Thursday, September 28, 2006

what is this?


Is this a Brit edition of Oppen I've not seen? I'm curious to see how it's set as New Directions trashed the poems in the new collected edition-- yes yes great intros and essays and unpublished stuff are good but the actual typesetting is no good-- completely throws out the sense of the poems as presented in the first ND Collected that Oppen proofed. I mean it's not that hard NOT to trash. sigh. etc.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Sunday, September 24, 2006

New Buck Downs


HOT off the press it's
Ladies Love Outlaws
by Buck Downs.

$5 to Aerial/Edge,
POBox 25642, WDC 20007.

24 pgs of


unspeakably fertile ground
turns to serious jelly
sticks to the furniture
"I have the agua."

October Readings in DC

Wed 4th -- Wave Poetry Bus, 7 PM The Big Hunt, 1345 Connecticut Ave NW

Thurs 5th -- Lisa Robertson & James Scully, Georgetown University, 8 PM ICC Auditorium

Sun 8th -- Michael Friedman & Tom Orange, 7 PM Bridge Street Books

Wed 11th -- Leslie Bumstead & Rod Smith, 5:30 PM George Washington University

Sat 14th -- Ben Doyle & Sandra Miller, 8 PM Pyramid Atlantic

Sun 15th -- Ric Royer, Ward Tietz, & the Is That Wool Hat My Hat Players, 3 PM DCAC

Thurs 19th -- Brenda Hillman & Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Georgetown University, 8 PM ICC Auditorium

Sun 29th -- Terence Winch & Geoffrey Young, 7 PM Bridge Street Books

Directions to many of the venues available at dcpoetry.com.

Lannan Series at Georgetown.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Flarf goes to college!

Dickinson College that is.

Flarf & Friends:

Saturday Sept. 30 7:30 PM Poetry, film and music performance

This poetry performance includes readings, film, and music. Flarf readings by Jordan Davis, Katie Degentesh, Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Michael Magee, Sharon Mesmer, Rod Smith, Gary Sullivan. Dusie readings by Mackenzie Carignan, Scott Glassman, Mark Lamoureaux, Marcie Nelligan, Boyd Spahr, Dana Ward. Film by Brandon Downing. Multimedia work by Joey Bargsten. Musical accompaniment by Alarm Will Sound.
Location: Rubendall Recital Hall, Weiss Center for the Arts
Fee: Free
For more information:
Email Richard Abrams
abramsr@dickinson.edu

Intercapillary Space

featuring poems, reviews & a symposium on the work of Douglas Oliver.

rock on, like they say



Monday, September 18, 2006

Gutstein/Toll, DCAC




Dan Gutstein. Chris Toll. Duets and Shapes. The museum of inconsolable hangovers cries in the electronic alibi acrobat. The cactus wren going suite-sweet, the inglorious amphetamine dawn. The ant preaches "Words will not pollute the soup." Catherine retrofits a woodpecker thumping code. Rain, stop me before I kill again. What I mean is he puts the words, the pollution, and the soup in his pipe and plays it in order to think how coordinating conjunctions can pervert the enforcement of our already perverse, prefabricated life paths and in order to sing how much you can groove to that if you just prepare yourself hard to make it up as you go along. I know where the treasure chests are. The strange thunder of meal carts in the hallway. Our mouse found in the oleo. Our radials. Our bodysuits. Our digital rhythm in the running around chickens. Our mode tomb loons. Our face grayed organizing plain. Our bodysuits. Our hotel grammar seagull of death. Our limpid striescence. Our nouvelle demultiplex bordello paperwork. Our rags of truth. Our majority. Our luck.

Inman/Lang, i.e. series at Clayton & Co., Baltimore



Peter Inman reads like a combination of Morton Feldmans. No 1 any is of it. It doesn't seem right, somehow, to mention other poets relative to Peter, of course there are 'relevant' comparisons-- but the experience of an Inman reading isn't, for me, analogous in that manner. There's a different kind of tuning in involved- a music. But a music of linguistic specificity, that context-rubbing politic a strung word can only offer. Peter seemed very relaxed and concentrated, intent. He began with a piece 'on beauty' and finished with a piece dedicated to Beckett. In the middle much recent work some of which will be published by Cathy Eisenhower's press Interrupting Cow. Details as they emerge. A recent reading of Peter's at Penn Sound.

