Bernstein/Smith 11/18 4 pm

i.e. reading series

Saturday, November 18th
4 pm - 6pm

Charles Bernstein & Rod Smith

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

Raworth/Brötzmann at Woodland Pattern

Thursday November 16 and Friday November 17, 10PM
Peter Brötzmann (Germany) and Tom Raworth (UK): Poems and Improvisations and Cheryl Lynn Bruce (Chicago) and Joshua Abrams (Chicago): Pickling by Suzan-Lori Parks, performance monologue with music Elastic Arts Foundation, 2830 N. Milwaukee, 2nd floor
$10

Sunday November 19, 7PM
Peter Brötzmann (Germany) and Tom Raworth (UK): Poems and Improvisations and Cheryl Lynn Bruce (Chicago) and Joshua Abrams (Chicago): Pickling by Suzan-Lori Parks, performance monologue with music Co-presentation with Woodland Pattern
Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 East Locust, Milwaukee
$8/$7 students and seniors/$6 Woodland Pattern members

Charles Bernstein at Bridge Street, Sun. 11/19, 7 PM

Come to Bridge Street Books

at 7 PM on Sunday, November 19th because

CHARLES BERNSTEIN

will read.

Charles Bernstein is the author of 30 books of poetry and libretti,
including Girly Man (University of Chicago Press, 2006), Shadowtime
(Green Integer, 2005), With Strings (University of Chicago Press,
2001), and Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (Sun & Moon Press, 2000).
He has published two books of essays and one essay/poem collection: My
Way: Speeches and Poems (University of Chicago Press, 1999); A Poetics
(Harvard University Press, 1992); Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984
(Sun & Moon Press, 1986, 1994; reprinted by Northwestern University
Press, 2001). Bernstein is Donald T. Regan Professor of English,
University of Pennsylvania. He is the co-founder and co-editor, with
Al Filreis, of PENNsound (writing.upenn.edu/pennsund); and editor, and
co-founder, with Loss Pequenño Glazier, of The Electronic Poetry
Center (epc.buffalo.edu). In 2006, Bernstein was elected a Fellow of
the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Bridge Street Books
2814 Pennsylvania Ave.
(202) 965-5200

Located in Georgetown next to the Four Seasons Hotel, 5 blocks from
the Foggy Bottom Metro station (blue & orange lines).

BYOE (Bring Your Own Ears)

Dem Senate Majority

The new AP count showed Webb with 1,172,538 votes and Allen with 1,165,302, a difference of 7,236. Virginia has had two statewide vote recounts in modern history, but both resulted in vote changes of no more than a few hundred votes.

"World Reaction"

Kaplan passed this on from CNN:

In an extraordinary joint statement, more than 200 Socialist members
of the European Parliament hailed the American election results as
"the beginning of the end of a six-year nightmare for the world" and
gloated that they left the Bush administration "seriously weakened."

yay dems!!

The Work of Leslie Scalapino

Saturday, November 11th, 1:00 pm at The Poetry Project, 131 East 10th Street, NYC

please come!

A celebration and inquiry into the work of prominent contemporary experimental Bay Area writer and publisher (of O Books) Leslie Scalapino. Leslie Scalapino's over 20 books challenge the boundaries of poetry, prose and visual art. Her most recent titles are Orchid Jetsam, Dahlia's Iris and Zither & Autobiography. Six poets will each present a short talk on aspects of Scalapino's work, followed by a question/answer session. Poets will include Brenda Iijima, who will host the discussion, Rod Smith, Laura Elrick, Alan Davies, Jennifer Scappettone and Rodrigo Toscano.

