"New in NOLA" reading recorded

My Reading on October 20 with Nik De Dominic, Sara Slaughter & Paul Killebrew at NOCCA in New Orleans. Curated by Anne Gisleson.

I'm Reading This Month

Creative Reading Series Fall 2010

New to New Orleans

October 20^th, 2010 Kirschman Artspace

NOCCA Riverfront

2800 Chartres St. NOLA 70117 www.nocca.com

Contact Anne Gisleson agisleson@nocca.com

7:00 to 8:30

Reception to follow.

New Orleans has always attracted writers and artists, and in the last few years, the city has seen another wave of literary newcomers. That got us thinking—why? We’re curious about what New Orleans has to offer them as writers and vice versa. On Wednesday October 20^th at 7:00, the NOCCA Creative Writing Department is showcasing four poets who are relatively new to town and we look forward to hearing their work and thoughts about their new home.

Nik De Dominic moved to New Orleans in May, 2009. Pushcart nominated, his work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Harpur Palate, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. He is an editor of The Offending Adam and an associate editor of the New Orleans Review. As a visiting instructor for Bard College, he teaches classes on thinking and writing inside Orleans Parish Prison.

Paul Killebrew was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. His first full-length collection, Flowers, was published by Canarium Books this year, and his long poem Inspector vs. Evader has recently been republished online by Ugly Duckling Presse. He moved to New Orleans in 2008 to take a job as a staff attorney with Innocence Project New Orleans, an nonprofit law office in the Bywater that represents innocent prisoners in Louisiana and Southern Mississippi who are sentenced to life without parole.

Sara Slaughter is a native of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, who moved to New Orleans in the summer of 2009. She is currently enrolled in the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in Helicon, The Honeyland Review, and a collection celebrating what would have been the 100^th birthday of Elizabeth Bishop.

Jeremy JF Thompson was born in Los Angeles, CA. He went to college at UCSB in Santa Barbara, CA. He went to Grad School at Mills College in Oakland, CA. Shortly after, he moved to Queens, NY, where he was an instructor at The Center for Book Arts. His book, AUTOGRAPHOGRAPHY, will be out in 2011 through Cuneiform Press. He runs Auto Types Press and blogs at autotypist.blogspot.com.

Home Is Where this Part Is

One month has passed since I moved to New Orleans.

Cassie Smith, longtime co-conspirator and fabulous friend, is visiting me.

In my attempt to convince her (and most everyone) that New Orleans is the best place to call home, I have also managed to keep us out until 6:30 am, sweating away in the world's most exotic dive bars, where exhaustion can't find you, as you're held up by the sheets of smoke that stack and rise in every room. Should you need to get from point A to point B, say the bar to the bathroom, or the dance floor to the patio, the rolling and rousing 60's R&B, 70's Funk, or 100 years of Jazz will aid in your crossing.

I've begun managing and training bartenders at a new bar/ restaurant/ venue/ club/ art-space called Eiffel Society. We grow a large percentage of our herbs, vegetables and spices on premise. The cocktail menu is focused on house-made cordials, bitters and infusions, aided by the vision of Alan Walter of Iris. The space was once the restaurant built into the base of the Eiffel Tower. We've only just begun, but the potential and the ambition are there.

I have a reading at NOCCA in October, along with 4 other recently transplanted poets. I am trying to write about the heart in a way that hopefully a few people might understand. The heart as container, carrying blood and baggage, moving it from here to there, lest it sit and drain itself of oxygen and worth. I believe I am failing at this. I am failing at this in the wrong way. Or the heart as computer, to reboot upon freezing, to reboot upon downloading software updates. The heart as de facto icon for all emotion in and all emotion out. Home is where the heart is. Where people move in and move out. Where rent is split. Where walls are painted. Where furniture reluctantly rests on floors, unfixed and impermanent. Where you go when you're tired. Where you leave when you're tired. I want to discuss a kind of structural surgery, the impossibility of fusing together the anatomical heart and the drywall of a home. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. This sickness, where we learn to love what leaves, expending proportionately more energy to love someone whose distance away from us is measured in days passing. Not "days until," but "days since."

This is not despair. This is not tragedy. My first love is living. The heart, before all else, is an advocate of life. Rather, this is grief or mourning. I want to dance blindly and awkwardly, breaking down my inhibitions. I want to accept the unsystematic occurrence of crying that comes as I walk through my apartment door, or when the food is brought to the table, or when fixing the chain on my bike. I want to let it happen. I have so much belief, and I would trade the world that I know for a place to put it.

