Brief Reviews: Amy De'Ath and Murat Nemet-Nejat

 

Amy De’Ath’s Erec & Enide is a small but impressive first book by a poet whose work is certain to get more attention as time goes on. While on the surface, the poems frequently create shimmering, often romantic scenes and interactions, that surface always comes along with a level of sharp political and social critique, and is often disrupted by language that is more blunt and ironic than the poems set up readers to expect. Gender dynamics within individual sexual relationships are often connected not just to individual human isolation but also to many larger scale political problems.

The poems that result have a lyrical sophistication and sometimes even a gauzy sheen, but they also feature sharper, very much non Art Deco edges that break out in unexpected places:

Said Erec to Enede, the sun burst
down on my sails and gallowing tore
my winnow North.

Said Enide to Erec, I don’t know how

to soothe you.

Said Erec to Enide, the airline strikes pulled

holes in my interior liver tissue, and

I daren’t touch a drop.

There’s humor throughout these poems too, but it’s so sneaky in its bite that it’s easy to trip up and be amused just at the moment that something dangerous is about to happen.

Ultimately, the range of tones and surprising shifts of context in Erec & Enide make for a little book with a much broader variety of concerns than might at first appear. De’Ath writes poetry capable of lyrical power, ironic rupturing, and a complex awareness of political and social ideologies, all of which she handles with an always precisely inflected literary style.

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Murat Nemet-Nejat’s poems in the The Spiritual Life of Replicants take his thorough understanding of the history of Turkish poetry and modify it in fascinating ways that respond to the cultural and media conditions of life in the contemporary United States, where he now lives. Nemet-Nejat is the foremost contemporary translator of Turkish into English, and the anthology he edited, Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, is a must read for anyone interested in the last one hundred years of Turkish poetry. Replicants features a number of usually short, often fragmented lyrics that frequently make use of characteristics of Turkish poetry and the Turkish language more generally, for instance in the way sentences and phrases slide sideway into extended sequences rather than being constantly dead-stopped by periods.

Nemet-Nejat’s exploration both of materiality and the mental procedures whereby people try to grasp phenomena develops through the poems based on an animist philosophy that doesn’t make overly simple distinctions between living and non-living matter. The poems also frequently play with and undermine the relationship between perception and that which is supposedly perceived: “the yellow of the carpet/ lurks in the yellow of my eye/ and waits.” Fascinatingly, the book also develops as an extended critique of U.S. cultural attitudes through a reading of the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner and an interrogation of what it means to be human or machine in the context of capitalist power. The boundaries between poetry and prose are also frequently undermined, although the book moves closer towards prose narrative in many of its later sections. Replicants is therefore an exploration both of cultural and aesthetic hybridity, although like the best hybrid approaches, it doesn’t seek to resolve its differences but to exploit and grow them.

The shape and formatting of the book become a bit annoying at times, and some of the fragments feel like mere wisps of language, although ultimately I concluded that even the slightest wisps were important to the author’s sense of the physical world as incredibly close and concrete, but never more than partially graspable. His sense that human desire often tries to control what it cannot hold anchors many of the problems both of individual people and of the larger cultural dynamics that develop over the course of the book. The prose sections which conclude the book become more explicitly an exploration of character, and the way people from differing cultural contexts struggle and fail to understand each other, while finding themselves part of the same often mysterious world:

“The damn guy is impossible. Do you know one day he made me sit in a chair and read a whole damn short story, for one and a half hours, about this girl in a mental asylum, Karala, Aura, or something, who had attempted suicide.”

The Spiritual Life of Replicants is a unique book of poetry with a well-considered philosophical underpinning, even and perhaps especially at those moments when it veers close to falling apart.

Experimental Haiku and Roadrunner Journal

The online journal Roadrunner, more often referred to as R’r, publishes consciously contemporary and experimental haiku—and yes, it is possible to experiment with haiku.

The issues frequently feature a judged competition, the Scorpion Prize and for the most recent issue, I was the judge. Check out my essay, and the haiku themselves, here.

Other recent Scorpion Prize judges include Marjorie Perloff, Robert Grenier, Tom Raworth, Rae Armantrout, Joseph Massey, and Ron Silliman. I’m glad to be in their company and to have had the chance to read the work in Roadrunner closely.

Advice for Students Who Have Left School and Still Want To Be Writers

If you're out of college now, or were never there, and are still thinking that you want to become a writer, here's some great advice on how to do that from Daniel Gutstein, poet, short story writer, and playwright.