Rod Smith is the author of In Memory of My Theories, Protective Immediacy, The Good House, Music or Honesty, and, forthcoming You Bête. He publishes Edge Books and edits the journal Aerial in Washington, DC. Smith is also co-editing, with Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, for the University of California Press. Laura Elrick's book Fantasies in Permeable Structures is recently out from Factory School (2005) in Vol. 1 of the Heretical Texts series. She is also the author of sKincerity (Krupskaya, 2003) and is one of the featured writers on Women In the Avant Garde, an audio CD produced by Narrow House Recordings in 2004. Alan Davies is the author of many books of poetry including Active 24 Hours (Roof), Name (This), Rave (Roof), and Candor (O Books). Jennifer Scappettone's recent poetry, prose, and translations from the Italian are forthcoming in 4x4, Drunken Boat, P-Queue, The Cracked Slab Anthology of New Chicago Writing, Jacket, Modern Philology , and Zoland Annual . She is working on an archaeology of the landfill & opera of pop-ups in progress, provisionally entitled “Exit 43”, commissioned by Atelos Press. She teaches at the University of Chicago. Rodrigo Toscano is the author of To Leveling Swerve (Krupskaya Books, 2004), Platform (Atelos, 2003), The Disparities (Green Integer, 2002) and Partisans (O Books, 1999). His poetry has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Toscano is originally from California (San Diego and San Francisco). He lives in New York City. Brenda Iijima is the author of Around Sea (O Books, 2004) and two forthcoming titles: Animate, Inanimate Aims (Litmus Press) and Eco Quarry Bellwether (OtherVoices). She runs Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs from Brooklyn, New York.

In memoriam, Brad Will

Bradley Roland Will (1970-2006) was a U.S. anarchist, documentary filmmaker, and journalist with Indymedia New York City. He was shot and killed on October 27, 2006 during the teachers' strike in the Mexican city of Oaxaca.

GROVER LEPER

Being a Grover Leper,
something is going on--

Grover was an American politician--
outraged citizens branded him a "moral leper"--

freesofree that my pastor, St. Francis Rickenbacker:
Roar! I'm a leper!

!!

Roar! Roar! I'm a hamster! &
this is disjunctive poetry

'Jesus' can also be translated as 'Leper Colony'
makes me happy

This is the situation--
want to drown?

"To heal the leper"
militia?

the other kids not accustomed to
"LEPER MILITIA"

become part of the Grover family
(the Honolulu Chapter)

If all employers
be like ya know 'neighborhood leper'

then the Dems have a chance!
yay Dems!!!

Tough times for NGC 6745

Just remember, no mater how bad it gets, at least you're not in a colliding galaxy . . .

Reading Bay Poetics

Reading Bay Poetics is devoted to collecting and generating discussion of the anthology Bay Poetics, edited by Stephanie Young (Faux Press, 2006).

Potential contributors should email Tom Orange at tmorange[at]gmail[dot]com.

limetree's movin'

new add

HELLO

we're perverts . . .

Gottlieb/Smith 11/4 NYC

SEGUE READING SERIES @ BOWERY POETRY CLUB

Saturdays: 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
308 BOWERY, just north of Houston

NOVEMBER 4 MICHAEL GOTTLIEB and ROD SMITH
Michael Gottlieb’s most recent books include Lost and Found, Gorgeous Plunge, and The River Road. In the late 70s and early 80s he helped edit one of Language Poetry’s seminal periodicals, Roof Magazine. Rod Smith is the author of Music or Honesty, The Good House, Poèmes de l'araignée, In Memory of My Theories, The Boy Poems, Protective Immediacy, and New Mannerist Tricycle with Lisa Jarnot and Bill Luoma. A CD, Fear the Sky, came out from Narrow House Recordings in 2005. He edits Aerial magazine and publishes Edge Books. Smith is also editing, with Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley for the University of California Press.