I left work at 3 o'clock in time to pull up at Clayton & Co at 4:35. Doug was out front smoking. We missed his reading. Damnit. He read from a sonnet sequence some of which I've heard but I always always always want to hear this poet so was bummed. Here's a piece of Doug's at McSweeney's.

Moist Feelings: A Love Poem

Every now & then
I feel you ignore me

Knee-deep in lust

I turn around &
look at you
& you're not there
because you're not you

It feels like something
Wet and ugly
Has taken my place

It smells like strawberry surprise

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Thursday, September 14, 2006

pheep

Footnote

Passion as a lucky rollabout, blundering. I met several, and man-o-man, how explain the apparent lack of impact on discursive frameworks of power? Worse than that though, in world war 2.786 leading American contradictions have to get mine any way. Our only hope is to rewrite Napster (or any "peer-to-peer," I'm not picky) to redistrubute wealth rather than music.

Don't think of a shark



1/43/96


HF--

Part of that thing of Doug's is in Aerial 6/7. I just spaced on the colab as I am wont 2 due. Personally I've been reading THE POLITICS OF TIME, if'n we don't need to take on a bigger subject. That idea + form as activity + cognitive limits < some idea of 'scale' (as in covered with) that Watten sort of points at/toward when he says: "If at some point language walked in the open door, we would show it some respect." Our response would be more immediate than to use it as a sign. So we respect language by not being content to operate in any one part of it. It's greater than we are. That has implication for the form. “The sense is larger than one can say."
Now, what wld it mean to operate "in any one part of it"-- is that possible? Or are we always already illiterate-- in that there will always be much more that we don't know: cognitive limits carried into periodization as latent scale = form as activity trap. Nonsense is very telling. In _The Elucidation of Intention_ Charles Bernstein Rinpoche is cautioning against the means of designation as the designative base. This is a general characteristic of hermeneutical strategies that depend upon content rather than context. "As long as we think of solutions as happening only once we perpetuate the trauma of our native insecurities" sayeth Rasula. What he might mean by "trauma" is all too clear to the "native insecurities" which are IN FACT in the dictionary. However in Edgar Alain Poe's recent chapbook we find an argument for "the Principle itself. . . the Human desire for Supernal Difference." It seems the fundamentally systemic indignity is HISTORY, or else haddock, but let us suppose it is history-- 'politics of time' -- "all politics as centrally involving struggles over the experience of time" -- with respect to this: "Think, in particular, about the problems posed for a politics of emancipation by a horizon of expectation within which the replacement of capitalism within any current lifetime is no longer a feasible prospect; and the social forces traditionally assigned to the job can no longer be looked upon with any confidence to 'grow into' their allotted political role." Without the "jargon" but with the "in particular" this seems to be accurately involved in an elucidation of the historicized deprivation of the disingenuous.
But is there some hope for a commodification of revolution?
Modernity has codified change-- post-modernity being only meaningful if allowed to be meaningless, i.e. as schism in modernity's endless meaning concretions-- & if meaningless then the famous haddock (named Kannon) blurred with tears of major tremble is the meaning to be decided. We're always already always already at this point & Sunoco's web-page (under construction) is a "community"
"resource"--
it is as snow falling
a big yellow glove that waves bye-bye a million times
holds me in my Novocain creations
Do lots of Nicotione-Fairys visit your dreams as well?
Do you have an e-mail for Irigiray? (bad line)
NOT KNOWING
"now more than ever"
Art as creator of concepts yes. . .
Concepts as hollow in our happenstance?
Portable action: projection?, extrapolation? Hopelessly inert articulations
I'm willing to settle for less, but wish it were a choice.
Dressed in lint
it's glimmered
one pint Asterick (or a pitcher?)
motions the luck
back out from under
the laundered
ratiocination
Binky gasps
at the lamps’
back-lit bummer
levens this roiled-up
limey cliche's
callous "cash-payment"
of the mandarin praise. Gramsci's
kite in a tree-- the given
glistening-- eschatology's
psychedelic narrative deed.
Billy Dungoski saw Jesus on a telephone pole-
The Rainbow Gathering as parapatetic circumference,
but I don't have enough gas to get "home." George Will found
therapy to involve too many nasty words-- talk about
attention deficit. Vietnam was considered a bad cause. "Was." "One by one all the bars fell into place."
DEALING WITH WITHDRAWAL
my haddock or yours, a diurnal
dissonance to unlock the fob

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

It's out!

