Month: April 2009

If it were up to me every man who wasn’t already a dandy would be
forced to be a transvestite.

Had a moment of intense happiness today although tired and cold, sitting on the corner of Cortelyou and Coney Island Avenue waiting for the B68 bus, eating two absolutely perfect Medjool dates.

Thinking that I am neither beautiful enough to relax into beauty in order to hypnotize people nor homely enough to relax into homeliness and just be pure consciousness. It is a tense middle space.

I would like to learn to speak the language of men. I mean, not to capitulate to them, but for the sake of dramatic breadth, and also for attention.

I do notice that when I post on certain “Aspergerian” topics, like “poetics,” below, I get a flurry of comments from men. Hi fellas! Come here often?

If I post instead on the fact that Conway now has the most amazing selection of t-shirts for no more than 3.99 apiece, plus these great prim cardigans (I bought three! Teal and black and grape!) for only 10.99, will anyone care? Will anyone actually go to Conway? Will anyone comment? Ladies?

Conway, like many of the places that poor people shop, has the most insidious smell. At first, one thinks it is cat or rodent pee. I think instead it’s just the offgassing from all the toxic cheap materials of the no doubt unethically produced items for sale there. But still: $3.99. Just sayin’.

The magnolias are decidedly Out, and early cherry blossoms, too. This afternoon though there were a few freakish puffs of snow flying around, and I thought, ooooh, poetic… magnolias in the snow! And then I remembered the name of the lipstick I used to wear as a punk teen, and its horrible taste: “Cherries in the snow.” Blecch, but the most vivid vermillion, really.

Because I don’t watch TV, I find out about a lot of pop-cultural phenomena through the backdoor, by google-searching for flarf purposes. I didn’t know, for example, what “The Watchmen” was, or who “Amy Smart” was, until I inadvertently found them in a search for poetry. I find out other things, too. I knew, of course, that Krafft-Ebbing was the author of Psychopathia Sexualis, but I had never actually looked at the book. What beautiful writing! It gets horrible and violent in parts, but there are gems among the cruelty and offal, and the latin terms for sex acts are great fun: “Maxime delectata fuit lambendo anum feminarum amatarum, lambendo san- guinem menstrualem amicae.”. Because Google Books is so wonderfully obliging to provide a plain-text version, here are some quotes:

Veronica Juliani, beatified by Pope Pius II., in memory of the divine lamb, took a real lamb to bed with her, kissed it and suckled it on her breasts.

St. Catharine of Genoa often burned with such intense inward fire that in order to cool herself she would throw herself upon the ground crying, ” Love, love, I can endure it no longer “. At the same time she felt a peculiar inclination to her confessor. One day lifting his hand to her nose she noticed a peculiar odour which penetrated to her heart ” a heavenly perfume that would awaken the dead “.

“A Russian prince, who was very decrepit, was accustomed to have his mistress turn her back to him and defecate on his breast; this being the only way in which he could excite the remnant of libido.” [EWWWW!]

Another supported a mistress in unusually brilliant style, with the condition that she ate marchpane exclusively.

I am sure that must have made her very sick, unusually brilliant lifestyle notwithstanding.

Trust me, you will not want to miss this.

On Friday and Saturday, May 1st & 2nd, 2009, join us as some of New York’s most accomplished writers and performers take the movies to task. Featuring a mix of realtime commentary, collaged and re-edited fragments, Neo-Benshi (live film narration) and other perversions, this two-evening program should prove that all poets really want to do is create chaos and watch movies. Curated by Brandon Downing. Presented by the Flarf Collective and Dixon Place. A benefit for the Dixon Place, a 501 (c) 3 organization.

It was beautiful to be way up north for a few days, even in the chilly spring rain, and to stay in a little motel with a taxidermied bear in the lobby, and to read for an attentive and amused audience, and to eat sea creatures at a lobster pound, and to take a picture of a Paul Bunyan statue, and most of all to have the chance to hang out with Ben and Carla. I believe I met Ben when I was sixteen, although I may only have met his bookshelf. I remember going to a party with my ex (who once worked at the same skateboard shop in Berkeley where Ben’s best friend Jimmy also worked) in Oakland and seeing a shelf full of interesting books I identified with and finding out they were Ben’s. I guess we started hanging out when I was maybe nineteen or so, as he (along with his girlfriend at the time, Pat) was one of the only other young people around at Language Poetry readings at places like Intersection (the old one, when it was in North Beach) and 80 Langton St. One of the great joys of hanging out with Ben is the intensity of conversation, for he is so well informed and thoughtful and enthusiastic; it turns out Carla is, too, and I was so happy to have a chance to get to know her on this trip.