Warhol photo of Ron Padgett, ca 1965

Padgett/King 11/5 at Bridge Street 7 PM

Join us at Bridge Street Books

Sunday November 5th @ 7 PM

for a reading by

RON PADGETT
&
AMY KING

Ron Padgett's contribution to American poetry is HUGE. Originally from Tulsa, where he edited The White Dove Review with Joe Brainard, publishing Creeley, Kerouac, Leroi Jones and others, he moved to New York in 1960 with a cadre that included Ted Berrigan, Brainard, and Dick Gallup. Together they invented (&/or re-invented), via the inspiration of poets such as Ashbery & O'Hara, what has become known as The New York School. He studied with Kenneth Koch and Lionel Trilling at Columbia. He directed The Poetry Project in the late seventies and publications at Teachers & Writers from 1980 to 2000. Padgett's books of poetry include You Never Know (Coffeehouse Press, 2002), Poems I Guess I Wrote (2001), New & Selected Poems (1995), The Big Something (1990), Triangles in the Afternoon (1979), and Great Balls of Fire (1969). His first collection of poems, Bean Spasms, written with Ted Berrigan, was published in 1967. He has also published a volume of selected prose titled Blood Work (1993), as well as translations of Blaise Cendrars' Complete Poems (1992), Pierre Cabanne's Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1971), and Apollinaire's The Poet Assassinated (1968). His most recent book is a memoir--Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers.

Amy King is the author of Antidotes for an Alibi published in 2005 by BlazeVox. She teaches English at Nassau Community College on Long Island and has been writing poems throughout her numerous careers, which have included working for the Department of Defense, managing a popular fast food restaurant, multi-tasking as a medical technician in Labor & Delivery, serving as a residence counselor and advocate for the learning disabled, directing an ESL school in Manhattan and many other positions better left a mystery.

Bridge Street Books
2814 Pennsylvania Ave.
(202) 965-5200

Located in Georgetown next to the Four Seasons Hotel, 5 blocks from
the Foggy Bottom Metro station (blue & orange lines).

Upcoming at Bridge Street:
Nov 19th - Charles Bernstein

BYOE (Bring Your Own Ears)
---------------------------------------------

XX

Death has only
writing to end.





Tolling Elves arrived today announcing its demise-- significantly-- with the stop of a REAL magazine, felt & thought, always, in its choices, in its attn, in its gifting, and with a powerful "return" to poetry by Barrett Watten. I daresay a double masterpiece that leaves us with "masterpiece?" and means to.

VERY interesting . . .

The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist government of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

Thorson/Potvin/Manzione @ Bar Rouge 10/30 8 PM

Maureen Thorson, PF Potvin and Gianmarc Manzione at Bar Rouge in Washington D.C. Monday, October 30. Reading will begin at 8:00 p.m. in The Dark Room at Bar Rouge.

oh great

If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That's almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America - Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included.

Claire Lise

Elle a chantés à Washington dernier soir. C'étais bon. Terrific stage presence. Good fun. Good band. She'll be in New York at Pianos on Sunday Oct 29 at 9:30 & at the Bowery Poetry Club Monday the 30th, 6 PM.

The Anger Scale by Katie Degentesh

Starred Review-- Publishers Weekly October 16, 2006


The Anger Scale
Katie Degentesh, Combo (SPD dist.), $12 paper (80 p) ISBN 0-9728880-2-0

Degentesh's debut draws on Google by importing content from Internet searches into her poems to fill in the blanks of the MMPI. That's psych shorthand for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, sample statements from which --"I Feel Uneasy Indoors"; "I Am Not Afraid to Handle Money" -- serve as titles for these 35 beautifully conflicted poems. Degentesh inhabits the poems' weirdly pathologizing psychic space with a deep love of overheard speech that's charged with unconscious (and sometimes not so unconscious) violence, longing and misunderstanding: "it was sloppy and bloody and all fucked up,/ when I try and translate it back into English/ it sounds like the Christian notion that we are born// to read stories of free, unhindered UnaBirths." Degentesh is a member of the Flarflist collective, a loose gathering of Google-obsessed poets who cast their poems in an ironic, deliberately "not ok" mold: "I loved my mother, and she did nothing/ as my father repeatedly beat me." The Weird genius of these poems is that Degentesh encodes a sliver of identification within her deadpan sendups of cliché and banality surrounding real feelings, such that when one speaker says, "at the same time some poor wanker necro in half undress/ was kissing, fingering and licking Shelene's pussy," the reader feels a kind of celebration rather than censure. (Nov.)

Now available from Bridge Street Books-- (rod at bridgestreetbooks dot com). Or visit Combo Arts online.