Current and former students of mine should definitely read what Dan has to say.

http://dangutstein.blogspot.com/2012/08/blogpost-to-young-poet.html

On Blogging and Much Else: Women Who Write Poetry Criticism (Roundtable)

If you’re a student or former student of mine who has asked me about blogging, this discussion, featuring some of my favorite writers currently working in North America, is essential reading. It’s also essential reading for anyone interested in blogging, writing about literature, or gender. And people who think they’re not interested in any of those things would benefit from reading it too.

 http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2012/08/women-who-write-poetry-criticism-roundtable.html

Janette Kim Larson and Mark Wallace: On Teaching the Poetry of Catherine Wagner

Janette Kim Larson, a former student of mine and a fine poet, is doing some research on contemporary poetry and asked me some questions about the work of Catherine Wagner (pictured above), with particular emphasis on the experience of teaching her work in the university classroom.

You can check out a recently published poem by Janette here at splinter.generation.com:

http://www.splintergeneration.com/broken-men-were-her-specialty/

And here’s our discussion:

JKL: How did you first discover Cathy and what was so striking about her work to you?

MW: It’s funny that you use the word “discover” (although not surprising) because I didn’t discover her work at all in the way that the word is usually meant.

I organized a literary reading series in Washington, D.C. from 1995-2005, The Ruthless Grip Literary Series, named after the experimental art gallery and artist co-op, Ruthless Grip, where the series was located for its first five years. The Ruthless Grip reading series, along with other D.C. reading series at Bridge Street Book and the DC/AC Arts Center, were and are known (all three still exist) for their focus on avant garde and various aesthetically and culturally extreme literature. That focus contrasted greatly with the more mainstream approaches found in the universities.

Cathy was quite a young poet (I wasn’t that old myself) when she wrote me in the late 90s and asked me for a reading in the series both for her and her husband at the time, Martin Corless-Smith, also a poet. I don’t think I’d heard of them, but Cathy had grown up in Baltimore and some of the poets I knew were aware of her work. This was several years before her first full-length book, Miss America, came out, but I think she had published a chapbook of the magazine poems that reappeared in Miss America. And Martin’s first book, Of Piscator, was either already published or came out shortly thereafter. They both gave a good reading, and there was the usual sets of poetry conversations afterwards, since a lot of writers came to those events and everybody would stay together talking for some hours. Since then, Cathy and I have been in touch many times about all sorts of literary matters, readings and conferences and so on. I invited her out to Cal State San Marcos to read in April 2007. It has been great to see her work continue to be published and to get more attention, which it deserves.

JKL: Why did you decide to include her work in a grad and undergrad contemporary lit seminar (513)? If you have assigned her elsewhere, please let me know where and why?

MW: I teach Cathy’s work quite commonly in my grad/undergrad cross-listed contemporary literature course, and I’ll be teaching it again this fall, although in the context of her work and the work of others that appears in the recent anthology Gurlesque. And I taught Miss America once in an undergraduate poetry class at American University in Washington, D.C.

Cathy’s work is rather uniquely well-suited to the needs of the students that take 513, I think. Of the full range of poetic approaches at the moment, hers is hardly the most extreme. In a time when many poems switch subjects rapidly, or undermine and critique in numerous ways the idea of a central subject, Cathy’s poems are still mainstream enough to be recognizable to students unfamiliar with contemporary poetry, simply because they often have identifiable subjects (a young woman dealing with love, or motherhood, or buying a house, etc.) commonly recognizable as archetypal American middle class and women’s issues. No all her poems do that, and some of the poems in her most recent book, My New Job, maybe veer farther away than ever from having unified central subjects, although the job is of course archetypal too.

At the same time, Cathy’s poems avoid and critique more expected ways of looking at their subjects, and she has a consciously jagged and often staccato approach to language that gives her an extremely unique style. Her poems in Macular Hole, for instance, displace the idea that human emotions are at the center of having babies and buying houses and much else. Instead the poems explore the physical and social structures that shape emotional reactions. A mother and baby have bodies that act as bodies and need to be recognized as such rather than swaddled in sentimentality, especially since sentimentality often becomes a way of ignoring and denying the kinds of problems that mothers face. This approach leads Cathy often to use more clinical language than expected in mainstream poems, and shows emotion as being conditioned by social structures rather than simply sweeping those structures aside.

The bluntness of her language is not simply an emotional bluntness, although her poems have those moments also: the bluntness raises the issue of what kind of language people use when they speak about human bodies, and women’s bodies specifically. And the playful and purposeful complexity of her word choices leads to poems that never quite present these issues with easily transparent representational imagery. Instead, the focus moves in and out and approaches the subject at many odd and yet ultimately insightful angles. She manages to make archetypal subjects strange again, and through that, reveals important issues that have often been covered up or overlooked.