Now, one of the conversations I had with Ben has me a little puzzled. It was a conversation had towards the end of the evening, when I was tired out from a hectic day with Q and A with students in the morning and the lobster pound in the afternoon and lots of heavy rain, so I may have been a little crankier or argumentative than normal. We were talking about blogging, and what blogs are good for, and I said that one of the things I like about doing Ululations is that it gives me a place to “articulate my poetics” in a space that is occasional and in a form that accrues. At least, I think that was what I said (I was tired). Ben said then that, I think, “poetics” was not really the right term for me to use: “just thinking and writing about poetry,” or one’s own poetic methodology, was not, he said, a poetics. Poetics, he clarified, implies a set of general statements about all poetry, about how poetry works, and is not the same thing as one poet’s “working notes” or even one’s personal aesthetic (which is what the word seems to synonymize with in our community). [And it makes me wonder, too, does the same distinction apply to “aesthetics”?]

I argued that this was just a difference of semantics. His may be the official definition, but I’m using the vernacular. Could the difference also be signaled by the possessive pronoun, i.e. “my” or “his” or “their” poetics as opposed to Poetics, a la Aristotle? It’s very unlikely, at any rate, that I am going to enunciate a highly worked-out Aristotelian system of the structure and function of poetry, so if that is the sort of thing that poetics is, really, I guess I’m fucked. Because a) highly worked-out systems are not my thing, and 2) look, just take a look at my tag cloud just to the right of you. What word is biggest? You guessed it: poetics. And it’s possible I’ve been using the word wrongly all this time.

I’m lazy about tagging posts, but it occurs to me that if I were to go back and tag everything, there would be far more to which I would give this same tag, which just goes to show you either how a) expansive and casual my use of the term is, or b) how exact and rigorous and maybe pedantic Ben’s is. I don’t know. What do you think? It seems to me that all statements are partial; that is, they create “states” that isolate even when they masquerade as statements of totality. Or maybe I’m just stubborn?

It’s true that poetics is an overused and underdefined word, though. In this day and age we can have a “poetics” of all sorts of things, a poetics of doughnuts, a poetics of carburetors, a poetics of poetics, a poetics of peepee, I don’t know, why do we not use the word “theory” instead? Or is theory different? A theory involves a hypothesis to be proven; a poetics seems to pretend to be descriptive, maybe? Or perhaps there is something about “poetics” that implies appreciativeness, what I think Kristen Prevallet once called (in reference to how poets write about other poets’ works) a kind of “fondling.”

We looked, for example, at the artist statements on the 21 Grand web site, and Ben contended that they were not really poetics statements. I think he’s right, although to be fair I don’t think that’s what they were asked to do, and I do think that there is a kind of implied poetics in each of them that can be deduced from the choices they made in writing them.

Ben’s more erudite than me, and better educated, so I want to take his distinctions into account, even though I am certainly not going to go through my archives and retag everything! But I wonder, what would be a better term for the tag? If musing dilettantishly on the how and what and whoa of poetry doesn’t count as doing poetics in the strict sense, what is it, exactly?

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Me as Janus +. Photo by Ben Friedlander!

Here are my Segue introductions for Spring 2009. The first two are collaboratively written with Gary. Kasey’s is posted earlier (scroll down).

KENNETH GOLDSMITH & EDWIN TORRES

Kenneth Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry and founding editor of UbuWeb (ubu.com). He is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU and teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania. A book of critical essays, Uncreative Writing, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

Edwin Torres is a NYC born lingualisualist currently on hiatus from the apple, living upstate. A NYFA recipient and 2006/7 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Writer-in-Residence, he’s been widely published and taught his Brainlingo workshop at numerous venues & universities. His books include, The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books), The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker (Roof Books), Onomalingua: noise songs and poems (Rattapallax e-book), and Please (Faux Press CD-Rom).

A couple of months ago Kenny told me that, when he thought about New York poetry, one of the first poets who came to mind for him was Edwin Torres.

