my upcoming east coast readings (March 29 and 30) and new books

Hello Friends:

With a book of stories that came out in September and a new book of poems just out in the last week or two, I think the time has come to go east and give some readings. I have two east coast readings coming up, one in New York City and one in Washington DC. I'd love to see you at either one and for any socializing that goes on afterwards.

Here are the details on the readings and my new books:


New York City
Saturday, March 29, 4 p.m.
Rodrigo Toscano and Mark Wallace
The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery @ Bleecker, right across from CBGB's and just north of Houston.
For more details, including directions:
http://www.bowerypoetry.com/


Washington, DC
Sunday, March 30, 7 p.m.
Christina Strong and Mark Wallace
Bridge Street Books
2814 Pennsylvania Ave. in Georgetown
202-965-5200
For more information, including directions:
http://www.dcpoetry.com/bsb
http://www.frommers.com/destinations/destinationmap.cfm?destID=35&s_id=24744


For further details about my new book of poems, Felonies of Illusion, go to:
http://aerialedge.com/felonies.htm


For further details about my recent book of stories, Walking Dreams, go to:
http://www.amazon.com/Walking-Dreams-Selected-Early-Tales/dp/1934289264/ref=sr_1_2/104-0654963-8599943?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187220844&sr=1-2


I hope all is well with you. With luck I'll find out more about that when I see you.

Wish I'd Known Back Then

“A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content. All that needs to be done is to turn back each single reproach on to the speaker himself. There is something undeniably automatic about this method of defending oneself against a self-reproach by making the same reproach against someone else... A grown-up person who wanted to throw back abuse would look for some really exposed spot in his antagonist and would not lay the chief stress upon the same content being repeated.”

Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

Big Ilya Makes It Big

Or at least he’s made it to the front cover and main story of the San Diego Weekly Reader, with a caption reading “Tie This Guy Up: Make Sure He Stays at SDSU.” I’ve linked to the story here, and I hope you’ll read it.

For those of you who don’t know the San Diego Reader (which I’m assuming is most of you), it’s the main alternative weekly paper of the city, equivalent to the City Paper in Washington, DC and other similar versions elsewhere. The Reader is hardly as good as the City Paper, which is faint praise, I know, but there it is. They don’t even run Savage Love, for one, although a recent occasional series, Dumped, allows people to write in their stories about just how badly they let their romantic partners treat them before being left behind entirely. It’s a voyeuristic treat for those like me who enjoy that “how bad can it get” sort of thing.

The City Paper sometimes runs articles on local writers. They once did one on me, and on Buck Downs, and recently on Rod Smith. But they were small articles (and perhaps, uh, reveal a bit of gender bias?). This on the other hand is a cover story, and the picture, as you can see, is a big picture, with Ilya’s eyes looking down over his glasses skeptically and intensely at us all. This is some serious Local Press Cool Points.

Some of my friends in DC probably remember Big Ilya from when he lived there and was taking classes at Georgetown University. He became Big Ilya not simply because he was big (about six foot three) but because we also met another Russian emigré poet about the same time, Little Ilya, who was much smaller. In order to avoid people asking “Which Ilya?” dividing them into Big and Little made sense. Little Ilya has not so far made it as big, although I continue to wish him success for the future.

Being in theory the political center of the U.S. (although much of its power has long since been farmed out to various multinational corporations, in case you didn’t know), DC has a large international population. In fact there’s something of a history of Russian poets and Russian emigré poets in DC, although I myself don’t know it in detail. I remember, probably some time in 1996 or 97, my friend Joe Ross arranging to give a reading with a Russian emigré poet at the series I ran at the Ruthless Grip Art Project. I have pictures of the event, but I only met her that one evening and never saw or heard of her again, and I can’t remember her name. So Joe, if you’re reading this, can you fill me in? But in any case our audience that night featured a very sizeable Russian component, and the event was enjoyed by all. My impression is that the Russian presence in DC poetry has remained somewhat low profile but is also consistent. Recently my former colleague at George Washington University, Daniel Gutstein, was working with a young Russian-American poet, Olga Tsyganova, who has now gone to graduate school at Georgetown.

I’m hardly on expert on modern and contemporary Russian poetry or on Russian poetry in translation. For the most part I like the Russian poets that you might expect me to, given that I’m one of those people who still thinks the word avant garde means something worthwhile. Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Mayakovsky. Of living Russian poets I think Arkadii Dragomoschenko is really great, although I’ve heard it said that some Russian poets believe his work is too Americanized. There was a book called Blue Vitriol by Alexei Parshchikov published by Avec back in 1994 that I thought was very enjoyable. Much of the rest is a mishmash to me. Other Russian poetry I’ve read in translation can seem more than a little lugubrious, which is indeed just the word I want: long, image laden lines in a grim monotone. I don’t know enough to know whether that’s a function of what Russian poetry is like, or what it sounds like when translated into English, or whether it’s just my own lack of information. I’d love to be further informed, so let me know what you know.