I AM READING AT THE EOAGH ISSUE 5 LAUNCH

EOAGH Issue 5 First Launch Event

SATURDAY, OCT 3 @8 PM Unnameable Books 600 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn This event is co-sponsored by Chax Press 8:00 Amy King 8:15 Jeremy James Thompson 8:30 Mark Lamoureux 8:45 Christie Ann Reynolds 9:00 Eric Lindley 9:15 Bill Marsh 9:30 Adeena Karasick 9:45 Matthew Rotando Amy King is the author of I'm the Man Who Loves You and, and forthcoming, I Want to Make You Safe and Slaves to do These Things. She curates the Brooklyn-based reading series, The Stain of Poetry. For more information, please visit amyking.org. Jeremy James Thompson is an instructor at New York's Center for Book Arts, as well as curator of the reading series TEXTFORM. His work focuses on the process of collaboration, the reinvention of propaganda, and the defining of a practical avant-garde. Mark Lamoureux lives in Astoria, NY. He is the author of Astronomy Organon (Blazevox) and 5 chapbooks. In 2006 he started Cy Gist Press, a micropress focusing on ekphrastic poetry. Christie Ann Reynolds is a native New Yorker. She is the 2009 winner of The New School Chapbook Contest, chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy. Her first full-length manuscript will be published by Black Maze Books in the summer of 2010. She lives on the undetermined border of Queens and Brooklyn. Eric Lindley loves language like a baby loves life; that is, fearfully, perversely, inscrutably, and currently working as a robot-builder, electro-folk musician, and psycholinguist. Bill Marsh co-directs Factory School and edits the Heretical Texts series. He also curates NoDiff.com, a social networking site for his students at Queensborough Community College. Adeena Karasick is a poet, media-artist and the award-winning author of six books of poetry and poetic theory, most recently Amuse Bouche: Tasty Treats for the Mouth (Talonbooks 2009). Matthew Rotando's first book of poems, The Comeback's Exoskeleton, (with a foreward by Tim Peterson) is available from Upset Press. He is a member of POG, a collective of artists and poets in Tucson, Arizona.

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)

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. 

performative poetic mortification! the Broadside was appreciated

The broadside I produced for Charles Bernstein's reading was well-received by both him and the attendees. I will soon have it scanned, then post it here, as well as on my website. Though I was excited while at the event, it is always something of a disappointment, as most of my excitement occurs during the procedure, the act of production.  

I am thankful to Blake Butler, William Moor, Walter K. Lew, Dillon Westbrook & J.D. Mitchell-Lumsden for their contributions. I also am thankful for my wife's contribution, which involved acting on behalf of William Moor: using a yellow pencil to circle every word in the poem 150 times. 

Charles Bernstein genuinely expressed appreciation for the piece, both at the reading and in a subsequent email. I felt appreciated. In particular, I was most gratified upon witnessing his own fountain-pen produced typographia: notes, edits, sketches and E.D.-style word alternatives scrawled about the surface of the broadside while in the act of penning his signature. He also personalized a number of them. This was entirely in the spirit of this production, and more than I could have hoped for. He referred to this as his "own final collaboration as cancellation/holograph, fitting both to "Recantorium" and "Every True Religion.""

"Every True Religion is Bound To Fail" is the title of the poem printed in the broadside. "Recantorium" is the title of the poem he read that evening. In the latter poem, he repeatedly and repeatedly recants his poetic waywardness, his socio-poetically sinful swerve toward experimenting with language and context. He plays the straight man, long-faced and too genuine. It gets early and quick laughs. More laughs follow, but as the pattern of recantation, the flogging-like rhythm  of every apologetic synonym compounded, continues, the laughter becomes agitated, less unanimous, more sparse, like the last few kernels of corn surrendering inside the microwave. In the end, looking back on the form as it occurred in our ears, I see that he's guiltier than ever. The audience is left somewhat battered. Again, like having watched a catholic priest enacting corporal mortification, but this is performative poetic mortification enacted by a Jew. 

Getting back to the broadside, his own inscribed additions are also kind(s) of recantation(s), nixing previous lines and words for new ones, changing "fail" to "succeed," or to "win," even emphasizing a rhetorical recant of rhetoric. I'm left thinking that perhaps all apologies is equal to no apologies. It was exciting to hear this poem read aloud. Exciting to be battered this way. I thought about it as a broadside, & I think it would either be impossible or awful. 

Lastly, I've begun compiling a list of possible broadside collaborations & methods. In the meantime, I will take a break from printing. 

On Producing a Broadside including and involving a Poem by Charles Bernstein

The last several weeks have left me little time for posting, as I have been preoccupied with a string of overlapping events and projects. I've spent most of my time working on a broadside to be presented tomorrow night as part of the Center for Book Arts Broadside Reading Series. 

One of my primary occupations over the last few years has been developing a more collaborative process for producing broadsides. Broadsides, within poetry communities, are generally understood to be commemorative posters of a single poem or excerpt, often appearing as a larger-scale portrayal of the page, frequently balanced by a corresponding image adjacent the text. They are almost always printed using a letterpress method, generally on a Vandercook press. The technology has evolved, but not so significantly as to prevent even Gutenberg from being able to acquaint himself with the updated equipment and be printing in no time, producing the same results he had with his own movable type.

