Mappemunde

I predict there's now going to be a rise in people holding up gas stations.

Reading Julia Cohen's chapbook Who Could Forget the Sensational First Evening of the Night (H_NGM_N):

"Try to keep us warm in the best way possible
Away from the pinstripes hiding their accurate suntans the hubcap seduction of car shows"

"Occasionally we mistake reading in high doses for no longer living"

Reading Lisa Samuels' book The Invention of Culture (Shearsman):

"Much as I told you, your eyes having lunch in the little town of my face."

"You've made a place for scrupulous delay, the fulsome bite of syllables, the 'what we do not need' printed pack-wise on your parts."

"Sorrow, it is sorrow to get somewhere you don't efface nor half-belong - to soft-formed people moving in their shadows, they know 'how to be' there, company procured."

 
at the Audre Lorde Project: http://www.alp.org/

I just couldn't resist posting a link to this.

Also, be sure to check out Uncalled-For, a reading series happening at Unnameable Books this summer!

Geoff Olsen now has a blog.

Bouquet

“So, how are the kids?” They are suffering from their lack of existence, in the park, chasing a kite or morphing into moebius-strip-like shapes of language mesh, it’s scary how a zoo can make you feel safe. We like to elide into the crowd, the mass, the prow of the boat cutting through the echo of the snowglobe, keeping an appointment and bereft of the appropriate forks. Instead we’ve developed a new, all purpose utensil that incorporates every angle, a Picasso painting of a utensil, which though slightly tortured looking and sometimes beaten up on the street, is nevertheless parking transgressively in your spot when you’re not looking. Here’s a gesture only an entitled punchbowl hand can make, we attempt while leaning over the banister to carouse with people who make half a million, then go home and hide, the syntactical confusion crooning us into velvet sheets of the poem. As long as we could hide, internalized normative surveillance coming over for a little red wine and some brie cheese in the evening, we’d catch the bouquet before knowing what it meant.

Wrestled a little with Ron's blog today in response to this post. My comments:

Not sure I want to get involved in another one of these accursed fantasy football taxonomy conversations, but here goes:

What's with all this top-down conceptualizing? Coalitions? Reeeeaaaallly.......What you're describing sound to me like two planks with hardly anyone standing on them yet. Plank? Plunk!

Why don't we try to build up from actual social formations and their accompanying political tendencies by describing existing groups that are currently out there? Writing is foremost a phenomenon of individuals overlapping as social sub-groupings (with their associated politics) before these are articulated movements.

There are a couple as-yet-unstated tendencies that I'd like to describe, and I will. But in the meantime I'd like to think the Queering Language anthology (over 100 writers, a selection from which was recently published as chapbooks by Faux Press) represents one of those tendencies and political groupings which is prevalent, as yet unarticulated as a poetics of the avant garde, and not included among this taxonomy you're setting up above. I could probably describe at least three other current tendencies in poetic community and sociology which need to be named and which you'd really be shooting yourself in the foot to leave out of this binary system. And all of them have equal claims to be considered as what you're calling "the new."

Ron, I'm just having a spasm here in the comment box because you're usually much subtler, much better at articulating this stuff than the hastily sketched out and reified categories above. I'd be interested to see you, and us, try to expand the demographic categories here a little beyond the plank. Does aesthetics MATTER? Or is it the politics evinced by a community formation that lends energy to poetics?

Furthermore, what we perhaps most disastrously lack is a believable working definition of what might constitute "Official Verse Culture" at this point. Oh boy is it out there, but the definition is sorely out of date. Of the two planks you describe above, neither offers a convincing vision of what we're up against. One evokes a non-existent "political correctness" bogeyman, while the other evokes an absurdly overdetermined romantic poet caricature which appears to describe what...the protagonist of I Heart Huckabees?

Segue 5/13: Matthew Rotando and Simone White

The Segue Reading Series Presents:

Matthew Rotando and Simone White

Saturday, May 31, 2008 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

hosted by erica kaufman & Tim Peterson

Matthew Rotando’s first book of poems, The Comeback’s Exoskeleton, (with a foreward by Tim Peterson) is available from Upset Press. He is a member of POG, a collective of artists and poets in Tucson, Arizona. Rotando received his MFA from Brooklyn College and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arizona.

“Story of Learning”

After I learned the language, I learned it well. Then went down to the lake. I said, “Hey, Pond, you got rabbit-congress, how about witch go seventeen something something?” Pond said, “Man, the language is not like that. You better learn.” So I learned. I learned and learned. Then said to Old Man Killer Whale, “Nice for this mine, your thermos mine, your brown interval mine, your Viggo Mortenson.” Killer Wheel said, “Not far enough yet, son. But if you study, your own reward will be that you studied.” Shivering and shaking, I studied and learned. I learned hand and by hand and hand stealing and victim-focused learning. Then I met Wall Of Dogs. Wall said, “You look like another dog for me.” I said, “Yes, cylinder and me talking—like night fighting—and yes or same project makes blame, the astrolabe, wicca, not chancy chancy, all these marriages end in more desire.” Wall Of Dogs spoke, and said, “Only that last bit showed some learning.” So I made the Walking Wall my right side master, learned something else on my left and in my front I wished for a gymnastics container. I said, “I’ve learned. This old language in mine, and easy now. I have it for naming and knowing and learning.” Then Hey Pond, Old Killer Whale Man, and Dog Wall said, “Ho! Ho! Pond Consonant Boy, look at you, handclapping for bottles and vowels and cans!”