In any case, on those occasions when I talked to him, usually when sitting in on a poetry seminar at Georgetown, where I taught a class now and then, Ilya seemed like a nice guy, and I wish him well. He published his first book, Dancing in Odessa, when he was 28, and it won something called The Dorset Prize. Now at 31 he’s an assistant professor at SDSU, so he and I are in the same business and just down the road from each other too. For his theories on poetry I’ll leave you to the article itself, although his basic theory, as quoted in the article, is “All young men’s poetry begins with a broken heart.” I suppose on some level I wouldn’t disagree, at least not entirely, although I imagine some of us might get, at times, a little tired of young men and their broken hearts.

culture and circulation

One definition of culture is the whole nexus of lived social practices of a particular group of people in a particular place and time.

If we accept that definition, then the constant force of change that’s present in culture might be defined as circulation: the movement of people across place and the exchanges of resources (both ideas and goods) that occur as they move.

This exchange always involves conditions of power. The most extreme use of power in the process of circulation involves the forced seizing of resources: an invasion.

Culture always remains most the same when it circulates least. But even when it remains most the same, culture also always involves conditions of power: how the culture is organized and who is in charge.

Even when it remains most the same, a culture also always contains within it pressures towards circulation, even if those pressures are nothing more than the shifting power relations within a family, clan, town, or region. All people can seek to circulate at any time, although others may succeed in restraining them.

Yet even when circulating is most frequent, the force of culture remains, even if it is nothing more than the distant memory of a person who long ago traveled permanently far from home.

The dynamic interaction between culture and circulation is inevitable. The key issue involves when to assert the value of culture and when to assert the value of circulation.

But it’s also not surprising that it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that one or the other is a fundamental source of good or its opposite. At the present time, for instance, some see the good of culture as being at war with the evil of globalization, while others insist on the good of exchange over the backwardness of culture.

How can we work to recognize that culture and circulation will always interact, and that conditions of power will always be at stake in them, without the always fundamentalist assertion that one or the other is an absolute good?

Felonies of Illusion is now available

138 pgs.
Cover by K. Lorraine Graham
$15

$11 if you order directly from Edge Books (click here)


A master at making genre question itself, Mark Wallace gets the square peg in the round hole again. A stark and aphoristic long poem about living and working during the war—direct, wise, and brave enough to skip the decorative—bumps up against the witty, clanging, angry, top-speed, palimpsestuous title series—lyrics that swallow their own tails. Wallace is cynical, clear-eyed, and resolutely jokey on commerce, war, love (the "therapeutic use of commitment") and exhausted longing ("This day could be about today, leisurely and bright/if the days weren't stacked like nights inside it.") Nobody gets away with anything in Felonies of Illusion: we're all skewered till we grimace and grin.

Catherine Wagner


Mark Wallace invents only what's real. If democracies could talk, we would in fact be able to understand them, but we would need the help of poems like these. As its title suggests, the language of Felonies of llusion is premised on a sense of justice and reciprocity. The need is real, and thus the need for invention is constant. The writing betrays no qualms about showing this. There's serious play going on here.

Bob Perelman


Elegaic without strings, passionate without bravado, up the tragic creek without a cathartic paddle, Mark Wallace’s Felonies of Illusion is an intensely personal collection of valedictions, an extended suite of lyric leavetakings written in the infinite series of penultimate milliseconds before an always-imminent obliteration—a “now” that “is not that long from now.” These already painful goodbyes, however, are suspended in a nervewracking holding pattern as “the total system / shouts back that there’s no way to leave.” Wallace rehearses the purgatorial illogic of perpetual orange alert with unsparing gravity, but also with empathy and wit. His poems confront us with the human truth of the narratives we spin daily in the name of individual survival at the same time that they caution us not to “get / too attached to the story told / imploding.”

K. Silem Mohammad



SPRAY DAY

It’s happened before or every other guest
aches to be buried the new right way
proofs are proofs? When we set out to design
compact thinking, we ended up with lots

of transit to the usual beach spots
splintered on assumptions. Are you talking
to your hand yet? Out of signs,
tumble switched, thrown on

a presupposed interior call field?
Before anyone can toss in the towel
on top of excessive numbers or nightmares
read the instructions carefully. So does it

take ammonia? Could one highlight film
recall a bandit on the run
for all new greed? People are people
like news is gossip. Whatever I did

becomes equivalent border patsy
stressful reflex. If responsibility accepts
another slanted chain of events
to slip away from, the clamp

on the clamp, the public note,
slander advancement eats alive
at many a local hot spot, previewing blunders.
Step right up to the pressure cap.