Both Edwin and Kenny are possessed of a fierce, quintessentially American charisma that makes them near-mythic: indeed, if Edwin is a free-spirit Johnny Appleseed of the imagination, sowing bits of his wildly fertile sonic constructions in his downtown peregrinations, Kenny is a sort of latter-day P.T. Barnum, who in his time was called the “cultural manager of the century,” the “Shakespeare of Advertising,” and “the prince of humbugs.”

Even more so, they have long seemed to me to be the quintessential _New York_ poets of my generation, the people who, in the 90s when I was living in Minneapolis, I looked to for some understanding of what it might mean to be a poet in this city—they, as much as the New York School and the east coast language writers, had a big hand in ultimately drawing me here.

Information fairly streams from them like light from lasers at a rock show or like water from an opened fire hydrant; in Kenny’s work, the information is very often recognizably external, from the newspaper or television, or from his conversations, or his movements, whereas in Edwin’s work the information that reaches us, in his trademark ludic phonemes, seems to have passed through the synaptic distortion machine of his alchemical sensorium.

Kenny, from an interview: “There’s a type of sports practice that calls itself Extreme: Extreme Skiing, Extreme Skateboarding, things like this. I’m interested in Extreme Writing; and I’m convinced that the procedures that set it up inform the intensity of the writing.” Edwin, from an interview: “Q: Who are your precursors? A: Everyone who’s come before me.”

So, with the dual glories of Kenny’s informed intensities and Edwin’s radically, even cosmically inclusive literary DNA, we can fully expect to be wowed by this afternoon’s event. Let’s give an extreme welcome to our first reader, Kenny Goldsmith…

STEVE BENSON & STEPHANIE YOUNG

How fitting that Steve Benson and Stephanie Young should be our Valentine’s Day readers, as they are both paradigmatic practitioners of EXTERIOR PROJECTIONS of INTERIORITY, which we might take as one definition of love.

Yes, and I think equally crucial to establishing and maintaining that kind of connection, whether romantic or platonic, is a mix of spontaneity, enthusiasm, openness, and willingness to improvise, which I think both of these writers possess in spades—both seem comfortable being defined by what they do “off-page” as much as on—Steve, obviously, through his legendary performances, and Stephanie through her blog her Flickr account, where at the height of her productivity online I used to frequent regularly to get a sense of what was going on in the Bay Area.

“On-page,” Steve’s most recent book, Open Clothes, is composed of existential questions that probe the most basic confusions and discomforts and puzzlements that form an examined life, and we see this probing also in his autobiographical contributions to the Grand Piano series; Stephanie’s most recent book, Picture Palace, operates similarly in that it is a compilation of lateral movements toward memoir as an exploration of the lineaments of selfhood.

But they’re not islands unto themselves—community is crucial to both Steve and Stephanie’s projects—which I think will be evident by the end of today’s reading.

Let’s get back to Projection for a moment. Neither poet today will stand before you merely reading. They will be accompanied, enhanced, inspired, and changed by the visuals and text you will see projected on this very screen. Do you remember Donne’s neologism, “interinanimate” from his great love poem, The Ecstasy? The one with the intertwining eyeballs? (If not, It’s homework: you should go home and read it after today’s event.) In any case, the visual projections will interinanimate with Steve & Stephanie’s words and physical presences.

So, without further ado, let us intertwine our own eyeballs around the fabulous Stephanie Young.

JOHN GIORNO

Let’s see, Ron Mann’s classic film, Poetry in Motion, came out in 1982, when I was eighteen. I remember sitting through it twice, enthralled, thinking, OK, that is where my life is going to go, and sure enough, here I am today, standing before you, still on poetry’s crooked path. I can remember many of the readings and performances in that film, but one of the most memorable was John Giorno’s. Who could forget? He reads like no one else – although he has many imitators – transforming his body into an intense column of force and breath, of sheer performative presence. His signature double reading of lines creates a kind of echo in the listener’s ear: the first iteration burns the line into one’s consciousness, and the second makes it shine.

Indeed, John has been a pioneering presence in poetry since the 1960s, and has done so much to get poetry off the page and into people’s ears, eyes, and minds. The artists’ collective he founded, Giorno Poetry Systems, is responsible for a wealth of recordings and videos that document the excitements of New York poetry in the 70s and 80s. His Dial-a-Poem project, which he began in 1969 after a conversation with William Burroughs, offered a truly revolutionary, 20th century way to deliver poetry.

Despite his immeasurable influence on slam and spoken word poetry, John is not merely a “performance poet.” His textual innovations are present on the page, too, in the form of cinematic intercutting that challenges linear reading habits. His work is expansive enough to please and inspire poetry aficionados of all stripes.

