Thinking Again

Joyland: A Hub for Short Fiction

2012-01-31T09:13:00.000-08:00

Joyland: A Hub For Short Fiction, is a very interesting online literary journal which divides the work it publishes into a number of regions around the U.S. Some are specifically cities: Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, Vancouver, and San Francisco, among others. Others have a broader focus, like Joyland South or Midwest or Montreal Atlantic. All of them feature intriguing and often innovative fiction.

Joyland Los Angeles, for whom at least one of the editors is Mathew Timmons, is now featuring some short fictions from my flash fictions manuscript The Measure Everything Machine and Other Sketches. I hope you’ll take a look. Joyland Los Angeles has published fiction by a number of really great southern California writers, including Kate Durbin, Anna Joy Springer, Sesshu Foster, and Amanda Ackerman, among others.

Mathew tells me that Joyland is intending to expand, soon, to include poetry as well as fiction, so check back in again later to see what else they’re doing.

Bureaucracy Series 2011

2012-01-24T11:43:00.000-08:00

Just in case anyone doesn't know I work for a living, I present the following:

Bureaucracy Series 2011

The institutional meeting: never does it take so many so long to do so little.

Why would I need to go to MLA? I’m already on Facebook, aren’t I?

This hyperactive anxiety and trapped feeling is exactly what involving oneself in American university, intellectual, artistic, and broader public discourse causes. I guess I’m finally home again and ready to go to work.

Now playing seriously discordant music, so that organized chaos can bludgeon the chaos of organization out of my head... temporarily, I know.

Academic gossip = low-hanging fruit.

Who administrates the administrators in these U.S. universities? And if the only answer is, “More administrators and Boards of Directors,” then we’re headed for trouble.

Hundreds served yearly.

Becoming a bureaucrat: Nature or Nurture?

In my dreams last night, I learned that I can't take a bus ride, hang out with friends, eat a plate of chicken fingers, and make it back to class on time when I only have a five-minute break between classes. My dreams were very insistent on this point.

People who insist that educational standards are too low but then make angry phone calls if their children don't get A's? I see... perhaps you wanted higher standards only for others?

My office has windows, but not windows that can be opened.

E-mail Question: Who do I ask about this? Response: Please contact the site administrator. Question: Who is the site administrator? Response: I am. I’ll get back to you about this.

Why do something burdensome and vaguely necessary once when you can also do it a second time, totally uselessly?

These complicated online grading systems often act as if progressive teaching pedagogy has never happened. All these bells, clangs, and whistles, yet the systems still assume that instructors mark “errors” in red ink.

A company is an organization, with means at its disposal. So why shouldn't workers also have an organization with means at its disposal? Of course organizations on either side can take advantage of conditions, and often do, but fundamentally, both sides in any work related discussion should be treated similarly in terms of their relationships to organizations, and the laws that allow them to organize. Therefore: if corporations can exist, unions can exist.

I want to be in a band called Job Application Screening Death Machine.

In my dream, we reviewed job candidates by having one white man put on black face and imitate a candidate, then take off the black face, put it on again and imitate another candidate, each time kneeling with his hands behind his back, execution-style. Really, oh my unconscious? Really?

What goal could life have other than moving the maximum possible number of units?

May I gently suggest that creating another official document might cause more problems than it solves?

That moment when I tell people how things work at my university and they look at me in stunned or incredulous silence.

I is an institutional function.

Long hours of discussion about problems no one is going to try to solve!

Event Listings “needs” information about the event three months in advance, while Events Planning will let you plan it about a month in advance.

May the infrastructure have mercy on my poor wiring.

Your advice is logical, but unfortunately the situation is not.

The structure announced that it was pleased with itself despite the challenges that lay ahead.

Bureaucracy encourages passivity because, over time, the blockades it sets up make even valuable actions feel not worth the effort.

I love exclamation points! In work correspondence! Proves we love our jobs and institutions! That we look forward brightly to our future institutional work! With high spirits! Never enough exclamation points!!!!! SO Happy To Be Here and Use Them!!!!!!!!

In an era when institutions are supposed to create “vision statements,” I keep wondering what it would look like to see an institution having a vision.

My campus appears to be using an online computer system that has bugs and that also has no readily identifiable source to contact regarding problems. The great computerized future of education continues to amaze.

This time of year, I could do my job more effectively if I could be purchased in a 3-pack.

When I look over the broad, debris-strewn expanse of bureaucratic documentation that I have to complete in the next few weeks so that it can sit barely touched, in some cases for years, in a computer capsule, I’m moved to an almost mystical awe at the human capacity to create non-essential work.

I left one meeting today at the moment when people were debating whether the official paragraph about where professors should keep student papers was a rule or a guideline.

I’m afraid that if I complain on Facebook about how many recommendations I have to write, someone is going to see it and ask me to write them a recommendation.

After a long discussion, the committee finally agreed that it would be important to take some kind of action.

The first business before the committee: whether it really was the officially authorized committee for examining the work of other committees.

When I feel myself losing faith in the U.S. education system, along comes a man like Chancellor Reed, who raises the salary of top administrators in the CSU system, expands the teams of lawyers designed to protect them, moves trustee and other decision-making meetings to private, undisclosed locations, and tries to finance it all with funds gained by attacking faculty and staff salaries, workload, and bargaining rights, as well as faculty academic freedom, and by massively and frequently raising the tuition of an often naive or complacent student body, more of whom are getting it all the time and speaking their minds in public protests where they can be assaulted by police with paramilitary style weapons who claim to be ensuring everybody's safety.

When, after months of long work hours using the performative friendliness and defensive wariness that allows me to function, I finally have a bit of time to read and write and be, at first it’s like being peeled open, and everything I’ve had no time to feel or think about always threatens to overwhelm me.

Conclusion: "Landscape as Activity in The End of America poems"

2012-01-12T09:34:00.000-08:00

"Landscape as Activity in The End of America poems"

Part Three

(Part One can be found here.)

I’ve always been interested in altering the relation between form and content in specific poems or groups of poems, and The End of America is no exception. There’s no one formal structure, or content, or relation between structure and content, that can be said to be ultimately, or even most, realist, if by “realist” one means an attempt to describe life as it is lived and experienced. Literary description can never simply show readers the real; it always reshapes it, leaving some things out and highlighting others, exaggerating and understating, tweaking for effect. Literature inevitably intervenes in the world; it reshapes it and so changes it, always.

This fact leads some writers to give up entirely on description, to consider it irrelevant, or to treat it as no more than literary, a created language with no definite relation to anything beyond language, certainly not life as it is lived and experienced. But those seem two extremes: to say either that literature can give an accurate depiction of life or can give no depiction of it at all. Instead, life and literature might share a pattern similar to that of character and environment, a series of mutual interactions that converge and diverge in different ways at different times.

In the various books of The End of America, I conceive of the person as an activity. Thoughts and feelings (whatever distinctions there may or may not be between them) are as much part of that activity as more physically visible ones. In the poems, the social geographic environment is also an activity, one of multiple voices and landscapes, of money and politics and hands gripping fences. Landscape is inevitably not stable; it changes. The person is the focal point for a processing of social geographic stimuli, acted upon by that stimuli and acting upon it, although the limits of the person’s ability to act upon it become part of the process, and a struggle. The person doesn’t always process the noise and reshape it into a clearly articulated response. That can happen sometimes, but clearly articulated responses are hardly the only way that persons process environments. Ultimately the process is less one of final answers than of motion itself, person and environment acting and re-acting. Hardly symbiosis or an easy relation, but one that involves uncertainty and anguish and that’s destructive as well as constructive.

Despite all the poetics I might use to talk about various aspects of the approach, there’s an element of barely filtered survival instinct in The End of America. Here’s what’s happening, here’s what I’m seeing and hearing, and now how am I going to live with it, to make something of it in a way that will help me be part of it? The end of it all, or the making of the end of it, can’t be the goal, since the wearing out of any person is inevitable. It’s the making something of it now, in a succession of nows, that is the most any person or poem can do.

Literary Aphorisms and Short Comments 2011

2012-01-03T11:44:00.000-08:00

Here’s a collection of literary aphorisms and short snippets of thought that I wrote in 2011. From the most part, I’ve separated them out from my quick comments on cultural, historical, and political issues more broadly, and also from lines that are just primarily quotations. I may put lists of those up later if I find time.

Agree, disagree, or ignore as you will. I’m just glad to know I was thinking, at times, about things other than how to make it through the work day.

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Avant literary resistance to bourgeois U.S. aesthetic and cultural norms is what makes avant work seem opaque or “elitist,” since fundamental to upholders of bourgeois norms is an inability to recognize, much less respect, anything that does not resemble them, even when the people doing those opaque other things are also bourgeois.

How many categorizing terms does it take before your poetry can no longer be recognized, even in current critical discussions? I’m thinking three.

Which other books, besides The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, have gone from being considered high school “readable” books to books needing a complex critical/historical approach to understand?

I once taught a version of Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass that had (unexpectedly for me) neutered all the gendered pronouns.

One of the best insights into writing fiction that I’ve ever received: take the people and situations you have known, and make them worse.

The only thing as unsurprising as a writer going to AWP is a writer acting superior about not going to AWP.

The people who want to go to AWP and be too cool for it simultaneously now do it this way; "Yes, I'm going to AWP, but not to attend any of the panels."

I want to believe that writers moving higher up into the echelons of the MFA world don’t necessarily have to embrace greater and greater dullness in the writing of others, but I struggle sometimes to find many counterexamples.

I don’t follow many standard English guidelines about the comma. I don’t use them for clauses and meaning always as much as I use them for pacing.

Guess I’ll never be called a New Fad now.

Radical poetry’s now going high speed into an era split between randomized aesthetic wordplay and painstaking factual documentation.

Hearing about what poets in MFA programs are reading often makes me want to insist on a more hardcore avant garde line than I might otherwise. Oh, bad history and creeping middle-of-the-road blandness masquerading as the exciting edge.

Because my students have often been confused by literature, they frequently assert that they wrote something confused in order to confuse readers because that’s what (most of) literature does. This issue comes up in every single introductory creative writing class I teach.

I’m not sure there’s any line about literature I quote more often than Gertrude Stein’s “There is no repetition, only insistence.”

A creative writing workshop is most effective when people in the workshop share some sets of principles about what makes a good piece of writing–something which makes very clear the problems of the workshop model.

Look at any word too closely, and language turns to mush.

A word is always in conversation with other words.

Has any writer (including writers of science fiction) ever idealized and glorified machines as thoroughly as Marinetti?

What would have happened if Aimé Césaire’s Notebook On A Return To The Native Land had become the central text of the Modernist poetry canon, instead of The Waste Land?

One thing that a university literary education apparently teaches you: writing a poem, story or novel is the easy part.

Fascinating to remember that for some people, every book gets called a “novel.”

Sign of bad literature #1: Dullness.

Sign of bad literature #2: Lack of energy.

Sign of bad literature #3: Lack of risk.

Sign of bad literature #4: Conventional view of the world.

I’m maybe not that interested in literature that tries to depict the values people should live by.

Of course it’s easier to write effective dystopias than effective utopias. What’s maybe more surprising is that dystopias are so much more enjoyable to read.

It doesn’t matter what your subject matter is. It matters what you do with your subject matter.

Trick endings and forced rhymes are more or less the same problem: the power of mass information.

The Author may not be coming to save us.

With my students, I usually need to get them interested in what literature cares about before I can get them to care about literature.

The Modernists were often genuinely weirdo outsiders. These days, it’s mostly just a bunch of ordinary people using Modernist techniques.

I’m with Thomas Pynchon on the greatness of Oakley Hall’s Warlock (1958). Maybe the most significant novel there is about the (old) American West, and the desire there for (and absence of) anything resembling justice.

I’m not a fan of the Beating A Dead Horse School of Poetics, but sometimes you have to beat a dead horse because if you don’t, people start thinking it’s alive. With apologies for the metaphor...

Writing a theory about why your poems are fascinating is not the same as writing poems that are fascinating.

Poetry and poetics as community garden: a metaphor I just don’t believe in.

As much as Joshua Clover’s overly abstract idea of totality annoys me (which is every time I think of it), I still prefer it to the idea of a political poetics as community garden. The problem is always larger than local specificity can make sense of.

Dear Poetry: I want someone to say something weird, flabbergasting, impossible, or non-existent. Anything but helpful.

Poems that just want to be helpful: ugh.

I’m not a poetry fetishist.

I don’t believe in literature or love, although at times I practice them.

Few misconceptions about fiction annoyed John Cheever more than the idea that fiction was really just non-fiction, memoir in flimsy disguise, and I’ve always felt the same way.

The idea that literature should be uplifting comes out of the idea that somehow it should shield and save us from our lives. Much more interesting to me is literature that makes us recognize our lives and the lives of others.

The trouble lies in what the story doesn’t know.

Love literature but don’t idealize it.

The pervasive sexism of a lot of the male radical New American poetry and fiction of the sixties gets wearing and seems very dated.

Poetry doesn’t have a Zeitgeist.

Writing poetry anonymously or under another name turns out to be an excellent way of making a name for oneself.

Isn’t some of the most fascinating poetry from any culture work which may not translate well? I'm always intrigued by poetry that doesn't speak at all to my own cultural condition. Makes the world a much bigger place than my narrow dreams sometimes imagine it to be.

It’s not only acceptable for a writer to be frustrated by the state of literature, it’s also often essential.

The work was slightly avant, somewhat, in a non-threatening, non-risky way that left few traces.

I liked Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy well enough, but the growing genre of lyric poetry about being bored and angst-ridden in the suburbs easily gets boring. Travis Nichols’ Iowa, despite many well written lines, would benefit from more terror, frustration, anguish or harsh alienation.

If you doubt the cultural value of literature, move from a place that has frequent public literary events to one that doesn’t.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" as American allegory about the significance of real estate.

Consolation? These people occasionally writing articles asserting that contemporary poetry is no good almost certainly aren’t writing good poems themselves, since clearly they haven’t learned to pay sufficient attention to words.

I’m not a fan of the use of italics in poetry to indicate the intensity or sensitivity or importance of a line. If the words don’t carry that weight already, the italics will only highlight that, and if the words do carry the weight, the italics aren’t necessary.

The most frightening work of literature I’ve ever read, unquestionably: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

Few things ensure the publication of mediocre, middle-of-the-road books of poetry as effectively as a rigorous, professionally scrupulous academic peer-review publication process.

It’s not clear that literature and theory have ever “gone past” anything, but it may well be that they have yet to comprehend most things. And rejecting what you don’t yet comprehend is to invite the return of the repressed.

Writers whose whole context for literature is the university always depress me.

It had only minor dissonance against its own certainty of its own good intentions.

So far, with one notable exception to my knowledge, at the &Now Literary Festival the No Futurists, and the Queer and Aberrant and other Political Futurists, have kept mainly to their own panels.

Going to one literary reading and assuming all readings are exactly like that is not that different from going to one live music show and assuming all music is like that.

Much of the most gripping art of any kind has a uniquely vivid personality that’s in the work itself, even if that work features a critique of individuality and the privileges of the subjective author/creator, as long as we understand that the work itself is a translation of various material processes into another kind of material process. That is, not essence, but condition.

As amazing as his work can be, I don’t think that the John Ashbery influence has really served poetry in the U.S. all that well.

Whenever I look back at poems I’ve written, there seems no clear correlation between my feelings during that time period and the mood of the poems. Some of my most brutal pieces have been written during eras when I was enjoying myself, and some of the most optimistic during eras when I felt desperate.

I agree with scholars when they say “critical writing” is also “creative,” but I’ve never heard one say that “creative writing” is also “critical.”

I’ve never wanted to be the kind of writer who dislikes any aesthetic that doesn’t resemble my own. In fact, crucial to my aesthetics may be an attempt to challenge, even violate, whatever aesthetic principles I might convince myself I have.

My reaction to a recent book of poems: “I’m sorry that your potential girlfriends find you annoying and so act skittish.”

All these writers always declaring that something is dead have to be right every now and then.

Literature when I’m angry about its social condition: words written in a specific cultural pattern for the pleasure of a few friends and rare professional advancement opportunities. Makes you look cultured in the eyes of the non-literary, although it’s essential, when among the tribe, to admit a constant sense of defeat, humiliation and rage. Best used by those seeking spiritual rewards or who simply can’t help it.

Book Review: Dieter M. Gräf’s Tussi Research

2011-12-28T11:45:00.000-08:00

Containing poems translated from the German by Andrew Shields, Dieter M. Gräf’s Tussi Research (published by Green Integer) was a book I found consistently fascinating and worthy of re-reading, while at the same time I recognized that I was likely missing some or even many of its occasionally oblique cultural nuances.

Tussi Research features a series of poetic meditations on German culture and history, a history not just of many events over several centuries, but also of a variety of mythologies that also make German history and culture what it is. The book delves deep into the German Warrior mythos (my term, not Gräf’s) and shows how interconnected this primally violent mythos is with German music, literature, culture, politics, and ideas about beauty, revealing that the brutality of German history and its most wildly beautiful artistic creations are so intertwined that it becomes impossible, or at least willfully naive, to think of one without the other.

The poems in Tussi Research explore these and related issues with fascinating indirectness. The poems are often elliptical, working by hints and suggestions, giving the feeling that something, as likely horrific as not, is happening just off to the side of what the poem is detailing. Then, frequently enough, the ellipsis suddenly emerges into a more direct brutality: “crown of thorns in scalp skin,/ martial eavesdropping of hammer/ blows in front of fainting:/listeners to his shattering bones” (45-46). These particular lines are by no means the most blunt moments in the book. Some of the most revolting ones highlight the fact that the brutality being describing is also part of a long history of male violence towards women.

The bluntness (and occasionally more comic shocks, like “the old/ God with a naked/ ass”(25)) inevitably comes along to disrupt the intense beauty that certain lines, with their lyrical energy, precision, and symbolic resonance, offer at moments: “autumn is over; green/wild parrots around last/leaves of the tree by the city/ woods. Warmer,/ now. More and more/ those who were killed/ dissolve, we walk on/ them, toward elsewhere, lighter,/ for meaning in the massacre/ of the eldest” (115). Many similar pastoral locations and images are also revealed as sites whose current beauty overlays some past incident of nearly unspeakable violence. Gräf’s poems frequently juxtapose the intensity of two types of physicality, one of surface beauty and another of the violation of that beauty. At a few moments, the drive for that intensity leads to a bit of overreaching: italics are used to emphasize the lyric power of words that already have enough power not to need further highlighting, with the result that the italics become unnecessary.

A lot of specific historical moments and figures are being referenced in Tussi Research, but the poems rarely let on as to exactly what those are. That’s probably one of the reasons that the book contains at its end a thirty-page glossary that provides more direct information about the people, histories, and mythologies being referenced. I read the poems the first time through without looking at the glossary and found the imagery powerful and mysterious and the rhythms complexly jagged. When I read the glossary and looked back at the poems, that dispelled their mysteries somewhat, although never entirely, mainly because Gräf’s glossary entries are often as poetic, and sometimes as elliptical, as the poems.

There may be a tendency in critical thinking about contemporary poetry to separate a materialist poetics from mythopoetics, a split in which the materialist approach considers mythopoetics too involved in flights of fancy, while mythopoetics disdains the too literal nature of the historical materialist. Whether I’m overstating the existence of that split or not, Tussi Research is fascinating also because of the way it breaks down the difference, showing readers how much historical conditions remain a function of cultural mythologies, just as those mythologies are bound to, and exposed by, the historical conditions that they are more than partly responsible for creating. If Tussi Research explores conditions too brutal to claim that reading this book will be pleasant, the poems here are ones that for that reason, and for the beauty and power they manage nonetheless, are not at all easy to forget.

Merry Christmas Office Party

2011-12-23T08:39:00.000-08:00

As it turns out, I’ve written several pieces about Christmas, the most recent of which is part of my long poem The End of America. I don’t quite have a whole Christmas collection yet, but who knows? Maybe at some point I will.

Here’s one of the earlier ones, which appeared in my book Haze from Edge Books. Otherwise, I’ll just wish you the best for the Holiday Season. I hope that Christmas brings you everything it’s designed to bring you, and that the new year of 2012 turns out to be a new year.

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Perhaps nothing produces more exactly the subtle horror of current social relations than the office Christmas party. There are far worse nightmares, undoubtedly. Yet the never quite located, permeating sickness of the office party is the perfect expression of developed alienation for three reasons. One, everyone there appears as though they are there to see each other, when really they are there to protect their tenuous economic circumstances. Two, it's a party and supposed to be fun, while fun is precisely what it is not about, indeed while anyone seeking fun could more likely find it anywhere else, literally. Three, in its apparently voluntary, benevolent largesse, it appears to make people welcome and to feel like they belong, while it displays exactly that to which no one is welcome, namely, a voluntary gathering of like-minded others who work together simply because they prefer to do so.

Thus it displays its alienation through the fact that no one can state openly why they are there. And this is true even for those who believe they are, who in fact are, having fun.

For all these reasons, people who avoid office Christmas parties are only avoiding their feelings. They don't wish to know, to experience directly, and deludedly believe that avoiding the truth will make it not so. I myself go to every office Christmas party to which I am invited, arriving early and staying late, chatting, eating, and drinking, until the sickness congratulates my entire body, until each toast I have made can be faithfully dedicated to its exact opposite.

Insert Blanc Press Benefit & Holiday Party: Los Angeles, Saturday Dec 17

2011-12-13T13:47:00.000-08:00

I'm really looking forward to participating in this great reading and party in Los Angeles this Saturday night. Take a look at this amazing lineup. If you're anywhere nearby, I hope you'll join us.

Insert Blanc Press Benefit & Holiday Party
Saturday December 17 from 6-12pm
Weekend Gallery
4634 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Donation at the door of $10 or more

Insert Blanc editor Mathew Timmons says:

$10.00 or more donation at the door (all donations will help cover expenses for Insert Blanc Press future and current projects and operations). Additionally, throughout the month of December Insert Blanc Press will run various tempting discounts on the whole catalog of books, all of which will also be available at the Holiday Party—many authors will be on-hand to sign copies of their books.

Artists & Writers performing at the Insert Press Benefit & Holiday Party include: Harold Abramowitz, Amanda Ackerman, Brian Ang, Allison Carter, Brian Joseph Davis, Robin Dicker, Kate Durbin, K. Lorraine Graham, Daniel Hockenson, Jen Hofer, Garrick Hogg, Gabriel Loiderman, js makkos, Max Mayer, Joseph Mosconi, Adam Overton, Christopher Russell, Ara Shirinyan, Brian Kim Stefans, Mark Wallace, and our special guests Dodie Bellamy, David Buuck & Kevin Killian.

Insert Blanc Press has published and promoted the work of over 60 artists and writers since it's humble beginnings in 2005. The PARROT series alone will publish the work of 23 writers over the course of its run and features the design work of the brilliant printer Margaret Lomeli. Blanc Press has recently published the enigmatic project (!x==[33]) Book 1 Volume 1 by .UNFO and has garnered attention by publishing the three volume series Tragodía by Vanessa Place.

Over the course of December I hope to raise $5,000 for Insert Blanc Press in sales and donations to fund printing and press operations in 2012. I hope to raise $2000 of the goal at the party on Saturday December 17. $2000 will go principally to funding the printing of the remainder of the PARROT series, which, if that goal is met, I hope to have out by summer 2012. An additional $1500 will go to moving all of Blanc Press' publications to a new printer and distributor which will give us international distribution and access to sites like Amazon and actually lower the price of the books. Any additional money raised to meet our total goal of $5,000 will go towards publishing new projects in 2012, including Bruna Mori's Poetry for Corporations, Kate Durbin's E! Entertainment Diamond Edition, Joseph Mosconi's GRRR ARRRGH as well as a forthcoming project by Christopher Russell and many other projects I just can't tell you about quite yet.

Whether or not you can make it to the party, donations can be made to Insert Blanc Press anytime at the following link https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=XSKLUVBA2AFU4

Past and current Insert Blanc Press artists include: Harold Abramowitz, Amanda Ackerman, Will Alexander, Brian Ang, Stan Apps, Janine Armin, Gary Barwin, Guy Bennett, Gregory Betts, Amaranth Borsuk, Franklin Bruno, Amina Cain, Allison Carter, Teresa Carmody, Marcus Civin, Ginny Cook, Dorit Cypis, Brian Joseph Davis, Katie Degentesh, Michelle Detorie, Robin Dicker, Sandy Ding, Kate Durbin, Bradney Evans, Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, K. Lorraine Graham, Nicholas Grider, Daniel Hockenson, Jen Hofer, Gabriella Juaregui, Maxi Kim, Janice Lee, Margaret Lomeli, Michael Magee, Joseph Makkos, Donato Mancini, Elana Mann, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, William Moor, Bruna Mori, Joseph Mosconi, Jeffrey Joe Nelson, Julie Orser, adam overton, Vanessa Place, Amar Ravva, Dan Richert, Stephanie Rioux, Christopher Russell, Kim Schoen, Ara Shirinyan, Rod Smith, Michael Smoler, Brian Stefans, Stephanie Taylor, Jason Underhill, Mark Wallace, Christine Wertheim, and Allyssa Wolf.

Currently on view at Weekend Gallery: Jay Erker - This Is So Much Better - Erker's work often manipulates subjects from readily available popular imagery which, in a simple and personal way, investigates the notion of identity in public space, hierarchies of dissemination, and the desire for meaning in contemporary life.

Full schedule for the evening ...