Exxon's Profit Exceeds $10 Billion

Number 1:

Krush @ Sonar

thanks Adam

Winch & Young @ Bridge Street 10/29

Please join us

Sunday, October 29th @ 7 PM

for a reading by

TERENCE WINCH
&
GEOFFREY YOUNG

Geoffrey Young is the author of Fickle Sonnets, Lights Out, Admiral Fever, Pockets of Wheat, Rocks and Deals, and Subject to Fits. He lives in the Berkshires where he runs The Geoffrey Young Gallery, an art space celebrated in such publications as Artforum and The New York Times. Publisher's Weekly writes of his recent book Lights Out: "Young's great strength, like that of his compadres Michael Gizzi and Clark Coolidge, is his updated use of Kerouac's "spontaneous bop prosody," an intricate and seemingly improvised incantation of word and syllable whipped up to ecstatic length." Young is also publisher of The Figures-- one of the most important literary presses of the last thirty years.

Terence Winch is the author of three books of poetry: The Drift of Things, The Great Indoors, and Irish Musicians/American Friends. His most recent book, That Special Place: New World Irish Stories, is a collection of non-fiction stories drawn from his life as a musician playing traditional Irish music with Celtic Thunder-- a band he started with his brother Jesse in 1977. Celtic Thunder's second album, The Light of Other Days, won the prestigious INDIE award for Best Celtic Album. His writings have appeared in more than 20 anthologies of poetry, prose, and non-fiction, and in journals and newspapers such as The Paris Review, New American Writing, American Poetry Review, Arshile, Shiny, Verse, The Washington Post, The Washingtonian, and The Village Voice.

Bridge Street Books
2814 Pennsylvania Ave.
(202) 965-5200

Located in Georgetown next to the Four Seasons Hotel, 5 blocks from the Foggy Bottom Metro station (blue & orange lines).

Upcoming Bridge Street Readings:
Nov 5th - Amy King & Ron Padgett
Nov 19th - Charles Bernstein

Creeley Letters!

The first publication of the project Kaplan, Peter, & I have been working on is now up at Jacket 31--

Robert Creeley, ‘Wow. I called it and why not:’ 7 letters, 1950–1961
edited by Rod Smith, Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris

Letters

* To William Carlos Williams (February 11, 1950)
* To William Carlos Williams (February 27, 1950)
* To William Carlos Williams (January 1, 1957)
* To Denise Levertov (April 22, 1951)
* To Robert Duncan (September 24, 1955)
* To Robert Duncan (October 30, 1959)
* To Tom Raworth (January 21, 1961)

Thanks to Michael Kelleher & the folks at Jacket. They're still in the process of finalizing the Creeley Feature.

yo yo yo ya'll gotsta dig de 14 Midget Man

If you can imagine a fat bald midget
wearing a bright blue sweatsuit,
you are a fourteen-midget man.

Dan Gutstein in Rat Genius 10/20 @ 9 PM

Our DC friend and future Edge author Dan Gutstein makes an appearance in Natl Geographic's Rat Genius, 9 pm Friday October 20th on the National Geographic Channel.

Archive of Dylan's radio show

Click on the link above and start downloadin'. Thanks to the gentle radishes of Lisablog.

Ben Doyle & Sandra Miller photos

Sandra & Ben read two sets-- the first individual readings of 15 minutes each, the second trading poems and a few collaborations. It rocked.

Thanks Carol!

http://www.candystand.com/juicyfruit/index.do

The World Premiere of the all-new stand-up special, "Steven Wright: When The Leaves Blow Away" debuts on COMEDY CENTRAL Saturday, October 21 at 9:00 p.m.

Hillman/Berssenbrugge Georgetown 10/19

GU Poetry & Seminar Series Presents

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19
Brenda Hillman & Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Gender on the Lyric Edge

Seminar: 5:30PM, 462 ICC
Reading: 8:00PM, Copley Formal Lounge

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's mixed-media collaboration with artist Kiki Smith, Concordance, has been published by the Rutgers Center for Innovative Paper and Print. Her selected poems, I Love Artists, appeared in 2006. Among Brenda Hillman's recent books are Pieces of Air in the Epic and an edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry. She is active in the non-violent Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Nathaniel Mackey Natl Book Award Finalist

audience on flarf

Bumstead/Smith at GW.

