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. 

Radio Ceptuetics: no nonsense noncepts

Ceptuetics, hosted by Kareem Estefan, has recently become my favorite radio talkshow series to download & listen to at work and in transit.

Avant-garde poetry readings/ interviews every Wednesday night from 7:30-8:00 on WNYU 89.1FM in the NYC tri-state area and www.wnyu.org worldwide, or directly through iTunes (Radio--> eclectic-->WNYU)

As interviewer and host, Kareem is both confident and calm, presenting each guest with simply stated questions, which seem to always result in responses that illuminate fundamental aspects of the poets' processes and mechanisms. The half hour is more well spent than many 3 hour lectures I received in college.

Of those I've listened to so far, I recommend the episodes with Ara Shirinyan, Marie Buck, Rob Fitterman, and Danny Snelson.

Shirinyan reads from his Syria is in the World, an especially jaring poem for me, the son of a transient missionary, spening much of my childhood in foreign countries for only weeks at a time.

Buck is very well spoken, managing not only to compose intricate texts, but to articulate their production process in an equally impressive way.

Fitterman kicks of the inagural episode, which is appropriate, as he spends his time discussing appropriated language, a phenomenon or device that acts as a relatively common thread amongst the poets and poetics of the following episodes.

Snelson, whom I recently met at the Charles Bernstein reading, reads/performs another variation of my Dear coUntess, a sometimes video sometimes audio cut-up drawing from a vast pool of avantist' source material: Goldsmith, Stein, Mac Low, Paik, and many many more.

These and other Ceptuetics episodes are available for download at Penn Sound.

Flarf is Nonceptualism vs. a Conceptual's Poetics = LangPo's Bastards Hit Puberty

In what I would have considered an unlikely turn of events, a online debate (or simply sometimes militant compare and contrast session) between Flarf and Conceptual Poetry is underway. Thus far, I would have to say that the debate is less about the differences between the two practices, and more about the differences between the practicioners, though perhaps the line is thin. Occasionally, a third, fourth, or fifth party weighs in... most often to object to the existence of the debate, with some even seeming to prefer that neither practice existed at all.

I disliked these 3rd party reminders from the outside world, these supposedly impending contingencies. They impose without any alternative implications. It would seem an increasingly common reaction toward many poet's/artist's frustrations with such specific debates. It's not that what they say isn't true, but that its relevance is superficial: there are omitted, ignored and rejected factors in every debate, as a debate is defined by the examination of a confrontation taking place along specific boundaries of certain entities.

Highlights:
Flarf is Projective Verse. Conceptual Poetry is the New York School. - Ron Silliman

Conceptual Poetry is the new Language Poetry. Flarf is the new New York School. -Andy Dander

Conceptual poetry
is like saying

'hot heat'

flarf is more like
constructing the sound
of a human sneeze
out of dog barks. -Phaneronoemikon

CON POET POWER! -Nicholas Manning

From now on the collective formerly known as Flarf will be known as the Nonceptualists. - K. Silem Mohammad

Nonceptualist Manifesto Part I -K. Silem Mohammad

new movements like Conceptual Writing or Flarf are the correct responses for our time. If writing is not taking these new conditions into its poetics, it simply cannot be considered contemporary. -Kenneth Goldsmith

Now Even More!:

I don't much give a damn whether Flarf or contemporary "Conceptual Poetry" correspond to the poetics of two generations back or not. Kind of a dull question, in my view. -Curtis Faville

We do not have a few vocal male figures to name us something, to decide who's in and who's out of the group, to allow some to talk and others to be silenced. -Erika Staiti

Are these really the kinds of fruitless (and suffocatingly ameri-centric) mappings you want us to engage in? -Brent Cunningham (to Ron Silliman)

Poetry is divided into:
(a) belonging to the emperor,
(b) embalmed,
(c) tame, 
(d) sucking pigs, 
(e) sirens,
(f) fabulous, 
(g) the sounds of human sneezes constructed out of the barks of stray dogs,
(h) included in the present classification,
(i) frenzied, 
(j) innumerable,
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
(l) et cetera, 
(m) having just broken the water pitcher,
(n) that from along way off look like flies on shit,
(o) those brands owned by the corporations Monsanto, Kraft Foods (i.e., Post Alpha-Bits), Dole, Tyson Foods, Nestle, Sysco, DuPont, Archer Daniels Midland, Sunkist, Chiquita, Kellogg's, Unilever, and The News Corporation.

- Angela G.

UPDATE EDIT:

OFFICIAL(esque):

Having some unseen impulse, Kasey Mohammad once again repositions the poetry formerly known as Flarf. Read the revisions: Nonceptualists Now Transceptualists. Related fields being Misceptualism/ Unceptualism/ Noceptualism/ Someceptualism/ Windsweptualism/ & Flarfing as a product of a Poetic('s) Disorder [to promote word loss].