6:30-7:05
Brian Joseph Davis
Robin Dicker
Jen Hofer
js makkos
K. Lorraine Graham
Mark Wallace
Amanda Ackerman

7:30-8:05
Daniel Hockenson
Brian Kim Stefans
Allison Carter
Joseph Mosconi
Ara Shirinyan
Harold Abramowitz

8:30-9
Adam Overton
Christopher Russell
Brian Ang
Kate Durbin

9:30-10
Dodie Bellamy
David Buuck
Kevin Killian with the three piece band Garrick Hogg, Gabriel Loiderman and Max Mayer

Part Two: "Landscape as Activity in The End of America Poems"

2011-12-08T11:24:00.000-08:00

"Landscape as Activity in The End of America Poems"

Part Two

(Part One can be found here)

I can’t call it a “happy accident” that in my long multi-poem project The End of America, which I have been writing on and off since January 2006, the focal point of my exploration of how to work with description and character has been the San Diego area and the larger histories of U.S., Pacific Rim, and globalist culture and economics, a history which San Diego is neither clearly inside and dominated by or outside and controlling. Before taking a job at Cal State San Marcos in 2005, I had no intention of writing anything about the San Diego region, nor did I begin the project energetically or enthusiastically. The End of America is an attempt to process where I am geographically, and to process what I might do in relation to where I am, in a way that comes from finding myself in circumstances that didn’t result from any consciously literary goals.

The word “process” is crucial. I’m not attempting in The End of America to understand, in some clear way, materialist or otherwise, where I am, much less to explain where I am, and definitely not to formulate an argument based on using the place where I am as background data source for making the argument. Nor is this essay the place where I will explain how the interaction between environment and subject works throughout the poem, or what that interaction ultimately means.

Instead, in The End of America, the meaning of any given poem is the interaction, and can be traced only through the poem, whose insights already move ahead of, or at least differ from, any explanation I might make. I’m not saying that I make no arguments or claims in the poems, or take no positions, but rather that such possibilities are part of the interactions of the poem and not its goal. Nor am I saying that because arriving at a political statement is not the goal, the poem is not political. Instead, the political perspectives of the various poems are embedded in the interactions, are part of the mesh of experience which any given poem moves through. Politics appears as an essential and unavoidable part of life, but not as the reason for or the goal of living.

There are of course many precedents for my attempt to find different ways to write about the social geography of San Diego—“social geography” being the phrase that to me best includes issues of natural landscape, human-created landscapes (rural, urban, and suburban, and all other contexts in which humans shape the environment), and the political, cultural, environmental, and psychological goals and effects of human interaction with the physical world. Lisa Robertson’s work on soft architecture or her book “The Weather” are obvious examples, as are the social and linguistic landscapes in Ron Silliman’s poems. But I’m also motivated, perhaps surprisingly, by work like Flaubert’s, which shows human consciousness as always structured, and responding to, the social environment of which it is a part.

In none of these precedents do I find ideas about sociology, psychology, or natural environment operating in the same ways as in The End of America, since my interest lies in seeing how those ideas play out in particular poems, in a particular context (none of the above writers have anything detailed to say about San Diego), in a way that no prior work or set of theories could account for in advance. I think of literature as precisely the way to explore the ongoing interactions of all these possibilities, often on a momentary basis.

Instead of landscape as background, or as staged set of pre-determined human meaning, or even as character (when a conflict is about “man vs. the natural environment”), it seems to me that landscape, like character, is a shifting group of possibilities (some damaging, but not all) changed by its relationship to other groups of possibilities.

When thought of that way, one thing becomes clear: whatever partial perceptions I have of it, I don’t know all of what landscape is in any specific instance, any more than I can know all of what character is.

Natural landscapes, human landscapes, their interaction, intellectual and artistic insight floating through my brain in and around the shrill manipulative distortions of mass media mental bombardment, stories and counterstories of borders, nations, and cultures, a distant yell in the sunset, the padding of a dog, the shrill whistle of nearby juvenile hawks who haven’t yet learned the silence of their parents. All these, and many more, different at any moment, become part of the environment I find myself encountering.

End of Part Two

“Landscape as Activity in The End of America Poems”

2011-12-01T08:39:00.000-08:00

Here, in several parts, is the talk I gave at the And Now Literary Festival at the University of California, San Diego, on October 13, 2011.

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“Landscape as Activity in The End of America Poems”

Part One

The conventional narrative assumption about landscape: events happen on it. Landscape, surroundings, environment, milieu–interactions and differences between these terms included—become both background to the foregrounded action and the frame inside which differences between characters play out. Fiction, and poetry with elements of narrative, differ little here: Description of landscape comes first, or at least early, and comes up again, at well-timed intervals, to fill in around the action. Description doesn’t merely set the stage on which the action will occur. Descriptive language is the stage itself.

Given the human ability to assign meaning (or, say, the human determination to impose meaning on whatever exists, human-created or otherwise), frequently it turns out that descriptions of landscape are not only frames on which meaning takes place, but meaningful frames that determine the significance of whatever happens on them.

In much of western culture’s pastoral literature, description creates a rural, natural, supposedly timeless source of virtue in which humans find solace and steadfast grounding among the flux and chaos of human societies with all their circulations and interactions and cage-like enclosures, a flux and chaos which becomes the essence of the urban landscape (the urban stage). While characters are supposedly the crux of the action, in fact in the pastoral and its permutations, the primary struggle often occurs between the rural and urban stages themselves, with the characters becoming examples (if sometimes nuanced ones) of those stages.

Or consider the post-apocalyptic landscape: that stage on which human life has come close to destroying itself because of its power, corruption and contradictions, a stage on which all social contracts have been demolished and people are attempting to re-create them or exploit their absence. Oddly enough, the post-apocalyptic is still pastoral in its implications, though post-social rather than pre-, with the natural world polluted by layers of human-created (urban-created) debris.

While pastoral narratives might seem to imply that landscape shapes character, it is not landscape in these narratives so much as human assumptions about the meaning of landscape that shapes character. The idea that nature brings virtue, or that urban life breeds corruption and immorality, doesn’t question and explore the effect that landscape might have on character, but assigns that value in advance, limiting itself to playing out the interaction of pre-determined values, though admittedly often with intriguing turns.

Whatever the power of landscape in pastoral narratives and the meaning assigned to it, the action focuses primarily on the characters and their interactions with each other. The landscape, often inert and passive, occasionally disrupting or impeding through thunderstorms or nuclear fallout, remains background to what the key characters do and realize about what they do.

I don’t feel the need to rehearse here a long history of cultural and literary theory, Marxist and much else, that questions the centrality of character and subjectivity over environment and history, and shows how history and cultural and the physical opportunities available in specific geographical environments (the focus for instance of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel) shape people’s behavior, possibilities, thoughts and feelings. Instead I want to ask, what might a work of literature look like if, instead of keeping landscape as background, or pre-determining its value, one thought of both landscape and character/subjectivity as questions and mutual interactions, person-in-flux and landscape-in-flux, that dynamically dissolve, or reassert, or otherwise unsettle distinctions so that there is no stable ground or clear center of action, but only multiple shifting points of contact?

End of Part One

My upcoming readings featuring The Quarry and The Lot

2011-11-08T11:49:00.000-08:00

Hello Friends:

I have several readings coming up soon in Southern California, one in San Diego and one in Los Angeles. If you’re nearby, come on out.

Upcoming Southern California readings for The Quarry and The Lot

In San Diego:
Saturday, November 12, 7 p.m.
D.G. Wills Books
7461 Girard Avenue
La Jolla, CA

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In Los Angeles:
Saturday, November 19, 8 p.m.
The Empty Globe Literary Series
with readings also by Bruna Mori and Adam Novy
At:
Pieter
420 West Avenue 33, Unit 10
Los Angeles, CA
$5 donation
*please park on the street, and not in the lot
The Empty Globe series is curated by Amina Cain

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Bruna Mori is a writer, and educator, preoccupied with peripatetics. Her books include Derivé (Meritage Press), with paintings by Matthew Kinney, and Poetry for Corporations (forthcoming from Insert Press), exploring the unregulated drift of people and commodities through cities. Since moving to La Jolla, she has turned her attention to the suburbs, with photographer George Porcari, in a collaboration titled “Beige.” She also teaches in the writing program at the University of California at San Diego, and writes for a nonprofit design and media firm called Lybba founded by filmmaker Jesse Dylan, dedicated to open-source health advocacy worldwide. She is also Lucien’s mom.

Adam Novy is the author of a novel, The Avian Gospels (Hobart). He lives in Southern California.

Mark Wallace is the author of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he has co-edited two essay collections, Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s, and A Poetics of Criticism. Most recently he has published a novel, The Quarry and The Lot (2011), and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion (2008).

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On The Quarry and The Lot:

Joseph Klein was a brilliant boy, talented—and dangerous. When he dies, at age 32, under uncertain circumstances, a group of his former friends gather for his funeral and see each other for the first time in some years. How did Joseph change them and what does he mean to them? What do they mean to each other, and why have their lives come to be what they are? The Quarry and The Lot is a novel about love and its limits, memory and history. It explores whether any truth can be stable when what’s happening is changed by what people understand and where what passes for normal is something far more frightening.

Mark Wallace's The Quarry and The Lot is a big, complex, tender, angry, haunted charting of how each of us is many strangers, any past many pasts, our biographies always-already written by others. Ultimately, though, for me it's about that bland, dangerous medication called the American suburb--how, once you've had a taste of that stuff, it's almost impossible to kick, even as it turns you into a ghost, or a guerilla, or, sometimes, both at once.
--Lance Olsen, author of Calendar of Regrets and Nietzsche's Kisses

For more details about the book, go to:

http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/news/the-quarry-and-the-lot-by-mark-wallace-34/

Part Three: Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation with Carol Mirakove, Susan Schultz, and Mark Wallace

2011-11-03T11:42:00.000-07:00

Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation with Carol Mirakove, Susan Schultz, and Mark Wallace

Part Three

Click here for Part One or Part Two

HTML Giant posited that a certain small press was turning into a vanity project. I'd like to talk about what a "vanity press" is and is not, and how we value and de-value editorial models. Thoughts: Lots of literary heroes funded or helped fund their works into print, e.g., Gertrude Stein. Can we talk about the widespread stigma on this? What feeds the notion of 'merit' that one might value in having a manuscript selected by a third party? What do we think of the notion that writing be judged 'purely' on the work itself?

SMS: A vanity press publishes whatever it gets. The author pays, and the publisher prints. This is not what BlazeVox was doing. I have had a couple authors contribute toward their Tinfish books, once they were accepted for publication—I did not demand it, but I did not refuse their offers. I have put in some of my resources toward marketing my own books for other presses. Now that I'm feeling very self-conscious about this, I think that Tinfish's policy of not paying anyone, from author to designer to editor, makes us a cooperative. Those authors whose books sell well end up helping to fund the books that don't sell well. I'm comfortable with this, as I am with asking designers to volunteer their time and work. But I can see the point of view that says designers and authors should be paid, or even that the publisher should take some of the money. I have a day job; other publishers do not.

I don't think writing should be judged only for itself. I publish books that I think are in conversation with each other and with the larger world (whether or not that world reads them) on issues from poetic form, language use, cultural politics, and much else. I publish books that I think will work in my classroom, books from Hawai`i or with something to offer us here. I strongly believe that publishers should be making an argument with the work they publish. That de-emphasizes the single volume, and ups the ante on the catalogue as the art/cultural form. I blogged about this question here: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2009/03/reading-small-press-as-argument-not.html

I believe in merit; I believe that when I publish a book of poems, that they are good poems. But what means at least as much is the way in which that book fits into a conversation or series of conversations.

MW: Susan’s description of the historical definition of vanity press seems correct to me. But it’s also interesting who, in our current cultural context, can be accused of being a vanity press. The concept of the “vanity press” (and the way in which the term can be used in an unfounded hostile attack) really becomes, in this context, a press that cannot keep silent about its finances because it is weak enough to have financial needs and so can be coerced into making financial confessions because it needs help. And that’s what we’ve seen recently: a significant number of small presses defending their practice by confessing, while more powerful institutions confess nothing.

So why should it be small presses confessing when, for instance, not a single MFA program has had to confess that it never teaches its students anything about the financial realities of contemporary publishing? No matter the reason that those programs don’t: the individuals involved in those programs may not know or care, or don’t realize it’s their job, in part, to be providing that information. But that’s another discussion: my point is that it’s not so easy to coerce them into confession.

None of this is to say that publishers shouldn’t be honest with their authors. It is, instead, to say that the very fact that it’s small press publishers who can be coerced into confession is a result of a system of exchange in which the more power and money you have, the less you have to tell anybody anything about it.

What can we do about it being so hard to publish books (books that everyone loves and needs)? Can we imagine more sustainable models?

SMS: We do what we can. There is no model that works perfectly, whether it's based on contests or donations or author assistance or collectives (which also fund books that sell and books that do not). We need more reviewers, more readings, more virtual connections. And we need to destigmatize (again) the kind of work that offered us models in the first place, the cheap and dirty mimeograph or xerox. It's the work that counts, ultimately. I'd rather use the language of “getting the work out” and “sharing work” and “building community” than of “marketing” and “selling,” but in some sense I feel uncomfortable with--even as I troll university websites late at night looking for professors who might like Tinfish's work--they may boil down to the same thing.

MW: I think it’s not that bad an era to be a small press publisher or to be running a literary magazine. Sure, putting out books is time-consuming and somewhat costly, but there do seem to be many ways of doing such things, more than before, and not all of them are tremendously expensive. The growing number of print-on-demand options and online literary journals of significant quality shows that people on the lower end of the financial power scale can continue to do a lot for literature. In fact I’m tempted to say that the small press world does more than ever to help worthwhile writing reach anybody who’s willing to look for it.

SMS: After re-reading this conversation, Mark, I'm fascinated by how many times you used the verb “to confess.” Small-press publishers “confessing” their finances, MFA programs not “confessing.” Why this theologically loaded word?

MW: I used it because I believe that the recent controversy about small press practices has been mired, from the first, in a discourse of accusation, guilt, sin, confession and (I suppose) possible redemption. Not that it was about religion, or that many of the people involved are invested in religious belief (although some may be), but since the issue is one of belief as much as practicality, a drama of belief has been being staged. It has been many years since I wrote my essay “On Genre As Conversion Experience,” which talked about the ways contemporary writerly discussions of genre remain more invested in the dynamics of religious discourse than many writers realize, as opposed to the supposedly religion-free discourse of community or intellectual field etc. And I think that’s often still what we have. Of course, having said that, it might seem that I would be suggesting that we rid ourselves of that anti-rational and anti-community claptrap and start getting our materialist business together more straightforwardly, but actually I think that the idea that we could do such a thing often just becomes a liberal fantasy that people should all be able to talk to each other despite our lack of shared values. Which brings me back to where I came in to this conversation, so let me just end by saying that there are few things I myself love more than a friendly, energetic exchange of ideas.

CM: I agree. Thank you both for your generous thoughts and for your tremendous contributions to poetry.

Part Two: Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation with Carol Mirakove, Susan Schultz, and Mark Wallace

2011-10-26T13:34:00.000-07:00

Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation with Carol Mirakove, Susan Schultz, and Mark Wallace

Part Two

(Part One can be found here).

There has been some debate around the expectation that small presses should abide by rules and guidelines versus small-press publishing being fueled by a gift economy and donations. What kinds of transparency does a publisher owe to their readers and authors in terms of submission guidelines and publishing expectations?

SMS: I think we're caught between two models right now. The old model was self-publishing and micro-press publishing. That's where Tinfish started, publishing chaps of 100 copies and a very short run journal that was xeroxed. But we rather quickly became a “real publisher,” meaning that our books cost more to produce and came out in larger runs. The production values went way up. So there was more need for resources. It's very easy to get big fast, because there are so many worthy manuscripts floating around out there. And I have no objection to presses that publish a lot—Salt and BlazeVox come to mind. That doesn't mean they aren't publishing good books or that they don't care about what happens to their product. They are working with possibility, which is a finer thing than prose . . . While I would never publish as many books as they do, I applaud them for their efforts. And, if a publisher tries to live off of his or her work, why not? It may seem “suicidal,” as someone wrote on an fb page, but so much more gratifying than many other jobs with steady incomes.

If a press asks for money from its authors, something I have no problem with, I do think they should be up front about it. Otherwise, I don't think authors need to know the details, except perhaps to realize that the work of publishing involves a lot of resources by someone(s) else—editing, designing, printing, distributing, marketing, and so on. Some of the nastiness of the recent discussions revolved around a fundamental misunderstanding of the work and resources involved. My students sometimes tell me that they are going to make money with their poems. One class accused me of not taking them seriously when I laughed at this notion. We need to disabuse others of the notion that seriousness = money-making, while letting them know that it takes money to put out a product. Our most recent Tinfish book cost us over $2,000 to print (600 copies) and I bought advertising cards and sent out review copies. The book could have been less gorgeous, but we made our choices—it could also have been more gorgeous and a lot more expensive to make.

It's also a good idea, as Craig Santos Perez and others argue, for authors to work harder to promote their own work, and work that they think is important. The problem there is that the fine line between disseminating important information and sounding like someone selling refrigerators (though my local Sears salesman was a former student!), is easily crossed. Keep the emphasis on the work, is my advice. Then make sure people know about it.

CM: Thank you for breaking that down.

MW: The question of the transparency that publishers owe to readers and authors is an important one, and I like Susan’s answer. But is there any reason that the focus of transparency, even in this conversation, should be on publishers alone? Should there be transparency (and is there any?) in Creative Writing MFA programs? What about in education institutions more broadly? Or in the work of political organizations and corporations? The fact is, in all those larger social institutions, there’s little and sometimes no transparency. That lack of transparency serves the interests of those with most access to money and most power.

In the case that led to this discussion, a lot of the expressed frustration with small press publishers, and the expressed frustration about that frustration, comes from a context of massive lack of transparency and honesty in multiple institutions, and not just in relationship to literature. And while many small press publishers, Tinfish and Bloof and others, have been lately explaining and confessing the details of their practices, corporations fuel their power over public life by deploying much larger resources under legal cover and never have to mention it.

CM: Mark, you offer good points in helping us to get out of a myopic framework. At the same time, we don’t interact with small-press publishers on the same terms of MFA programs or corporations. I believe this merits a distinct (and useful) thread. The question I asked around transparency was specifically between a writer who might become a press author and the press. This is a different dimension than those in the relationships you bring up, e.g., I may get my MFA certificate based on the criteria spelled out in the application process, but the meaning of the MFA may not match the implied promise of the degree.

That said, I think one of the best parts of operating in the small-press publishing world is that a sketchy or shady corporate framework is not the standard. There are several people working hard to demand that corporations be more transparent, and I don’t think there’s anyone arguing that there should be low-transparency on any corporate or institutional agreements, so I don’t think it’s true that we’re asking more of publishers more than we are of more powerful institutions, even though the fact that we are often more successful in having reciprocal conversations with publishers makes it seem as though they are subject to more critical scrutiny.

MW: I appreciate you trying to focus the discussion more specifically. Your points have also helped locate for me one of the things I find myself concerned about in this conversation. We’ve put the focus on what writers might ask of and need from publishers, but I’m not sure we can ask that question fairly without also asking what publishers might ask of or need from writers. I think part of the reason that there was recent controversy was an assumption by too many writers that publishers are more or less just a writer service industry, doing the janitorial work of creating a nice clean place for writers to put themselves center stage. I’m not saying anybody thinks this consciously, but that’s often in effect what happens. It’s too easy for writers to think of small press publishers just as people serving to advance a writer’s career, instead of as people who are often writers themselves and who are also working collaboratively to put forward the interests of an interconnected group of people.

SMS: So the new model is “real publishing.” And there's a need for it, because MFA grads and others need jobs. To get a job teaching you need to have published. And you need “real” books, not chaps, journal publications. No quarrel there. The quarrel comes in when the relationship between author and publisher becomes one of producer and—how to put this?--hired but unpaid help. This model is much less personal, much more capitalistic, and much less equitable. Another danger with this second model is that it makes publishing less a visionary enterprise than a business. (Not that businesses can't be visionary, but I would rather use another metaphor for small press publishing, something that describes an enterprise between business and gift economy.) Tinfish Press has been lucky that our vision has—in some instances, if not in many others—proved marketable, especially for classroom use. “Experimental poetry from the Pacific” has been rare, until recently. We helped create a market for it, and the texts with which to teach it. Several of our books have sold in the thousands. They help to pay for those that sell in the hundreds, or in the tens.

The discussion reminds me, in odd and mostly unparallel ways, of conversations in the adoption world. We're talking about a practice (adoption, small press publishing) that has a value (spiritual, familial, aesthetic) apart from the monetary, but which inevitably enters the marketplace. Then the question becomes, to what extent does our pure ethics inevitably get muddied by realities? And how can we act ethically, even after acknowledging our lack of purity?

CM: Susan, you ask a complex question and I appreciate the depth of it. To begin, I believe we can act ethically by making a conscious effort to communicate constructively and with respect for each other. If you think someone is naive, maybe try to remember when you were naive and be a friend, be a neighbor -- if not to an individual, at least to the art.

If your goal is truly to have another poet shut up and sit down, I want to ask about the violence of that reaction.

Mark, I am glad you bring up that publishers might ask things of authors; it may be the question at the crux of this upset. I, personally, believe completely in cooperation. But, I continue to feel that disclosing the terms of cooperation after a manuscript has been accepted is not a good model, and I don't believe that mode is likely to yield positive relationships. Maybe I am proposing an undue burden on the publisher to have figured out what is needed from authors -- I do appreciate that a lot of publishing labor is already invisible and thankless -- but there is right now an opportunity for presses to consider publishing terms, and if they are stated up front then we might avoid vitriolic controversy.

(End of Part Two)

Third and final part coming next week.

Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation (Part One)

2011-10-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation with Carol Mirakove, Susan Schultz, and Mark Wallace

Part One

Following a recent controversy in the small-press publishing community, I reached out to Mark Wallace and asked if we might have a broad discussion on the issues and hand towards potentially avoiding an ugly repeat. I knew Mark and I did not totally agree, which is why I reached out to him. We also looped in Susan M. Schultz, editor and publisher of Tinfish since 1995. -- Carol Mirakove

Susan M. Schultz: Thanks for asking me to speak to the issue. I blogged about the particular controversy when it first hit the airwaves, here: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-blazevox-and-other-publishing.html. I read blog and facebook posts by Johannes Gorensson, Craig Santos Perez, Amy King, Reb Livingston, Matvei Yankelevich, Shanna Compton, and probably others, as well as many of the threads written about the controversy. But of course there's much more to it than whether or not one press asks its authors for contributions toward the publication of their books.

CM: Absolutely, but a point of clarification was not whether or not a press asks authors for contributions but how and when.

How do we distinguish critical discussion from destructive attacks? Name-calling seems to always reflect far more poorly on the insulter than the target. Why does this happen in our community? How can we criticize practices constructively, without personal wars being waged?

SMS: I've worked in an English department for over 20 years now, and if I knew the answer to that question, I'd be a lot happier there. We could create a forum to discuss these issues and put out a list of rules and regulations, beginning from “no name calling” and continuing with “keep it civil,” but I don't know that that works either. Such discussions happen rather organically (good to remember that many poisons are also organic). Part of the problem is that, name-calling aside, we all take our own and others' practices very personally, indeed.

CM: You make excellent points -- we certainly don't want to regulate speech. But, it seems to me that we take some others' practices very seriously, notably others we know, and other others' practices and positions are met with hostility.

SMS: Even apart from overtly personal attacks, every conversation about contests, prizes, subscriptions, funding drives, how many books we publish in a year, and so on, is implicitly personal. One of the uncomfortable values of this discussion is getting out in the open just how vested we are in some practices, and how hostile we are to others. I'd rather see us moralize less and encourage each other more. Or make the rhetorical point that we do not like certain practices, but do not condemn others for using them. Tinfish does not have contests, for example, because I find them an odd mix of revenue enhancement and the promise of cultural capital, but I know full well why many presses run them. Cash flow.

Mark Wallace: Distinguishing critical discussion from destructive attacks seems easy enough. The focus should remain on the ideas in question, not the personalities or behavior of the people expressing the ideas. It’s a matter of tone too. Hostility or dismissiveness, even when focused on an idea, quickly moves into the personal, since the more one’s tone highlights emotion, the more people become emotional in response to it.

Still, to say that it’s easy enough, in general, to distinguish between the two, doesn’t change the fact that in practice, there are many murky situations in which the boundaries get blurry, especially since, as Susan says, people take their ideas seriously. We can’t help but have an emotional relation to them.

The Enlightenment, of course, invented most of our contemporary ideas about the value of dispassionate, rational discussion. But the very belief in it brought in whole new waves of irrationality, not just in all the ways that people continued not to behave rationally, but also in the ways that many notions of Enlightenment rationality were nothing more than new ways of being irrational.

I’ve always appreciated what Dostoevsky said relative to the Enlightenment (if you’ll excuse but also note the way it’s gendered): “Men are so necessarily mad that imagining them sane must be another form of madness.”

I’m not sure much can be done to change the nature of public discussion. People come from so many backgrounds and ways of understanding words that standards for discussion vary from context to context. Professional and intellectual and literary discourses do have defined social standards, no matter how fuzzily followed, but it shouldn’t be surprising that not everyone has absorbed or respects them.

Public language has always involved murderous hostility. Right now, we’re in a moment when the unfounded hostile accusation has tremendous power in U.S. politics and culture, as just one for instance (I don’t say “more power than ever” because I don’t think that’s true). Hostile lies and accusations, if there’s enough power behind them, can force individuals and groups to spend most of their time defending themselves regarding things they didn’t even do, and explaining and even confessing the things they actually do. In fact, this current discussion of publisher’s financial practices is happening mainly because of the power of such accusations.

I don’t believe, by the way, that there’s any such thing as “our community” of writers. Sure, those of us who have been writers for a long time are likely to have some (many, in my case) trusted, respected, and loved comrades, but even the small world of experimental/alternative etc etc etc poetry and poetics features a constantly changing list of active participants. Look at the names of who is publishing in any literary magazine that you like now as compared to 20, 10, or even 5 years ago, and you’ll see how fast the participants change. None of us know more than a portion of those people, and it’s an open question about how well we get along even with those we do know. Certainly our feelings of community towards and with others are real, but I don’t think that there’s any stable entity there that belongs to any of us. Community is established through ongoing interaction and is always fragile. It can’t be relied on too much.