Add it all up, and her work operates on an edge between mainstream and more extreme avant approaches that is very helpful for me in leading students away from conventional expectations about the language and subject matter of poems, while giving them enough grounding in familiar subjects that they don’t feel lost. From there I can I send them on to even more extreme poems. In that way, her writing is not only fantastic on its own but serves well as a gateway to the variety of challenging aesthetic approaches available in contemporary poetry.

JKL: How do students typically respond to her work? Are they horrified by her stark honesty? Pleased by the boldness in her voice? Confused and frustrated by lack of accessibility? All of the above?

MW: Teaching would be a lot easier if there was any typical student response to anything. Certainly her work has caused all of the reactions you describe, but I also have students who feel liberated by her stark honesty, upset at the boldness or bluntness of her voice, or excited by some of the difficulties her language creates. Some people read her work and are really energized by it; to others it’s just an assignment that they want to get over with. I’m happy of course when students like the work I’m teaching, and I hope my enthusiasm for that work gives people reason to believe that enthusiasm about poetry really is possible. Ultimately what I want is for students to be able to talk and write effectively about the poems I teach. When people can articulate what something is, they become more likely to be pleased by their relationship to it.

Brief Reviews: Poetry by Stephanie Balzer and Gina Myers

For many reasons, I haven’t had a lot of time for blogging or for reading new poetry this summer, but here are a couple of brief chapbook reviews to tide things over until I find more time again, and an intriguing couple of chapbooks they are.


The prose poems in Stephanie Balzer’s Faster, Faster (Cue Editions) create, in their line by line shifts and twists, an ultimately melancholy and insightful wittiness full of energy and the pleasure of words. Balzer knows both the psychological foibles of people and the structural limitations of the environments they create for themselves, but the narrator in these poems is never simply an observer. Instead she finds herself often in a perpetual in-between, trying to connect with others and not being able to, or connecting with them but needing to back off when they impose their problems on her, instead of trying to work them out in some mutual process. Balzer’s not afraid to examine political conditions either; the pieces are filled with references to the CIA, Starbucks, HBO, The New York Times, McDonald’s, and other people and organizations that create dangerous limits on human interaction. The sly rewrites of phrasing from Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs never come off as mere tributes, but reveal Balzer’s own concerns with an inevitable web of connections that frustrates even more than it promises. “I confess: my state of mind is America. ‘something to do w entropy, i think. the force of nothingness so much stronger than its opposite.’”


I really enjoyed the understatement and surface simplicity of the poems in Gina Myers’ chapbook False Spring (Spooky Girlfriend Press). A continuation from Myers’ earlier work of her moody re-envisioning of the New York School casual tone transferred to more sparse and economically depressed environments, the poems in False Spring are much more minimal than in her earlier book A Model Year, saying no more than needs to be said, but implying deeper wells of alienation than the surface elaborates. I was reminded of the various Rexroth translations of ancient Chinese poems in terms of how much a few words can evoke, yet there’s nothing indirect about these poems. They lay out the narrator’s struggles flatly and bluntly. The impression of empty rooms, missed possibilities, and unkept urban spaces kept resonating for me long after I put the book down. “Weddings & funerals in the span of a week./Each year, the family grows & shrinks./ I search the classifieds for a new job,/a new place to live, a change.”

Summer Salon Series at The San Diego Museum of Art

The San Diego Museum of Art Summer Salon Series begins tonight, with a reading by Sesshu Foster and many other happenings throughout the gallery.


Details:

We hope you can join us for a reading by Sesshu Foster in the Summer Salon Series at the San Diego Museum of Art, Friday, June 29 at 7pm in Gallery 18. Museum admission is $12 for adults, $8 for students with college ID, and open to the public.

In conjunction with Agitprop, the Agitprop Reading Series is collaborating with the San Diego Museum of Art for the third year in a row to present the Summer Salon Series. Every Friday evening, from June 1 through August 31, the San Diego Museum of art will be hosting artists, lecturers, poets and performers to investigate the topics of historical fictions and the dissemination of information.           

Sesshu Foster will read from his award-winning text Atomik Aztex.  In the alternate universe of Atomik Aztex, the Aztecs rule, having conquered the European invaders long ago. Aztek warriors with totemic powers are busy colonizing Europe, and human sacrifice is basic to economic growth. Zenzontli, Keeper of the House of Darkness, is plagued by nightmares of a parallel reality where American consumerism reigns supreme. Ghosts of banished Aztek warriors emerge to haunt contemporary Los Angeles, and Zenzontli’s visions of Hell become real as he’s trapped in a job in an East L.A. meatpacking plant. 
Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for 20 years. He's also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. One of his last readings at St. Mark's Poetry Project NYC is Mp3 archived at www.salon.com and local readings are archived at www.sicklyseason.com. He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the website, www.ELAguide.org. His most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook. He blogs at East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines.