John’s many books include Cancer in My Left Ball, You Got to Burn to Shine, and the recently published Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962-2007. He also has the special distinction of being the star of Andy Warhol’s five-hour and thirty-five-minute film, Sleep. It is a great thrill to welcome to the Segue series the legendary John Giorno…

MELANIE NIELSSON

Dear Melanie,

I’m home today trying to get over a nasty flu, and I’m really so sad not to be there, because I’m intensely interested in how your writing has evolved since 1991’s Civil Noir. That’s pretty much all I have to go on for this epistolary intro, plus the link to the How2 poem you sent me, plus a memory of a delightful reading I heard you give maybe 8 or 9 years ago at NYU. I remember you were sourcing nursery rhymes for those lovely poems. Anyway, looking into Civil Noir again is a huge pleasure: it’s whimsical, unpredictable, sonically and syntactically inventive, rhythmically adept… basically, all the things I want poetry to be. Yesterday, home with a fever, I wrote on my blog about a west-coast trend I’m seeing towards “docu-poetry,” and a tendency in a lot of poets these days to require of their poems some sort of explicit social critique… a “moral,” really… at the expense, sometimes, of the poetry. “Isn’t, um,” I write on my blog, “aren’t the lessons already in the fabric of the language? Can’t we just write inductively, forefronting the senses?” and I think you do that. In my febrile meditation on what I see as essentially the anti-poetic reportage and mimesis in docu-poetry, I write:

“it’s just that, there’s something else I want
from poems, something not so controlled by the superego
or by external conditions, something that rolls
about in language and gets covered with its secretions,
… something that foils the message instead of making it more
transparent, something that forefronts cadence.
Think of cadence as a kind of skipping through
a little bit of time, just that much duration and the
sound and meaning and syncopation in it. Material.”

Your poems give me (to evoke, for a moment, Eddie Cochrane) this “something else.”

I really do wish I could be there.

Audience, how fortunate you are to witness the marvelous…

Melanie Nielsson.

RACHEL ZOLF

Rachel Zolf is the author of the brilliant Human Resources, which most deservedly won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, Shoot and Weep, a chapbook of poems made with found text about the Lebanon/Israel war, and Masque. She hails from Toronto and is currently gracing our fair city.

Her writing weaves together many of the most vital tendencies in contemporary poetics: it is conceptual, procedural, feminist, wryly humorous, a little bit lyrical, and profoundly investigative. Her most recent poems, some of which I think she’ll be reading today, have actually emerged from a real trip to Israel/Palestine. She wrote to me in an email yesterday, “I’m using various procedures to try and probe my questions about I-P from various angles,” and at first when I read that, I read I-P as “investigative poetics” and not “Israel-Palestine.” To me, that is what is remarkable about her poems: they are as engaged in events and issues as they are with form and procedure, without loss of energy, I think, either on the side of “form” or “content.” She knows that material can speak for itself, as in her poem in Shoot and Weep, “Grievable”, which is a list of Arabic names, followed simply by the line “at five o’clock in the morning.” And she also motivates that material with a keen inquisitiveness, her “need to know,” which very often in her work focuses on the fraught question of Jewish identity.

Her procedures and sources are fascinating in and of themselves, whether she is using (and here I quote from the coda to Human Resources) “the Gematria of Nothing engine at http://www.mysticalinternet.com,” which is “a method of Biblical exegesis based on assigned positive or negative numerical values of Hebrew letters and semantic links between words based don their values,” an online bible concordance, or the Harvard Business Review. She truly explores what is described on the back of Human Resources as “the creative potential of salvage,” recuperating language for examination under the fierce spotlight of poetic framing.

I haven’t heard Rachel read before, but I’ve been told her reading style is singular and striking, so I can’t wait. Please welcome our fearless war correspondent, Rachel Zolf.

ADEENA KARASICK

Adeena Karasick does not merely “write”; she gushes, explodes, squirts, and drips. Like a big, full, brash wine, her poetry gushes oranges, golden raisins, brandied corrupt cherries, licorice, mint, and maple sugar, sun-baked black plums and fresh, fuzzy figs.

It takes for its raw materials things like honey, olives, meat, and coffee; processed foods like tapenade, marzipan, and chocolate; quasi-edibles like violets, tea roses, dried leaves, beeswax, and green tobacco; inedibles like oyster shells, camphor, and stones; and imponderables like “orange-scented peach,” “precious, very roasted wood,” cocoa, marsh flowers, irises and undergrowth.