That said, I do think individuals and groups can and do influence the nature of public conversation in limited contexts. I’ve long been interested in fostering friendly but open intellectual discussion among the people around me, and I think I do it well, and I’m hardly the only one who does it. Still, hostile or irrelevant commentary can’t be avoided entirely even in the best conditions.

CM: Mark, you foster open discussion exceptionally well, which is one of the reasons I approached you about having a discussion amidst a very heated debate.

You reveal that the two of us have defined community differently, and while multiple definitions are “correct,” you explain that community is established through ongoing interaction where I imply earlier that it is defined by a common interest, in this case an interest in small-press poetry.

However community is defined, my concern with the hostility of late is this: the way we treat individuals in our microcosms, especially in the microcosms we choose (e.g., small-press poetry), informs the way we act in the world at large. If we aspire to a global respect and peace then we have a golden opportunity to hone those practices amongst our friends, and friends of friends, and strangers who share interests in things about which we are most ardent.

SMS (interrupting): I'd suggest that we stop trying to define what community is, and simply act as if we are members of a community. Enact community rather than sit back and try to figure out who's in and who's out.

MW: With apologies for being contrary and insistent, Susan, I don’t quite agree with that approach. I think we often need to act as if the people we’re dealing with in the world of poetry are strangers—which, much of the time, they are, at least to some degree. I think we need more awareness of the fact that other people, even if they’re poets, don’t share our values or assumptions. Precisely one of the reasons that this issue became controversial recently was that a lot of people discovered that they didn’t understand each other, which came to them as a surprise because they had assumed a lot of mutual agreement. Many people involved assumed that they knew what a poetry press was… except, as it turned out, they didn’t share the same assumptions at all.

Our responses to people in the world of poetry would probably change if we went in with the recognition that community can’t be taken for granted or assumed. Like any relationship, it has to be worked out. Speaking just for myself maybe, even with my close friends I’ve often become most frustrated when I assume, in advance and unintentionally, that because they’re my friends, we agree about things and understand each other. As it turns out, we often don’t.

I would have no problem with calling such interactions instances of community, I suppose, if we described “community” as a group of individuals interacting because of a shared interest even when they might not have much otherwise in common.

(End of Part One)

San Diego’s Social Geography in Innovative Literary Aesthetics

2011-10-13T06:47:00.000-07:00

If you're in or near the San Diego Area, I hope you'll head out and join us at the &Now Literary Festival on the UC San Diego campus, from Thursday October 13 to Saturday October 15.

Here's the panel I will be part of, along with a great group of other writers, and I'd love to see you there.

San Diego’s Social Geography in Innovative Literary Aesthetics

featuring talks, readings, or performances by:

K. Lorraine Graham, Bruna Mori, Jeanine Webb, Mark Wallace
Thursday, Oct 13
11:30 a.m. to 12: 50 p.m.

&Now Literary Festival
on the University of California San Diego campus
DeCerteau Room
Literature Bldg.

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Original full text of the panel proposal:

"The Aleph?' I repeated.

"Yes, the only place on earth where all places are-seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending" (10-11)

…"Then I saw the Aleph…. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass?" (12-13)

-Jorge Luis Borges, "The Aleph"

This panel will highlight innovative literary approaches that engage with the social geographies of San Diego. Los Angeles is often the social, critical and artistic space in which writers explore literary geographies. In "Taking Los Angeles Apart: Towards a Postmodern Geography," Edward W. Soja asks, "What is this place? Even knowing where to focus, to find a starting point, is not easy, for, perhaps more than any other place, Los Angeles is everywhere" (222). While Los Angeles might be everywhere, San Diego often seems like the nowhere which desires but has never developed the cultural projection and ideological reach of Los Angeles. Yet because of this, the social geography of San Diego is a fruitful space in which to explore how American spacial and temporal fantasies about play out.

We take the phrase "social geography" to include issues of natural landscape, human created landscapes (rural, suburban, and urban, and all other ways in which humans shape the environment), and the political, cultural, and psychological goals and effects of human interaction with the physical world. By positioning textual worlds as spaces which exist in creative tension with the material spaces in which readers and writers live and move, engagement with social geography can extend conventional understandings of literary art's social consequence.

Borges noted that language and description tend to be linear and sequential. However, attention to social geography allows us to envisage and describe the simultaneity inherent in all landscapes. This discontinuity both separates and links time (history) and space (geography). In Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Soja notes, "Prophesy now involves a geographical rather than historical projection; it is space not time that hides consequences from us" (22). The spaces of San Diego are particularly adept at hiding consequences.

While the methods of describing landscape and environment in conventional poetry and fiction are well known, how do writers working with more innovative literary structures approach the problem of describing, or otherwise engaging with, social geography-especially in the spaces of San Diego which are so adept at hiding consequences?

Lyn Hejinian's phrase, "We are parting from description," articulates how some innovative literary approaches of the past twenty years have been resistant to the idea of referential social realism in description. Yet many innovative writers in recent years have been considering non-conventional ways of engaging with specific social geographies. Bhanu Khapil's Humananimal and Allison Cobb's Green-Wood, for example, consider how ideology is embedded into social-geographical forms that are commonly understood to be "natural" or transparently factual. As opposed to more conventional notions of writerly description as removed, unbiased, objective, and totalizing, these more experimental approaches engage with social geography in ways that are fragmentary, partial, ruptured, oblique, subjective, or layered, while recognizing that any form of description intervenes in and shapes the environment it engages rather than standing impartially outside it.

The fact that UCSD is hosting the 2011 And Now Festival makes the 2011 festival a perfect occasion for highlighting recent work that has engaged specifically with the social geography of the San Diego region and Southern California more broadly. San Diego has never been a significant center of literary activity in the U.S., and even to the present day, investigations of the San Diego region in literature remain relatively rare. At the same time, the social geography of San Diego is a complex, troubled one. Urban and suburban expansion, border culture and politics interact with fragile local ecosystems in a way that leads to a variety of unique social and ecological problems, but problems that are also indicative of larger global changes.

In keeping with its focus on the innovative, the panel is open-ended in terms of genre. Participants may give readings of their poetry or fiction, or present a brief paper, or work in a genre that mixes "creative" and "critical" elements.

Details about the participants:

K. Lorraine Graham is the author of Terminal Humming, (Edge Books), and her visual work has appeared in the Zaoem International Poetry Exhibition at the Minardschouwburg, Gent, Belgium, and the Infusoria visual poetry exhibition in Brussels. She has a BA in East Asian Studies and Chinese from George Washington University, an MA in English from Georgetown, and is currently a second-year student in the writing MFA program at UCSD. Her artistic and research interests include performance and embodiment, hybrid genres, poetry as pedagogy, and multilingual texts. She is at work on an obsessively-cited, partially-collaged text called White Girl, and Ostrich Play, a performance text in two forms.

Bruna Mori is a writer and educator, preoccupied with peripatetics and process-obsessed. Her books include Dérive (Meritage Press), with paintings by Mathew Kinney, and Poetry for Corporations (forthcoming from Insert Press), as well as the chapbooks Tergiversation (Ahadada Books) and The Approximations (Second Avenue Poetry). She relocated to San Diego over a year ago, where she has taught in the writing programs at the University of California at San Diego, Woodbury University's School of Architecture, and New School of Architecture + Design. She also writes for design + research firms and on behalf of cities, and is Lucien's mom.

Jeanine Webb's work has appeared in many journals, including the West Wind Review, ZYZZYVA, The Antioch Review, the San Diego Writers' 2010 anthology A Year in Ink, and is forthcoming in Lana Turner. She is one author, with Brian Ang, Joseph Atkins and Tiffany Denman, of the poetry pamphlet Poetry is not Enough. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing at UC Davis, where she taught a workshop in Making Poems. She is currently working to assemble a collaborative Durutti Free Skool for radical poetics in San Diego for spring 2011.

Mark Wallace is the author of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he has co-edited two essay collections, Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s, and A Poetics of Criticism. Most recently he has published a novel, The Quarry and The Lot (2011), and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion (2008). He teaches at California State University San Marcos.

&Now Literary Festival 2011: Tomorrowland Forever, at UC San Diego Oct 13-15

2011-10-09T14:46:00.000-07:00

The complete program for the &Now Literary Festival in San Diego is now available here. An event like this doesn't happen often in San Diego, and is not to be missed.

Area college students should bring their I.D. and can attend the conference free of charge.

&Now Festival of New Writing: Tomorrowland Forever!

OCT. 13 – 15, 2011 @ UCSD

&NOW is a festival of fiction, poetry, and staged play readings; literary rituals, performance pieces (digital, sound, and otherwise), electronic and multimedia projects; and intergenre literary work of all kinds, including criti-fictional presentations and creatively critical papers.

Brief Reviews: Three from Burning Deck (Howard, Dubois, Doppelt)

2011-09-06T08:39:00.000-07:00

The weight of the terror and loss of 20th century European history hovers—nearly unspoken—in the background of the prose poems in Isabelle Baladine Howard’s Secret of Breath (Burning Deck 2008, tr. Eléna Rivera), all of which explore communication, miscommunication, and the limits and end of communication. The pieces are divided between sections in italics and sections not in italics, which seem to sustain a dialogue between them, although no stable identities are maintained by the marked divisions. Instead, the attempt at dialogue constantly breaks down, or open, because of a social landscape of uncertainty and horror: “the earth is plundered and the bodies abandoned./They changed the names of countries,/they no longer even know from what.”

If one senses, in these prose poem dialogues, the lurking presence of more specific details of European history (“here we are at the gaping borders” brings to mind many possibilities; I thought for instance of Walter Benjamin’s suicide at Portbou, but many other implications are possible), those details rarely emerge; this is a book whose power comes from suggestiveness rather than direct treatment. That technique leads to a few lines whose heaviness seems more posture than profound (“the talking of everything and of nothing,” or “The tires scream as though someone were insane with pain”). For the most part though, Secret of Breath is an unsettling book, one providing no clear answers to questions which can never quite be raised.

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The group of serial prose poems that make up Caroline Dubois’ You Are The Business (Burning Deck 2008, tr. Cole Swensen), all revolve in strange circles of displacement around the idea of the double, of split identity. Each of the seven individual prose poem series latches onto a specific set of names/characters around whom to spin their tight, often funny permutations, with some of the names drawn from the history of film.

In one of the serial sets, Simone Simon (the French actress perhaps most famous to American audiences through the evocative Val Lewton horror films The Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People in which she stars) becomes, with her human/jaguar split identity and her neatly split female/male name, a perfect site for a set of twisting reflections on gender identity and more: “Or Simon name of daddy so slightly exceeded because I’m a girl inscribed inside with the silent and so that I Mmm there name of Daddy in my own”

The poems in You Are The Business are tautly constructed, often lasting just long enough to turn in a new direction off the previous poem in a way that makes the serial aspect clear; each poem seems to think again on the one before it. The result, over the course of the book, is a kind of gleefully paranoid hall of mirrors in which viewers, thinking they are watching the spectacle of the world, end up often seeing only their own projected distortions–which, to some extent, is what Dubois suggests makes up the spectacle of the world.

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Suzanne Doppelt’s Ring Rang Wrong (Burning Deck 2006, tr. Cole Swensen) fascinatingly combines visual images with prose poem paragraphs that appear at first to be explanations of, or at least reflections upon, the visual images but turn out to be no such thing. The black and white images, all in rectangular frames, are mainly abstract textures divided into two contrasting halves, though the occasional insect or pair of human hands enters either directly or in distorted silhouette.

But it’s in the prose poem commentary that surrounds these images that Ring Rang Wrong comes most alive. The commentary seems at first to be notes for some kind of explanatory lecture, yet the notes veer off quickly into obviously nonsensical statements that still have a metaphorical, even symbolic, resonance (“The sun is as wide as a man’s foot”), or similar statements that, while seeming ludicrous, are actually quite exact (“To experience imbalance just spin around for awhile and then stop, you get the vertiginous sense that it’s the earth that’s spinning, a rotation—swirl and vertigo”) These statements show, quite often, how a very precise specific can seem almost too weird to be true.

Within the commentary, occasional sections of pun-heavy invented or borderline pre-existing language strings sometimes take over (”Orclôsśorambĺocha” begins the start of one such string, which includes multinational or just plain invented typograhical marks that I can’t recreate, while some of the language seems vaguely French or else unlike anything I can recognize).

The result is a funny, precise, ambiguous set of often dissociated reflections that bear many resonant implications for the surrounding images, while neither explaining or exhausting them. Ring Rang Wrong is a book operating on multiple levels of oddity and precision, and is well worth returning to more than once.

Brief Reviews: Donato Mancini and Benjamin Friedlander

2011-08-23T09:59:00.000-07:00

Donato Mancini’s AEthel is a focused, nuanced, and frequently minimalist book of concrete visual poems that gain power through Mancini’s use of repetition and engaging variation. The visual poems are split into two basic series. One consists of letters constructed from different typographical systems that have been combined, melted together, and stretched in ways that make the original letters usually (though not always) illegible. The other juxtaposes visual images of hands, similarly melted and blended, that at the same time are both clearly hands and yet not-so-clearly different from each other.

The titles of each piece, placed beneath or beside the images, are poems both in themselves and in their resonant, never precisely defined relation to the visual details floating above or alongside them. Each title (such as “Xxtreeme Author-Function,” or “I Think Therefore I Am Not Sure”) intriguingly and often satirically twists and combines phrases, some of which are recognizable in the history of literary and cultural theory, and others of which come from some of the oddities of ordinary daily language.

Both the visual poems and their titles reflect back on and alter each other, as well as the proceeding and following pieces, through these different interactive serial changes. While each piece, on its own, has a unique visual interest, where AEthel most excels is at showing the interconnectedness of language and visual systems and, by implication, the interconnectedness of human bodies that both deploy and are deployed by those systems.

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If it isn’t already, it should be a truism that literature developed through procedures that take language from outside the author’s subjective vocabulary is no less free of the marks of an individual writer’s concerns and obsessions than other kind of literature, though it may distribute those marks in ways different than the poem fundamentally attempting to express a unique subjectivity.

Given that, I was eager to read Benjamin Friedlander’s Citizen Cain, a collection of flarf poetry by a writer who has neither been stuffily dismissive of flarf or whose work has been significantly defined by it. For awhile now, Friedlander has been one of the most inventive contemporary poet-scholar-critics, able to write game-playing critical work that is literature in its own right, while he has also written understated, subtle lyric poems that recall at times the poetry of Robert Creeley and at times a graceful, thought-provoking European lyric influenced by a broad array of poets and philosophers, including Emmanuel Levinas and many more.

Of the Friedlander whose work I have encountered over more than a few years, I was curious to know what echoes would still remain in the context of the crude reveling in the contradictions and incoherence of contemporary Internet speech for which flarf is either reviled or loved. And Citizen Cain didn’t disappoint: although its gleeful vulgarity is not much different from a lot of flarf, there’s a greater range of historical reference, both cultural and literary. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and long historical mistreatment of Jewish people and culture are just as likely to appear in Citizen Cain as “Hugs, Fudge, and 41 Cellphones,” the title of one of the poems here.

Of course, flarf has always been at least partly an investigation, purposely irreverent, haphazard and slapstick, of contemporary cultural conditions, but Friedlander writes flarf that has a larger and more explicit sense of history than most other flarf attempts, although it resembles some of the historical sense of one of the first and still most crucial works of flarf, K. Silem Mohammad’s Deer Head Nation. The opening to the poem “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” among many pieces, makes this larger historical context clear:

The Chinese cantos are about a girl
who lived in the Song dynasty
about a thousand years ago.

The girl was not only poor but crippled. Happily,
there was a Shriners Hospital
in Louisiana

with free orthopedic care.

People who hate flarf on sight will not give a pass to Citizen Cain. Friedlander fully indulges himself in the pigfuck grossout bathroom humor fests that give fans of flarf giggles and enemies conniptions, which the book’s very first poem, “Biological or Social Female Parent of a Child or Offspring and Its Poetry,” hardly allows readers to avoid:

Kangaroo poo eaten by a kitten
made you into a “back-up” turkey,

in case my bird flopped. Mom,
you are simply red-

faced professor made up scary story
about moms and their poo

which, in consequence of Section 3
of this agreement, the turkey baster

can eliminate Eve’s curse with a flush—
and now there’s nothing new to eat!

Whether one finds Citizen Cain tough to read through, or not, depends on one’s ability to enjoy lines of this sort. For the most part, the book doesn’t add much that’s new to the most recognizable aspects of the flarf tone.

Flarf though it is, Citizen Cain is also unquestionably Benjamin Friedlander’s flarf. The book consistently and fascinatingly combines flarfy obsession over the detritus of contemporary culture with a larger contextual exploration of European and global history. Although it’s no doubt consciously ludicrous, Citizen Cain thus takes its place in the history of a writer who has matched tremendous critical and philosophical sophistication with constant undercutting of any too settled way of approaching literature or the world.

The Washington Review (old reviews): Jennifer Moxley and Jacqueline Risset (1997)

2011-08-09T11:52:00.000-07:00

I published many reviews in The Washington Review, the fine D.C. arts and literary magazine that thrived through the 1990s and even, I think, into the early 2000's before finally succumbing. I’m going to reprint occasional reviews from that era on this blog when I have the time, because other than being in the old print issues of TWR, these reviews are probably no longer available. I’ve edited them a bit for style and phrasing, but otherwise want them to reflect the time and place of their writing.

It’s interesting to me how these old reviews show not only the different ways I thought about poetry some time ago, but show also the era of their composition, and the questions about poetics that were abroad and in play at that time.

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Jennifer Moxley
Imagination Verses
Tender Buttons Books
P.O. Box 185
Stuyvesant Station
New York City, NY 10009
90 pgs., $8.95

Jacqueline Risset
The Translation Begins
Burning Deck Press
available through:
Small Press Distribution
1814 San Pablo Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94702
96 pgs., $10.00

In contemporary avant garde poetry circles, very little can cause such extreme disagreement as a discussion about the value of lyric poetry. Is lyric poetry by definition the singing of a solitary voice which takes its own problems to be central? Is lyric poetry based on the idea that the human being is an autonomous, free individual who always has power to choose, and who forms all meaning, a notion that would imply that social power and cultural history play no major roles in who we are? Or are there ways of using lyric that suggest that people are formed as much in the connections between each other as in their solitary wills?

Such questions are very much foregrounded by Jennifer Moxley's excellent first collection of poems, Imagination Verses. When Moxley writes, in her brief preface, that her poems are "written out of a desire to engage the universal lyric 'I,'" readers need to understand that she is not reasserting the idea that lyric poetry consists of a series of isolated individuals singing their own lives. Rather, she is engaging the cultural dilemmas that such a notion reflects and creates. In so doing, Moxley strikes at the heart of the conscious ambiguity that lyric poetry can suggest at its best; that we are both isolated and connected, that we are not simply individual but nonetheless cannot speak for others. In Imagination Verses, Moxley struggles with the problem of how to find a perspective from which to write. Who is she when she writes as "I"? Her poems seem to ask who she is in relation to others, and how a lyric poem can help her understand that.

Perhaps the greatest pleasure of Imagination Verses is the way the ironic ambiguities of these problems reveal themselves in the crafted twists of her lines, as in the opening of the book's first poem, "Home World":

   I will say what the register calls forth,
   the range of the heart
   a journey in the strap of speech,
   unrealized, failing to grapple
   with even the first word,
   or world where I saw humans
   in the shadows of buildings
   unable to speak at all.

Here, the "range of the heart," which might seem a conventional lyric positioning of the individual as central, is ironized by the way the heart can speak only from the "strap of speech," from what "the register calls forth." Rather than speaking simply as herself, the poet can speak only from what the "register" of this speech will allow; by thinking of herself as centered on a metaphor about her "heart," the narrator is aware of how much she is leaving out. She has already assumed something that cannot be assumed, and she knows it. But she still wants to speak from the heart, however much she is aware of the limitations of doing so, and however much she has already failed. Not to do so would be to suggest that there was some other, less located possibility from which she could speak, and she knows that's a falsehood also.

What's remarkable about these poems is the way their sophisticated intellectuality is, in fact, so located. They don't read like a theoretical discussion of the problems of lyric poetry; Moxley is not simply investigating the history of the lyric, or analyzing the problems of language from a safely contained distance. Rather, her poems read as lyrics of moving personal intensity that nonetheless consciously embody theoretically sophisticated investigations of lyric. These poems show the poet living a life, but one in which thinking about what she is doing is as crucial as doing it, as she reveals in "Night Train to Domestic Living Arrangements":

   In my own mind you have put me
   beside compunction. Re-worked
   this mourning room where looking
   smacks of mother may I
   though to this day I'll falter
   when sleep holds sway.
   Throw me over your deep end
   with some faith next time,
   as if to lend some bother to the vex.

The problems that the narrator faces in these poems will be familiar to anyone well read in the history of lyric poetry; problems of desire and love, of the effect we have on others, of the narrator's limited abilities to make the wholesale social changes she often wants to make. That these themes echo the history of lyric poetry does not suggest traditionalism on Moxley's part so much as it suggests the flexibility that lyric poetry can offer in the present moment, in the hands of a writer willing to engage both its possibilities and its problems. While, at times, the twisting ambiguities of Moxley's poems feel so carefully crafted that they lack energy, even that lack seems not Moxley's unconscious failure to write with the passion of her existence, but a conscious understanding of the limitations of passionate conviction.

And there is, in Imagination Verses, a haunting sense of limitations. Much of the book confronts the very harsh reality of the world around her, with its political manipulations, legal robberies, and personal misunderstanding. Limits imposed by others, self-imposed limits, the limits of all that it seems not possible to act on--all these bring to Imagination Verses a deep sense of loss and sadness that is not quite, but just barely not, resignation. In the book's last poem, "Wreath of a Similar Year," hope emerges one more time, flitting in and out of focus among a landscape of mistakes and misunderstandings:

               As in the wake
           of awakening
       wrong attempts
           and wrongful death
       will fall adjacent
               careful Hope.

But, as the last stanza of the poem tells us, this Hope sounds "strangely of untold direction," and is "blind as/the first letter on the first stone/written down." This hope is as blind as even the first attempts to write it into poetry. As blind, that is, as any attempt to write into a poem the ironic depths of opportunity and despair that a conscious life faces when it touches the displacements of its connections.

Anyone wanting a further look at Jennifer Moxley's talents should check out Jacqueline Risset's The Translation Begins, recently published by Burning Deck, and which Moxley translates from the original French. Compared to the struggle for a fully-lived language in Imagination Verses, the poems in The Translation Begins can seem anemic. Indeed an abstracted, distanced lack of particulars, designed to resist representation and image, is at the heart of many other contemporary French avant garde poets, including writers like Claude Royet-Journoud and Jacques Roubaud. One can develop a taste for Risset's anemia, though, once one recognizes the complex shifts in her work. Although the bloodlessness is disturbing, it can be disturbing in a way that is often illuminating.

As Moxley points out in her "Translator's Note," Risset's work often centers on destabilizing patterns, patterns that often emerge from interplay with a series of "hermetic references." Moxley writes, "as soon as the significance of the pattern is recognized, the pattern itself is transformed and torn apart." Although the pattern of destabilizing patterns could easily itself become a too stable pattern, there is enough striking variance on the level of the line, and between lines, in Risset's work that one does not feel the presence of any overarching theoretical schema. There is surprise in these poems, and constant subtle ironies, as in these lines from "M.S. 1544", which do not offer anything to see, and even critique the idea that there might be a clear perspective from which something might be seen:

   the reverse--
   or the relation--
   knowing that everything--
   and if in you--
   you see--
   that seeing--

Still, in lines like "that the problem consists of/ torpid--the story...," from the end of the poem "Fiction," I find it too tempting to take Risset's comments as an accurate evaluation of some of the book. But the brilliance of her insights finally do win out over my skepticism, because Risset's work reveals a truly cunning destabilization that can even anticipate and diffuse potential criticisms of its sometimes anemic abstractions. As if in agreement with Imagination Verses, Risset's book suggests that conscious anemia is better than passionate conviction that doesn't know what it's talking about.

Imperial Feelings of Warlike Victoryhood as the Example for All Minorities: Anarcho-Capitalist Commando Mythos Force, conclusion

2011-07-19T08:06:00.000-07:00

Part One can be found here.

Part Two can be found here.

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Anarcho-Capitalist Mythological Action Force: A Drama in Multiple Voices

Part Three

Section Leader (wheels out an overstuffed filing cabinet): Here are the brief summaries for the Section, Sir. Shall I get the raw data?

Commandant: No need.. The principles we use define the raw data, because that’s what principles do. As you see, I have no need whatsoever for data, the, as it were, facts. The facts are simply, as you know, a function of the principles.

(He takes the first folder that the Section Leader hands to him) Beautiful Object? Which of you is Beautiful Object?

Beautiful Object (stepping forward): As if there could be any doubt. Here I am, Commandant Sir. What do you think? Do I have what it takes? Am I the principle of me?

Commandant: Well, uh, yes. Quite a looker. I may have to, uh, inspect this situation later. Eh? Doesn’t it seem that a little inspection is in order? That is, take a moment, in this instance, to examine the, how shall I say, raw data?

Beautiful Object: I can be as raw as you’d like me to be, Commandant Sir.

Commandant: Very good. Shall we say 7? Ahem. I have read your Personality Profile Survey. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is this. You will move about among the populace in a way that shall cause, how do I put this, I’m not becoming flustered, I’m not losing the point, desire. You must make people believe that there’s a chance, just a chance, that if they become an example of success in the marketplace, that is a principle of success, that you may, just may, belong to them. You will serve as a principle of what the market can get for those who succeed. Ownership, sex, the ability to show off are further subprinciples of the principle you are. And last but surely not least, you will serve as a principle of love, but love, of course, understood as the combined principles of ownership, sex, and the ability to show off. Love as the Beautiful Object of the Marketplace. Can you do it?