San Diego Museum of Art
Gallery 18
Friday, June 29, 7pm
Facebook Event Page:

http://www.facebook.com/events/194590347335376/?context=create   
Directions and parking information are available on the SDMA website:
http://www.sdmart.org/visit/travel-information
For more information about the Summer Salon Series, Please visit:

http://www.sdmart.org/calendar/summer-salon-series-2012-beyond-banner-3 

For more information about the Agitprop Reading Series, you can join our Facebook group:
http://www.facebook.com/groups/149903861746355/
Or visit our webpage:

http://agitpropspace.org/literaryarts/


Upcoming Summer Salon Literary Readings include:
July 20 | Omar Pimienta with John Pluecker
August 17 | Allison Cobb

Altered Scale online journal now taking submissions

Altered Scale, an excellent new online journal being edited by Jefferson Hansen, a poet, fiction writer, and essayist who has been a close friend of mine for many years, is now taking submissions for its second and further issues. The first issue is now online and features fine work by a number of excellent writers, performers, and musicians.

Editor's Statement:

All art contains musicality: harmony, disharmony, tone, rhythm, and so on. The musicality in this journal is highlighted by my editorial decisions: I want the texture of various pieces of writing or performance to creak and crimp against one another, thereby revealing something about what is at the musical heart of each piece. In this way each page, which usually contains several artists, is a mini-gallery that explores how works explore musicality through juxtaposition.

Of course, editing should not override the presentation of art. When it became necessary to set aside this focus to one degree or another in order to do justice to the work, I did so.

Jefferson Hansen

AlteredScale.com is open for submissions of audio, video, graphic, mixed-media, and literary art. Issue 2 will move to a Wordpress platform, which will allow for more flexibility. Send audio in Soundcloud and videos in either You Tube or Vimeo. Literary art is best in an attached Word file; plus the text should be reprinted in the body of the email. Please also include a biography. Send to jh4090@gmail.com

The Contemporary Literature That I Believe Is Most Worthwhile

The Contemporary Literature That I Believe Is Most Worthwhile

Takes aesthetic, linguistic, and/or structural risks, challenging present cultural and literary norms, while not being committed to a one-dimensional, one-size-fits-all notion of “the new.” Difference and uniqueness exists in relation to multiple contexts, literary and cultural. There is no such sufficiently identifiable total thing as the “field” of literature or cultural production in which only one main approach could be new.

These risks, however, must not be simply aesthetic; the literature also

Explores cultural, historical, environmental, and sociopolitical conditions (including that of literature and art) in the specificity of their materiality, recognizing that all such conditions are a function of human, bodily interactivity both with other humans and with the physicality of the world beyond the human. Such explorations understand that all writing is ideological, that there is no such thing as a neutral position and that an attempt to achieve an impossible neutrality always has ideological implications. These explorations, in their materiality, are not automatically opposed to ideas of magic, spirituality, and religion, since those are crucial parts of the full range of available human beliefs and attitudes and have real effects on bodies and environments. Such work can also be scientific and non-human-centered, as long as it includes the recognition that human perceptions are the ground from which any literary exploration takes place. No one ever gets outside themselves entirely.

The literature also

Must be readable and worth reading in its specific parts. I don’t mean “accessible,” since accessibility is a matter of convention and requires challenging. Rather, the specifics of the writing are significant and engage attention on a part-by-part basis, not just as overall concept. I say “part-by-part” rather than “line-by-line” because it is also possible to read a work’s visual elements, sound elements, and/or performance elements, and much worthwhile literature goes beyond being solely words on a page. I also include work whose overarching concept may be the main point, as long as the parts (the words and other elements) contribute significantly to a concept that is itself worthy of continued attention.

Brief Review: Answer, by Mark Ducharme

I really enjoyed the complex, playful, sometimes impressively contorted rhythms of Mark Ducharme’s recent book of poems, Answer, published by BlazeVox. Those rhythms combine well with the book’s rich and frequently surprising vocabulary. While some lines in the book are bluntly political, more often the poems create a moody and shadowed (yet somehow also deadpan Midwestern) romanticism, one in which clarity of thought and action repeatedly finds itself deflected by misunderstanding and uncertainty.