Old news

Flarf split.

Alan Gilbert on Lisa Robertson.

Saturday & Sunday

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 Art Center

8:00PM, October 14, 2006
BEN DOYLE and SANDRA MILLER

Pyramid Atlantic Art Center is located at 8230 Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring, MD, three blocks from the Metro red line.


I N Y O U R E A R R E A D I N G S E R I E S
@ District of Columbia Arts Center
3:00PM, Sunday, October 15, 2006

RIC ROYER
WARD TIETZ
&
the "IS THAT WOOL HAT MY HAT?" PLAYERS

District of Columbia Arts Center is located at 2438 18th Street NW in Adams Morgan, Washington, DC, between the Dupont Circle and Woodley Park metro stations.

Leslie Bumstead & Rod Smith @ George Washington University

Wednesday, October 11th
5:25 to 6:25 p.m.
GW Visitor Center
(next to Smith Hall of Art)

Free and open to the public

Directions: Foggy Bottom Metro, take a right at the top of the escalators, then a left at 23rd and H. Cross 22nd on H. Past the statue of Pushkin (on your left) you'll come to a walkway between two buildings. Take a left. The Visitor Center will be the first door on your left.

Friedman/Orange at Bridge St Pics

Tom read from his forthcoming Dusie book and a new piece dedicated to Joe Ross and the DC poets. Write him soon and you might be able to get a copy. Michael read from his new rather flarfy novel Martian Dawn, just out from Turtle Point Press. Good crowd, 30-40 people, including regulars like Leslie Bumstead, Tina Darragh, P. Inman, Phyllis Rosenzweig, and Buck Downs, as well as a number of GW and Georgetown students. Afterwards, we repaired to Marshall's for refreshments. All was, briefly, well.

repopo

"a blog dedicated to reviewing women’s innovative poetry and related poetry work. If you have a review of a book, poem, po-formance, or other uncategorizable woman product, please send it to repopo1@gmail.com right away."

This is Cathy (aka Vigilante Librarian) Eisenhower's new project. Recently posted, Maureen Thorson on Lauren Bender's The Dictionary Poems.

Lisa Robertson / James Scully reading

At the seminar Lisa spoke eloquently of her recent reading of Arendt & of "a necessary inconspicuousness" -- the poem's non-site -- ". . . a place that gives pause, a clandestine hiding place that is always strategic." That one can, or must "extract a representation which remains both inconspicuous and a site for future thinking."

I enjoyed James Scully's talk but didn't quite get what he was getting at when he said "Emily Dickinson is an anti-poet," somebody said something about "pseudo-anti-poetry."

From Scully's reading:

"The future of sleep is buried alive."

A few quotes from Lisa's reading:

"O, uneven survival"

"and if I degenerate into style it's because I love it so"

"The biggest problem with melancholy is that it is more detailed than the world."

From the Norton Anthology of Sea Shanties

If I had a boat

I would eat a sandwich




Video from Day 31 - Rod Smith and Cole Swensen.

Pics from Poetry Bus in DC.

Friedman/Orange 10/8 at Bridge St

Sunday, October 8th @ 7 PM


MICHAEL FRIEDMAN
&
TOM ORANGE

Poet Michael Friedman's debut novel, MARTIAN DAWN, is just out from Turtle Point Press in New York City. He is the author of six collections of poetry, including the book of prose poems SPECIES (The Figures, 2000). Since 1986 Friedman has edited the influential literary journal SHINY.

Tom Orange is currently teaching literature and creative writing at Georgetown University and The George Washington University. His recent work appears or is forthcoming in Court Green, Primary Writing, The Word at Peek Review, Rock Heals, and The Poker.

Bridge Street Books
2814 Pennsylvania Ave
(202) 965-5200

Located in Georgetown next to the Four Seasons Hotel, 5 blocks from the Foggy Bottom Metro station (blue & orange lines).

