I AM READING TOMORROW (MONDAY) AT ST. MARKS' POETRY PROJECT

As part of the Poetry Project Reading Series curated by Kyle Schlesinger, Karen Randall & I will be reading on 

MONDAY, MARCH 23rd, at 8 PM.

You might say that both Karen & I exercise implementing & synthesizing the textual visual, (textu(r)al).  

I hope you will come see/hear us read.

See Below for more information:

Karen Randall is an artist who works in the media of words, digital collage (both sound and visual), oil painting, and letterpress printing/artist’s books. She is the daughter of an astrophysicist & grew up playing with primitive computers, a very cool chemistry set from the 50s, building short wave radios and a telescope, while also painting & writing poetry. She has taught hands-on science in the Chicago public schools, literary studies in western MA, and letterpress printing at the Center for the Book in NY and at Naropa. She developed four-color printing process as a means of combining the fluidity of contemporary digital imagery with the luminous qualities of ink layered on Japanese papers. Her work has been collected by numerous colleges, institutions and private collectors including the Library of Congress. Images of her work can be seen on line at www.propolispress.com. 

Jeremy James Thompson is an instructor at New York’s Center for Book Arts as well as a curator for their New Voices reading series. His work focuses on the process of collaboration, the reinvention of propaganda, and the defining of a practical avant-garde. Through his own Auto Types Press, he has produced collaborative prints with poets including, Edwin Torres, Joan Retallack, David Lehman and Charles Bernstein. His texts and typographic works are published in collections and journals including Cricket Online Review, Pinstripe Fedora, The Houston Literary Review, The Bucky Monkey, Lamination Colony, WORK, and Viz. Inter-Arts, a Trans-Genre Anthology. He blogs about movietelling, typography and poetics at autotypist.blogspot.com.

The Poetry Project at St. Marks Cathedral is Located in the East Village at:

131 E. 10th St., New York, NY

(through the gate and around the back)

NOW FOR THIS NEW THING

I've returned from an internet absence largely compelled by the process of moving house, beginning a new job in an entirely new industry, the arrival and departure of a number of house guests, and the other miscellany. 

I've announced my return with new Fall Colors, because the virtual seasons are otherwise difficult to detect. 

NOW FOR THIS NEW THING: my honest engine reason for not posting anything for some long while has been my inability to determine how to proceed. There are different ways of saying the same and different things. Saying things differently. So an ongoing presentation determining the difference is the solution. I'll be posting in different colors:

White facts & white opinions. 

Pink poetic or abstract. 

Light blue nearly meaningless.

1 Week ago, I went to Brooklyn to investigate The Poetry Brothel, a gallery/ club of sorts. Its run by folks calling themselves The Madame and Tennessee Pink. The fundamental concept is a venue offering rooms laden with pillows and fabrics, wherein poetry is read to you by poets dressed in sexier than usual garb. It all suggested more 80's & 90's theater than any kind of discernible poetics, though I'm told they're mostly students from the New School MFA Program. $10 buys you admission, a gold plastic coin good for a private reading with a Poetry Whore (fresh from The Madame's Finishing School for Poetry Whores), and a green plastic coin for Absinthe (still the official drink of olympic poetry!).  Also included, The Poetry Brothel program, which amounts to a list of cast (character) biographies, acknowledgements, and advertisements for 3 workshops: 

A Finishing School for Poetry Whores: "geared toward the development of a poetry "whore" persona through the writing and workshopping of a small body of poetry for this alter-ego." 

Theories of Poetic  Enunciation: participants "focus on finding the more resonant qualities of our own voices," beginning with a study of the poetry of the "great masters."

Tarot and Poetry: "poets in this workshop will come to understand ways to incorporate into their work the still, small voice that is so easily hushed and disregarded in daily life."

These are six-week sessions. Want more? "all of our instructors are also available for private, one-on-one consultations. These are recommended for those with an existing body of poetic work and a desire for some length, indepth feedback on it. Consultation Fee: $100 per 2 hours."

My blog reading fee is $600 per post read (& it's still a better deal). 