Beautiful Object: What do you think, Big Boy? We’ll talk about it at 7, won’t we, Sir? You do like to be called Sir, don’t you? I mean, even at special times?

Commandant: Ha ha ha. Well done, Beautiful Object. I think you are, uh, well-equipped to begin your mission. Now (taking another Survey from the Section Leader), which of you is Group of Dudes?

Group of Dudes: We’re him.

Commandant: Very good. This should be easy. Your mission: make it fast but spend it faster.

Group of Dudes: Shit, man. That’s a mission? That’s, like, what I do already.

Commandant: Indeed. The logic of the marketplace is beauteous. Your indifference about how you make your money must be well-matched to the indulgence with which you throw it away. Beach vacations, resort hotels, beer bashes. You are here to party. A total, good time willingness to break down any local barriers to international trade. Are you ready to buy and sell whole cultures, rip them out and replace them with Tiki Bars and $1 Friday Night Jello Shots? Can you put a kegger in that gas guzzling SUV? Do you thrill to the idea of Inland Waterways Demolition Derby Casino Cash Giveaways?

Group of Dudes: We thirst for what I do, no doubt about it. Will we each get, like, an eight-pack of seven ouncers in our own bucket of ice?

Commandant: The Skyy Vodka’s the limit, Group of Dudes. Now (taking another survey) which of you is Grammar?

Grammar: I am the one of whom you are speaking.

Commandant: Excellent, Grammar. The market will rely very heavily on your precision. Your principle, should you choose to act on it, will be this: The marketplace is self-correcting. Every time anyone does anything that imbalances the markets, it will be your job, as a principle of the self-correcting marketplace, to correct them.

Grammar: Will there be frequent exams?

Commandant (coughing). Well uh, yes, uh, you could see it that way. The marketplace imposes tests on all of its members, and the marketplace is always correct. Those who succeed in conforming to the laws of the marketplace will do well. Those who fail to learn those laws go to the bottom—although we must remember that they will be welcome there. And you will keep watch over all this, making sure that those who conform know that they will be rewarded, and that those who do not conform always have the option to conform at a later time or, if they do not wish to conform, will be welcome at the bottom. Well Grammar, what do you say? It’s important that you give everyone accurate marks. Marketplace marks, as it were.

Grammar: I can’t tell you how pleased I am, Sir. I feel like the Marketplace and Grammar are one.

Commandant: Excellent, Grammar. And you will be zealous in your duties? You will correct everyone? You will correct any and all errors which you may encounter?

Grammar: Without fail, Sir. And actually, Sir, now that you mention it, in your speech I noticed...

Commandant: Ha ha ha. That’s enough, Grammar. When I said it was your duty to correct everyone, I didn’t mean that you were supposed to correct those in charge. Just, you know, everyone.

Grammar: But as a category, everyone includes...

Commandant: Grammar, you’re talking too much. Don’t you have some correcting to do? So, who’s next? (Picking up another survey and reading). Ah, oh ah. Fascinating. Brilliant. Unexpected and original. And at the same time, so successful in the marketplace. An example of how one can find perfectly one’s own unique niche. Which of you is Judas Priest?

Judas Priest: There I was, completely wasted, out of work and down.

Commandant: Most excellent. And then you broke the law, eh? A shining example of a successful use of failure. Impressive vandalism. Extreme forms of sadomasochistic desire linked directly to imperial feelings of warlike Victoryhood. You pummel your victim, do you not? You let them get away with nothing? You are determined to triumph? You, as it were, deliver the goods?

Judas Priest: You give me evil fantasies. You want to get inside my mind.

Commandant: Then you will have no problem, I take it, whipping up fear and rage among the masses, encouraging them to believe that war is only the natural extension of their frustrations? That individual Victoryhood is the goal of all endeavor?

Judas Priest: Sin after Sin, I have enjoyed. But the wounds I bear are the wounds of love.

Commandant. Poetry, Judas Priest, poetry. Sadomasochistic war poetry, to be precise. There’s none like you, Judas Priest. Which brings me to an important point. You have a crucial role here. Our current Anarcho-Capitalist force is a little lacking in, what’s the word again? Diversity. By which I mean, window-dressing. You are an excellent, how shall I say it, token. There are not many minorities here on our force. Warlike sadomasochism is indeed under-represented in the culture at large. No doubt you have experienced, how shall I say it, prejudice. Everyone can succeed of course. The marketplace is never prejudiced. I mean, that is the theory. And the theory is the principle. And therefore the raw data results from the theory. At the moment, of course, there are so many, ahem, minorities, ahem, at the bottom. Of course that cannot be the fault of the market. If they are at the bottom, that can only be because they have failed to conform to the principles of the market. Eh? That’s what it means to be a minority, does it not? To have failed to conform to the principles of the market? But that can change. The market is, as we know, open to the proper functioning of the market. On our force here, Judas Priest, since you are currently the only minority, you can be an example of all those minorities not currently on the force. Eh? You have been abused. Left out. But only abused by your failure to conform to the principles of the marketplace, which is to say, you have abused yourself. It is a principle of the marketplace that the only person who can truly abuse you is yourself. That is, you have left yourself out. But that can change. You, Judas Priest, have held on to your anger, have kept your culture and everything that makes you unique. Yet you have also conformed to the marketplace, and you have been a success. Can you therefore play a role as the Example for All Minorities? The one that suggests that conforming makes success possible? Which of course it does.

Judas Priest: The truth is like a chain.

Commandant: Excellent, Judas Priest. Fascinating. Ah, the originality of Judas Priest, an Example for All Minorities Everywhere. Now (picking up another survey), where is Revolution?

Revolution: I despise you. I will devote my whole life to overthrowing you and all the principles you stand for.

Commandant: Excellent. Just the sort of revolutionary rage essential to your role.

Revolution (confused): What? I said I despise you. I won’t play any role in your system.

Commandant: Ah, Revolution. Your gumption is impressive. Your fervor. Your total commitment. Your willingness to break down all barriers in your own name. It’s just what we need.

Revolution: Are you hearing anything I’m saying?

Commandant: I can only hear you, Revolution. What else could I do? The marketplace exists to hear you. You, Revolution. Your role, should you choose to accept it, is to question, undermine, and change anything too settled. You must bring the old guard down, Revolution. You must usher in a new era. Nothing is more encouraging to the marketplace than a new era.

Revolution: I won’t participate, I tell you. I won’t do anything you say. I’m going to bring down you and the rest of the old guard.

Commandant: That’s the spirit of Revolution, Revolution. Cut the excess. Chop off the, as it were, fat. Be willing at any and all times to change everything it’s in your power to change. As you know, the marketplace has no role for the old verities. It needs the new, whoa baby. The total new.

Revolution (looking frustrated): I’m going to bring your marketplace crashing to its knees.

Commandant: Excellent, Revolution, excellent. The marketplace must be cleansed, so that it can function in the realm of the total new. And who better to do that than Revolution?

Revolution: I’ll tell you once more. I refuse to participate in any aspect of this circular logic.

Commandant: Revolution, of everyone gathered here, you feel your own role most deeply. You see limitation everywhere, you know no bounds in your desire and effort for change. You cannot pause for a single second in the restless pursuit of your path. I can only thank you.

Revolution: You’re a slave of all that’s indecent in men.

Commandant (blushing shyly): I love how you talk to me. It’s really hot. Don’t stop for a second. Right about now, the whole marketplace is turned on. Fired up by the fires of Revolution.

Revolution (looking more and more frustrated): I don’t intend to stop.

Commandant: That’s the spirit. Now (looking at Section Leader) have I missed anyone? Are there any folders left? Are we done here?

Reginald. What about me? What’s my role? How do I fit in?

Commandant (looking at him skeptically, taking the final survey from the Section Leader, looking at it skeptically): Oh. It’s you. To the extent, of course, that there is any you for you to be you of. Skills? Ah. Talents? Ah. Drives? Well yes, a few. Of a sort.

Reginald: You know I’ll do anything you ask.

Commandant (diffidently): I do see that. Well, I suppose we’ll find something. Your role, uh, how about this? Your role is to take initiative.

Reginald (crestfallen): Take initiative? Will you tell me how to do that?

Commandant: What, me? Tell you how to do something? No. Unheard of. Are you insulting me?

Reginald: Sir, of course not, Sir. All I wish to do is be like you.

Commandant: Exactly the problem. You cannot be like anyone. The marketplace demands your uniqueness. You can only be like yourself, and you can only tell yourself what to do. Your must pursue the path of yourself at all costs, even if it leads to the bottom. Can you do that?

Reginald: Are there instructions? I’d be happy to read the booklet. Even if it’s lengthy.

Commandant (sighing). Booklet? For market’s sake, he talks about a booklet. What are we coming to? Look. If you need a booklet, write it yourself. Spend all goddamned day reading it, if you want. Booklet, he says. Be like you, he says. Still (the Commandant brightens) I guess there’s room for us all in the marketplace. Even if it’s at the bottom. (Smiles, turns to Section Leader). Well, looks like I’m done here. Excellent organizational skills, Section Leader.

Section Leader: Thank you Sir, Commandant Sir.

Reginald: But Sir, you haven’t told me...

Commandant: Yes I have. You’ll have to take it from here. (Starts to walk away). Booklet, he says. See you later, Beautiful Object?

Beautiful Object: You can see anything you want.

Reginald (distraught): But wait, wait. You haven’t told me...

The Commandant: There shall be more of this masquerade (walks off stage).

"There's a lot of room at the bottom": Anarcho-Capitalist Commando Mythos Force, Part Two

2011-07-05T08:02:00.000-07:00

Anarcho-Capitalist Commando Mythos Force: A Drama In Multiple Voices, Part Two

Part One can be found here

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Commandant (standing before the section):

The Long Arm of Discipline will come down to help you. Don’t think you can escape. But although it may chastise you at times, the Long Arm feels the pain it inflicts upon you. Remember that if I am forced to punish you, it hurts me more than it hurts you. Know that I weep, but only so that you all may become beauteous.

Grammar (leaning over towards rest of huddled section and whispering): Does he mean beautiful?

Revolution: I’ll show him the long arm.

Commandant (looking out at section dubiously): Is this it, Section Leader? The whole Section?

Section Leader: Attrition, Sir. Less resources for recruitment. We have all had to, as it were, tighten the belt. But never fear, Sir. We are, as one might say, doing more with less.

Commandant (coughs). Well yes, that’s all right then. In the future, as you know, my Section Leader, we shall no longer require a military to fight the axis of evil. We shall simply invade our enemies with Benevolence.

Group of Dudes: Party, man. The tacos will be spicy!

Section Leader (sharply): At ease everyone.

Everyone tightens up.

Section Leader: That’s better.

Commandant: Now, Section, as you know, you are training to become a crack group of Anarcho-Capitalist Commandos. If you do exactly as the organization commands, without fail, than it shall be Every Man For Himself. Is that clear?

Grammar: All but the words.

Reginald (raising hand): Oh oh Sir, Sir. I have a question, Sir. If it’s every man for himself, what happens to our benefits package?

Commandant (looking at Section Leader skeptically, then back at the Section): I’ll ask the questions here. If you have questions, I will let you know what they are. Now then, some of you may have questions. Some of you may have things on your mind. Some of you may be, frankly, wondering. You may even be asking yourself if. And these questions, I’m sure, seem to you reasonable. Therefore, let me answer them by saying no. They are not reasonable, and no one will be answering them. I can say this: if you have questions, you are not with the program. The program has answered your questions already. If you have a question, please remember that it has been answered already.

   (He goes on). You are a team of Anarcho-Capitalists. You must recognize that there is no difference between doing what you want and doing what we tell you. If you find that you are doing something you want and it is different from what we have told you, then you are not doing what you want. There is no doubt about it: doing what we tell you is what you want. Now, you may be asking yourself, what is Anarcho Capitalism? But don’t ask yourself. Don’t ask me. You aren’t asking questions.

   Since you have no questions, I can proceed to review what, as our crack Anarcho-Capitalist Commandos, you will doing. Of course, on some level I don’t have to review this. Anarcho-Capitalism is natural. Therefore, by doing what comes naturally, you are already our crack Anarcho-Capitalist commando machine. You have had to learn nothing; you are simply being yourselves. Therefore, in these remarks, when I am pointing out to you what you already are, you will find nothing surprising, and you will have no questions.

   What is Anarcho-Capitalism? Of course, you already know. Some of you, however, may feel uncertain on the details. But let me remind you that you are wrong about that. Again. You have no questions, and you are not uncertain. Nonetheless. I am the Commandant, representing the Long Arm of Discipline, aka the Anarcho-Capitalism you already understand. If it seems like I’m drifting from the subject here, let me assure you that I cannot drift from the subject. That’s because the subject comes naturally to me. I can be only on subject, since there is nothing else I could possibly be on. And I’m going to ride that subject until it hurts you, which, as you know, can only make you feel better.

   As we all already know, and couldn’t possibly forget, Anarcho-Capitalism simply tells us what we already know, which is: There is a marketplace for everything. And God looked down on the marketplace and called it good. And lo: everything resulted from the marketplace. People resulted from the marketplace. Water, food, animals. Without the marketplace, there are none of these things. Got it? Nothing. If you want an animal, buy it. If you want food, get hold of some. If you don’t get hold of food, then there is no food. If you can’t buy anything, then there’s nothing to buy. Am I making myself clear? Of course I am. There’s nothing to make clear except what was clear already. And that was already clear.

   You are, as you clearly know, for sale. There’s nothing else you are. Therefore, get your ass off the can and start selling. Make hay while the sun shines. The early bird catches the worm. Am I getting to the point here? Of course not. I don’t have to get to the point. The point is the only point there is. I don’t have to get to the point because I’m already at the point. There is nowhere else for me, or anyone, to be.

   The goal of the Anarcho-Capitalist commandos: everyone must work together so we can all be in it for ourselves. Do you not see that it is beauteous? Of course you see. Mankind, who is selfish (and womankind too, whoa baby) must work hand in hand so we can rip out each other’s throats. It is only by cooperating fully that each of us can really and truly be out to get each other. The best way to do this? Money. If you’re making it, you’re golden. If not, you’re out of here. And how do you make money? You take it from somebody. This is what it means to work with somebody; you rip them off. If you don’t rip them off, you’re not doing what either of you want. Do I have to ask again whether I’m making myself clear? I do not have to ask, since clear is the only way I could make myself.

   The market is not simply the best way, it’s the only way. It helps us decide who should be in charge of what. If you can buy it, it’s yours. If you can’t it’s somebody else’s. If you have nothing, and somebody else has it all, well, figure out how to get some from them. You can work for them, for instance. In fact you have the right to work for them if they will let you, and you have the right to be paid exactly what they feel like paying you. There are other methods however. You may manipulate the system. Fraud, graft, corruption, these are only some of the good things that will result. Remember, if you can cheat someone out of their hard-earned money or property, you’re only doing the right thing. After all, they were already trying to do it to you. We may therefore define cooperation in the following manner: a deadly struggle between two or more individuals for control of the marketplace. Nothing’s better than the feeling of working together with others in the attempt to dominate them utterly.

   Now that I have established the principles of the marketplace, which you can see that I have, because there was nothing else you could possibly see and nothing else I could do, you understand also that I have established the principles of you. Because, as you know, you are principles of the marketplace. That’s all you are, and since that’s all, it follows that you are nothing else. If you are all something, then there’s nothing left over for any part of you to be anything other than what all of you is. It would make no sense, to say that you are more than all you are. Eh? But you knew that already. What else is there to know? An individual may therefore be defined as a principle of the marketplace. An individual is an example of the proper functioning of the marketplace, which can, as you know, only function properly. Therefore the individual is an example that illustrates that the marketplace is functioning properly and can only function properly. Therefore the individual is an example that is therefore also a principle. It can be nothing else. Right? Of course it’s right. What else was there for it to be?

But ah, you might say, if I am an example of the proper functioning of the marketplace, and therefore, as an example, I am also a principle, well, what is the principle that I, as an individual, illustrate? What is the principle of me? And this would be a valid question, except that there are no questions. And the reason there are no questions is that all this comes naturally to you. You are the principle of what comes naturally to you, which is the proper functioning of the marketplace. Since that functioning is natural, obviously it comes naturally to you. And look, here it comes now. Incoming!

(Everyone falls to the floor but the Commandant)

Commandant: Ha ha ha. Just my little joke. Don’t be so gullible. My goodness. Obviously, the marketplace can’t be incoming. It’s already here. Where else could it be? Ha ha ha. What are you doing on the floor? Are you, on the floor, illustrating a principle of the marketplace? Of course you are. It will be the duty of many individuals, in their role as examples of the marketplace, which is to say principles of it, to end up on the floor. Many individuals will end up as the principle that many will be on the bottom. In the proper functioning of the marketplace, there is room for a lot of principle at the bottom. The principle is: there’s a lot of room at the bottom. Make room down there, because more of you are coming. But as you see, lying there on the floor, there’s no need to make room at the bottom. There’s always room at the bottom for as many people as end up at the bottom. The principle is that the bottom is big. Furthermore, you don’t need to do anything to get there. The principle is: do nothing, and you will end up at the bottom. It’s comforting. To know that the bottom is there, waiting for you, every time you do nothing. To know that a principle of the marketplace is that you are welcome to be at the bottom. Welcome to the bottom, where everyone is welcome. As you see, the marketplace has a role for everyone. That is one of its principles.

But up now, up.

(The Section gets up slowly.)

Very good. You are a crack section of Anarcho-Capitalists. You will not be at the bottom if you do something. That is, if you do the something that you should do to illustrate the principle of the marketplace that each of you as an individual is. Which you cannot help but do, of course. But what you can help is this. You have it in your power to become the principle of the marketplace you will illustrate, which is to say, be. You have the power to become what you will be. What specific principle of the marketplace are you? That is the question you will answer, because you cannot help but answer it. Because the answer to the question is the principle that you are, and that will come to you naturally as a function of who you are. The principle that you will illustrate is the principle of your own individual talent. Your talent for the marketplace, which is who you as an individual are, is the principle of the marketplace that you will illustrate. Understand? Of course you do, because there’s nothing else to understand. Therefore it is now time to define your individual missions, which are already defined for you because of the kind of talent you are. It is defined for you because it comes naturally. But it is up to you to use this natural talent. You do not have to use it. You are always welcome to end up at the bottom. But if you use your talent properly, then you will end up as the illustration of the principle that your talents illustrate. I must now, as Commandant of this Section, define for you your mission, which is a function of you, which is to say, a principle of the marketplace. Therefore I am not defining it. I am simply stating that which is already defined by the natural fact of who you are. Section Leader, do you have the Personality Profile Surveys?

End of Part Two

Anarcho-Capitalist Commando Mythos Force: A Drama in Multiple Voices

2011-06-30T11:41:00.000-07:00

Part One

-----------------------

Reginald: All I ever wanted was to be a deployable resource.

Judas Priest: The engine roars between my thighs.

Grammar: Some things, however, are simply built into how the mind works. Toying with them is madness.

Beautiful Object: Oh, look at the pretty things!

Group of Dudes:
            We don’t care
           We don’t care
           All we wanna see
           Is your underwear

Section Leader: All right, section members. The Commandant is on his way. Prepare for inspection.

Reginald (lining up). I’ve always loved being inspected.

Judas Priest: We are the hell patrol. All guns, all guns blazing.

Grammar (grumbling): Once a subordinate clause, always a subordinate clause.

Beautiful Object: Cleaned and pressed and ready to go, Sir!

Group of Dudes: Fuck. Ouch. Shit.

Section Leader: I know how long you’ve all been waiting. Today’s code word: One for all and all for one.

Reginald (gratefully). I’m a cog. I’m finally a cog.

Judas Priest: The engine roars between my thighs.

Grammar: It’s true that all the parts, when taken together, must form a complete whole.

Beautiful Object (showing off): Don’t forget to admire the centerpiece.

Group of Dudes: Hey, can you repeat what you just said?

Everyone looks at them reproachfully.

Group of Dudes: What? My cell rang. Can I help it if my cell rang?

Grammar: That’s just great. Here I am, stuck with a bunch of run-on sentences.

Group of Dudes: Dude, what makes you think we care? We’re just marking time. Waiting for life to begin. Don’t harsh my buzz, getting all full of purpose and shit.

Reginald: Team Leader, Sir. Permission to report an infraction, Sir?

Section Leader: Granted.

Reginald (walking up to Team Leader). I have the impression, Sir, that some people aren’t getting with the program.

Section Leader (coughs): Well, uh, well. Well. We’ll see about that. The Commandant, as you know, is on his way.

Revolution walks in. Everyone turns in Revolution’s direction.

Revolution: The economies least damaged by globalism are the ones who refused economic restructuring.

Group of Dudes: Who’s the clown? Kick his fucking ass.

Reginald: You’re not the Commandant.

Section Leader (to Revolution): You’re late. Get in line. You’re this close—this close—to being guilty of breaking rank.

Revolution (sarcastically, getting in line): I sure wouldn’t want to do that.

Beautiful Object: You’re cute. Want to form a domestic partnership?

Reginald: You really do try that on everyone, don’t you?

Beautiful Object: It’s not my fault if some people say they can’t afford it. It’s not my fault if some people say, “Not until we have better benefits.”

Reginald (huffy): So I want an institutional framework. Is that so wrong?

Judas Priest. Change, change, all re-arrangin’. Look around, at the sit-u-a-tion.

Group of Dudes: Tequila shot, motherfuckers!

Reginald (still huffy): Better to buy in than be left out.

Revolution: Yet globalism has left more people than ever before without a stake in any system. What are you gonna do, build more prisons?

Reginald: Better to manage the money than to be managed by it.

Grammar: Language is not a prison house. Processing words is a basic biological function and it behaves according to certain laws. All of this is elucidated in Chomsky’s notion of deep grammar. Please don’t say anything more until you have absorbed the truths of that text.

Group of Dudes: Always some asshole trying to get nuanced. I don’t even know what nuanced means.

Beautiful Object: I need attention bad.

Judas Priest: No sign of life. No flicker on his face.

Grammar: Where’s a topic sentence when you need one?

Section Leader (shouting): Enough. Everyone in line.

Reginald: I’ll follow you anywhere, Sir. Even Tampa Bay if necessary. Nashville, Asheville, you name it. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to let the winds of capital blow me about. Think of the salary.

Judas Priest: I’m headed out to the highway. I’ve got nothing to lose at all.

Group of Dudes: Party on both coasts!

Beautiful Object: All she wanted was just to be free, and that’s the way it turned out to be. Flow, river, flow, down to the sea.

Revolution: Wait a second. Isn’t any of this open for discussion? If the goal is freedom, why can’t we even discuss what it means to be free? Oh, I get it. None of you are even you. You’re only the image of you that you wish to project. Meanwhile, people are dying, countries are falling apart. And all you do is sit around and watch TV like you’re on it.

Beautiful Object: Gross. Ewww. Imagine how fat they’ll get. It’s so horrible that all I want is not to think about it.

Group of Dudes: Hey, any girls out there? We got beer. Got cable.

Judas Priest: We are saints in hell.

Reginald: People, please. Can’t we work together on this? Follow the rubric?

Revolution (groaning): Where’s my politics of hope? I’m surrounded by people who just want a piece of the action.

Section Leader: Everybody at attention! The Commandant is here!

End of Part One

Brief Reviews

2011-06-23T11:16:00.000-07:00

wordlick, the latest book by Joe Ross (pictured above), pushes its astonishing linguistic pyrotechnics as far as it can go, then pushes it several steps farther. The series of five-line stanzas, each of which ends in a period, and spread out three to a page, purposefully never make clear whether we are reading one three-stanza untitled poem per page or an ongoing long poem. Each line is crammed with invented word combinations (“Casinochipped in wonderskated breezeby reserve”) that sometimes end in single words and sometimes in further word combinations.

The language of wordlick immerses readers in a social and political bog from which there’s no easy way out (“Kneeraised buttocklock in doggystyle war” is just one of many impossible to navigate morasses), and the bog just keeps coming, overwhelming and fascinating simultaneously. The poems very consciously range in the layered subjects they take up, glance at, and slide by on into the next tongue-twisted-and-numbed-and-twisted-again word package. If the poems undoubtedly revel in language play that’s meant to impress, they do so always with the purpose of showing that it’s not a game at all, but a serious evocation of what might just be more, and more manipulated, social meaning and control than any of us can stand.

It’s worth hearing Ross read these poems live, his shoes clicking, shoulders and head bobbing in some off-kilter combination of tap dancer and prize fighter. Reading them to yourself, be forewarned: even more than most contemporary avant poetry, it’s difficult to get through more than a few pages of wordlick at a time without suffering linguistic burnout. But return to the poems every so often, and the power of what Ross is doing grows and digs in, leaving readers of wordlick with the kind of elation that only exhaustion can create.

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Kathryn l. Pringle’s Right New Biology knows exactly what the central point of all political and social difficulty is: human (and other) bodies. Pringle’s book shows many and often conflicting large global forces coming to bear on that most intimate physical context. Psychology, theology, war, culture, nation states; these are only some of the pressures that human bodies encounter daily.

Right New Biology also reveals that language itself is a body, and makes readers constantly aware of the physical of language through jarring usage of capitalization, broken words, and shattered syllables wobbling unstable across the bland whiteness of the page. This fracturing of words and syllables and different mishapings of the look of the page (which works both against, and with, the fact that the whole book might be considered a single long poem) reminds me a bit of the physicality of Hannah Weiner’s work, although Pringle’s subject matter is framed much more blatantly by competing discourses of power. “broken muscle AND RIGHT/ where all langering furls from endorphins to WAR/ a FOND ignorance we calls it/ this that is sprung of METTLE/ and lending spaces/ veterans MISPLACED limbs/ that trivial uttering/ encamped unfolding/ surreptitious following.” This is a smart, challenging, and remarkable book, informed not just about poetry but about the many non-poetic tensions in which poetry is enmeshed, and bristling with insight about all of them.