Poet, Translator, and International Man of Intrigue

As fruitcake sd to my
fruitcake, because fruitcake is
always talking—

Flarf/Dusie at Dickinson College

The entire weekend was a kind of lettucey stegner fellow, very Presidential.

Drew conducting the Flarf Collective with Alarm Will Sound, the best.

Scott Glassman on the event. The above, and most of photos from the weekend were taken by Mel Nichols.

Four Serious Days of F*%#ed Up Music

SONIC CIRCUITS DC
OCTOBER 05 - 08, 2006
Warehouse - 1017-1021 Seventh Street NW, WDC

Phill Niblock : Mikroknytes : Wolf Eyes : Matterlink : Los Glissandinos :
Koen Holtkamp : Queens : Scott Smallwood : Andy Hayleck : Ben Owen : BLK w/ BEAR + VJ Poppins : Lum and Abner of Morocco : Harvey Bainbridge of Hawkwind w/ Spaceseed : Yellow Swans : Mouthus : Kohoutek : MoHa! : Robert van Heumann : USA-USB : SKIF++ : If, Bwana : Violet : Michael Gendreau : elmapi : Northern Machine : Jeff Carey : Office-(R)6 : PHO : DB : John Wiese : Ovo : Mr. Natural : Harrius : Facemat : HZMT : Mat Weston + Tone Ghosting ...

Sonic Circuits is a celebration of audio extremes. The 4-day festival, October 5-8, at Washington DC's Warehouse arts complex features local, national and artists from around the world who are doing something unique outside of "popular" musics; sonic architects who explore and expand on the elements of music beyond melody and rhythm, leading to new territories and discoveries.

SONIC CIRCUITS : ONLINE TICKETING + ARTIST BIOS + FULL SCHEDULE:
http://dc-soniccircuits.org

Robertson/Scully 10/5

Thursday, October 5
James Scully & Lisa Robertson: "Social Practice"
Lannan Poetry & Seminar Series, Georgetown University
Seminar 6:00PM 462 ICC || Reading 8:00PM ICC Auditorium

Poetry Bus 10/4 - 7 PM

Wednesday October 4, 7:00pm

Wave Poetry Bus reading with Joshua Beckman, Kyle Dargan,
Peter Gizzi, Sally Keith, Valzhyna Mort, Dwaine Rieves,
Catie Rosemurgy, Gwydion Suilebhan,
Rod Smith, Cole Swensen and Matthew Zapruder.

The Big Hunt
1345 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington, DC
(Metro: Dupont Circle)

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.

Greetings from Dickinson College

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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'

osama bin drinkin'

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

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.

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.

The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice

"I love women as I love food when I am full. I am surfeited but despairing-- I would take the forbidden fruit. How I envy the man who has appetite!"

Yes, but where was Dolphy?

Dolphy was with the Coltrane group at Babe Baker's Jazz Corner in
Cincinnati, January 7-13, 1963.

quoting sizzle chest

"Last night, Rod and I (and others) saw DC United get humbled, 5-2, by the L.A. Galaxy. The Redskins lost, 41-0, to the Pats, in preseason action. And the (g)Nats got smashed by Atlanta, 10-1.

In all, Washington sports teams scored 3 points last night. Their opponents scored 56. So, Washington lost last night, 56-3."

no, it's not a joke

The vertebrate silence worries the legal sail

kudos to Orange comma Tom on this one

The Strength

In the renting & in
something lenghty
a loosening, a lack’s lattice
round-- this beam abbreviate oppposite-sized carnal loam--

it is its sever

triad is not so low as to shove a gone stop

& then the solve curses
& thin the corpse ago

-- dawn runs it, dawn, that is.

the rising’s recourse.

alone.

Code Orange

We have an Orange (Elevated) mouse alert.