A New Reading Series in a Gallery in San Diego: Who Would Have Thought?

Without meaning this as a criticism, because there’s no reason anyone should have thought differently, I’ve been interested to note how many people assume that the city of San Diego must have at least something of a poetry scene. And certainly it does. But what’s there and what isn’t might be surprising.

Just in case anybody’s counting, the city of San Diego is currently the eighth largest city in the U.S. The massive size of its city limits somewhat exaggerates its population, but not entirely: San Diego County registers as the 17th largest Metropolitan Statistical Area in the country.

At this time, most of the literary series in the San Diego area happen at colleges: UCSD and San Diego State both have fairly large literary series, USD and Cal State San Marcos and a few small private colleges feature a reading now and then. Downtown there’s San Diego City College, which runs a lot of readings and music aevents and does good activist work in the heart of the city, to the extent that the city has a heart in the way that other cities do, which it only sort of does.

Also downtown there’s the Too Much Information GLBT reading series, which emphasizes important social issues and welcomes performative and experimental approaches. There are also a few small local scenes, spoken word to some extent but not only, one or two downtown, one in Oceanside/Escondido/North County, and perhaps one or two others that I barely know about. In La Jolla, D.G. Wills Books and Warwick Books host a number of events each year featuring first-rate writers of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. UCSD has participated with the San Diego Museum of Art in featuring a few readings at the museum in Balboa Park. Local libraries feature an occasional reading too, and there’s even a mystery book store that brings in lots of mystery and crime writers, mainly for book signings. I haven’t lived in the area for even three years yet, so I could be missing something, but those are the series that I know about.

So that’s not nothing, that’s quite a bit. But is it quite a bit for the 8th largest city in the United States? It might seem, from that perspective, a little thin.

Like Los Angeles, San Diego County is large. There are many interesting writers here, but they often live far apart from each other. Getting to and from events is time consuming and, given the traffic, often not easy. Unlike Los Angeles though, arts culture is not the main business of San Diego. Still, there’s more going on here than there might be. But there’s also less than there might be.

What there certainly is not is any community-based scene centered on experimental/avant garde/post-avant/New American poetics (whatever you want to call it). Nothing like Beyond Baroque or The Smell in L.A., the Artifact series et al in San Francisco, Spare Room in Portland, Subtext in Seattle. You know the kind of thing I mean. While TMI, for instance, welcomes innovative literary approaches, that’s not automatically the center of their concerns.

But now one such series is starting this Saturday at Agitprop Gallery in North Park. I wish it well, and look forward to participating. It’s being co-hosted by James Meetze, who has organized a few area readings in the past, and Sandra and Ben Doller. If you live in the San Diego area, come on out. If not, I hope you’ll wish them well in gaining a toehold.

Here are the details:


NEW Triple Threat Reading Series--sponsored by 3 San Diego Small Presses: 1913 Press (ed. Sandra Doller), Kuhl House Press (ed. Ben Doller), Tougher Disguises Press (ed. James Meetze) announces its inaugural event...


Come one, come all to the first reading in North Park's new and explosive series. We begin with Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson who are reading in support of their fresh new collaborative book Figures for a Darkroom Voice.


Agitprop Gallery in North Park
2837 University Ave. San Diego, California 92104
(entrance to the gallery is actually on Utah)
7:00pm Saturday, March 1st.


Noah Eli Gordon's first book, The Frequencies, was published by San Diego's own Tougher Disguises Press in 2003. Since then, he has had five other books appear, including Novel Pictorial Noise, which was selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series, and published last year by Harper Perennial. Last year also saw the release of Figures for a Darkroom Voice, a book
written in collaboration with Joshua Marie Wilkinson. He writes a column on chapbooks for Rain Taxi: Review of Books, and his reviews and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Publishers Weekly, Boston Review, and Denver Quarterly. He teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado in Denver. See him reading with Joshua Marie Wilkinson here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=aSENrRf0pNw


Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Pinball, 2005), Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (U of Iowa, 2006), and The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (forthcoming from Tupelo Press). He holds a PhD from University of Denver and lives in Chicago where he teaches at Loyola University. His first film, Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape, a documentary about the band Califone, is due out next year. He curates Rabbit Light Movies, a website devoted to short poem-films, and recently co-edited an anthology of conversations between younger poets and their elders, which is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. See him reading with Noah Eli Gordon here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=aSENrRf0pNw

quick takes

Here are some books of poems I’ve been enjoying recently. I’d like to write more about these books later if I ever have more time, but who knows when I will? Outside of business for work, at most I can read a few poems here and there. I mean, there's only five minutes until the door opens.