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The sensitive, understated lyric surfaces of Lacey Hunter’s poems in her inaugural chapbook The Unicorn hide more deceptive angles that undermine and break up the angst of sexual and romantic desire that the poems often explore. The Unicorn acknowledges how things right in front of us, or things we seem to care about most, are filled often by what people don’t understand or fail to notice, since we’re all too busy obscuring our observations with our needs.

These are poems about the odd edges of loneliness and failed connection, and the way some moments can’t be captured by images. “She took off her danger—the house/doing the good ordinary thing / the narrow/ quiet thing all fighting to rush out together./ We were just going to take a little/and then bring out the car.” Expect to see more worthwhile future work from Hunter, a young poet currently based in Ashland, Oregon, and contact her if you'd like a copy of the chapbook.

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Robert Mittenthal’s Wax World is a crucial book of poems that, I worry, may not be read as widely as it deserves. Mittenthal, based in Seattle, writes poetry that operates at the nexus of several key approaches to contemporary poetry. Anybody interested in new developments in poetry fully informed by the theoretical, political, and aesthetic histories of language poetry and of Vancouver Kootenay School of Writing work will find Wax World as good an example of extending the power of those histories as there is in newer generations of contemporary writing.

Wax World is a brilliant mix of concreteness and abstraction operating not simply as aestheticized technique (a problem in too much contemporary experimental poetry) but as a political case study, and a fully realized instance of its own theory in action. These poems show, through their precise accrual from line to line, a world in which “the abstract power of society creates its concrete unfreedom,” in Guy Debord’s famous phrase.

Mittenthal’s poems in Wax World always risk collapsing into the oblique, dissociated haze of contemporary confusion as a necessary gesture in portraying how contemporary capitalism bewilders us with terminology and megabucks sleight-of-hand. Then certain lines twist, sharply, into moments of political clarity. Mittenthal doesn’t write the flashiest poems around, and he certainly doesn’t fetishize the new in an attempt to grab center stage in the avant poetry popularity contest of the moment. Instead he writes developed, precisely delayed word bombs designed to pinpoint the center of whatever structure he’s going after and blow it open. “Each letter a snapshot of what remains——previous occupant unknown/The body decamped, leaving its plastic bivouac/ An indistinct wave which yields no magic/ No flakes of dead skin. No DNA samples for the imagination.” Wax World also contains the poem “Value Unmapped,” which appeared in an earlier Mittenthal chapbook that I blogged about here.

Mad Hatters Review Blog Call for Submissions

2011-06-15T09:28:00.000-07:00

Carol Novack, editor of the online journal Mad Hatters Review, is announcing a new blog and looking for submissions:

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Announcing the Mad Hatters' Review Blog! Call for Submissions
Mad Hatters’ Review is an online journal with a collaborative spirit
that caters to an international audience with an appreciation for wit,
whimsy, dark humor, satire, lyricism, rhythm, word play and post
postmodern post avant-garde literature, art, music, politics, films,
columns, book reviews, interviews, scratch n sniff projects, collages,
literary audios, etc.

We at MHR see the Mad Hatters’ Review Blog as a gathering place for
courtiers of spoken and unspoken words, inventive images and music,
and of course, the mad at heart, to stay informed and invigorated.

Our multi-media landscape is featuring poetry, flash fiction, interviews, reviews,
visuals, audios, and contributors’ news—in short, whatever strikes hosts and editors Marc
Vincenz and Susan Lewis, and occasionally publisher Carol Novack,as intriguing
or enlightening for freethinking arts enthusiasts everywhere.

Check our non-profit organization's new website for the latest on the MadHat’s Little Mountain Retreat in Asheville, North Carolina, and MadHat Press’s Wild and Wyrd Poetry Chapbook Contest –to be judged by the quintessentially mind-bending Philly poet CAConrad, and subscribe (free) to MHR's newsletter for infrequent updates you may not catch on our blog.

The Mad Hatters’ Review Blog welcomes submissions of single poems,
flash fictions, short interviews, audio works, visuals, multimedia
pieces and reviews all year round. For poems, we prefer no more than 20 lines.
For flash fictions, preferably no more than 300 words. Please include a short
biography. Include the name of your piece in the Submission Title. No
multiple or simultaneous submissions. We answer within 14 days, but
more likely within 24 hours.

ONE poem (20 lines max)
ONE flash fiction (300 words max)
ONE mini interview (3 – 5 questions)
ONE review (500 words max)

Submissions of previously published poems and flash fictions may be
considered as long as authors own the copyrights and the works were
published in a print mag or defunct online journal.

Please submit to: http://madhatter.submishmash.com/Submit

For audio, visuals and multimedia pieces, please query first:
mhrblog@madhatarts.com

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A Community Writing Itself, ed. Sarah Rosenthal

2011-06-08T08:43:00.000-07:00

My review of A Community Writing Itself, a collection of interviews with Bay Area writers conducted by Sarah Rosenthal (pictured above), is now online at Jacket 2.

I hope you'll read the review, but more importantly, I hope you'll read the book.

My May East Coast readings

2011-05-17T08:37:00.000-07:00

I’ll be on the east coast for several weeks, giving readings from my new novel, The Quarry and The Lot (more information about the book can be found here), along perhaps with some of my poetry as well. Also featured will be a number of other interesting writers well worth hearing.

If you’re in any of these cities on any of these dates, I hope you’ll come out to the reading, and join us for whatever festivities may ensue.

Philadelphia, PA
Saturday, May 21
Whenever We Feel Like It series
3 p.m.
Jose Pistolas
263 S 15th St

featuring:
Mark Wallace
Debra Morkun
&TBA

http://wheneverwefeellikeit.blogspot.com/
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Washington, DC
Tuesday, May 24
7 p.m.
Bridge Street Books
2814 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
(202) 965-5200

featuring:
Mark Wallace
& Jennifer Fink

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New York, NY
Saturday, May 28
7 p.m.
Yardmeter Series
267 Douglass Street
Brooklyn, NY
(in the Gowanus neighborhood)

featuring:
Mark Wallace
& rest of lineup TBA

http://yardmeter.blogspot.com

Andrew Shields on The Quarry and The Lot / An Upcoming Reading in San Bernardino

2011-05-10T08:23:00.000-07:00

On his blog, Andrew Shields (pictured above) explores some interesting questions regarding one aspect of my novel The Quarry and The Lot, that portion of the book which concerns the emotional and intellectual struggle of the character Luke Owen regarding whether to keep writing poetry or not, and why. As Andrew pointed out in a note to me, the issue is not the central one of the novel, or even in his own thinking, but he does feel it’s worth taking up.

Minor spoiler alert: although Andrew’s thoughts hardly exhaust the question of what happens in the book, he does take up at least one portion of the novel’s conclusion, so if you’d rather not know about that yet, here’s your chance to save his excellent insights for another time.

Meanwhile, I’ll be giving a reading this Thursday night, May 12, at Cal State San Bernardino. The reading will be at 6 p.m. on the Cal State San Bernardino campus in Room 4005 of Pfau Library (pictured above). If you happen to be anywhere nearby, feel free to come on out.

Maps and Directions for Cal State San Bernardino can be found here.

Brief Reviews

2011-05-05T09:10:00.000-07:00

Beautiful poems aren’t my forté, and I’m distrustful of poems that make an uncritical attempt to be beautiful, but the genuine lyric beauty of the poems in James Meetze’s (pictured above) new book, Dayglo, brings along with it the right degree of social and political awareness to make the beauty both earned and subtly undermined whenever necessary–and it turns out to be necessary a lot. Dayglo is full of remarkable insights into the physical and social landscapes of Meetze’s southern California home. These are indeed landscape poems, but they’re very aware of all the social constructions that shape ideas about landscape; these are landscapes filled with people and their contradictions.

If The New Sincerity ever really existed (did it?), Dayglo is the epitome of what it should have been: sincere while crucially incorporating irony, lush while never taking its eye off what is also annoying and frustrating about Southern California culture and politics. The book’s title poem is a successful attempt by Meetze at a longer, more philosophical lyric that’s almost painfully well-attuned to California’s immediately powerful physicality. “Mountains of earth rise from marshland/where we live background lives/ with basketball hoops in the driveway./A sporting chance for light to fill us./ Our digital children and their rapid-fire,/ virtual dreams, I see them bug-eyed in back seats,/ combat in every eye’s reflection.”

Several of the book’s later poems continue the title poem’s big camera-eye view of California environment and culture and take it into a broader historical scope, signalling that Meetze’s ambitions, so well-realized in Dayglo, are only continuing to develop.

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Loquela, by Allyssa Wolf, the fifth number in Insert Press’ Parrot Series, reveals a somewhat more pre-Raphaelite, Victorian, Art Deco romantic sinisterness than did her earlier collection, Vaudeville, which was more consistently noirish and explicitly violent. But while Loquela may be more plaintive and decorative in the kind of longing that it exposes, its concerns remain of a piece with the ones that Vaudeville established: that separation is unavoidable, that the desire to inflict pain on others is inextricably bound with physical love, and that sexuality may very well be the best, most intimate ground for exposing the mechanics of capitalist domination and its various control fetishes.

Wolf knows not simply that love is political, but that politics itself, from its most totalizing conceptual levels to its most individual material acts, invades every aspect of the human desire to touch and be in contact with others. “Blinding silence/In the glittery beige room, and/Hymn in the thorns: “doing nothing”/ Such control of doing nothing, with strings/With each small movement, again/A bruise flowers and flowers...” These are dangerous poems, alluringly feminine, sharply self-aware, and relentless in their nearly science-like attempt to expose the most intimate corruptions that mark human confusion about love and power.

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Allison Carter’s A Fixed Formal Arrangement has two sections. The first is a compelling section of prose poems which, using commas and no periods, feel almost like they sway as they move through a series of impressions, observations and a casual and oddly unique sense of alienation and isolation arisiting from unpleasant or difficult to interpret interactions with others.

The pieces in the second section, closer to flash fiction but still with significant prose poem influenced moves in direction and development, and with several numbered running series with titles like “Public Garage” and “Garage Apartment,” have a similarly disquieting and disorienting affect, as they move through a variety of garages (yes) and related urban and suburban settings. “I saw that you opened your mouth. Now there were three places: school, the rec room, and your mouth”(64). It’s a group of pieces about all the quiet ways people don’t fit the expectations of others, and it exposes and explores a powerful uncertainty about what there might be to want in the wasteland of contemporary American post-place no-place suburban pseudo-ideality. “Who wants to clean the garage floor, everyday, forever?” (79)

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A bit of Bruce Andrews-style jamming the frequencies, a bit flarfy overt political excess, and all bristling hilarious fury that can’t hide an essential good humor, Brian Ang’s debut chapbook Paradise Now introduces a new talent whose work I think people are going to be reading for awhile. “What is Intelligent Design anyway/When quantum giggity-giggity multiverse anti-Batman/ Leads masturbation upon Übermensch Picasso/It’s 6:18 p.m. on Judgment Day/Dear Dr. Stalin Augustine Manhattan/Seneca Cloud Strife Lyotard hello/”.

The chapbook flings a wide range of reference (especially regarding the history of Chinese communism) and theory and genuinely scary wild contradictions at its readers with an abandoned and daring glee. If the poems wear their influences a bit too clearly at times, and if a few lines overreach into bits of generalized rhetoric (“alienation is played out and global capital is bullshit”), that doesn’t significantly harm the unassailably charismatic social grid feedback going on in these poems. I’m interested to see what Ang does next, and I bet I’m not the only one.

Boycott the Koch Brothers' Products

2011-04-26T07:56:00.000-07:00

The Koch Brothers use their financial empire to back all sorts of political activities harmful to U.S. citizens and in fact to the rest of the world. Some of the things that they actively push or that their money supports include:

●Attempts to destroy Medicare and to limit access to affordable health care for U.S. citizens.
●Attempts to lower and eliminate clean air standards and to eliminate other policies designed to protect people and the environment from the effects of oil spills and pollution.
●Attempts to eliminate rights for U.S. workers, to end the ability of U.S. citizens to collectively bargain for their contracts, and to destroy union rights and unions themselves.
●Political indoctrination of their employees in Koch Brothers’ political interests, and pressure, through group meetings and constant work place announcements, to make their employees vote for the candidates that the Koch Brothers support.
●Huge financial support for political candidates whose goals are to eliminate all government checks on corporate power and to support all the practices listed above.

However, you can take one small step towards reducing their damaging influence on the world. Don’t buy Koch Brothers products, and recommend to others not to buy them also.

Koch Products & Companies to boycott include:

- Angel Soft
- Angel Soft Ultra tissues
- Brawny paper towels
- Dixie cups (& napkins & plates)
- Insulair cups
- Mardis Gras napkins
- Perfect Touch (cups, paper products)
- Sparkle paper towels
- Stainmaster
- Quilted Northern
- Vanity Fair napkins & paper towels
- Zee Napkins
- Georgia Pacific products

Home/Office papers:
- Advantage
- Image Plus
- Spectrum

Other:
- Stainmaster
- Lycra
- Teflon

Building supplies:
- Georgia Pacific

Source for the list above: http://www.boycottkochbrothers.com/

Fight back against the power of the Koch Brothers starting today.

First Southern California readings for The Quarry and The Lot

2011-04-14T07:53:00.000-07:00

My first two Southern California readings featuring The Quarry and The Lot are coming up a few weeks from now. I won’t be reading only from the book, most likely, although most of the reading will certainly feature the book, which I’ve never read in public before. If you’re nearby, I’d love to see you there.

Saturday, May 7
7 p.m.
The evening will also feature literature in performance by India Radfar and Simone Forti
Agitprop Gallery
2837 University Avenue in North Park (Entrance on Utah, behind Glenn's
Market)
San Diego, CA 92104 * 619.384.7989

Thursday, May 12
6 p.m.
Pfau Library Room 4005
California State University, San Bernardino
5500 University Parkway
San Bernardino, CA 92407-2318
(909) 537-5000
Directions to Campus: http://www.csusb.edu/MapsDirections/Directions.aspx
Campus Map: http://www.csusb.edu/MapsDirections/img/CSUSB_Campus_Map_web.pdf

The Quarry and The Lot

2011-04-05T08:56:00.000-07:00

Joseph Klein was a brilliant boy, talented—and dangerous. When he dies, at age 32, under uncertain circumstances, a group of his former friends gather for his funeral and see each other for the first time in some years. How did Joseph change them and what does he mean to them? What do they mean to each other, and why have their lives come to be what they are? The Quarry and The Lot is a novel about love and its limits, memory and history. It explores whether any truth can be stable when what’s happening is changed by what people understand and where what passes for normal is something far more frightening.

Mark Wallace's The Quarry and The Lot is a big, complex, tender, angry, haunted charting of how each of us is many strangers, any past many pasts, our biographies always-already written by others. Ultimately, though, for me it's about that bland, dangerous medication called the American suburb--how, once you've had a taste of that stuff, it's almost impossible to kick, even as it turns you into a ghost, or a guerilla, or, sometimes, both at once.
--Lance Olsen, author of Calendar of Regrets and Nietzsche's Kisses

My new novel, The Quarry and The Lot, is now available.

You can find it here from BlazeVox books.

For those who prefer, it can also be found here on Amazon.

And here, you can read a short, pre-release interview with me by Jefferson Hansen, based around his reading of the first chapter of the novel back when it was available in an earlier version in an online magazine, Big Bridge.

For those interested in potentially reviewing the book, review copies are available. To obtain a review copy, please leave an e-mail address and mailing address here in the blog comments, or drop me a note at markwallace1322@yahoo.com

Many thanks to all the people who helped me with the many parts of the process of the book, both in its writing and its publication. Any book is truly a group endeavor, and I couldn't have finished it and brought it into the world without a great deal of help from others.

If you're in Detroit on Thursday night

2011-03-23T15:45:00.000-07:00

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit Reading Series
Curated by K. Silem Mohammad, featuring Alli Warren and K. Lorraine Graham
Thursday, March 24th at 7PM

Please click this link for further details.

State Worker Pensions Aren't Bankrupting States

2011-03-15T11:49:00.000-07:00

I really hate to break up with actual details the barrage of right-wing manipulative hysteria, but just in case you're a person whose political ideas might involve caring about facts, here's a good article on the subject of how state worker pensions are affecting the finances of U.S. States. Happy reading.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/03/06/109649/why-employee-pensions-arent-bankrupting.html

Brief Reviews

2011-03-10T08:56:00.000-08:00

With its not-at-all-as-dumb-as-I-sound slang, all elbows humor, and pseudo-historical research, Adam Robinson and Other Poems, by Adam Robinson (pictured above), is as fun a book of poetry as I’ve read in awhile. The poems in this book (published by Narrow House) make some use of google searches in a way that recalls both Flarf and Conceptual Writing without being either. Reminiscent of a New York School matter-of-fact-poet who has gone on a consciously ironic self-aggrandizing bender, Robinson consistently and playfully puts a sense of personality center stage. The poems have a wide range of reference that they handle wryly and about which they seem to ask, in an undergraduate drunken slur, “Am I going to be tested on this?” A big plus: This book has the first poem I’ve ever seen about Judas Priest, and it’s good. From the poem “Frederick Law Olmstead”: “He didn’t go to college because sumac poisoning messed up his eyes!/He thought slavery was bad business and wrote about it when he was a journalist/Also he was like a Red Cross guy in the Civil War/He designed the park system in Milwaukee and Buffalo”

Although its title suggests a potentially exaggerated poetic sensitivity that doesn’t appeal to me that much, Louise Mathias’ chapbook Above All Else, the Trembling Resembles a Forest (Burnside Review Press) turns out to be full of subtle poems with precise, understated twists of line and subject matter. These are minimalist elliptical poems, creased by hints, suggestions, and not-quite-hidden implications that purposefully never cohere around clear central stories, although love, alienation, abandonment, danger and violence are frequently invoked. Mathias contrasts an emotional fragility, one that in a few moments feels a bit forced, with lines of blunt physicality that effectively evoke never-quite-seen brutality and an always present sense of fear. “If you ask me to loosen my grip,/ Consider the source—/My father put his right hand through the glass.” If some of the scenarios suggested in her poems run the risk of seeming too expected, what Mathias does with those scenarios is always precise and unique.

Clay Matthews’ Pretty, Rooster (Cooper Dillon Books) is a strong series of sonnets notable in their understatement and their ability to make the casual and ordinary seem significant. The chicken art, in the cartoons that frame the collection and the flashbook that runs through it, gives some whimsical pseudo-down home flair to the deadpan humor. The repetition of the last line of one poem as the first line of the next poem was often memorable, although the method starts and stops somewhat randomly. Although no one is going to call this a significantly intellectual book, a convincing world view and philosophy does emerge, one involved in the maintenance and care of the particular. “I wash the gutters, try to patch the house/ together with some caulk. I can’t say that/ without you laughing. That’s how words run south/around here. I feel today I want at/ least to say something beautiful. The dog/licks his leg and we are alive.”

I liked Laura Cherry’s Haunts from Cooper Dillon Books best in its more biting, satirical moments (“Surely your next move/will be a twenty-one bagpipe apology,/with you in a hot air balloon high above/reproach, flaunting your star-spangled manner”. Many of the precise descriptions of character were also revealing and memorable. At times the tendency towards quiet understatement (there’s even a poem titled “After Li Ch’ing Chao) was very evocative and affecting, while at other times the drive to be evocative and affecting seemed overplayed in the context of not always inventive subject matter and situations that didn’t seem as emotionally moving as the language wanted them to be. While the satirical metaphors were often fantastic, other metaphors seemed strained or too conventional in their phrasing (“when I go there/like a butterfly on a pin/of narrow want”). Still, at their best moments (and there were many), these poems effectively highlighted the subtle absurdity and often unarticulated pain of contemporary Americans stunned by their own complexity: “You’re dead and I’m here with your ex-wife. Stranger things have happened, but this one/didn’t occur to me before it occurred.”

What Is A Lyric Poem?

2011-02-27T11:13:00.000-08:00

Lyric Poetry consists of a poem, such as a sonnet or an ode, that expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet. The term lyric is now commonly referred to as the words to a song. Lyric poetry does not tell a story which portrays characters and actions. The lyric poet addresses the reader directly, portraying his or her own feeling, state of mind, and perceptions.

A short poem with one speaker (not necessarily the poet) who expresses thought and feeling. Though it is sometimes used only for a brief poem about feeling (like the sonnet).it is more often applied to a poem expressing the complex evolution of thoughts and feeling, such as the elegy, the dramatic monologue, and the ode. The emotion is or seems personal In classical Greece, the lyric was a poem written to be sung, accompanied by a lyre.

A type of emotional songlike poetry, distinguished from dramatic and narrative poetry.

Lyric poetry is a form of poetry with rhyming schemes that express personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were meant to be played to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat.

Highly musical verse that expresses the speaker's feelings and observations. In ancient times poems were sung with accompaniment from a lyre. Modern lyric poems, although usually not sung, still possess musical qualities

A short poem of songlike quality.

Lyric Poems such as a sonnet or an ode, express the thoughts and feelings of the poet. Lyric poems do not tell a story which portrays characters and actions. The lyric poet addresses the reader directly, portraying his or her own feelings, state of mind, and perceptions.

Of or relating to a category of poetry that expresses subjective thoughts and feelings, often in a songlike style or form.

Lyrics are the written words in a song. Lyrics can be written during composition of a song or after the accompanying music is composed. Sometimes, however, music is adapted to or written for a song or poem that has already been written. Not all lyrics generally make sense or are even intelligible. This has long been a plaint about the work of rock and roll lyricists, although it doesn't pertain only to that genre of music. From the Greek, a lyric is a song sung with a lyre. Now, it is commonly used to mean a song of no defined length or structure. A lyric poem is one that expresses a subjective, personal point of view.

Through the years, three main kinds of poetry have developed: lyric, narrative, and dramatic. Lyric poetry is any short poem. Narrative poems are ones that tell stories, an epic or ballad. Dramatic poetry also tells a story, but in this case one or more of the poem's characters acts out the story.

On the ancient Greek stage, a dramatic production often featured a chorus, which was a group of speakers, who commented on the action of the play. When a single individual sang or spoke more personally and accompanied himself on a lyre, the verse was called lyric. Thus, our present designation of lyric poetry includes personal, individual emotion. The lyric does not tell a story as an epic or narrative poem does. Most poetry as we think of it is lyric poetry. There are many subdivisions of lyric poetry. The weakest form is the song, especially popular songs that are heard frequently on the radio. With the exception of the hymn and chant, most songs do not achieve the level of true poetry, even though they employ some poetic devices. The words to songs are often inaccurately referred to as “lyrics.” The entire song is the lyric. The next best-known lyric is the sonnet, which may be in the Petrarchan or Italian form, Elizabethan or Shakespearean or English form, or the American or innovative form. The Petrarchan takes its name from the 13th century Italian poet Petrarch. The Petrarchan sonnet consists of two stanzas: an octave of eight lines with the rime scheme ABBAABBA and a sestet of six lines with a varied rime scheme CDE.

A poem, such as a sonnet or an ode, that expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet. The term lyric is now generally referred to as the words to a song.

In ancient Greece, lyric poetry was sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument called a lyre, and its subject matter embraced thoughts and sentiment, rather than heroic deeds or other classical subjects. Housman's "Loveliest of Trees" provides an example of the personal insight associated with lyric poetry: "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/Is hung with bloom along the bough/And stands about the woodland ride/Wearing white for Eastertide./ Now, of my threescore years and ten,/Twenty will not come again,/And take from seventy springs a score,/It only leaves me fifty more./And since to look at things in bloom/Fifty springs are little room,/About the woodlands I will go/To see the cherry hung with snow."

Meaning: A short poem of songlike quality. Classified under: Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents. Synonyms: lyric poem; lyric. Hypernyms ("lyric poem" is a kind of...): poem; verse form (a composition written in metrical feet forming rhythmical lines). Meronyms (parts of "lyric poem"): strophe (one section of a lyric poem or choral ode in classical Greek drama); antistrophe (the section of a choral ode answering a previous strophe in classical Greek drama; the second of two metrically corresponding sections in a poem). Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "lyric poem"): ode (a lyric poem with complex stanza forms).

Lyric Poem Pictures. Click any thumbnail below to go to the full-sized version of that picture or photo.

A poem with song-like qualities, usually employing sensory details to convey an emotional experience. Lyric poems can become songs with the addition of a tune. Ballads and sonnets are popular forms of lyric poems.

Mad Hatters Review Issue 12 Now Available

2011-02-18T09:02:00.000-08:00

The next issue of Mad Hatters Review, its 12th, is now available online.

The Mad Hatters Review was founded in 2005 by Carol Novack (pictured above), who is still the publication's Editor-in-Chief. If you don’t know her work, Novack is also an excellent writer of experimental fiction, and a performer ready to spring the unexpected on her audiences at any time.

Mad Hatters is a multi-genre journal, with poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and much else in the way of writing, and it makes innovative use of image and sound. It’s a literary journal that will talk to you, literally, and there’s as much innovation, fun, and significant insight in it as anybody could want. I hope you’ll check it out.

Some of my own pieces of flash fiction, accompanied by music from Paul A. Toth and art from Gene Tanta, can be found in the Wit & Whimsy section.

Happy reading.

Mira Nillson Has A Blog!

2011-02-10T07:21:00.000-08:00

And you’ll find it here.

I first became acquainted with Mira Nillson's writing through my time visiting again over the last several years my hometown of Washington, D.C. where, a few years back, Mira’s absolutely scathing Letters to the Editor began appearing in The Washington Post and other newspapers. Mira’s letters take on the rich and powerful and corrupt and, in fact, just about everyone and everything who deserves it in this great U.S.A., which is no longer ranked in the Top 20 Least Corrupt Countries in the world.