What Was Turtlism

What Was Turtlism

Suppose you tried to separate the feeling which music gives you from hearing music. Aspects of the composition of a book must partake of this attempt. Suppose you tried to separate the feeling shopping for music gives you from the experience of shopping for music. We may wish to call the elements of the aspects of the composition of a book its various “schizotypes.” The combining of the schizotypes imply an impractical material telepathy which is ever-present & decaying. The moment at which this decay communicates its unique advent-- its schizotypicality-- is the moment at which a reader escapes the artifact’s nascent particularity. Advents which plus then pulse.

The duration of the decay of the Poundian tradition -- if we were able to isolate that which is “truly Poundian” (i.e. it is merely a manner of articulation which Pound energetically intensified via his own conceptual artifice) -- relates directly to the problem of duration within the conflict of the poetic utterance. This conflict is the impression that that which is poetic is composed out of emotional &/or ideological conflict(s). Negation is previous to any event AND (re Spicer) it’s all content.

The transformation of conflict into musical event gives ground to the activities of impractical material telepathy. However such ground is staggeringly a-restringent, & desirously unspeculative. When Steve McCaffery writes in Close Listening: “The twentieth century presents two distinct scenarios for the voice in poetry. One is primal identity, culturally empowered to define the property of person. This is a phenomenological voice that serves in its self-evidence as the unquestionable guarantee of presence--when heard and understood through its communication of intelligible sounds this voice is named conscience. The other scenario--renegade and heterological--requires the voice’s primary drive to be persistently away from presence. This second is a thanatic voice triply destined to lines of flight and escape, to the expenditure of pulsional intensities, and to its own dispersal in sounds between body and language.” I want to locate a third term in which presence’s primal identity is found in "the book is said to be a duck." A flight back to presence in which any 1 duality, even that of life & death, does not suffice. In the duck, the third term is culturally empowered to define lines of flight as internally aperiodic passions, perceptions, & principles. This seems preferable to me.

gb

sad to underthink said
moistening--

let the favorite
numbered
or open

shading
leather the close. Of

these, their next
returnable intensities

the marquee lintcatchers
having half said.

YEAH THAT TOTALLY SOUNDS LIKE

Yeah that totally sounds like Hard Dance Channel's FBI smurf thing, but maybe a little more facile. & I know you think we need to be aware, but this is really destroying and has no symmetry or judgmental bitches with giant tote bags or bands like Piffpaff Popo Death at all. I find it offensive but mostly I am just tired and you are radically unhypnotized. I mean what are you saying? Clearly, the squid is on the toad, people.

& with all due respect, every egg and sperm has to be used with the assumption that Satan could defeat Disney and the Aztecs and all their quote ass-poodles unquote. I know that's stretching it but it's getting harder and harder. Or at least it gives lip service to the asspossum slash badger in the front seat. That's my confusion. So thanks for continuing to come.

& not to start a flame war but a guy is beating me over the head with a bear and he's in a bear suit doing it. Which is to say certainly THE PROBLEM is stemming from "Anybody's" "family skills" but do you want my opinion for your research paper about Howard the Duck or what? Get your mind out of metafictional bumfuck. I find it offensive that kids refer to themselves. I mean you can't read can't you?

Fuck fuck fuck fuck! You just sit there!!?? Hot dorks are going off on random tangents in the form of poetry while other people laugh. Why should babies be any different?

Snoring Weenie

Bailey

the asthmatic,
developmentally
challenged

pug

is
snoring alongside
the
weenie ball on

the
boots
of
neo
Pinkos
&
nazi weenie
Iggy's incisors:

medically inert,

assemble-at-home
anti-ostentation--

a kind of nordic gumbo--

any soup
which is based on a roux

over rice
and
gestures.

Somebody tell me what I feel inside.

Things happen every day that you just
don't hear about. Like the other day

Grover & me was hangin out eatin
satanic koala meat with Elvis, like they say,

& alluvasudden 4 equal parts
heathen butler guts & spew-boogers errupt all

outta everthing like we was sposed
ta re-understand the northern lights

as actual rat-incisor transmissions from end-table lamps
& shit-- Grover didn't have his camcorder

& I didn't have my ass. So, I don't know.
Wal-Mart is like Alpha team re-assigned from Tukwila?