So maybe most poets are no longer nearly so eccentric as history suggests certain dead poets were. That's no reason to go running around charging people to develop  stock strange artists. These workshopped poetic personas consist of 1 paragraph bio descriptions, toting pre-war stylings, exoticism, orientalism, EVEN MODERNISM. Each one has a list of influences beneath: Arthur Rimbaud, William Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, Bly, Hass, Kunitz, William Carlos Williams, Silvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Frank O'Hara, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, John Ashbery, Charles Bukowski, Walt Whiman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H Auden, Russel Edson, Robert Creeley, Anne Waldman, Margaret Atwood, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, Anne Carson, and Salinger. 

This would not be my starting line-up. It almost reads like a "Much Loved Poets and Writers" coffee table collection. Hard-bound. Massive. Shiny. Black.  

Though, amongst the lot of them, they also managed to include: Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, William Burroughs, James Joyce, Richard Brautigan, Lyn Hejinian, Alice Notely, and Anna Akhmatova. 

Other odd notables included: Tom Waits, Marilyn Monroe, and Edith Piaf. 

What I liked (& would like to see at other poetry events):

-inclosed front patio replete with odd lounging furniture and friendly faces

-a charming well-dressed Maitre'De

-alcohol besides wine

-an accordion player serenading between acts

-art on the walls

-attractive environs

-the idea of private readings within a larger reading

-generally friendly and approachable people

-a large constituent of women reading and listening

-Queer Friendly

What I didn't like (& am even somewhat vexed by);

-bad accents (it only makes it more difficult to care about what is being said)

-costumes (as opposed developing your "character" and subsequent aesthetic within the parameters of day to day living)

-absinthe (I love the drink, but it comes with so much baggage, and they were more interested in the baggage than the drink).

- "Poetry Whores" (as a title, the result is neither sexy enough, nor exploitive enough. Think School of Quietude in fishnet stockings and patent leather heels). Cheesecake Gluck!

- temperature (too hot to contemplate so much personal narrative)

Perhaps if the focus were set more upon the "poetry" and less upon the "brothel." Perhaps if there were less emphasis on kitsch Lit history, and more upon the spirit of experiment with venue, text and performance. 

Should have gone to TIM PETERSON  the should've shid. I saw peterson on youtube smash his club on IOWA's creative MFAce. It made sense. I think he's as intelligent as he sounds, but he has strong feelings about some poets he knows. 

PAOLO JAVIER left to teach in Miami, an associate prof on perm VAY-K. Many people visit my blog in search of PAOLO JAVIER. Keep Coming. 

ITTk looks like a dumb truck full of TT. TTap Dance. Ta Ta Tap Tap ap laPDAnce LAPDance. Ignant words doggy up my flexis mooch. Up in their towel wrapped a  fat sperm whale. 

To gurlesque, make bugwords CUM! THIP! CRISH! PHUSH! Prack ... to star in John McC[[l]]ain and William Moor Lie Hard with a Variance.

New Voices, LMFAO, Geof Huth, WORK#4

It seems that recently I have witnessed more events than there have been days in which to do so.

NEW VOICES

The story begins on Wednesday evening, July 23rd at the Center for Book Arts. I curated the inauguration of a new reading series misleadingly titled New Voices (the participating readers are well beyond "new," as they are all recognized and published within their communities). The title was predesignated by the Center for Book Arts, but in its defense, I suspect the desire was to employ "New" as an adjective in the service of Progress, as in New Perspectives... fresh, surprising, etc.

Taking into account my own reaction, that of the readers, and those of the audience, I am sure that the work presented did come off as Fresh & Surprising. Much of it still remands so in my memory. The reading was (audio) recorded, and hopefully will make its way on to Penn Sound, courtesy of Danny Snelson.

I had a conversation or two with each of the readers that night, and some of us went out for a drink after the event. Many of them shared my enthusiasm for continuing to develop a community of printers, booksmiths and poets: actually any artists interested in the tensions and cooperations evident in text-based mediums at every stage: words, and words as they are placed and then found on a surface.

I have already begun to keep in touch with several of them, and I believe that the correspondence between us will be vital in encouraging the presence and longevity of the community I have suggested above. That said, I'd also like to see the Center for Book Arts become a more central hub for readings and other text-inclusive performative events.