And now she has a blog, and her first several posts seem devoted to satirizing conservative attempts to eliminate higher education options for students in the U.S. It’s hard to know what she’ll take on next.

Be forewarned though: Mira’s comments are very funny, but they’re not pretty, and the faint of heart should tread warily.

Laynie Browne and Joe Ross reading at Agitprop, Saturday Feb 12, 7 p.m.

2011-02-06T14:46:00.000-08:00

We hope you can join us on SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 12 at 7pm for a reading by Joe Ross and Laynie Browne. You can readmore about our series and view a list of upcoming events at
http://agitpropreadings.blogspot.com/

LAYNIE BROWNE is the author of nine collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent publications include: The Desires of Letters, from Counterpath and Roseate, Points of Gold, from Dusie Books (both
2010). Other recent publications include The Scented Fox, (Wave Books 2007), Daily Sonnets (Counterpath Press, 2007) and Drawing of a Swan Before Memory, (University of Georgia Press, 2005). Her honors include: winner of the National Poetry Series, of the Contemporary Poetry Series, two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Poetry, and a recent Pushcart Prize Nomination. With others she has co- curated various reading series including the Ear Inn reading series in New York, the Subtext Series in Seattle, and now the POG reading series Tucson Arizona. She has taught creative writing at The University of Washington, Bothell, at Mills College in Oakland and at the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona, where she is currently the Elementary Education Coordinator.

JOE ROSS is the recipient of a Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and the author of numerous books, most recently Strata (Dusie, 2008) and EQUATIONS=equals (Green Integer, 2004). Ross was born in Pennsylvania and after university, moved to Washington, D.C.. In D.C., he worked at The JFK Center for the Arts, served as the President of the Poetry Board at The Folger Shakespeare Library and was the Literary Editor of the Washington Review, 1991-1997. He co-founded and directed the In Your Ear poetry reading series. In 1997 he received an NEA Fellowship for his poetry and moved to San Diego, where he worked for that city’s Commission for Arts and Culture. In 1999, he left that position to put his poetics into practice, and to work directly in politics serving as Chief of Policy for elected officials. He also co-founded the Beyond the Page reading series. In 2004, he and his wife moved to Paris, where their two children were born, and where he continues to publish while working as an educator.

Agitprop readings are free, but wine and donations to the gallery are always welcome.

We hope to see you there and for festivities before and afterward.

Agitprop Gallery
Saturday, December 4, Reading 7pm, Art Opening at 8pm
2837 University Avenue in North Park
(Entrance on Utah, behind Glenn's Market)
San Diego, CA 92104 * 619.384.7989

Tenure-Track Job Searches in Literature and Writing at CSU San Marcos

2011-02-01T08:26:00.000-08:00

TENURE-TRACK POSITIONS

Cal State University San Marcos (San Diego County)

Literature and Writing Studies Department

Assistant Professor - Early U. S. Literature

Must be able to teach Colonial period through American Renaissance. Subspecialty in Native American texts desirable. Must be willing to teach in general education program. Begins Fall 2011. CSUSM (in San Diego County) is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer strongly committed to equity and diversity and seeks a broad spectrum of candidates in terms of race, sexual orientation and identity, gender, age, and disability or veteran status. The university is particularly interested in candidates who have experience working with students from diverse backgrounds and a demonstrated commitment to improving access to higher education for under-represented groups. CSUSM has been designated as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI) and was recently named one of the top 32 Colleges most friendly to junior faculty by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education. Letter of application, vita with references, narrative of teaching philosophy and successes, writing sample by 2-15-11 for best consideration; applications accepted until position is filled. Position pending budgetary approval. Visit http://www.csusm.edu/facultyopportunities for submission procedures. Contact for questions: Dr. Mark Wallace, markwall@csusm.edu.

Advanced Assistant/Associate Professor –

Writing Program/Rhetoric & Composition

Direct CSUSM’s first-year writing program and teach undergraduate and M.A. courses in Rhetoric and Composition and Writing Theory/Pedagogy, beginning fall 2011. Ph.D. or dissertation in Rhet/Comp or Writing strongly preferred; should have significant, long-standing experience as writing program administrator and publications in field. Will participate actively in campus governance, advocate for the writing program at the college and university levels, and teach in general education program. The Department has a strong Cultural Studies emphasis and interest in digital rhetoric. CSUSM (in San Diego County) is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer strongly committed to equity and diversity and seeks a broad spectrum of candidates in terms of race, sexual orientation and identity, gender, age, and disability or veteran status. The university is particularly interested in candidates who have experience working with students from diverse backgrounds and a demonstrated commitment to improving access to higher education for under-represented groups. CSUSM has been designated as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI) and was recently named one of the top 32 Colleges most friendly to junior faculty by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education. Letter of application, vita with references, narrative of writing program philosophy and successes, writing sample by 2-15-11 for best consideration; applications accepted until position is filled. Position pending budgetary approval. Visit http://www.csusm.edu/facultyopportunities for submission procedures. Contact for questions: Dr. Martha Stoddard Holmes, mstoddar@csusm.edu.

Regarding Trauma: William Burroughs on Courage

2011-01-19T10:28:00.000-08:00

Whenever I worry that, for whatever reason, I might fall apart completely, or when I know someone who’s falling apart, I always think of these lines.

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You never have real courage until you have lost courage. Lost it abjectly, completely... bolted, crawled. And there is no exhilaration equal to courage regained. That is why it is almost always fatal. How can you top it? And if you haven’t got anything left to top, what are you waiting around for?

Never fight fear head-on. That rot about pulling yourself together, and the harder you pull the worse it gets. Let it in and look at it. What shape is it? What color? Let it wash through you. Move back and hang on. Pretend it isn’t there. Get trivial. And what will they serve at this faculty party? Some lethal acidic punch no doubt, just the thing to bring on my hiatus hernia. A dreary parade of faculty parties and office parties to remind you that acute fear and boredom are incompatible.

There are many ways to distance yourself from fear. Keep silence and let fear talk. You will see it by what it does. Death doesn’t like to be seen that close. Death must always elicit surprised recognition: “You!”

The last person you expected to see, and at the same time, who else?

When De Gaulle, after an unsuccessful machine-gun attack on his car, brushed splintered glass off his shoulder and said, “Encore!,” Death couldn’t touch him. You don’t say, “Oh, You again!” to Death. Death can’t take that.

Francis Macomber and Lord Jim: courage lost. They both bolted. Courage regained: Death.

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William Burroughs, The Western Lands, p. 246

California Faculty Association Statement On The January Proposal For A 2011/12 State Budget

2011-01-11T10:06:00.000-08:00

The California State University is still "The Solution."

A cut to the California State University of $500 million would have a devastating impact on our ability to deliver the quality higher education so crucial to our state's economic recovery and global competitiveness.

If the proposed cuts are adopted in California's 2011/12 budget, thousands more qualified high school and community college graduates could be turned away from our state university. This tragedy would be compounded by rejecting a rapidly rising number of applicants from among California’s under- and unemployed who seek more education for jobs in new fields.

The effects of past cuts are stark enough: desperate students cramming into jammed classrooms hoping to add what they need to graduate; 3,000 fewer faculty members to teach them, a decrease over just two years.

Our students—and our potential students—already have had fewer educational opportunities while facing exorbitant increases in costs. Since 2002 alone, student fees in the CSU have risen 242%, far faster than inflation.

We in the California Faculty Association are not blind to the fact that the state of California is in dire straits. We will support a serious, honest, fair effort to put the state’s fiscal house in order. We welcome attention not only to cuts but also to revenues with the understanding that as a state we must pay for the institutions and programs that make California great.

We must warn, as we have in past years, that underfunding our public higher education system, along with a failure to direct enough of the dollars we do get to our university’s classrooms, puts not only the university at risk, but also California’s economic underpinnings.

To Governor Brown we say: the California State University is a fundamental part of the solution to advance California. We believe you know that; you have publicly supported the notion that quality education from pre-school to PhD is fundamental to California’s recovery.

We need you to propose legislation and measures at the ballot box based on principles of shared sacrifice, the paramount importance of jobs, and honest and just reform of the system:

SHARED SACRIFICE: Any plan to fix our state must be based on genuine shared sacrifice involving all Californians, including those at the top. We are all in this mess together.

It is time to address reform of California’s tax structure, including closing corporate tax loopholes that have resulted in everyday Californians and small businesses paying more on their property and purchases while the largest corporate entities and highest paid individuals pay less.

JOBS ARE PARAMOUNT: We have to get California back to work. The California State University is a key to accomplishing that. CFA says, “The CSU is the Solution!” California has long competed with the world for quality jobs and our strong public higher education system has enabled our success.

For that reason, in bad times the CSU is a good, necessary investment—it is actually counter-productive to cut it. The CSU builds strong citizens with good work skills who earn and contribute back to the state at higher rates.

This shows in the actual numbers. Unemployment among college graduates is about 5%. Among high school graduates it is about 10%. Among those who do not finish high school it is 15% and even worse in some areas.

Furthermore, investment in public higher education activates economic life. Every dollar invested by the state in the CSU generates about $5 for California's economy and much more in tax dollars over the life of the graduate.

HONEST REFORM OF THE SYSTEM: Until proper revenues can be achieved, every precious dollar must be used with laser focus on its intended mission. In the case of the CSU, this is spending on the classrooms and services needed to educate our students.

Any funding plan must adopt this focus and do it with openness, transparency, and a commitment to public service on the part of all of us, starting at the top.

No cuts should be applied to classes or services to students without thorough, transparent evaluation of the use of managerial and special-project dollars in the university and in university-related auxiliary organizations. We need managers to understand their ethical role in leading a vital public institution and to act accordingly to advance its mission.

The End of America, Book 5 (conclusion)

2011-01-05T09:35:00.000-08:00

The End of America, Book 5, begins here.

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The End of America, Book 5 (conclusion)

What I value about America is B.B. King singing, “One day, baby...”

What I value about America is how, at Stonewall, blacks and whites, gays and lesbians and the transgendered fought back against police who intended to beat them.

What I value about America is that I’ll never be in a situation like that, but I’ll have to fight back in some other situation and who knows whether I’ll do as well.

What I value about America is when, on July 4th, the police arrest a drunken white man for shooting off fireworks on the sidewalk, he shouts, “I love my country I love my country,” as they handcuff him and pin him to the pavement.

What I value about America is the forgotten dead.

What I value about America is nunchucks.

What I value about America is that moment when it seems funny and that moment when it doesn’t.

What I value about America is laughing uncontrollably the moment I write, “it doesn’t seem funny.”

What I value about America is flirtation.

What I value about America is anything, anything, to keep me distracted so I don’t have to feel myself dying.

What I value about America is a new theory.

What I value about America is a smart young woman who spends a few years in the Philippines studying with revolutionaries after graduating from college and becomes more aware of the problems caused by globalism and poverty and devotes a number of years of her life to working for organizations which try to change U.S. political structures.

What I value about America is cynicism.

What I value about America is cross-platform computer programs.

What I value about America is the way I can feel “I’m making it through life” as if life is the work week and death is the weekend.

What I value about America is the cult of youth and disdain for the old and their wisdom, assuming that any of us at any age has any wisdom.

What I value about America is how the success of fast food has contributed to high obesity and depression.

What I value about America is Alaska.

What I value about America is desolated parts of its cities or hidden parts of its countryside where poor people, white or black or of many different cultures or backgrounds, live in decrepit apartments or on the street or in their cars or in a tin shack, hungry or out of work or both or carrying some small blunt weapon, and how the lives they live are still unknown in most of America.

What I value about America is runaway teenagers.

What I value at America is being told, at an afternoon barbecue, that “there are more wealthy people in China then there are middle class people in the U.S.”

What I value about America is getting the good stuff.

What I value about America is how many people, even in casual conversation, feel free to establish a point by quoting a study that nobody else has heard of and that may or may not exist.

What I value about America is how health insurance companies do everything they can to charge you the maximum and pay you as little as possible and kick you out if you actually get ill and not allow you on if you ever have been ill at any time in any way that anybody officially noticed.

What I value about America is that even though health insurance is a rip-off, it’s much worse not to have it.

What I value about America is the cheese sandwich, the tuna fish sandwich and the turkey sandwich.

What I value about America is companies who spy on employee e-mail.

What I value about America is the power of textbooks.

What I value about America is so many types of charts.

What I value about America is blurry boundaries.

What I value about America is one toke over the line.

What I value about America is the home credit crisis, with Bank of America and other corporations being sued by the San Diego city government for fraudulent loan practices, with people who have lost their money and their houses and who, in abandoning their houses, break windows and crack swimming pools and strip walls and pour concrete down toilets, and I value the mosquito problem that has developed in those neighborhoods because of the standing water problem created by the ruined plumbing, as if the aftermath of the collision between the naive and overwhelming desire for the American Dream Home and abusive corporate practices is an infestation of insects.

What I value about America is termite fumigation.

What I value about America is cliches about America that make Americans feel comfortable while at the same time saying nothing specific, and I value the way Americans often want to value America without valuing anything about America too specifically.

What I value about America is road trips. And given the cost of gas, road trips are more valuable than ever.

What I value about America is that “looking for a job has become a full-time job.”

What I value about America is office gossip.

What I value about America is the proliferation of credentials.

What I value about America is that “A sandwich is a sandwich, but a Manwich is a meal.”

What I value about America is how often I’d rather be distracted than actually do the work I most want to do.

What I value about America is local brew pubs.

What I value about America is golf courses.

What I value about America is who’s lurking out in it, waiting for a chance.

What I value about America is shell games.

What I value about America is the skyrocketing price of gas and the way I can’t get out of my head the idea that even under these conditions, gas prices will go down in the few weeks before an election so that the American population will feel more optimistic, since when they feel more optimistic they’re more likely to vote Republican and oil corporations know that.

What I value about America is conspiracies and conspiracy theories, especially ones that suggest that the U.S. government is involved in bombing or poisoning the American people.

What I value about America is wondering about what sorts of Americans are more fascinated by John F. Kennedy or Lee Harvey Oswald.

What I value about America is that, at the Republican National Convention, every camera angle taken on the crowd seems to show precisely one African American.

What I value about America is lawn mowers you can drive.

What I value about America is how America wears me out just thinking about it.

What I value about America is that I could never run out of things to value about America.

What I value about America is institutional funding.

What I value about America is grammar manuals.

What I value about America is that even weather reports are designed to manipulate emotion.

What I value about America is dead baby jokes.

What I value about America is 11 a.m. check out.

What I value about America is corporate sponsorship.

What I value about America is Iggy Pop singing, in the 1970 song “No Fun,” “Maybe go out/ maybe stay home/ maybe call Mom/ on the telephone,” and that in America, boredom can be a function of privilege or a function of poverty but either way it empties the mind and soul a little at a time so that many people eventually come to the conclusion that it’s ridiculous to care too much about anything because nothing you care about matters to anybody.

What I value about America is isolation.

What I value about America is that whatever you think about America, someone in America or not in America might be dying, right now, because of what’s going on in America or what somebody thinks about America.

And I value, in America, the American poets who like to point out to other American poets that people in America or not in America are dying because of America, even though pointing that out doesn’t stop anyone from dying.

What I value about America is the struggle to wake up, to go to work, to try to help people or take people’s money or protect people or protect yourself from people.

What I value about America is not an abstraction but a question I face every one of these too little too big days, and that can be answered only by who and what I try to care about and who and what I don’t care about.

What I value about America is trying to figure out what matters and live a little with that every now and then, doing something about it or not doing something among all the other things I don’t want to do but have to.

What I value about America is that it’s easy, at any given moment, to forget about America, but that sooner or later I remember it again whether I want to or not.

What I value about America is the end of America and all the people who have imagined different ends for it, good or bad, and all the people who never want it to end, and I value the way that sooner or later, all of us say goodbye to America and to all the people who think about the end of America or who have never thought about it.

And I value about America that what matters most personally to me in the world, the people I’ve known and the animals I’ve known and all the others I haven’t known but who matter most anyway, and that it would be possible to have them all matter even if there was no America although I will never, even if it ends, be able to think about any of them without having the image of America stand in the way, whether the image is the Statue of Liberty’s raised hand or the Wounded Knee killing grounds or rows of corporate buildings standing greyly under Atlanta clouds or protestors along Pennsylvania Avenue with signs suggesting that America could still be as wonderful as it might have been but never has, and I value the disappointment of that dream’s loss and the need to find it somewhere other than America or to insist that even at this too late moment, America might still live up to it or even if not, might not so actively prevent it every time and everywhere it comes across it.

What I value about America is the whole sick surge of the desire for Heaven on Earth or the City on the Hill, and all the lies that have been told and the people killed in the name of that desire, and that wanting Heaven on Earth makes it unclear whether you want justice or to kill or just to be dead.

What I value about America is that, here in Carlsbad, only a few hundred yards from my home, I stand on the crumbling small cliffs above the ocean and watch the vanishing mythic sun as it leaves America, dropping below the edge of the ocean while nearby other people stand, some who come every day to watch the sun leave America, and I know how this moment is the most clichéd moment there is about California and the end of America, one that all sorts of people have mentioned, and I know that I’m never more than one of those people, and I know what else I think about although sometimes I don’t understand it but I never know what the others are thinking, the ones standing there, although of course I could guess and in some instants not be far wrong, their children or their car or the love they’ve always wanted but never had and are never going to, and we stand there awhile, watching the sun go and looking at each other while trying not to be seen doing it and wondering who else is here and what they might be thinking and whether all of us here are finally alone with our thoughts and with what’s left of the sun before it goes, just for today because it comes back tomorrow, probably anyway but who knows. And I value, in America, that once the sun is gone, people get in their cars and drive away or, like me, walk away because they live so close, all of us going back to lives that have nothing to do with each other but are unthinkable without each other, and a few yards back from the cliff I cross the Coast Highway at a crosswalk where the cars are supposed to stop for pedestrians although a few don’t until one makes the decision to slow and others do too, and once on the other side of the highway, walking on Acacia Street past the older, little beach houses and the newer beach mansions, almost always closed and empty, owned as real estate ventures by people who never live in them and don’t even rent them much, their huge windows showing me my own reflection and the Coast Highway behind me, I feel lost like the last man on earth and it’s pleasant and unbearable and suspicious, and feeling it and not knowing what to do except to write it I climb the stairs to my own darkened balcony, looking out at the low blue light above the leaf and twig choked pool that no one cleans or uses, and there’s enough twilight left in the shadows to allow me to find the lock on the door of the rented apartment where I live, who knows for how much longer.

June 2008-June 2009

Nada Gordon and K. Lorraine Graham Burn Down Los Angeles: Sunday, January 2

2010-12-29T19:07:00.000-08:00

Well, in fact they might just give a reading. But you never know, and whatever they do, this is going to be a fascinating, can't miss event.

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The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

NADA GORDON & K. LORRAINE GRAHAM

Sunday, January 2, 2011 at 7:30pm

The PRB@The Public School
951 Chung King Rd.
Los Angeles, CA

Doors open at 7:00pm
Reading starts at 7:30pm

$5 donation requested

Nada Gordon is the author of several poetry books: Folly, V. Imp, Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?, and foriegnn bodie-- and an e-pistolary techno-romantic non-fiction novel, Swoon. Her new book, Scented Rushes, is just out from Roof books. A founding member of the Flarf Collective, she practices poetry, song, dance, dressmaking, and image manipulation as deep entertainment. She blogs at ululate.blogspot.com.

K. Lorraine Graham is the author of Terminal Humming, (Edge Books), recent work has appeared in Eleven Eleven, the Zaoem International Poetry Exhibition at the Minardschouwburg, Gent, Belgium, and the Infusoria visual poetry exhibition in Brussels. She lives in Carlsbad, CA, with her partner Mark Wallace and Lester Young, a pacific parrotlet. You can find her online at spooksbyme.org.

The End of America, Book 5 (continued)

2010-12-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

The End of America, Book 5, begins here.

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(The End of America, Book 5, continued)

What I value about America is the way human overpopulation in southern California is helping crows become the dominant bird species.

What I value about America is news about sex slaves.

What I value about America is B-film shockers from the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

What I value about America is constant media coverage of the media.

What I value about America is Bomb Pops. Do they make those any more?

What I value about America is academic conference cash bars.

What I value about America is trivia game shows.

What I value about America is phrases like “Love It or Leave It.”

What I value about America is that while we may not have any more Mountain Men living in rustic shacks with their Indian Brides, we have plenty of guys in designer camouflage gear shooting prairie dogs with high-powered rifles.

What I value about America is tradition.

What I value about America is feuds and grudge matches.

I value, in America, professional wrestling and skateboarding and surfing and extreme sports and any and all instances of male bodies pitted against each other or the elements of nature, especially those that feature sponsors and endorsements. And I value instances of female bodies doing the same though they seem to get less sponsorship, which must mean that some people value them less but I’m not one of those people.

What I value about America is how much Americans are willing to pay to look at each other perform, especially in various degrees of undress.

What I value about America is fabric and upholstery freshener sprays.

What I value about America is the Conqueror Worm.

What I value about America is a couple on a balcony screaming at each other in the afternoon sun, their voices ragged with rage, the woman shouting repeatedly, “Get the fuck out of here.”

What I value about America is the certainty that what I value about America won’t be understood.

What I value about America is all sex all the time.

What I value about America is that some will call this poem elitist and some will call it too ironic and some will call it leftist and some will call it not leftist enough and some will say that what I value about America is based on the fact that I’m a white man and some will say that the poem is worthwhile and some will say that it’s not. And some will say that the poem fails to draw a clear distinction between moral and immoral action, or between useful or un-useful political action, and some will say its refusal to draw clear distinctions defines a necessary ground for moral or useful action that more cut and dried distinctions can never manage and some will say that it doesn’t.

And what I value about America is that neither me nor anybody else can say if writing this poem has any value, to anyone in America or anyone not in America but who might be interested in America, beyond whatever value it has to whoever might read it and do something with it and whatever value it had to me writing it.

What I value about America is that it’s two continents with many countries, not just one country, and if I don’t mention that, someone else will.

What I value about America is the sax solos of Lester Young and Charlie Parker and how Parker initially learned from Young but that, by 1946, when they played together at the Philharmonic, Parker was just beginning to be famous and Young, eleven years older, was battered by syphilis and alcoholism and his time in the U.S. military when he ended up in jail and was probably beaten, and how because of that in 1946 Parker could play more sharply than Young, who despite his growing frailty played an emotionally powerful if technically flawed solo before and after Parker’s two great choruses in “Lady Be Good,” and Parker’s fame increased because he had surpassed his own main idol and had become the most important original genius in jazz and yet only eight years later would be dead, actually dying before Young, who though already ill by the time Parker was rising to fame outlived him by four years.

What I value about America is CDs with endless alternate takes.

What I value about America is Internet cowards who leave hostile anonymous comments on other people’s blogs.

What I value about America is the firm conviction of many Americans that they, and they alone, are the last honest person in America.

What I value about America is people’s eagerness to take their clothes off.

What I value about America is summer. Especially summer weekends at the beach. And even more especially the nostalgia that gets attached to the idea of summer and how that nostalgia, when I was growing up, was put to work in television ads for lemonade.

What I value about America is making things into opposites that don’t have to be opposites.

What I value about America is everything people say about America and everything they don’t say. Which, you have to admit, gives me a lot to value.

What I value about America is the connection between mining strikes, the Carnegies, police and private security brutality, and the creation of the public relations industry.

What I value about America is the kind of life people have to live when they work at convenience stores and fast food restaurants.

What I value about America is its borders.

What I value about America is all the ways there are to make money—sometimes a lot, sometimes a little—off ideas about its borders.

And the way, in America, some people want people to come up from Mexico to work for them and some people don’t want people to come up from Mexico to work, and some people want the one while saying they want they other.

What I value about America is how it seems there’s a way to wring cash out of just about anything. Especially things that hurt other people.

What I value about America is con games and that it’s not clear how many of us are playing them.

What I value about America is that some people may think I’m writing this for the money.

What I value about America is career advancement.

What I value about America is that even people who don’t give a damn about freedom, justice or equality still have to say they do if they want to succeed in politics. But I also value the fact that having to talk about those concepts doesn’t mean you intend to do anything about them.

What I value about America is hypocrisy.

What I value about America is the way a mercenary organization like Blackwater can have a CEO who says he wants to get the company out of the security business as a cover for the organization’s future mercenary activities.

What I value about America is how difficult it is to know what goes on hidden behind the spin.

What I value about America are its many and constantly evolving types of stalkers: sexual stalkers, workplace stalkers, government stalkers, celebrity stalkers, Internet stalkers, even intellectual and poetry stalkers.

What I value about America is ordinary, hard-working Americans, the phrase “ordinary, hard-working Americans,” and the differences between the two.

What I value about America is that everybody in America is allowed to create any religion they want with any beliefs that they want and promote it as much as they can.

What I value about America is Hank in Alabama, Nate in Alaska, Barbara in Arizona, Katy and Matt in Arkansas, Dodie and Kevin in California, Noah in Colorado, Steven in Connecticut, a whole bunch of people in DC, Amanda in Delaware, Vernon in Florida, Laura in Georgia, Susan in Hawaii, Martin in Idaho, Lisa and Bill in Illinois, Joyelle and Johannes in Indiana, Cole in Iowa, Anne in Kansas, Dana in Kentucky, Bill in Louisiana, Carla and Ben in Maine, Tina in Maryland, Elisa in Massachusetts, Gina in Michigan, Elizabeth and Jeff in Minnesota, Tim in Mississippi, Jonathan in Missouri, Prageeta in Montana, Bill in Nebraska, Sherre in Nevada, no one I can think of at all in New Hampshire, Stephen in New Jersey, Joy and Bruce in New Mexico, Kristin in New York, Ken in North Carolina, no idea in North Dakota, Cathy in Ohio, Susan in Oklahoma, Allison and Jen in Oregon, Linh in Pennsylvania, Rosemarie in Rhode Island, David in South Carolina, no idea in South Dakota either, Amy in Tennessee, Hoa in Texas, Lance in Utah, Ruth in Vermont, Reb in Virginia, Nico in Washington, Tom in West Virginia, Roberto in Wisconsin, and Danielle in Wyoming

What I value about America is Marxists.

