason only, so the receiver will sound an alarm (an annunciator light).

Duly of course sounded.

[Rain, dew lied, scored, so undid. Common rail favor tampers with the road pine. They flew. The co-old. Lanced.]

posted byJack 11:45 AM