My primary interest is in the intersection of stunning writing and the possibility of the book as structure. Cuneiform does not ascribe to any particular school or canon, and remains committed to publishing enduring (and ephemeral) works that negotiate the critical imagination and poetic exploration. We aspire to maintain a zeal for experimentation and fascination with the intersection of meaning and form with each publication.
-Kyle Schlesinger, Cuneiform Press

In essence, I would like to apply these goals toward the continued formation of a community, marked by events such as readings and exhibitions of ephemera.


OMG! releases Paolo Javier's LMFAO

On the evening of Friday, July 25th, at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's projects space, DIY press, OMG!, released Paolo's idiomatic cut'n'paste, graphic no-vella LMFAO. I wish I could describe it in detail, but I am currently in Los Angeles, and the book is in New York. But I will say that his performance at the release reading was the 2nd impressive presentation of his I've witnessed. It was both conceptual and lyrical, managing and narrating text composed for other purposes by other people. When it came to the poems from his new book, he simply slowly passed over each powerpoint page without reading aloud. More on that text once I've my eyes on it again.


Meeting Geof Huth in Astoria, NY

The night before I left for Los Angeles, I sat at my computer, reading this post by Geof Huth, a well-known practitioner and collector of visual poetries. The post discusses some ruminations on what (or how) the visual poet sees, and it also lists the location whereat the thought was had, that being, Astoria, NY: my home. I immediately responded with my own thoughts on the relevance of such ruminations within Astoria, revealing my living there as well. He responded in turn, and within minutes, I was greeting he and his wife out on the corner of 27th st & 30th Ave. It is a rare thing when a blog post leads to a handshake, and it takes the outward warmth of a fellow like Goef Huth to initiate such a handshake.

I only recently finished reading his collected pwoermds, and had been having many discussions about them with my wife as well as other poets. Goef Huth's passion for & habit of photographing graffiti and other found texts has rubbed off on me since first discovering it some months ago. Also, and most importantly, his sandglyphs and fidgetglyphs have refreshed my otherwise tired understanding of experiential poetics. His practice suggests the renewed capacity for an immediate poetics, but one that is still meditative and concerned with its social and political implications. I'm speaking now in these broad strokes, but it's mostly out of excitement. I hope some insight can be gleaned from my explanation. At the very least, I hope I've incited some interest in investigating his work further.

We discussed locations and origins. We discussed his touring and reading. He seemed always excited about his work. He is committed, and has found a way to always be practicing, collecting, arranging. It was a real pleasure to meet him.

He gave me a copy of his "audience handout" (which is actually a well designed chapbook).
He gave me a copy of his hot-off-the-press book, Longfellow Memoranda.

I will discuss them soon.

He has also written a description of this encounter.

WORK #4 is online.
David Horton, diligent as ever, has posted another issue of WORK on the Internet.
I have work in Issue #4 (now online).

Charles Bernstein's Every True Religion is Bound to Fail

I've finally forced the broadside onto the internet. It's up at Bernstein's blog, as well as included in Ron Silliman's recent list of links. 

Read about the collaborative manufacturing of the broadside: here.

Read about Bernstein's reading at the event the broadside was produced for: here.

Click image for full-scale version. 

New Voices Inaugural Reading

I'm curating a new multi-genre reading series at The Center for Book Arts, NY.

Of the eight participants, many were selected from those who've participated in a Fine Press Publishing and Printing seminar offered to selected emerging writers and facilitated by The Center for Book Arts. 

The Readers (each name links to each's additional information):

Jen Bervin

Bronwyn Carlton

Marie Carter

Barbara Henry

Paolo Javier

Evan Kennedy

Ryan Murphy

Kyle Schlesinger

WHEN: Wednesday, July 23rd, 6:30pm

WHERE: The Center for Book Arts, 28 W. 27th St. 3rd Floor, New York

HOW (much): SUGGESTED admission $10/ $5 CBA Members

This is also my inaugural attempt at curating a reading series in New York, and I'm very pleased to be able to present these particular poets/writers/ personalities. 