What I value about America is the gnawing emptiness I feel when trying to write about what I value about America, and I value that the way I’ve been managing to get the energy to write is to make myself annoyed and find people to be annoyed about or to fill myself with longing and find people to long for.

What I value about America is my lack of inner emotional resources.

What I value about America is how difficult it is to like and help other people, and how that difficulty for so many people can override their own better intentions.

What I value about America is how often I’ve been told the joke, “Stress is what results from not kicking the shit out of someone who heartily deserves it.”

What I value about America is bathroom homily plaques.

What I value about America is how it’s possible for people to be marginalized and privileged at the same time in different areas of their lives.

What I value about America is advice columns.

What I value about America is my need for love.

What I value about America is how talk about true love is often a cover for the fact that in order to be happy, people need a fulfilling web of human connections of which romantic love is really only one element.

What I value about America is happiness studies.

What I value about America is how friendship is not really an element of the American dream.

What I value about America is that hard work is considered more important than thoughtful or effective work.

What I value about America is that dividing life into work and leisure makes both unbearable.

What I value about America is working for the weekend.

What I value about America is how stunning it is to be so lonely even when other people know and love me.

What I value about America is all the ways to be inaccessible.

What I value about America is Detroit.

What I value about America is people who are sure they’re right.

What I value about America is all the really cool Canadian writers even though I know that Canada has a similar set of problems to any capitalist democracy as well as a few unique ones of its own.

What I value about America is Quebec: the city, the old town, the province, the small shore towns running up the St. Lawrence River, the wilderness and mountains and inland fjords and the small cold inland industrial towns like Chicoutimi, which I visited in summer when the day was sunny and humid and light sparkled off gas station walls.

What I value about America is Lac Ha Ha.

What I value about America is the way governmental oversight organizations, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, or the Department of Health and Human Services, sometimes provide oversight and sometimes prevent it, requiring oversight of the oversight, which sometimes doesn’t work either.

What I value about America is sleeveless tees.

What I value about America is the exorbitant cost of women’s clothing.

What I value about America is that, after some years of the conservative training that became more common during the George Bush years, more and more young women in America say that having a baby is natural by which they mean that they shouldn’t use birth control, and so when they’re having sex they’re more likely to get pregnant casually, and sooner or later of course the man runs off, whether they were married or not makes no difference, and because of the idea that birth is a natural thing that happens to women, the women think it’s their obligation to raise the child or children on their own and they don’t even go to court trying to get paternity payments.

What I value about America is women who write well or play music well or paint well or work well in politics or community organizations and who are making decisions to do what they want with their lives, either with men or with other women or with whoever they want to be with, and I value the women who don’t know they have these options or who are prevented by their families or their upbringing from having these options or knowing they have them, and I value women who think they know what their options are when they don’t.

What I value about America is how many people think feminism should be over with when they don’t even know what it was or is.

What I value about America is when the fish people rise from alluvial mud.

What I value about America is what it must have been like to be the only Surrealist in Minnesota, and what it must be like, now, to be one of four or five of them.

(to be continued)

The End of America, Book 5 (continued)

2010-12-13T09:10:00.000-08:00

(Pictured: The Statue of Liberty and the Encina Power Station, Carlsbad, CA. Separated at birth?)

The End of America, Book 5 begins here.

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End of America, Book 5 continued

What I value about America is that little spongy pad not much bigger than the tip of a finger which falls off a space craft, a failure costing several hundred million dollars and causing several experienced astronauts to spend hours replacing it because otherwise they’ll never return to earth.

And I value those friends who can’t keep a secret and when you’re involved romantically with somebody new always wants to tell that person about all the other people you were involved with.

What I value about America is liking my friends and not liking other people’s friends, or else it’s not liking my friends and liking the friends of others.

What I value about America is spicy jalapenos.

What I value about America is salmonella warnings.

What I value about America is that the snake with one hundred heads jumps right out of the treasure chest.

What I value about America is pirate movies.

What I value about America is car dealerships.

And RV and SUV and motorcycle and pretty much every other kind of dealership.

What I value about America is my girlfriend.

I value photographs of Mom and Dad, Pappy and Grandma, Uncle Joe, and the dog.

I’m not sure about Uncle Joe though. What I value about America is a story that someone once told me about their Uncle Joe: “One time when we had a pool party of friends, neighbors, and relatives at my house. Joe disappeared for awhile with one of the neighborhood boys, and later that afternoon several people saw the boy run home crying. I barely noticed at the time and never thought about it again until years later when my brother, who had a long history of alcohol problems, drug abuse and difficulty holding jobs, called me drunk and crying and accused Joe of having molested him and several other neighborhood boys when they were children. He said my parents had known but refused to admit it. My brother never mentioned it again and since both my parents had died, I never found out what was true.”

What I value about America is family secrets.

I value, in America, the guy who says that says insurance salesmen have the kinds of values that make for great fathers and the guy who responds to him by saying his own father was an insurance salesman and a drunken lout who ruined his mother’s life.

And I value the 50th anniversary of Bob and Jeanette Smith, married in Kansas City, Missouri at the age of 18 and who still live just outside it, and who for their golden wedding party were greeted by their five living children (Steve, the sixth, had died in a car wreck), thirteen grandchildren and two great great grandchildren, as well as numerous friends, and who all weekend hugged heartily and laughed heartily and felt gratified and loved, and who looked forward to attending the wedding of their grandson Jeremy later that summer.

And I value the way, in America, when families like that appear in the news they’re always white families even though there are also Latino and black and Asian and Indian and Pacific Islander and Arab families who might be described a similar way.

What I value about America is how it seems impossible to include, even if only in a brief mention, all the different kinds of cultural backgrounds that people in America have.

What I value about America is how many Americans talk about the value of family while simultaneously seeing their families as little as possible, sometimes only on holidays during which a lot of depression, anxiety, and outrage is directed by Americans at other members of their families.

So when you ask me what I value about America, I’m going to have to say I value conflictedness.

What I value about America is warm July breezes off the ocean.

What I value about America is poets criticizing each other endlessly and harshly.

What I value about America is conventional standards of beauty, which make it easier to decide whether people are attractive before you even know them.

What I value about America is the cult of the baby.

What I value about America is the CPUSA, SWP, the AFL-CIO, the US American labor movement, and the SEIU (even their actions at the 2008 Labor Notes conference in Detroit), and all the work these movements have done to better the lives of working people and all the problems they’ve sometimes caused by supporting questionable positions in maneuvering for power and by disagreeing among themselves and with each other about how to better people’s lives and by not always being sure what the best ends might be.

What I value about America is exhaustion and feelings of emptiness.

What I value about America is starting over.

What I value about America is my right not to try.

What I value about America is that instant of knowing it’s not going to work, whatever it is, even though I’ve spent hours or days or weeks trying to make it work, but it’s not going to, it never is, and I’ve been fighting it for awhile and then the instant of knowing arrives and it’s devastating, like nothing is going to work ever again, and I’m right about that, nothing is going to work ever again, and I have to set it aside and not think about it but it’s all I can think about because what else is there to think about if nothing is going to work ever again, which it isn’t, yet eventually I forget about it and start up again at something else, whatever it is, that may work or may not work but probably won’t because nothing ever does, and so the instant of knowing is the instant of going on, the instant of forgetting and repeating and knowing what won’t work but then being unable later to remember even the most obvious and unavoidable facts.

What I value about America is the obvious and unavoidable facts and our ability to know them and forget them.

So don’t ask me what I value about America because I’m going to have to tell you and then we’ll both have to know.

What I value about America is all the flimsy appliances I use that are made in other countries under work conditions I never have to see or know anything about.

What I value about America is slang.

What I value about America is the right not to understand anything anyone is trying to say.

What I value about America is instructional films about car wrecks designed to scare teenagers into driving more carefully.

What I value about America is the death wish.

What I value about America is property and privacy.

What I value about America is slogans.

What I value about America is good people doing bad things.

What I value about America is perpetual war.

What I value about America is Justin from the trailer park, or Manuel from the barrio, or Reggie from the ‘hood, or Rochelle or Debbie from their apartments with their mothers, or Francisco the son of an insurance salesman or Elbert whose brothers work the docks, all of whom or any of whom sign up with the Marines because they need something or are looking for something or want to contribute something or protect something or are angry enough to take something out on someone, and who after a few weeks or months of training in “You Are Your Rifle” and how to do what they’re told and use a few pieces of electronic equipment and humiliate each other for stepping out of line or for having different cultural backgrounds or just for existing, find themselves on a street in Iraq where children wave to them or hide and adults come up, loud and friendly because they want to make sure that no one thinks they mean any harm to the young Americans with the weapons, and this goes on for awhile and it’s more than one hundred degrees every day and there’s nothing to do and they’ve been trained to fight, not just to sit and watch, and one day under the leadership of a man who has developed a nervous blink and who uses “fuck” and “raghead” in the same phrases over and over, they’re asked to clear a neighborhood where a few hidden people are firing rounds at them, and then Justin, or Manuel, or whichever one of them because it could be any, turns a corner and is startled by movement from behind and screams and shoots and more or less tears apart a woman who had thought she had heard something, one of her children maybe, and stepped out only half-intentionally into the alley, and then Elbert or Reggie, or whoever it is, knows instantly that he’s killed someone’s mother and that he, not anyone else, is the person who doesn’t belong here and never should have been here, and then several months later, exhausted and unable to sleep, he takes his rifle out one night and shoots himself, becoming one of the many suicide casualties of the war.

And what I value about America is the poets who argue that none of this should have happened, that Debbie or Francisco or Justin or Elbert or Rochelle should have known better or should have been able to go somewhere where people would have told them not to become Marines, that people have an ethical obligation to understand that you shouldn’t confuse future opportunities with signing up to murder people in distant parts of the world, and the poets, some of whom have no real potential soldiers to tell these things to, argue with each other about them or march in protests or learn the history of labor unions and social alternatives, and meanwhile future Justins and Manuels stop joining the armed forces so much, at least for the moment, because almost everyone has figured out by now that there’s no sense in going to Iraq, except of course for those so-called leaders who either still think that there’s something to be gained or, more likely, realize that they’d lose their jobs if they change their minds and they’d rather have someone else die than lose their jobs.

So if you value America like I do, you’re going to have to value a lot of people and ideas and events that are difficult to value, and you’re going to have to understand that saying you value something doesn’t mean you know how you value it, and how you value it is the question that you’re trying every day to answer.

What I value about America is the three baby hawks in the courtyard who have now gotten older and who play and fight with each other in the grass, picking up sticks in their talons as a way of learning to hunt.

(to be continued)

The End of America, Book 5

2010-12-08T10:59:00.000-08:00

(opening excerpt; to be continued later)

What I value about America is mass produced black tee shirts with mythical lizard images.

What I value about America is meaningless choices between gas stations and the worthless distinction called “Super Unleaded.”

What I value about America is the waitress in a coffee shop who by my third day of vacation in Palm Springs already knows what my order is going to be, and also the high school boy who works there and who, when I come back for the second time in a day, says, skeptically, “You again?”

What I value about America is any cranky opinion you want to have.

What I value about America is the leaking pump in my toilet bowl.

What I value about America is my ability to comment on the rest of the world without ever having to go there.

What I value about America is that instant when two people in a car sail out over a cliff, look back at the ridge where the police have gathered to watch them die and silver-streaked rocks glint in the sun, and as the car heads towards the ocean below they think to themselves that America never seems so beautiful as when you say goodbye to it.

What I value about America is hard drive crashes.

What I value about America is giving directions.

What I value about America is the way I don’t have to know anyone well.

What I value about America smells like cheeseburgers.

What I value about America is staying with friends for a few days in a house on the Susquehanna River and driving into Front Royal in the evening for dinner because even in the Shenandoah Hills there’s one good Mexican restaurant.

What I value about America is the hawks born in the trees in the courtyard of my apartment complex who think of the apartment complex as home.

What I value about America is lunch meat.

What I value about America is the way freedom of speech means that every organization gets to decide for itself what it’s unwilling to listen to.

And the way that anybody who calls somebody else an asshole thinks they have a right to a response.

What I value about America is going to work in the morning.

What I value about America is the way my whole life I’ve been told what America is.

What I value about America is the constant feeling I have that I never want to talk about America again.

What I value about America is, of course, American cheese.

But only when the slices are individually wrapped. Otherwise they all just stick together.

What I value about America is a woman who sits in the back of the class, says nothing, turns in a decent paper then disappears for weeks, shows up again at last and sits silently for a few more weeks and turns in nothing, then finally e-mails the professor on the last day of class saying “I’ve done all the work, can I still turn it in?”

What I value about America is the way Americans are asked to consider everything in terms of value. And in terms of the value of America.

What I value about America is the struggle between environmental groups trying to clean up the ocean and a corporate push to develop desalination plants to pull drinkable water out of salt water.

What I value about America is that activists hand out condoms, and roadhouse bathrooms have condom machines.

What I value about America is pop music.

What I value about America is the Charleston, the bunny hop, and the mosh pit slam.

What I value about America is all the ways to waste time on the job.

What I value about America is the struggle between sincerity and insincerity.

I value the way, in America, claiming to be sincere can be a way of saying “I have the right not to know what I’m talking about” while claiming to be insincere can be a way of saying “I have a right to feel this has nothing to do with me.”

What I value about America is comfortable running socks.

What I value about America is immigrants working for sub-minimum wage.

What I value about America is tequila and beer specials beyond the Mexican border.

What I value about America is the vision of a future in which one day all of us, no matter our race, class, or cultural background, will be working retail.

What I value about America is the way football season, basketball season and baseball season overlap so that year round, most evenings of any week, I can watch a game that I like at just that moment when I’m too tired to think.

What I value about America is Friday night parties.

What I value about America is oral narratives about its factories.

What I value about America is the fish taco in San Diego and the chicken wing in Buffalo and barbecued spare ribs just outside Dallas.

What I value about America is low fat salad dressing.

What I value about America is the impossibility not only of giving any issue a fair hearing but even of agreeing what a fair hearing means.

What I value about America is the stranglehold of the two-party system.

What I value about America is the meaning of what “is” is.

What I value about America is that equal numbers of U.S. citizens get incensed over an out-of-wedlock blow job and a war that kills hundreds of thousands of people.

What I value about America is greasing the palms.

What I value about America is men who live for the thrill of debate.

What I value about America is innuendo.

What I value about America is jazz, blues, folk, and rock and roll.

What I value about America is that the Duke and the Count and the King are musicians.

What I value about America is the bars and restaurants within a few blocks of the beach where people order tacos and nachos and pizza and beer and margaritas, even the bright yellow creamy Mango margaritas, and through the echos under the high ceilings they talk loudly about football teams and cars and boats and the price of gas and broken marriages and how much they want to get married again, and they show off tattoos and breast implants and wear tee-shirts that advertise their interests and laugh in a way that sounds half like they’re having fun and half desperate, then finally they step out to the parking lot full of oversized SUVs and drive drunk the few miles back to their vacation rentals.

So if you ask me about the end of America and what I value about America, you’ll have to listen to the answers.

(to be continued)

Kate Durbin reading at Agitprop in San Diego December 4

2010-11-29T13:08:00.000-08:00

Agitprop Reading Series, in North Park, now has a blog where you can get information about past and future readings.

Kate Durbin, a fascinating young poet who has one of the most unique and stylish stage presences around these days, will be reading at Agitprop this Saturday night. Fans of the gurlesque should especially take note and come out. The evening also features an art opening celebrating a new website by Susy Bielak.

For more details, including how to sign up on the mailing list and receive future announcements directly, visit the Agitprop Reading Series Blog.

Agitprop Gallery
Saturday, December 4, Reading 7pm, Art Opening at 8pm
2837 University Avenue in North Park (Entrance on Utah, behind Glenn's Market)
San Diego, CA 92104 * 619.384.7989 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 619.384.7989 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Importing Facebook to My Blog: Facebook Aphorisms 2010 (excerpts)

2010-11-23T10:33:00.000-08:00

In my ongoing transition to a world of Multiple Platforms, a lot of my written social and aesthetic commentary this year has been in the form of aphorisms (and sometimes anti-aphorisms) potentially meant to become Facebook status updates, although many never do. I find myself writing more of them than I would ever put on Facebook as well as writing ones that, because of their content, I also wouldn’t put on Facebook.

So in the spirit, or perhaps anti-spirit, of putting blog posts up on Facebook, I’m now putting some of these Facebook status updates (some which never otherwise appeared) up on my blog.

And I might put up more of them later.

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Dear Humans: Why should animals be friendly to you?

There’s a fine line between being laid back, repressed, and depressed.

I have the habit, probably bad, of liking people who like me and thinking they must be smart and have good taste.

Too many people would like individuality for themselves while granting only sociology to anybody else.

Either art, literature, and music have profoundly changed your life or they haven’t. Where do you stand on that issue?

The unending conflict between social norms and exploratory ideas in art and literature.

It felt a bit like being decapitated.

Today’s peace and quiet is neither.

Anything could become a cliche, but only some things already are.

Given your interests, I suggest you start doing documentary and skip the poetry part.

Your radical selfishness is actually just the same old selfishness.

Too many poems try too hard to imitate poems.

Too many poems try too hard to be poems.

Your music sounds so relaxed and precise that it seems like anyone could do it, except no one else can.

The guilt and trepidation that always comes with being exhausted.

Slang phrases like “my truth” and “relatable” try to pretend that a person’s subjective impressions are objective conditions by which other things and people must inevitably be measured.

Another one of those model husband turns out to be brutal asshole problems.

Enforced optimism imposes a culture of wishful thinking.

What is your interpretation of the phrase “settle down”?

Creating an anthology called The Generalized Grump: The Art of Criticizing Everyone While Saying Nothing Much. No trouble at all finding 800 pages of that.

My authenticity comes from being neither from the good or the bad side of town.

I like the writing of many sad, desperate poets, but that doesn’t mean they should be made into heroes, which would be, of course, to romanticize.

Too many people want themselves to be complicated and the world to be simple.

In this country, where many people construct fantasies about how much the government controls them, many people also fantasize about how much power to change anything the government actually has.

Overheard on a plane: “They’re from San Diego, so they don’t know how cold San Diego is in May.”

Intriguing detail from Gettysburg: 1863 newspaper editorials from London, Chicago, and even nearby Harrisburg making fun of Lincoln's "silly little" address. Ah, reviewers (and I'm one of them).

There are degrees and differences in poetic disjunction. It’s not just “two things that don’t match.” It’s how they don’t match that counts.

Saying that “politics is stupid” is still part of politics, and part of what makes politics stupid.

See You in Portland?

2010-11-01T16:42:00.000-07:00

I’m going to be in Portland this weekend, from Friday November 5th until Monday, and reading in the Tangent Reading Series on Saturday November 6th. If you’re anywhere near Portland, consider yourself invited.

Then, after traveling south to Eugene and Ashland during the week, I’ll be back in Portland for a second weekend, from Friday the 12th until I fly out on Monday the 15th.

I hope to see any of you who are there, and please be in touch.

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Poetry reading featuring K. Lorraine Graham, Kevin Sampsell, and Mark Wallace

Saturday, November 6  7:00pm - 10:00pm
Open Space Café
2815 SE Holgate
Portland, OR

The Tangent Press & Reading Series is pleased to host a cross-genre reading of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction on Saturday, 6 November at 7 PM. Portland-based writer and editor Kevin Sampsell will be joined by Southern California writers K. Lorraine Graham and Mark Wallace. The event will take place at the in Southeast Portland (2815 SE Holgate).

www.thetangentpress.org/readings.html
Admission is free.

Kevin Sampssell is the author of the short story collections, Beautiful Blemish and Creamy Bullets. His newest book is the memoir, A Common Pornography. He has been the publisher of Future Tense Books, a micropress, since 1990.

K. Lorraine Graham is the author of Terminal Humming (Edge Books), and her visual work has appeared in the Zaoem International Poetry Exhibition at the Minardschouwburg, Gent, Belgium, and the Infusoria visual poetry exhibition in Brussels. She lives in Carlsbad, CA, with her partner Mark Wallace and Lester Young, a pacific parrotlet. You can find her online at spooksbyme.org.

Mark Wallace is the author of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he has co-edited two essay collections, Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s, and A Poetics of Criticism. Most recently he has published a short story collection, Walking Dreams (2007), and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion (2008). Forthcoming in early 2011 is his second novel, The Quarry and The Lot. He teaches at California State University San Marcos.

My Cleveland-Chicago-Racine readings

2010-10-07T11:40:00.000-07:00

For those of you in the Midwest, I’ll be giving several readings, some also featuring other writers, in the following locations at the following times and dates:

Cleveland, Ohio
Thursday, October 14
9 p.m.
Jean Brandt Gallery
1028 Kenilworth Ave in Tremont

Kate Zambreno and Amanda Rosanne Howland Davidson will also be reading.

Chicago, Illinois
Saturday, October 16
7 p.m.
Myopic Books
1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue, 2nd Floor

Racine, Wisconsin
Sunday, October 17
7 p.m.
Gallery B4S, 613 Sixth Street
event hosted by the Racine Public Library

Jennifer Karmin and Tom Orange will also be reading.

Notes on the other authors:

Cleveland:

Kate Zambreno lived, wrote and taught for many years in Chicago before moving to Akron last year. Her novel O Fallen Angel, which won Chiasmus Press' "Undoing the Novel" contest, depicts a triptych of an American family during wartime. A collection of theoretical essays stemming from her blog “Francis Farmer is My Sister” will be published by Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents series in Spring 2012. She is currently teaching creative nonfiction at Cleveland State this semester.

Amanda Rosanne Howland Davidson hails from Canton and now lives on the West Side with her husband Scott. She has just started the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Cleveland State. For many years she has also been active on the Cleveland underground music scene, playing guitar and singing in the band Dead Peasant Insurance, which has toured widely throughout the U.S. and since 2004 issued nearly a dozen limited edition recordings on cassette and CD-R releases, most recently Cleveland Scum Skulls on the Pizza Night.

Racine:

Jennifer Karmin’s text-sound epic, Aaaaaaaaaaalice, was published by Flim Forum Press in 2010. She curates the Red Rover Series and is co-founder of the public art group Anti Gravity Surprise. Her multidisciplinary projects have been presented at festivals, artist-run spaces, community centers, and on city streets across the U.S., Japan, and Kenya. At home in Chicago, Jennifer teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and works as a Poet-in-Residence for the public schools.

Tom Orange currently lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. A poet, critic, and saxophone player, his recent work appears or is forthcoming in Court Green, Primary Writing, The Word at Peek Review, Rock Heals, and The Poker, and in the Slow Poetry anthology that appeared on Big Bridge.

My Readings in Portugal and Galicia

2010-09-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

If you just happen to be in Portugal or Galicia (northwestern Spain), I´d be as surprised about that as I would be about your ability to attend my readings there. But who knows? You can't make it if I don't invite you, so consider yourself invited.

On Tuesday, September 28 at 6 p.m., at the University of Coimbra (top picture), in Coimbra, Portugal, I'll be presenting my work at the Faculdade de Letras. My university, California State University, San Marcos, is celebrating its 20th anniversary (1991-2010) this year, which makes it almost exactly 700 years younger than the University of Coimbra (1290-2010), Portugal's first university. It's my second reading at the university in Coimbra. My first was in the 1995 Second International Meeting of Poets, which brought writers to Portugal from all over the world. For anyone who doesn't know, the University of Coimbra has long been a crucial European center for the study of literature.

On Friday, October 1 (time still to be determined; I'll update as I learn more), I'll be reading at the University of Vigo (seen from aerial distance; second picture) in Galicia, the northwestern edge of Spain, a region which has a very different history than the rest of Spain and sees itself as very much its own separate place. The University of Vigo is a new and highly energetic university and has a well-informed faculty very interested in contemporary literature. I've never been there before and I'm excited to be going there.

I'd end by saying that I hope I'll see you there, except that seems unlikely for most of you. So instead I'll say, so you there or somewhere else, some time soon, I hope.

Jumping Ship

2010-08-29T09:10:00.000-07:00

I’m flying to Europe tomorrow morning and will be there until early October. After spending a couple of nights in Belgium, I’ll be in Portugal for the majority of the trip, splitting my time between the city of Oporto (top picture) and Monsanto (bottom picture), a Portuguese village in the mountains and which has medieval roots.

I may not find any time to blog during this period, but if I get a chance to put something up now and then, I will. And I don’t know how often I’ll be available on e-mail, so please don’t be surprised if there are any delays in getting back to you.

In the meantime, my longtime colleague and friend Tom Orange might put a guest blog post or two. Tom and I agree on many things but may differ on others, and all views he expresses are his own. I hope you’ll engage him in discussion if you’re inclined.

This is the first time in my life that I’ve not worked or been in school in the fall, and I feel a sort of pleasant, falsely romantic sense of shirking my duties, jumping ship, and traveling to unexplored lands.

Brief Reviews

2010-08-26T15:55:00.000-07:00

Elisa Gabbert (pictured above) is a young poet whose work I’ve been loving for awhile. Several years back I blogged in some detail about her chapbook Thanks For Sending The Engine. Since then I’ve been following her writing closely, and these days she has many more avidly interested readers both of her poems and, lately, her blog: http://thefrenchexit.blogspot.com

After publishing several collaborative poetry projects with Kathleen Rooney, Gabbert’s first full-length collection, The French Exit, came out this year. The high energy and exuberantly dark poems in TFSTE are reprinted here, along with a number of other pieces. The book shows a much larger range in Gabbert’s poetic talents than has been on display before now. The biting, mordant psychosocial wit with which readers of her earlier work are familiar is surrounded by poems with a more sombre and melancholy tone, not to mention with some genuinely, although casually, brilliant social and even philosophical insights.