Robert Mittenthal, Value UnMapped

Is it possible to be a major contemporary poet that no one much has heard of? Robert Mittenthal might be an example. His poetry is always structurally complex, socially insightful, and more lyrical than one might expect for a poet who understands so much about the relation between language, history, and large-scale social structures. Value Unmapped, his new chapbook, starts out with a few intriguing short poems, perhaps not his most energetic work, that nonetheless bristle with misdirection and lost chances. The second half of the chapbook, though, contains the major work here, the long poem “Value UnMapped,” which is as good a poem as I’ve read by anybody in a while, a meditation on the alienation fostered by a public world in which words rarely mean what they say. “I saw you at the stop and pray, a temple built to Morse comma Samuel. The guy who dashed and dotted—fingers snapping in synch with his head—so that our mouths rope off whatever miswired thought.” Mittenthal lives in Seattle but in its understanding of the relation between political and linguistic structures, his writing is closest in spirit to the poets of Vancouver (where he lived for some years). If you see his work somewhere, don’t pass it by.


Susan Landers, Covers

This second book by Susan Landers came as quite a surprise to me because it’s so completely unlike her first book. A sort of landscape poetry of contemporary, post 9/11 NYC is juxtaposed and intermingled with a rewriting, and a loosely procedural writing through, of Dante’s Inferno. I was somewhat skeptical of the concept at first: projects that write through another text can often turn into dry, overly intellectual exercises (and I say this having done them myself), and the metaphorical connection between hell and NYC seems a tad strained and obvious. But the poems themselves quickly overcame these worries by being so consistently inventive and powerful: “nothing about this is funny/ the way I come to enter this place / I am crowded by sleep and sleepy crowds crowding/” The quick cuts between lines and social frameworks make this book a very dynamic reading experience.


Joe Ross, EQUATIONS = equals

The world of poetry changes fast. Now that he’s lived in Paris for a few years, I’m not sure how many American poets remain aware of Joe Ross (I can hear Johannes Goransson complaining already, and rightly so). Joe’s writing has always been carefully crafted, not to mention socially and politically thoughtful. Among his numerous books and chapbooks, EQUATIONS just might be the best, a book that’s unafraid to risk emotional darkness along with its social insights. Don’t read more than a few at a time; short though they are, these are poems that require slowing down. They’re flatly conversational yet constantly veering towards hinted-at abysses: “There is no it there being smoked to the core. Empty rooms and hope: left./Stranded on the edge of strategy, you are the only and forget once again comes to mind.” I may not see Joe on the streets of DC anymore, but these new poems are ones I’m going to think about a long time.


Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney, Something Really Wonderful

If Elisa Gabbert isn’t my favorite writer among a younger generation of lyric poets whom I’ve never met, then.... well, wait, she is my favorite of those poets. Hands down, as they say. These poems, co-written with Kathleen Rooney, have some of the necessary creakiness of co-written works, but that creakiness only further serves the charm and biting humor that makes these poems, well, just more entertaining than poems are supposed to be. And I’m not using the word “entertaining” as some kind of sly put down either. These poems have more human interaction going on in a couple of lines than many writers manage in a couple of books. The linguistic energy and, really, virtuosity, can be stunning. These are poems that know what people are like when they’re around people. “Say your prayers, princess—/I didn’t become a knight to meet girls./I wouldn’t slay a dragon—/I became a knight to meet dragons.” I have to admit that I don’t know Kathleen Rooney’s solo writing, but I look forward to finding out more.


Vanessa Place, Dies: A Sentence

This first book by Los Angeles area writer Vanessa Place is only one sentence long. Kinda screwed up minimalism is that? But the sentence itself may just be the longest single sentence ever written. I’m still checking that out, so if anybody knows any sentences that are more than 130 pages, please fill me in. Clearly, such a book risks being mere intellectual exercise. But a startling range of subjects emerge and re-emerge in an obsessive focus that is easy to pay attention to and is simultaneously a rejection of singular focus. Read it directly from beginning to end, if you can manage that, or jump around. I was reminded somewhat of Steve McCafferys book Black Debt, at least on the level of the combination of intense restraint and intense chaos. And there’s black humor in plentiful doses too. “...those who would refuse to be the Empire’s lapdog, don’t fret, my pets, you’ll get the hang soon enough, and if not that, the gate...” I’ll be interested to see where Place’s work goes next.