On My Desk

John Ashbery, *Chinese Whispers*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002
""If living is a hate crime, so be it.
But, hey- I was around when they invented the Cardiff giant.
I kid you not. God wanted you to know,
so you'd remember to love him..." (LITTLE SICK POEM)

Thomas Alan Brown, *The Aesthetics of Robert Schumann*, Greenwood, 1968
"The power of imagination is the prose of creative power [*Bildungkraft*] or fantasy. It is nothing but a highly intensified, brightly colored memory which animals also possess, since they dream and fear....but fantasy or creative power is something higher; it is the World-Soul of all souls and the elementary spirit of the remaining powers." (Schumann)

Ray DiPalma & Paul Vangelisti, *Uptown Vaunt*, Otis Laboratory Press, March 2007
"Elegaic in name only, there is no signature to accomodate the surcease of whatever future was lost in those years. Mornings there is the winter wren's 2-5 notes, followed by a trill, even when there may be no warning because finally you will blunder into dying as you've done about everything else. Just like the other night with one of those innumerable beautiful young women who approach you, the old master, even in spite of your caution, because she has a boyfriend who's building in his room a model of the Danube- until she will later understand."

Eli Drabman, *Daylight on the Wires* Vigilance Society
"[There was a wild place of limitation]/every kind of beast learned by heart/to fear it, to gallop full-throttle into/houses made/made from infinity's/nearness (because)her hair falls/into mud, becoming hoofprint, her gallop widens out, finding/voice (because) the fantasies/of gender, threnody, loose us /back upon the margins"

Patrick F.Durgin, *Imitation Poems*, ATTICUS/FINCH, 2007
"Is there anything to drink? Who am I speaking/with? Can I come home? Will you have me as I am?/How am I? How are you? Who built this ship? Is it/improper to ask? You're procrastinating, now. So kiss me."

Mitch Highfill, Rebis, Openmouth Press,2007
"Grind the brain with strong/vinegar or the urine of a young/boy until it turns black./Black as the heart consumed by hatred"

Mitch Highfill, United Artists Books, 1995
"COMFORTABLE BOMBING AUTHORIZATION
Civilian media damage crew formats
sagacious long face press return.
Conversation strategy needing public
casualities maimed massive children.
Well-fed suicide orchestrated
short plot provocation jaunty hours
opined death attitude"

Joseph Kanon, *Los Alamos*, Dell, 1997
"Santa Fe, however, was pretty. The adobes, which Connolly had never seen, seemed to draw in the sun, holding its light and color like dull penumbras of a flame."

Michael Lally, *Of*, Quiet Lion, 1999
"so here I am,back in LA
looking forward to reading
Elaine Equi's book & already
wondering why she doesn't
mention *me* in it- oh
wow- what is I'm still so
afraid of-
....& it's good, Elaine's book-
so direct & elusive at once
& the poems look like
poems so narrow & short"

Primo Levi, *The Drowned and the Saved*, Vintage, 1989
"Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment, despite all the logic; and for all that, compassion itself chides logic. There is no proportion between the pity we feel and the extent of the pain by which the pity is aroused: a single Anne Frank excites more emotion than the myriads who suffered as she did but whose image has remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is necessary that it be so. If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live."

C. J. Martin, *City*, Vigilance
"So CITY was mourning & they missed it,
mourning but not really answering.
A toy, a doll's eyes, for I have
a head now, too, were all manner--
instead they live upon have until now.
Not a dozen mourn on the road to Carna."