Uche Nduka, coworker & poet: his work discussed abstractly

routes at stake.

frontiers of tragedy.

websiting, hitchhiking, freighthopping

crumbling under

verbalists,

circus tumblers,

   ventriloquists,

jokers,

under the catafalque of bridges

under the garlanded streams

under the frenzied rivers

under the hounded seas.

-Uche Nduka, from eel on reef, pg. 113

Eel on reef (152 pgs) is strung together stacks of words, reef-like, sometimes jagged & dense, sometimes long & smooth. Without at least a few more reads, I couldn't begin to list, describe or define its subjects, topics, points. But the excerpt above suggests, in conjunction with further reading, Uche's interests is more invested in the boundaries and frontiers between things and places, than with the objects themselves. The words in the excerpt can be detritus as both object and wordobject, the object of each signifier locked in a vaudevillian past, discarded, but the signifier still "at stake" & "in route," but jeopardized through use. 

Uche's images, in those rare moments when they are static enough to be seen, are surreal in the most rational & jarring kind of way: the non-fantastically surreal, the uncanny & everyday displaced kind of surreal. He does it with questions on page 87:

how can i say in words

things i didn't

understand through words?

how serious can i

take the suggestions of 

this river searching for an ocean?

how involved are twisting

suckers in boyism in girlism?

who sponsored water

in the ventures of my land?

on behalf of whom

do stars dissect the night?

who surrendered to water

a portion of a salt hill?

And then again, more forcefully, and occasionally addressing the reader, on page 68:

a noontimer stands, aims straight

and kicks the gathering shit

with the argot of shit

pray pray from him

the prodigy's tongue is 

for grilling and the iced shit 

borne in gales of gray

is for drowning

let's read then the thesis

of a buffoon and proclaim

the apocrypha that is 

making our ears salivate

go ahead and die

you horde of doom,

framegrabber brasstender!

the earth start whelping on afternoon in june. 

Old Testament Spaghetti Western? 

The surreal: salivating ears, tongues for grilling, iced shit for drowning, a microcosm inhabited by the likes of noontimers, framgrabbers and brasstenders. Even "kicks the gathering shit," peddles a hazy image of shit gathering itself before a boot comes along to blast through it. 

The blurb on the back of eel on reef compares Uche to John Ashbery and A.R. Ammons among others. Perhaps, like Ashbery, Uche explores the possibilities of book-length poem/experiments with language, but he does so more playfully, with sharp brevity, winding his lines and breaking them. Uche is more like Mayakovsky, or even at times, Marinetti, two poets capable of what I might describe as intimate experimentalism with words. There is a definite focus on the motion of words & things, and most often, wordthings. He doesn't seem to differentiate between the subject he knows the reader can identify and the signifier who's subject is itself. 

I'll wrap this up with a poem from a series of his included in issue #4 of The Recluse (edited by Stacy Szymaszek, Corrine Fitzpatrick, and Arlo Quint):

CALL IT FLINT

Going for a tentmaker's fly-swatter. Finding our way by the light of a burning oildrum. Opposites attract but do not stay together for long. 12 dialogues with scabs. Blue earth brown skin. Steel toecaps hitting the hibiscus. Might like you, might like you the way we like the dogs of light. 12 dialogues with mesquite. Alternate takes & vocal throwaways. Consider cutting loose. Off-the-cuff power glut. But this is only one side of it. Of refusing to trim one's sails. Of refusing imprimaturs & being rabble-roused. For we don't mind if the day fries in its own fat. We don't mind losing ourselves in the scissions occupying june. Black orchid, blue moss: the quotidian is theirs. They may heed a hunt or heed a tremor. Beyond a shale, beyond a ravine. We can make you a gift of silence if you promise not to slim it. It's 2.30am. Dawn pulls at granite. And they can be found here-burning crosses, swastikas, nooses, drowning in generalities, thriving in details, over curbs, over projectors, over this city that first found us spooning. Distaff, carrion, towel. Midlevel tagline mixing hymns & stolen goods. What wanes won't be perfidy. Growing apart, laddering, curving in, inseparable exactitudes. A day taking a sip of soot. Double back, acrobat. Unspool a block watch, pull down a flying rock. You need a grid panel. I need pub talk.