Where once the practitioners of this technology were the vanguard of the democratic multiple, they are now mostly craftspeople, fascinated by the esoteric and sometimes trendy products the technology is capable of producing. Because of the time and patience (& $) involved in the process, combined with the visual & textural effects of debossed type & images, the product is endowed with (the suggestion of) a strong material value. 

There is nothing utilitarian left about this practice. For practical purposes, there is nothing it can provide that a $50 ink jet printer couldn't handle in a fraction of the time, and at almost no cost. That said, its "use" is now relegated to commemorative status: wedding invitations, birth announcements, high-end corporate mailers, business cards for the higher-ups at fashion magazines and design firms. Bold colors pressed deeply into triple-thick heavy stock continues to be a mark of status among the ephemera analyzers of the upper crust. 

I am employed as a commercial printer. I work in a warehouse in Soho, were no less than 23 Vandercook Universal I presses are set up to print this kind of prized ephemera seven days a week, all year round. My coworkers are all artists and musicians, each of them with their own aesthetic sensibilities. We never seem to grow tired of commenting upon the excessive nature of the products we are paid to produce. In our little factory, we do not discriminate between one job and the next: each must be made to meet a list of criteria, to pass inspection, and stay consistent, whether its 100 "save the dates," or 4000 envelopes with return address for a Chelsea art gallery. I think I can speak for most of us when I say that we could care less about the client or what the client does with what we make, but we do care about the quality of what we print; we care about the process.

And it is the process that keeps drawing me back to producing broadsides. Poetry broadsides, produced as I have described, are as excessive as corporate mailers. In fact, as they are sold for almost nothing and often given away, they aren't even capable of living up to being good product$. So they risk becoming a pure aesthetic object: a horrible thing to be in our waining economy of excess and regret. 

I have a great deal of time to think as I print, standing for 8 hours, repeating the same motions with my arms, directing the repeated motions of the machine. In a kind of trance, I try to understand my allegiance to this method, this superannuation of art practice. I will tell you what I have discovered, and why I have spent over a month producing my most recent broadside, almost emptying my bank account:

It's the process. The formalism. The phenomenology of having to literally and physically handle text, realizing along the way that shapes occupy letters, letters occupy words, words occupy phrases occupying sentences, all of which occupy space if they are to be seen and read. Whether it is the time spent taking lead type from drawers full of 50lb alphabets, or the money spent on producing a polymer plate of an image or text block, the process produces a weight (& a wait), a burden, AN EVENT. Composition is an event, and this process makes that realization sustainable and inevitable. 

For this broadside, I worked with a poem by Charles Bernstein. I prefer to collaborate as intimately as possible with the poets whose work I print, but sometimes, as in this case, collaboration is as simple as consent. I asked Charles for a poem, requiring that it be relatively short. I described to him what I have come to call an Annotated Broadside. With his consent, I sent the poem to 5 poets familiar with Bernstein's work. I deliberately chose people I knew would have identifiably different perspectives on the work and on Bernstein as a figure in the world of poetry. I also recognized that these poets would be drawn toward different aspects of his work, regardless of the poem at hand. I asked them all to annotate the poem, adding that I understood and welcomed the possibility that most of them would take significantly unconventional approaches to the practice of annotation in this instance. After collecting their annotations, I then went to work collaborating with their texts, trying to fit the puzzle together, with the end result being a 12x14 page of their annotations, each cast in its own vibrant color, surrounding and subduing the poem, colored a pale grey. I sent out the digital drafts, and soon received Bernstein's reply "Love the Midrashic layout." Two others, unrelated to the project, have referred to it as Talmudic. I should add that the poem is entitled "Every True Religion is Bound To Fail." 

Nearly a month after the approval of the draft, the broadside is complete. An edition of 150.

As soon as I can have it scanned, I'll post it. 

To conclude with my earlier remarks, this broadside, even more than my previous productions, emphasized the practice of practice. The broadside is attractive and complex in appearance, but it is primarily an artifact, whereas the art is found in the act of its production, wherein no distinction is made between the collaborative concept, designing, and the literal act of cranking the handle while printing. I hope, as I have with my previous broadsides, that the reader/viewer experience relays this story, that the artifact is desired as a key on a map, as well as the map itself, a segue into the poet's work as a composition, and as something experienced and responded to by others. There is a dialogue occurring on the page, and I want that dialogue to continue through its being read, even as it hangs decoratively on someone's wall. 

Note:

If you are in New York, please feel free to come by the reading tomorrow night 6/6 at 6:30.

Charles Bernstein and Rachel Levitsky will be reading.

It will be held at the Center for Book Arts in Midtown Manhattan. For the address and more information, go here.