Ducharme spins and alters the music of his lyrics in as varied a way as any lyric poet working at the moment, without ever losing their basic melodicism, as in the opening of “Imperfect World”:

To be a part
Of the treetops & furnaces
Where the only air to breathe is
Here——and we are

Stilled along the
way, to where
It is, we are going. Where is it, we
Are going

anymore? Only to where
In a moment, I’ll reappear
Ambiguous & startling
In your hair, replete, where I do not

See
You at all, or ever—or if I did
I would soon be about to go
Away. (31)

Melancholy, satirical and bemused by turns, the poems feature tight torques, subtle ellipses and, given their refusal to embrace too much drama, a surprising degree of lyrical grandeur.

Ducharme is neither a writer of conventional lyric phrasing and imagery, nor of Stephen Burt-named New Thing minimalism, although his work sometimes veers in and out of both tendencies. The poems in Answer take more risks than most lyric poetry of the present day, given many unexpected leaps in phrasing and Ducharme’s willingness to stretch language to the point that, often, meaning nearly breaks down entirely.

At times the metaphorical deflections of any too direct subject matter give the poems a sleight-of-hand that delays or withholds, usually in fascinating ways, any too easy definition of a given poem’s subject. The result is that many pieces become moody plays of visual tones and twists of sound. Yet if the book threatens maybe too often to float off into a soundtrack-like aura for a dead-ended, befogged Middle America where nobody knows anything or anyone, the language can also jolt abruptly into directness, even as it retains its quick turns, such as in these lines from “Thank You For Protecting Polar Bears”:

The centaur cannot fold. It has a new life experience
as seen on Lifetime, where, punctual
You are a modernist in a doomsday client
State—suppressing all legible offers
To become someone who cannot hum
I am reasonably sure this is private, & has
Only minimum content appeal
I am still not kidding (33)

The book is full of numerous highlights, including the section of “Crisis Sonnets,” the sudden leaps intro more extreme avant word play like in the poem “Glutton Tongue,” or the direct simplicity of the repetition in “Possible Ode.”

There’s a tendency in the book to overuse a few constructions, like replacing a direct image with the phrasing “of what,” as in the lines, “like their use at night/In the where of what can quickly swerve” (“There is Something Original About This Message”, p. 45), a construction which appears again later in the same poem and numerous times elsewhere. Ultimately though, Answer is a collection of poems that asks many significant questions and is never afraid to reformulate language in ways that will best explore or, more often, deny the answers. As it turns out, according to Ducharme, too many of the answers people willingly accept are just too easy.

Brief Review: The Odicy, by Cyrus Console

In recent years, the idea that many different aesthetic approaches can be considered to have innovative or experimental possibilities has opened up to include all sorts of approaches that, a decade or two ago, might have been dismissed out of hand as too traditional. Given that, I imagine that it was inevitable that sooner or later, a English-language writer was bound to “return” to iambic pentameter and see if new things could be done with it.

Enter Cyrus Console and The Odicy, a book-length poem in five parts, all written in variations on pentameter. The book’s back cover claims that The Odicy is a detailed attempt to “take the measure of our epoch’s cultural and ecological crises.” I don’t actually know how experimental Console imagines his take on pentameter to be. At times the book seems to be trying a genuinely unique approach, dunking the frequently high-toned pentameter in colloquial phrasing, social satire, and moments of bathos. At other times the book comes across as overly restrained, in tone if not in subject matter, with a use of pentameter that seems more conventional and almost even reverential.

Frequently, Console’s lines, with interestingly tight enjambments and torques, have a casual colloquial tone that undermines the tendency of writers of pentameter to drift towards loftiness: “Go now, Tony. Else you got to stay/ Tony. Fix a stocking to the chimney/ Decorate a tree this holiday/ Artificial is the only way to fly” (15). Perhaps just as often, the book seems to succumb to the temptation of just that sort of loftiness, occasionally with a significant degree of abstraction: “The littoral uncertainty in being/Neither continent nor boundary/ Unflixed measureless intermittent/ Crush of water macerating what/ On or near the day we lose the beachhead” (34).

The subject matter of the book wanders from idea to idea in a way that is frequently intriguing but sometimes too distant or general. The references to contemporary commodities like soda are often more vivid and memorable than the book’s philosophical framework, and by the time I reached the end of the book, its overall stance seemed a bit removed from its subject matter. Intentionally or not, the way pentameter is being used in The Odicy feels like it contains as much cultured disdain as satirical critique of the frequent absurdity of day to day life under capitalism. Whether readers will find that effective depends a great deal on how attractive the book’s shifts in tone feel to them.