Still, Gabbert’s energetic sharpness on the level of the phrase and the line remains remarkably consistent. “Mysteried distance, resistant distance: it glimmers/ out of visibility. The distance that runs seamingly/ along all my images like a fold. Like a hairline/ crack down my mirror———I am always/ looking at the distance, at it splitting me.” There are more than enough new poems and, as she herself might put it, new moves, in this book for The French Exit to be a crucial purchase even for those who already own TFSTE. For those who don’t, it’s even more of a must.

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Gabbert’s partner, John Cotter, has also recently published a book, his first, a novella. Under The Small Lights is not the kind of book I usually review, but I have to admit that I found it an enjoyably wicked quick read, though people wanting literature that deals with the “most profound questions of our time” should look elsewhere. The story is set in summer mainly, and the book will serve just fine as a summer read at any time of year in which one might want that.

I doubt many people will like the characters in Under The Small Lights, but we’re not supposed to. This narrative of the young, aimless, and well to do, with their desperately literary sexual desires and confusions, pinions its subjects keenly, while somehow managing to teeter effectively on the edge between satire and believable sympathy. Think Brett Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero if the characters in that book had gone to the country for the summer and hopelessly imagined themselves the next great writers of America.

Some of the descriptions in the book’s key slapstick action incident seem unfocused, but it’s dialogue that drives this novel. “‘Jack,’ she said. ‘You’re not still trying to get into her pants.’/’No.’/’Because you shouldn’t’/’Right.’/’Because they’re married.’” The characters don’t do much besides get drunk, have confused sex, and talk to each other constantly about themselves and about the books they’re not writing and probably aren’t going to.

My friend, the Boston-born novelist and poet Elizabeth Burns, once told me how often she had heard someone say something along the lines of, “I want to write a version of Kerouac’s On The Road about my summer at the Cape.” If you find that as funny as I do, you’ll want to read Under The Small Lights.

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I feel uncertain about Ron Silliman’s linking of Chris McCreary to New Thing (Silliman prefers “New Precisionist”) writers such as Joseph Massey and Graham Foust. McCreary’s poems are certainly often minimalist, and work with precision and understatement and tightly and oddly torqued phrasing, but on the evidence of McCreary’s latest book, Undone: A Fakebook, I’m not sure how much further the comparison goes. Whereas those writers are dour, observational and rather insistently non-urban (though Foust is significantly ironic) in their highlighting of male isolation, McCreary’s poems are poems of the city, urbane, ambiguous, witty, and populated--and most of all, much more whimsical.

There’s a devilish, almost child-like humor to many of McCreary’s poems in Undone, with a certain degree of lightness and joy. It’s a kind of humor I sometimes associate with parenthood, a way in which adult writers can tap into the casual surrealist fantasy-scapes of a youthful mind. Not that McCreary isn’t capable of sly, cutting, and very much adult insight into contemporary American urban alienation. “Common knowledge/as the lowest of limbos. Wall or cardboard bricks/as approximate graffiti. Screaming Green Gorilla/did the Dance Dance Revolution,/ left an Etch-/ A-Sketch in my teddy bear’s/intestines.” As a sort of break in the tight torquing, the several prose satires in the Great American Songbook section are howlingly funny for anybody interested in pop music criticism.

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Laura Moriarty’s A Tonalist is a significant contemporary work that not only deserves a longer review than I have time to give it but, if there is any justice in contemporary poetics (and sadly, there usually isn’t), should be the subject of much future in-depth critical analysis. A multi-part, deeply interconnected long work in multiple sections, A Tonalist is both a beautiful long lyric poem with a stunning array of keenly observed physical details and social situations, and a poetics essay, written both in poetry and prose, that makes a case for what a tonalist writer is. “I remind him that Jocelyn is writing a book of beginnings and he remembers that he knows that and likes the idea. I say there is something to be said for directionality/ Too exhausted to speak/Or sleep we listen to/The strangely sourceless airborne/Radio or TV endlessly/ I dream when I don’t sleep less clearly./ “Too much emphasis on the tonal,” the radio/ Says, “Creates a meandering quality/ Complicating the experience of the auditor.”

The book also quotes generously from other writers whose work Moriarty feels is crucial to the context she is trying to acknowledge, and highlights especially their involvement in “elegy and utopianism.” A Tonalist explores and defines both a poetic terrain and a geographical and cultural and political one, detailing Moriarty’s concept of Tonalist poetry both through the fact that A Tonalist is itself an example of such a poem and because it talks about the work of other writers who have helped move her towards the concept.

I picked up this book at the Miami of Ohio Postmoot Conference in April, and told Moriarty there that I had to admit, embarrassingly, that I didn’t know what it meant to be a tonalist. Now I have a better idea, at least to the extent that any firm idea of the concept is crucial, which maybe it isn’t.

Still, although it’s impossible to summarize the wide range of her richly tentative reflections, on the most basic level Moriarty combines the unique quality of light found in some Northern California paintings with the work of Bay Area writers. Moriarty’s concept of “A Tonalist” (for her, the phrase is always capitalized) deals with shades, subtleties, nuances, wrinkles, and of course tones, all of which tend to undermine the way U.S. poetry is often still discussed in binaries, such as avant vs. mainstream, or lyric vs. narrative vs. experimental, or literature vs. criticism, among many others. And although Moriarty’s focus is heavily on the Bay Area, when she suggests, at one point, that there are maybe many tonalist writers who don’t recognize themselves as such, I felt cheered, because I think, in some aspects of my work (and that “some” is crucial), that I may often be A Tonalist too.

Brief Reviews

2010-08-15T15:34:00.000-07:00

My longtime colleague at The George Washington University, where I used to teach, Daniel Gutstein (pictured above) shares with me an interest in writing across genres. He has published poetry, fiction, and drama, as well as work in cross-genre forms as the prose poem. Although his work has appeared in numerous literary journals, and several of his chapbooks have been brilliant surprises, oddly enough Non/Fiction is his first full-length collection. The book veers between short fiction and memoir, and between story and prose poetry, blurring those boundaries as it goes. The pieces explore a variety of locales, including Washington D.C., Florida, and the American west, as well as Israel and elsewhere overseas. The bulk of these pieces focus on a working class milieu, although the stories cross with some frequency into describing characters living a creepily rootless yuppiedom. The book is particularly startling for its array of cultural mixing; in these stories, identity is always in flux, even as some characters rigorously assert its stability. The pieces are full of the unexpected, both in the quirkiness of the characters and in the purposefully torqued, poetic prose. “I’d sat on the stone with Mrs. Kelly, the black landlady who recalled the nervous white boy stepping, bayonet-first, beside the convenience mart. Part of the town bruised, she explained, her grey-black hair combined into a grey-black knot. “ It’s not too much of a stretch to say that in its idiosyncracy and gnarled prose and concern with character and culture, the work here resembles the short fiction of the great Isaac Babel. At times the twisting language even takes on a postmodern opacity. A unique book by a unique writer who’s capable equally of the outrageous and the poignant.

I read it back in early spring, but A Model Year, by Gina Myers, is as good a first book of poems as I’ve come across in awhile and has stayed clearly in my mind. The poems are understated, often memorable, and frequently haunted and melancholy, which may come as a surprise to those who know Myers’ energetic work in social activism and local arts in her troubled state of Michigan. There’s a casual tone these poems that can be associated with the New York School (Myers lived for a time in NYC), but the social environment and individual consciousness on display here has a moodiness that seems more connected to Midwestern financial and emotional dourness, and the poems featured a more denuded landscape than one typically finds in New York School verse. “April snow & no/way to go, no turning/forward, motion lost/flickers across the wind-/shield & is forgotten./No scene waiting/to be seen, no unforgiving/space, empty drawer/& shutters shut.” The book’s final, title piece, “A Model Year,” attempts a more extended sequence, and almost stalls on its carefully crafted restraint, but ultimately works because, like in the rest of these poems, underneath the melancholy is a fierce desire to live a meaningful, socially engaged life.

Two chapbooks by Sandra Simonds, Used White Wife and the self-published Made From Scratch, are fascinating and energetic reads. In UWW, Simonds’ flair for high octane, historically detailed Surrealism takes a flarfy turn for the outrageously comical: “You’re not supposed to fuck your first cousin, expert/ on Reform Era pamphlets,/ or eat an oatmeal-flavored Powerbar on/the toilet. Even my dog, Scruffy-Pie, knows/not to shit in the room/where you sleep or sleep/where you’re not supposed to think of the clitoris.” UWW is hilarious, but also psychological insightful, a rollick through the ages that turns up a lot of hidden cultural embarrassments. Made From Scratch has a few outrageous moments, but seems more personal, historically specific, and sad by turns, and at times its emotional power runs deeper than that in the other chap. Both books feature Simonds’ startlingly rich vocabulary. She’s a writer who is only continuing to grow into the range of what she can do.

Another impressive first full-length collection, Occultations, by David Wolach, is more hardcore avant than the above books. The range in Wolach’s work is first and foremost formal, combining surprising uses of spacing, multiple overlays of text, and visual art, among much else. The book’s first of several extended poem sequence, “transit” is both the most lyrical and the most powerful and direct in the book, dealing with the author’s physical pain but also revealing a social awareness that’s too broad and informed to be solely an exploration of individual body and self, and the poem’s lyricism remains jaggedly unconventional. “What are we to do now/dark drawing its own outline/the wild/ child tapping terror pane/ your lands and grooves/ evidence/ of hallas, your hands their re-appearing/act/ leaves glass behind leaves all possible codes behind/” The later, even more experimental pieces are fascinating as well, and are full of political insight and outrage, as well as a sophisticated understanding of theory and culture. If there’s something occasionally a bit first bookish about Occultations, it may be that at times, Wolach wants to throw everything at once at the reader. The book is full of busy pages, to put it mildly, and the greater minimalism of the final piece, “ book alter (ed),” makes for a crucial contrast that wraps up the work nicely. Still, Wolach takes a lot of necessary risks, and Occultations is a demanding, rewarding book.

Cati Porter, Jeanine Webb, and Louis M. Schmidt at Agitprop August 7

2010-08-03T18:41:00.000-07:00

We hope you can join us this, Saturday, August at 7 p.m. for a reading by JEANINE WEBB and CATI PORTER. An opening reception for LOUIS M. SCHMIDT's "We're All in This Together for Ourselves," on display at the gallery, will follow the reading.

Jeanine Webb's work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, The Antioch Review, Louis Liard Magazine, the San Diego Writers' 2010 anthology A Year in Ink and online in the Summer 2010 issues of The Latent Print and WTF PWM. She holds a M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis, where she taught workshops in making poems. Her manuscript Flash Paper was a finalist for the 2008 Cider Press Review Book Award. Her work concerns images of apocalypse in relation to late capitalism, sci-fi, connectivity, surf culture, historical realities as shaped by technologies, modern mythography, media spin and pop culture. Jeanine lives in San Diego. Look for the literary magazine she'll be editing, Greater Than Or Equal To, which should exist at http://www.greaterthanzine.com/ sometime late this summer or in early fall.

Cati Porter is the author of a collection of poems, Seven Floors Up (Mayapple Press, 2008), as well as the chapbooks small fruit songs: prose poems (Pudding House Publications, 2008), (al)most delicious, an ekphrastic series after Modigliani's nudes (forthcoming in 2010 from Dancing Girl Press), and what Desire makes of us, a series written during NaPoWriMo 2009 (forthcoming from Ahadada books as an e-book with illustrations by her sister, Amy Joy Payne). She is founder & editor of Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry . In June 2010 she will receive her MFA in Poetry from Antioch University, Los Angeles.

Louis M. Schmidt is an artist currently based in San Diego, CA. His work addresses personal and societal unhappiness, the many failures of history and myths of progress and upward mobility. Schmidt's most recent body of work, "We're All in This Together For Ourselves," is an immersive, mixed-media wall drawing that presents itself as a cyclic fragment, a frozen section of negative feedback loop that evinces a dark pool of truths about humans, about Americans, about the now to which our ideologies have delivered us.

Please share this information with friends and any interested parties.

Agitprop readings are free, but donations to the gallery are always welcome.

We hope to see you there and for festivities before and afterward!

AGITPROP POETRY SERIES
Saturday, August 7, 7 p.m. reading (8 p.m. Art Opening)
AGITPROP Gallery
2837 University Ave in North Park (Entrance on Utah, behind Glenn’s
Market).
San Diego, CA * 92104 * 619.384.7989

Unnatural Acts: Events at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

2010-07-20T15:43:00.000-07:00

I'll be participating in the Friday and Saturday events for Unnatural Acts, part of the Les Figues Press Not Content project (http://www.notcontent.lesfigues.com), which is described by its curators as "A series of text projects curated by Les Figues Press as part of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions year-long initiative Public Interest."

Here's the full list of events and participants for Unnatural Acts:

UNNATURAL ACTS
July 21-August 11
Los Angeles, California

Taking its name from the historic collaborative writing marathons led by Bernadette Mayer and others in NYC during 1972-73, Unnatural Acts will explore the themes of hunger, war, and desire through public acts of collaboration.

Beginning with two days of installation and performance by Amina Cain and Jennifer Karmin, a group of eleven writers/artists will gather on the third day to write together over the course of eight hours. In a daily ritual inaugurated on the fourth day, the outline of a new person’s body will be traced onto the bodies of text until the exhibit closes on August 11th.

ALL EVENTS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC - 6522 Hollywood Blvd
http://www.welcometolace.org/events/view/unnatural-acts

July 21: Amina Cain
Installation (12-5)
Hunger Texts Read in the Dark performance (5-5:30pm)

July 22: Jennifer Karmin
Installation (12-5)
4000 Words 4000 Dead street performance (5-6pm)

July 23: Unnatural Acts
8 hours of collaborative writing (12-8pm)
Collaborators include: Harold Abramowitz, Tisa Bryant, Amina Cain, Teresa Carmody, Saehee Cho, Kate Durbin, K. Lorraine Graham, Jennifer Karmin, Laida Lertxundi, India Radfar, and Mark Wallace.

July 24: Presentations
Artists’ Talk (2-3pm)
Collaborative Reading (4-6pm)
Readers include: Harold Abramowitz, Tisa Bryant, Amina Cain, Teresa Carmody, Kate Durbin, K. Lorraine Graham, Jennifer Karmin, India Radfar, and Mark Wallace.

AMINA CAIN is the author of the short story collection I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues Press, 2009), and a forthcoming chapbook, Tramps Everywhere (Insert Press/PARROT SERIES). A recording of her story “Attached to a Self” was included in the group show A Diamond in the Mud at Literaturhaus Basel in Switzerland in 2008; other work has appeared in publications such as 3rd Bed, Action Yes, Denver Quarterly, onedit, Sidebrow, and Wreckage of Reason: Xxperimental Prose by Women Writers. She lives in Los Angeles.
http://aminacain.com

JENNIFER KARMIN's text-sound epic, Aaaaaaaaaaalice, was published by Flim Forum Press in 2010. She curates the Red Rover Series and is co-founder of the public art group Anti Gravity Surprise. Her multidisciplinary projects have been presented across the U.S., Japan, and Kenya. A proud member of the Dusie Kollektiv, she is the author of the Dusie chapbook Evacuated: Disembodying Katrina. Walking Poem, a collaborative street project, is featured online at How2. In Chicago, Jennifer teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and works as a Poet-in-Residence for the public schools. http://aaaaaaaaaaalice.blogspot.com

COLLABORATORS:

Harold Abramowitz's recent publications include Not Blessed (Les Figues Press) and A House on a Hill {A House on a Hill, Part One} (Insert Press). Harold writes collaboratively as part of SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and UNFO, and co-edits the short-form literary press eohippus labs. http://www.eohippuslabs.com

Tisa Bryant is author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), co-editor, with Ernest Hardy, of the anthology War Diaries (AIDS Project Los Angeles, 2010), co-editor of The Encyclopedia Project's Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K, due out Fall 2010, and has work forthcoming in Animal Shelter 2 and Mixed Blood. Her creative process demands she write longhand, one of her favorite words is 'autochthonous,' and she teaches in the MFA Writing Program at CalArts. http://www.encyclopediaproject.org

Teresa Carmody is the author of Requiem (Les Figues Press, 2005), and two chapbooks: Eye Hole Adore (PS Books, 2008), and Your Spiritual Suit of Armor by Katherine Anne (Woodland Editions, 2009). She lives in Los Angeles and is co-director of Les Figues Press. http://www.lesfigues.com/lfp/24/requiem

Saehee Cho holds a BA in Literature/Writing from The University of California, San Diego and an MFA in Writing from Calarts. She has just completed her first collection of short stories tentatively titled Form, Composite. Her work has been featured in Shrapnel and Ex Nihilo. http://www.thesproutandthebean.com

Kate Durbin is a writer & fashion artist. Her full-length collection of poetry, The Ravenous Audience, is available from Akashic Books. http://www.katedurbin.blogspot.com

K. Lorraine Graham is the author of Terminal Humming (Edge Books). Visual work appeared in the 2008 Zaoem International Poetry Exhibition at the Minardschouwburg, Gent, Belgium and the Infusoria visual poetry exhibition in Brussels and Ghent, 2009. http://www.spooksbyme.org

Laida Lertxundi, (Bilbao, Spain) works on film making non-stories with non-actors that play with diegetic space and a particular sound and image syntax to create moments of downtime, of a time between events. Her work has been shown at MoMa, Lacma, Viennale and the New York Film Festival views of the Avant Garde among other places. http://www.laidalertxundi.net

India Radfar is the author of four books of poetry: India Poem (Pir Press), the desire to meet with the beautiful (Tender Buttons Press), Breathe (Shivastan Publications) and most recently, Position & Relation (Station Hill/Barrytown Books) and one chapbook, 12 Poems That Were Never Written (Mind Made Books). She has lived in Los Angeles for the past 6 years. http://www.stationhill.org/authors/profile/230-India_Hixon_Radfar

Mark Wallace is the author and editor of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Most recently he has published a collection of tales, Walking Dreams, and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion. http://wallacethinksagain.blogspot.com

A Portuguese Silence

2010-07-14T16:25:00.000-07:00

Because I'm trying to finish a novel, and several reviews, and am also planning a fall trip to Portugal, I don't have much to say on this blog right now, and I don't have time to say it.

Silence has long been a key idea in Portugese literature and culture, and is one of the most commonly used concepts and images in Portugese poetry. Given the current silence on this blog, I thought I'd offer the above photo, not my own, as a case in point on the political and cultural complexities of silence.

I'm going to try to put up some short reviews here when I can find the time.

Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics

2010-07-06T08:49:00.000-07:00

There has already been a lot of discussion–and more than a bit of heated debate–about this anthology. Much of it has focused on the identity of the writers in the book: are they too white, too straight, too suburban, too American, too physically abled? The term “Gurlesque” has caused concern also: does its focus on girlhood subtly disempower women? Having read, and witnessed in person, many discussions about the Gurlesque long before the anthology itself was even in print, I was pleased to finally have a chance to read the book and take a look at the specifics of the poems.

The introductions by Arielle Greenberg and Lara Glenum seemed credible regarding both the creation of the term and the fact of the emergence of some suddenly common, but until then undescribed, features in contemporary women’s writing. The Gurlesque involves “writing about and through femininity in a new and exciting way,” according to Greenberg, a way that “brashfully, playfully, provocatively, indulgently” moves away from the “earnestness, sensitivity, and self-seriousness that marked many such poems stemming from Second Wave feminism.”

A great deal of work in the anthology hinges on the idea of self and identity and language as performance rather than essence. Through what Glenum describes as “hyperbole,” much of it seeks to break out of notions of proper behavior and language through which American women’s lives and writing still often remain closely guarded. While the degree of newness that the anthology represents may be an open question, a point that Greenberg herself acknowledges, both essays also find many historical and literary sources for the development of the Gurlesque approach, suggesting not so much an absolute break with the past as an intensification of some key concerns that more widely asserted themselves in the 1990s.

In reading the collected pieces, I noticed myself deciding which ones interested me more along several lines: level of energy (often intense); sense of rhythm and line; and description of the world with which the performed self is interacting. This last one was crucial, and surprised me a bit: I was most interested in those pieces that described others intriguingly as opposed to those that dwelt more absolutely on performance of self. Brenda Coultas, for instance, was represented by some of my favorite work in the whole anthology, and highlighted self as a performance within a dizzying array of social and family concerns (“I remember our pigs without the aid of hypnosis or memory drugs”). The more thoroughly interactive the self was with the world, and the more complexly that world was explored and exposed, the more I seemed to care how the self was performed. I suppose I could try here to assert some mainly specious distinction about social art vs. confessional art, as if discussing the self didn’t always also require involvement with things beyond the self. But my reasoning was probably simpler: in literature, as in life, I’m more interested in people who talk about things other than themselves.

I often especially enjoyed those poems that had more twist and surprise and kick in the lines. It’s difficult to think of someone doing more with rhythm than Catherine Wagner (“shudder out the little-girl/legs with a little/girl head mostly eyes, no ears,/bug brain, aimless/Send her to school”), and the tremendous movement in Dorothea Laskey’s work (“Instead no one is so weird/They have muscles/I write these poems instead of sitting in a bed/Sweaty all day/With men who are truly fuckable”) makes her pieces practically jump off the page. While some of her poems were a little rhythmically safer, Danielle Pafunda (“Slow me and fence it. I hock shop I gold play I leaking/valuables. There is a window, a roll call, a vile plastic stack.”) also worked in some pieces with an especially unique set of rhythms for which I can’t think of any immediate predecessors. Cathy Park Hong’s poems, not really possible to recreate well in blogger, had a precisely clipped sense of phrasing and spacing. And Nada Gordon was represented well by some typically ragged, watch-this-fall-apart-but-not-quite flarf (“Sweet Kitty kiss my ghosts Kitty doesn’t like/the soup, Mama, but she sure likes the cream.")

Gurlesque is without doubt a hybrid anthology, making no significant distinctions between those writers whose work draws more on the history of avant garde poetics, or confessionalism, or from backgrounds in narrative prose. Much of the work also collapses distinctions between high, low and pop culture and art, while other pieces undermine distinctions between poetry and prose, or poetry and drama. Stacy Doris (“An ember falls from the chandelier onto the marquise’s (MARQIUSE “A”) bouffant and—poof—she’s burnt to a crisp”) and Kim Rosenfield “Miss Wiggles is a sensitive/large quantity of limpid urine”) had particularly unique approaches. There were also some very effective, primarily prose works: I loved the keen, psychologically disturbing descriptions of family and intimate others in the work of Geraldine Kim (“My parents were going to name me after the patron saint of fertility. Then when I came out they saw that I didn’t have a dick”) as well as the medieval carnival gone wild in some of Elizabeth Treadwell’s prose pieces (“dedication to giant grotto recreation of ussong the camera xo.”). The anthology also features a collection of Gurlesque visual art, which highlighted the range of cultural contexts in which Gurlesque work has appeared.

Overall, the energy level in the book was remarkable. The work of Ariana Reines (“Being a night inside of the mouth of a loved boy. Red black and shiny teeth with a tongue. The world of a loved boy has sense.”), less intriguing to me in terms of the world around the self that it describes, nonetheless has the power of a very high speed something or other whose path it would be dangerous to be in. Yet much of the rest of the writing here was only barely less intense. Some other pieces that I liked less, poetry or prose, felt a bit more wordy or leaden. Still, if one of the things that has haunted pretty much all anthologies promoting so-called hybrid work (a term which for me means something else than it may for others, which you can read about here) is a distaste for overly crude imagery and energy, there’s no shortage of that in this anthology.

Despite the debates about identity that surround the anthology, as crucial as they are (debates about which I’m not nearly as capable as others will be of offering a well-informed perspective), what readers will find in Gurlesque is a very impressive, often powerful collection of literature. It’s a much more impressive collection, in fact, than other recent anthologies of contemporary work that include poetry, from whatever place in the always contested world of literature they have come.

San Diego Museum of Art presents a reading by K. Lorraine Graham and Mark Wallace

2010-06-21T11:37:00.000-07:00

San Diego Museum of Art Summer Salon Series
Thursday, June 24, 2010
7 pm

In conjunction with Agitprop Gallery, the Agitprop Reading Series is collaborating with the San Diego Museum of Art to present Thursday Summer Salons featuring contemporary artists and writers from Southern California. Museum admission is $12 for adults, $8 for students with college ID, and open to the public.

This Thursday, June 24, at 7 pm, writers Mark Wallace and K. Lorraine Graham will read from their recent work.

Mark Wallace is the author of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he has co-edited two essay collections, Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s, and A Poetics of Criticism. Most recently he has published a short story collection, Walking Dreams (2007), and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion (2008). Forthcoming in early 2011 is his second novel, The Quarry and The Lot.

K. Lorraine Graham is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Terminal Humming (Edge Books, 2009) and several chapbooks, including Large Waves to Large Obstacles, forthcoming from Take-Home Project. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Traffic, Area Sneaks, Foursquare and elsewhere. She currently lives in San Diego with her partner, Mark Wallace, and Lester Young, a pacific parrotlet.

During your visit will be able to explore the works of living artists and writers, participate in hands-on art making activities, enjoy a cocktail, and view the Museum's current exhibitions and collections. We invite the public to join some of the most exciting artists working in Southern California and immerse themselves in what's happening right now in our local art scene.

Artist Presentations will be occurring in the museum before and after the reading.

Judith Pedroza will recreate the block where she grew up in Mexico City in scale model with her work Marina Nacional 80. Visitors will be invited to help her expand the work throughout the evening by adding additional buildings and roads.

And Michael Trigilio will present one of his video works. Michael is a founding member of the independent radio project Neighborhood Public Radio, which was featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Directions and parking information are available on the SDMA website.

For more information about the Summer Salon Series, please visit: http://sdma.balboaparkonline.org/programs-events/summer-salon-series