Gutstein & Toll DCAC 9/17

IN YOUR EAR
@ District of Columbia Arts Center

DAN GUTSTEIN and CHRIS TOLL

3PM - Sunday, September 17th

District of Columbia Arts Center
2438 18th Street NW
Admission $3.00

dcpoetry.com

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Back to me


Thanks to O Books
for reprinting this.
You can get it on
Amazon for $74.47 cdn
or from SPD for $12
or from me for $10.

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Pics from Mirakove/Good reading

An audience of at least 50 came out to Pyramid Atlantic last night. Adam read in a highly rhizomatic fashion, fusing semi- circularities in an ongoing "Score for Local Knowledge" comprised of graphic filtrations of readings he'd attended, statistically improbable phrases, & audience audients. Kaplan Harris demonstrated something of Adam's method in yet another inexplicably apt introduction.

Carol spent many years in DC & is always festively welcomed back. She read largely from her latest book Mediated, which as Mel pointed out in her intro, received an important award even before it was published. Here's a bit from something I wrote on her first book, Occupied:
Mirakove makes, somehow, of this our collective deeply tainted unconscious, an art that is singular-- a space which only she could have created. This space is one of tension, a tension in process, subject to it, turned by them, and untrusted forward-- what breaks through is, to repeat, singular, & sometimes, shattered. poetry.

Afterward we went to Majorca. Kaplan often goes there to grade papers & read Creeley letters. It was good to catch up with Chris Nealon who's off to Berlin for a week. Buck Downs was in bright circumstance as per usual-- news soon of his new Edge chapbook. Leslie Bumstead was in attendance, David Berrigan, Mary Seidel, Jeff Vogt, o so many others.

It was indeed quite pleasant.

Click on the title link to see Cathy's monkey, shiny Adam, leaving Majorca, etc.

A favorite line from Mediated: "Even Juicy Fruit has a blog."

"The Vote"

In a sworn affadavit from computer programmer Clinton Curtis (a life-long registered Republican) he was told by his employer: “You don’t understand, in order to get the contract we have to hide the manipulation in the source code. This program is needed to control the vote in south Florida.” (Boldface in original).

Inman/Lang Reading 9/16

i.e. reading series-

Saturday, September 16th-
4 pm - 6 pm

P. Inman & Doug Lang

Clayton & Co. Fine Books
317 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
410-752-6800

Lester

This is Lester. He lives in Southern California. He is important. & yes, he will bite you.

For periodic Lester updates this is your best source of information.

Friday, September 08, 2006

Conrad Interview

TB: What do you think poetry does? What do you want a poem to do?

CAC: A poem should help you rob a bank. What kind of fucking poem wouldn't help you rob a bank?

Mirakove & Good Reading 9/9


R U T H L E S S G R I P
P O E T R Y S E R I E S
@ Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center

8:00PM, September 9, 2006
CAROL MIRAKOVE
and ADAM GOOD

Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center
8230 Georgia Avenue
Silver Spring, MD

Three blocks from the Metro red line.

Photo: Carol & Mel Nichols at after-Flarf party NYC

For directions:
http://www.pyramidatlanticartcenter.org/about/contact.htm

I'm not saying anything, I'm just sayin'

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Most Played

Zoom (It Happens All Over The World) -Robert Pollard
L'Orphelin De La Java -Francis Lemarque
Take Me Back To Tulsa -Bob Wills
My Valuable Hunting Knife -Guided By Voices
Jardin d'hiver -Keren Ann
Choo Choo Ch'Boogie -Louis Jordan
Desaparecido -Manu Chao
Profoundly Blue No. 2 -Edmond Hall's Celeste Quartet
Fish 'n' Rice -Andrew Hill
Wailing Wall -Andrew Hill

Sunday, September 03, 2006

The Bus is Leaving Tomorrow

Check out the insane schedule. Montreal to Northampton in one day? Durham to Asheville to Athens to Tuscaloosa, one night each? I'll be reading at the DC stop October 4th at Big Hunt-- wish I could make more of the dates but too damn busy. Rumor has it Peter Gizzi will be here for the Oct 4 reading as well.

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Comets on Fire at Black Cat 8/31


Desperately revelatory. Imagine what Grateful Dead circa '68 (tunes like The Other One and The Eleven) would sound like if they were new, if they were now -- seriously, this band is very hippy, very hardcore, and very convincing. For those that know the records I'll take any recommendations. Have heard only the first one which had a Jon Spencer thing, which is fine-- but not what they were up to on Friday. Will definitely see them again.