I was impressed by the ambition of The Odicy. Console is a writer with big goals, both in terms of writing a book length poem and of the wide range of culture and philosophical problems addressed in it. As his work moves forward, it will be interesting to see whether and how his conception develops regarding the relation between subject matter, form, and tone. He’s trying things in The Odicy that are risky and worthy of admiration.

The result, to my mind, is a long, bold and uneven poem that is perhaps bogged down at times in the historical role of pentameter in English-language poetry. In theory, there’s nothing about pentameter that requires a high-toned grandness, but in practice The Odicy echoed that tone too often to feel fully effective. Still, Console is exploring and developing an approach in this book that many other poets would be too timid or conventionally unconventional to try. It’s important to keep in mind that when ideas about the experimental become too narrow or expected, those ideas stop being experimental at all.

William Burroughs' Cut-Ups and the Use of Collage in Literature

I will be giving a talk on William Burroughs’ (and Tristan Tzara’s) use of the cut-up, and on more recent developments in the idea of collage as literature, this Thursday, March 22 at 11 a.m., as part of Collage in Context: A Symposium, a two-hour event connected with More Real than Life: An exhibition of contemporary collage, curated by Alexander Jarman, and running March 8-April 12 at Southwestern College Art Gallery. The event is free and open to the public. Address, program, and parking details below.

Come on out if you’re anywhere nearby.

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More Real than Life: An exhibition of contemporary collage

 Curated by Alexander Jarman

March 8-April 12 at Southwestern College Art Gallery

 In a digital world, the analog has become all the more important.

This exhibition will present 11 contemporary artists, from California to France, currently using scissors and glue rather than a mouse and a printer to create works that question our perceptions of common reality and provoke discussion about collage’s increased relevance.

Related Programs:
Collage in Context: A Symposium: Thursday,  March 22: 11:00-1:00 p.m.
Collage in poetry, Mark Wallace: 11-11:20
Artist Talk, Joshua Tonies: 11:25-11:40
Roundtable Discussion: 11:45-12:15
Q&A with Audience 12:15-12:30

This symposium program will present collage as a strategy both in art and literature, as well as position the practice within a larger context of current analogue approaches in art.  The first presentation, from Mark Wallace, will discuss the collage practices of William S. Burroughs and their continued legacy.  Wallace is the author of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays, and won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award for Temporary Worker Rides A Subway.  The second presentation will feature artist Joshua Tonies speaking about his own collage work.  His contributions to the exhibition highlight some current approaches to utilizing both analog and digital collage within a single work, and how the two differ or complement each other.  The last presentation will consist of a roundtable discussion between Michael Trigilio, Alexander Jarman and May-ling Martinez. May-ling Martinez is featured in the exhibition.  Besides creating analog collage, she has built outdated or impractical machines from old mechanical engineering manuals as part of her art.  Michael Trigilio is a Professor at University of California San Diego and a multi-media artist who has worked extensively with sound.  His independent radio project, Neighborhood Public Radio, has been featured at The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Exhibiting Artists:
Sadie Barnette  http://www.sadiebarnette.com/  Based in San Diego, CA.
Mike Calway-Fagen http://mikecalway-fagen.com/  Based in San Diego, CA.
Troy Dugas http://troydugas.com/   Based in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Lola Dupre http://loladupre.com/  Based in Avignon, France. 
Chris Kardambikis http://www.kardambikis.com/ Based in San Diego, CA.
Gordon Magnin http://gordonmagnin.com/ Based in Los Angeles, CA.
Morgan Manduley http://morganmanduley.com/
 http://sezio.org/feature/Morgan-Manduley.aspx  Based in San Diego, CA. 
May-ling Martinez http://www.maylingmartinez.com/index.html Based in San Diego, CA.
Arturo Medrano http://convulsive.tumblr.com/  Based in New York City, NY.  

Jason Sherry http://www.jasonsherry.com/  Based in San Diego, CA.
Joshua Tonies http://www.joshtonies.com/ Based in San Diego, CA.

The Southwestern College Art Gallery is located in Rm 710B
900 Otay Lakes Rd, 
Chula Vista, CA 91910.
Gallery Hours 
are Monday through Thursday 10:30am-2:00pm,
Wednesday & Thursday 5:30pm-8:30pm.
Tel. 619-421-6700 x 5568
Fax 619-421-6700 fax 5368

Free parking is available in Lot J on the days of the related events

Brief Review: glowball by Steven Farmer

Hardcore afficionados of poetry that stretches the materiality of language in surprising ways will love Steven Farmer’s glowball, and everybody else should read it too for the challenges it offers to overly conventional uses of language and for its insights into contemporary globalist capitalism. glowball features five poetic sequences, each quite different, but all of which interrogate how conditions of language can both reveal sociopolitical conditions and enmesh people in them.