  

WORK in general & WORK no. 6 specifically

The WORK series of chapbooks continues to hit like a shoveled face. It digs a hole, smites your face, and shoves you in. The most recent WORK, WORK no. 6, is a shovel, a hoe, and 2 bags of fertilizer, all for your victory garden face. 

But first, attention should be brought to the general design & presentation of the WORK series. The cover (front & back), is always marked by a Web-quality image, enlarged  & grainy, the subject of the image easily identifiable, but having no direct relationship with the work within. Images have included: ceramic painted chicken seated on eggs (sea shells), battered flattened empty manilla envelope stamped with 'opened for inspection by usps,' partial diagram of numbered rotating multiple gear system, and most recently, giant asian bride smiling down at knees-tucked-to-chest kissy-face asian groom cupped in her hands (or miniature knees-tucked-to-chest kissy-face asian groom seated in the cupped hands of smiling asian bride staring down at him). 

The title is offset to the lower-right vicinity of the cover, followed by the issue number. Initially, the typeface varied, (some kind of New Courier for Issue No. 2), but has, for the last 4 issues, stayed with a large all-Majuscule IMPACT typeface, always outlined, recently in blue, previously in white, with widths varying. The recent issue's title seems have some kind of raised outline, though it seems too faint to be embossed. 

The back cover of WORK uses whatever typeface is on the front. Listed are the names of the 4 poets included, preceded by "featuring," which in some issues is followed by a colon. In the recent issue, the ampersand has been removed, whereas it was previously lodged between the 3rd and 4th names listed (vertically). Also, offset to the lower right corner of the back cover is "$3."

The issues opens with the initial poem on the recto, the verso left bare. Each contributor's name is printed in the top right corner of the page on which his or her writing begins. In the initial issues, the names were set in what appears to be Bank Gothic, but was streamlined to match the IMPACT of the cover. There is no set number of pages for each contributor, allowing past issues to range from 28 to 44 pages (including covers). 

On the final spread of each issue, the recto is always bare, and the verso holds an image abstracted as a partial background, an issn#, and contact information. 

The background images have included: a rectangle of pixilated grey interrupted by half of a heavy-brush painted butterfly or a heavy-brush painted ship's bow and its dwarfed shadow on the water's surface, a maybe Japanese influenced minimalist pagoda like table lamp with no wires attached, a 3 figured many-parted cockroach Guantanamo or a rocket ship that insects are secretly  building, and an angled chart of downward ships with different mast & sail arrangements identified by numbers & roman numerals.

I will not take the time to list which cover images correspond with which back page images. 

The issn # is 1941-2673, though only WORK no. 6 lists the same # as an ISBN. 

Issue 6 also includes two spelling of Their(r)y Brunet. Issue 6 is the best issue.

The contact information is stated as such (though line breaks vary):

please address all correspondence to:

unionherald@gmail.com

Each issue has two staples along the spine, is printed on medium weight paper, with the cover printed on a light photostock or laserstock.

The words poetry, poem, or poetic are never mentioned.

The editor/publisher name is never mentioned. (It's David Horton).

There is no biographical or contact information for the contributors. 

There is no information as to the date of publications. 

The images used in the WORK issues may suggest a poetics of difficult categories, (re)numbered systems, and complicated mechanisms of/for beneficial and frustrated appliances. 

WORK no. 6 is great! 

William Moor's absolutely non-abstract abstracts of NEW PATENTS for copying & encoding techniques.

My wife & I disagree about Rebeccas van de Voort's wordobjects & handwritten graphoems.

Thierry Brunet's text is many-referenced &  m.i.s.h.m.a.s.h.e.d. lyricisms.

Tony Perniciaro's text is better than poetry, replete with water-colored line drawings & a sense of humor. 

Contact David Horton to purchase WORK no. 6.  Email unionherald@gmail.com

Deep Oakland also has scanned versions of issues 1 through 3 (out of print). 

My next post will be about Uche Nduka's eel on reef.