Simone White, a Cave Canem fellow, is the author of a collaborative chapbook in conversation with the paintings of Kim Thomas (forthcoming from Q Avenue Press). Currently a doctoral student in English at CUNY Graduate Center, she lives in Brooklyn.

“Poem That Reminds Me of Barack Obama”

Ice house, not original with me, marooned on an ice plateau,
phantom.  Were I captured, rendered elsewhere pictorially,
some other grey flake of building would be like
an erotics of long-headed men,
                                                              which are, like suburbs, not independently epic.
Cavalcade of the long-headed man,
                                                              turf one so wants to lie down on,
like a basketball star is an aggregate of longings to fly or be multiple, raceless selves,
like angels, like abstraction itself,
nonetheless like the awesome black cock we always imagined and coveted,
like, “The tricks I could do with a new eye pencil!”,
like, “A husband like hers erases neutrality.”                   
                                                             And what about grasses, blades of grass?
Like a fact no one has use for, these have no manner
unlike difficulty, like things I won’t talk about.
Like a scratched off part of my face.

POGsound

 
POGsound: An Archive of POG and Chax Press Readings

featuring readings by:
Laynie Brown, Arpine Grenier, Stephen Vincent, Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery, David Meltzer, Charles Alexander, Beverly Dahlen, Barbara Henning, Pierre Joris, Michael Kelleher, Paul Klinger, Sheila Murphy, Tenney Nathanson, Maureen Owen, Matt Rotando, Leslie Scalapino, Frances Sjoberg, Lewis Warsh, and Tyrone Williams (among many others)

Listen here.

Tenney Nathanson writes:
"In the Fall of 2006 we began to record POG readings and the Chax Press-Cushing Street Bar and Restaurant readings. The Chax Press-Cushing Street readings ended with the last event of their Fall 2007 season and may yet resurrect. POG continues."

PRESENT TENSE

play by Charles Borkhuis

part of the Tiny Theatre Festival (6 one-acts) at The Brick Theater

directed by Gabriel Shanks,

featuring Frank Blocker & Ben Trawick-Smith
Stage Manager: Jeni Shanks
Design: Allen Cutler

May 23 and 24 | 8pm | $15
at The Brick Theater, 575 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg
(L Train, 1/2 block from Lorimer Stop)
RESERVATIONS: 866-811-4111
http://www.theatremania.com

Two characters find themselves slipping in and out of parallel lives through "wormholes" in the space-time of the play. One believes he has dozed off at home with a book on his lap and the play is a curiously lucid dream. The other is convinced that their performances in front of a live audience are desperately real. Panic starts to set in as the play's complications and reversals become increasingly fascinating and frightening.

left to right: Javier, Delany (photo by Serena Liu)

Jesse Seldess' journal Antennae, far and away one of the best publications in contemporary poetry, now has a website.

Thanks to Jeremy James Thompson for a great review of Saturday's Javier & Delany reading.

Stein, Marks, Edmiston, Klassnik, and Peterson @ Stain Bar

I'm pleased to be a part of this event organized by Amy King:

Leigh Stein, Justin Marks, Will Edmiston, Rauan (Ron) Klassnik, and Tim Peterson
The Stain of Poetry: A Reading Series
Friday, May 30 at 7 PM

Stain Bar
766 grand street
brooklyn, ny 11211
(L train to Grand Street,
1 block west)
718/387-7840

Segue 5/17: Samuel R. Delany & Paolo Javier

The Segue Reading Series presents:

SAMUEL R. DELANY & PAOLO JAVIER
Saturday, May 17, 4PM-6PM
308 Bowery, just north of Houston

$6 admission goes to support the readers
Hosted by Tim Peterson (curated by erica kaufman & Tim Peterson)

SAMUEL R. DELANY is a novelist and critic who lives in New York City and teaches English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is a winner of four Nebula Awards, two Hugo Awards, and the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a Lifetime's Contribution to Lesian and Gay writing. His novels include Nova, Dhalgren, Trouble on Triton, Hogg, The Mad Man, Phallos, and most recently Dark Reflections. His short fiction has been collected in books such as Aye and Gomorrah and Other Stories and Atlantis: Three Tales. His nonfiction has been collected in volumes such as Silent Interviews, Longer Views, Shorter Views, and About Writing, and he is the author of a best-selling study, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

PAOLO JAVIER is a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Writer-in-Residence. He is the author of LMFAO (OMG! Press, forthcoming), Goldfish Kisses (Sona Books), 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books), and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada), which received a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award. He edits the online journal 2nd Ave Poetry, and lives in New York.

The Segue Reading Series is made possible by the support of The Segue Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts. For more information, please visit www.seguefoundation.com, bowerypoetry.com/midsection.htm, or call (212) 614-0505.