Each of the first four sequences establishes a serial structure: jagged seven-line stanzas in “Spectacler”; isolated lines of prose occasionally disrupted by stanzas in “Jewel Box” and “Saturuate”; and the chaotic yet still somehow pleasing visual shapes in “Parts/Din.”  The final sequence, “Metacity,” varies structures more from page to page with a virtuoistic flair attuned both to shifts in language and in visual presentation. At one point, “Metacity” breaks into a kind of call and response between contemporary power structures and language dynamics and Latin (yes, Latin) versions of the same. Farmer suggests by juxtaposition that the Roman Empire remains a  relevant precursor to conditions under corporate capitalism’s present-day empire, an empire which seems more shadowy only until you challenge it.

Within these various sequences, and almost in every line of the poems, the torturous, knotty problems of the present twist and turn and result in few clear possibilities, much less solutions. “The strong station, the weaker station, the station changing messages” is just one of many moments in “Saturate” that let readers know precisely what is saturating them (68). The lines “if he stands on the bucket, we see him in the abundance/lack dichotomy” from “Jewel Box,” show humans caught in their own clownishly absurd display structures (38). There are many more thematic nuances in every part of glowball, which deserves both re-reading and a closer, fuller elucidation of all its details than I am providing here.

My only criticism of glowball is that, at times, the poems struck me as lacking a bit in energy. The book shows a world so collapsibly intertwined on its own bad intentions that its various bits and pieces of language don’t build much forward momentum, and occasionally I felt myself pushing through rather than being taken along. Of course, that’s partly because there’s so much to dwell on in each of the book’s many small parts. Besides, the gleeful rush that comes from energetic language is perhaps, in the world of glowball, no more than a desire for escape, a desperate attempt to catch some final buzz while kneeling bewildered in the ruins.

AWP Chicago 2012: Where I'll Be

  

 I’ll be participating in the following events at AWP this coming week in Chicago. I hope to see you at any of them, or any of the number of other panels and readings that I’ll be attending.

Route 66 Off-Site Reading
Friday, March 2, 2012
3:30pm until 5:30pm
Buzz Café, 905 S. Lombard Ave., Oak Park, IL. 60304
  
This reading, coordinated with thanks to Grant Matthew Jenkins, features experimental/conceptual poets from states along Route 66. Get your kicks at 3:30pm!

Tentative lineup:
Grant Matthew Jenkins
Claudia Nogueira
K. Lorraine Graham
Mark Wallace
Bob Archambeau
Sloan Davis
Susan Briante
Farid Matuk
Greg Kinzer
Joseph Harrington
Simone Muench
Hadara Bar-Nadav
William J Harris
Dennis Etzel Jr.

To get there by subway:
Take the Blue line to Austin-Blue
Walk to 905 S Lombard Ave, Oak Park, IL 60304
1. Head west on Garfield St toward S Taylor Ave 0.1 mi
2. Turn right onto S Lombard Ave 0.1 mi
905 S Lombard Ave, Oak Park, IL 60304

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Saturday, 9:00 A.M.-10:15 A.M.
S117. Building and Surviving an Innovative Writing Program
(K. Lorraine Graham, John Pluecker, Anna Joy Springer, Janet Sarbanes, Mark Wallace)
Crystal Room, Palmer House Hilton, 3rd Floor

Participating in an interdisciplinary writing program committed to innovative pedagogies is exhilarating and confusing, especially if it’s a new program and you are a professor building the curriculum or a student in the inaugural class. A recent graduate, a current student, two tenured faculty members, and an adjunct professor discuss their experiences with innovative writing programs: the three-year old MFA at UCSD, the established MFA at Cal Arts, and the growing undergraduate BA at CSU San Marcos.

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Stop the Sentence: A Night of (Inter) Active Readings
Saturday, March 3, 2012
7:00pm until 12:00am
at Outer Space Studio
1474 N Milwaukee Ave.

FEATURE READINGS BY:
7:30 Matthew Klane
8:30 Cara Benson
9:30 Michelle Naka Pierce
10:30 Ronaldo Wilson
11:30 Tracie Morris

WITH READINGS, PRESENTATIONS & PERFORMANCES BY:

7:45 AWP SHOW AND TELL
Teresa Carmody, Feng Sun Chen, Gloria Frym, BJ Love, Mark Wallace

8:45 O.P.P./OTHER PEOPLE'S POETRY
Claire Donato, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Luis Humberto Valadez
Catherine Wagner, Tyrone Williams, Tim Yu
& a tribute to Akliah Oliver with a video by Ed Bowes & Anne Waldman

9:45 TAG TEAM READING
cris cheek, Laura Goldstein, MC Hyland, Tim/Trace Peterson, Michelle Taransky, Edwin Torres, Christine Wertheim

10:45 INSTANT READING
David Emanuel, Jennifer Karmin, Edwin Perry, Jai Arun Ravine,
Adam Roberts, Kenyatta Rogers

+ + PLUS + + AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION
That means you!