Adeena’s writing flows forth suddenly and violently like a massive waterfall straddling the border of Canada and the United States, full of unceasing, deafening, creato-destructive motion.

Did I say “violently”? Why yes, I did! As much as her poems are “hedonistic,” “pretty and caressing,” “ravishing,” “pillowy,” “seductive,” and “overendowed,” they are also sizzling critiques of global conflict, mordant indictments of power struggle; they exude raw energy even as the jump from the frying pan of sense into the fire of sound. What finally emerges, fully roasted on the torquing spit of Adeena’s mind, is delicious beyond mere description.

Truly, Adeena is one of the great natural wonders of the world. Here’s “TWO THUMBS UP!” for the “BREATHTAKING”, “MESMERIZING” Adeena Karasick!

CECILIA VICUNA

Cecilia Vicuña is a renaissance person and a visionary superstar. Born in Chile, she performs and exhibits her work widely in Europe, Latin America and the US. She is also a political activist and founding member of Artists for Democracy.

She has been creating “precarious works”, ephemeral installations in nature, cities and museums since l966, as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.” She lectures and teaches workshops and seminars for indigenous communities and at universities.

She is the author of 16 books which have been translated into several languages, and is currently at work on an Anthology of 500 Years of Latin American Poetry for Oxford University Press. Templo e’Saliva / Spit Temple, a collection of her oral performances, edited by Rosa Alcalá, is forthcoming by Factory School Press.

Her work is a meditation on and an enactment of the fine.

Not fine as in the sense of “precious” or “luxurious,” as in fine wines or “she lived surrounded by finery,” but fine as in “precise” and “delicate.”

Not “delicate” as in weak. Vicuña’s fine is penetrating and effective, like a string cutting cheese, like laser surgery, like the fine link of the copula in an uncannily exact metaphor.

Not fine as in “refined” — which calls up sugar, oil, and pretentious manners. Vicuña’s fine is the fine of nature, like that of spiders’ webs. Or the fine of manipulated nature, like goats mixed genetically with spiders to give silk in their milk. The fine of DNA.

It is the fine of lines.

She explores the mine of the f(emin)ine.
Or the filaments of the infinite.
Or onto the tightrope of the written word into sound and its unpredictable trapeze into meaning.

Vicuna’s fine can be graphic or liquid or fabric or light, and also can it be sound, as when in her performances she enters a room first with her voice — small (fine) but, even unamplified, capable of filling the huge hall at St. Mark’s church with its shivery resonances.
Just think, then, what she can do within these cozy brick walls…

We’re going way up north today for this:

Next up – Gary Sullivan & Nada Gordon

The New Writing Series welcomes poets Nada Gordon and Gary Sullivan to the UMaine campus for a performance on Thursday, April 2, at 4:30pm in the Soderberg Auditorium. Like all NWS events, this one is free and open to the public. If you have a disability that may require accommodation for this event, please contact Ann Smith in the office of Disability Support Service, 121 East Annex, 581-2319 (Voice) or 581-2311 (TDD).

Nada Gordon was born on January 14, 1964 in Oakland, California. She spent a colorful, semi-nomadic childhood in Chicago, San Francisco, Mill Valley, Fairfax, and Bolinas. At thirteen, she passed a high school equivalency exam and enrolled at a junior college. She graduated from San Francisco State University’s creative writing program in 1984, and received her MA in literature from UC Berkeley in 1986. In 1988, she moved to Tokyo, Japan, where she taught English, wrote textbooks, sang in a band, studied butoh, traveled around Asia and Europe, and was a co-editor of the literary journal, Aya. She returned to the US in 1999 as a result of a protracted e-pistolary romance. She is the author of More Hungry (1985), Rodomontade (1985), Lip (1988), Koi Maneuver (1990), Anime (2000), Foriegnn Bodie (2004), V. Imp, and Folly. She lives in Brooklyn with Gary Sullivan. She blogs at Ululations.

Gary Sullivan is a poet, cartoonist, and blogger. His DIY comic, Elsewhere—which he started drawing and writing in 2005— explores biography as an artistic construct. Sullivan lives in Brooklyn with Nada Gordon. Together, they wrote the book Swoon. Sullivan’s most recent book is PPL in a Depot. He blogs at Elsewhere.