Venue logistics --
doors open 6:45pm
in the Wicker Park neighborhood
near CTA Damen blue line
third floor walk up
not wheelchair accessible

Red Rover Series {readings that play with reading} is curated by Laura Goldstein and Jennifer Karmin. Each event is designed as a reading experiment with participation by local, national, and international writers, artists, and performers. The series was founded in 2005 by Amina Cain and Jennifer Karmin.

 

Book Review: E! Entertainment by Kate Durbin

Kate Durbin’s E! Entertainment, published by Insert Press, is certainly entertaining, but its ultimate effect is unsettling. The Conceptual Writing-like flat reportage of surface physical textures and human interactions gives a sense, throughout the text, that a great deal is missing, or the equally unsettling sense that maybe there isn’t anything important missing after all. Psychological motivations for the various characters (some are characters from well-known TV shows, while others appear as themselves in the context of Reality TV or media reports) are blotted out in transcriptions that record the surface of what they’re doing at the moment, as if that surface is all that matters:

“You just sit here by yourself?” asks Heidi, looking up to the ceiling. She laughs. Audrina starts to smile, then purses her lips together. She looks up at the ceiling too, nodding, her lips still pursed. Shot of Heidi looking up at Audrina. “Um,” says Heidi. “Spencer and I are having a little housewarming party and wanted to see if you and Lauren wanted to come” (16).

Why they do what they do is at times implied, at times simply not there. The result is a text that shows people as bodies in motion, watching and being watched, with some of the motions disorienting or odd or even pathological, and others having a kind of intense banality that can be even more disorienting than the oddities.

The book is broken into several sections of interconnected  prose paragraphs mingled among sometimes blurred film stills. The first follows several of the main characters from the TV show The Hills (2006-2010); the second describes some scenes from the show Dynasty (1981-89). The third section features Lindsey Lohan, through the words of reporters, as she appears in court, and the final segment seems to be from the short-lived Anna Nicole Show (2002-03) that starred the short-lived Anna Nicole.

The degree of bathos and abjection increases from section to section. By the time of the Lohan and Nicole sections, the actresses’ public personas are breaking down as the actresses themselves do the same, so that the distinctions between a public performance and a person become frighteningly lost:

ANNA: Huh? I don’t know. Oh. You said open ‘em. With a wha—for a waterpark? I wanna go. Why not. My baby’s over there sleepin. I think I just have a little gas. I think I just I think I’m having some gas trouble. It hurts and I need some gas poot stuff so I can poot it out. (54)

The lack of interpretive commentary from Durbin is crucial to the book’s oddity. She neither accuses this world of being shallow and degrading or revels in its supposed glamor. While she makes no attempt to call any of the situations banal, the lack of any attempt at psychological or social insight leaves readers with the sense that while these things are indeed happening, there’s nothing really making them happen except the fact that they’ve been created in order to be watched. I found myself wondering why and how these things and people had come to be, but realized that the author would be providing no answers.

Of course, ordinary capitalist television shows almost always feature a heavy-handed morality. The normal titillations of capitalist urges (money, beauty, sex, power, etc) get thrown hypocritically against a finger-pointing, numbingly conventional sense of right and wrong. It’s as if the two opposing urges (to lust or to condemn) shape in the dialectic between them the lives both of successful television characters and television viewers, and eliminate all other possible ways of feeling and thinking.

By removing both the titillation and the morality, E! Entertainment leaves readers with the disconcerting sense that there’s no significant reason why these things are happening beyond the possibilities they create for voyeurism. Readers wanting a moral framework (Marxist or psychoanalytical or Christian or anything else), or even a simple explanation of why things are happening, will have to impose them on the text. Instead, what E! Entertainment shows readers is bodies wrenching awkwardly with desire, anxiety, and physical pain, struggling with each other and talking to each other and dramatizing in public the fact of themselves. What finally turns the book into a kind of contemporary gothic is the developing dread, the sense that the whole show is leading in the direction of decay and collapse. The voyeur watches others go through their act of pain and dying in order to avoid the uncomfortable and unspoken truth that the voyeur too is headed in the same direction.