K. Silem Mohammad, Anne Boyer eds., *Abraham Lincoln#1* Spring/Summer 2007 (16 poets)
..."other people leave astral imprints, dead or alive in buildings
you can feel the bad energy from that person's thoughts
tasteless to refer too closely to a person's contact with the Reich/
I feel the rising nausea once again, faced with the appropriation of this terrifying muzzle/
bend down & touch lightly with my iips the white face in the coffin/
The Internet puts me in touch with thousands of them who act as my scouts" (Gary Sullivan)

Mode A, The Grand Piano, Part 3, 2007 (10 poets)
"The dilemma of memory, the demand of remembering to fix meaning has always troubled me. This has at times made me reluctant to continue with this project: when I was a child I threw away my diaries after I filled them up." (Carla Harryman)

Peter Ostwald, *Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius", Northeastern University, 1985
"Geniality, getting high, and originality are very closely elated concepts, generally speaking, at least all three are volcanoes, spewing lava, from which one or the other boldly goes forward. Geniality likes to erefct its temples in wine cellars, and getting high is like a handyman, or finally even the left hand itself. Originality is the foot. Besides, a youth wants to understand geniality differently than a man; genial men even hate genial youths for the most part, because both look at each other through reducing lenses. The logical, calcified blockhead would very much like to be genial, but he wheezes away like a fox with sour grapes....In other words, beauty may be (in mimicry of the sisters Grace and Charity), amost essential covering that entices us to geniality. Available for everything but fit for nothing- now like butterflies, flimsy, flitting, fluttering, flying, and fondling- now like elephants, sullen, slow, trampling, and crushing- now soft and gentle like virgins- now strong and wild like a lion woken from its slumber. Female delicacy and frivolity, male brutality and destructiveness- like a chameleon that assumes every color and shading-" (Schumann, June 1828)

Phyllis Rosenzweig, editor, Primary Writing 5/07 (2 poets)
"We can barely see what's out there
Overwhelmed as we are by repetition
Though I depend on it for what sense
Of continuity remains to me when
I see you I know I'm at work....
My skin is made of your decision
We write with paint on old newsprint
There are poets in the debris by the door
What comes in goes out
Hello name we say
What do you want?" (Laura Moriarty)

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, *The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery*, Metropolitan, 2001
"The Frondists, who opposed French absolutism and, after their defeat, traded the sword for the pen, were typical "losers" of this reflective sort. The memoirs, and aphorisms of Saint-Simon and La Rochefoucauld were ultimately both a sublimated form of revenge and a social critque that led directly to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In the twentieth century, Russell Jacoby made a similar point about West European Marxism. Stumbling from one political defeat to the next, it retained a crucial potential- a flexibility, an openness, and a humanity- that Soviet Marxism, its twin brother, lost while triumphantly marching foward."

Mark Young, editor, Otoliths, issue five, part two; Southern Autumn, 2007 (15 poets)
"VANISHED INTO TIME THEORY
HAS MELTED POISONED METAPHOR
& TRANSPLANTED CRANIAL LIGHT" (Andrew Topel)

Contradicta



Envy would not be such a bad thing, except that we always envy the wrong ones.



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To know how to begin things, and mostly see them through, yet still enjoy the suspense between, is a secret shared by few.


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--Nada--


simulated direct from--

ululations

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Invisible Notes

Peter Ciccariello

YVW, Nada

Drew Gardner's Poetics Orchestra

peformed on Sunday with poets Nada Gordon and Kimberly Lyons. There were readings as well by Gary Sullivan, Kimberly Lyons, Mitch Highfill, Brenda IIjima and others before and after sets with the Orchestra. Nada, who was in spectacular form yesterday at the BPC was brought back, not suprisingly, for an encore at the end of the Orchestra's second set.

I am going to try very hard not to sound overly melodramatic- I admit I sometimes have a tendency to exagerrate in favor of work I wish to be noticed- but I've had such an experience of watching a ripening talent like Nada's hit the stratosphere enough times in my life to know what it looks like, and a few of these were: Buddy Holly at the Brooklyn Paramount in 1958, Ted Berrigan at St Mark's in 1966, Blondie at CBGB's in 1975, and Holly Hughes at the Wow Cafe in 1985. If you weren't there, and probably you weren't, you should do everything in your power to watch Nada Gordon perform as soon as possible. Nada read mostly from her new book *Folly*, Her second set involved a section of her new Roof Book in which three girls rap while trying on clothes at Target, who somehow manage to teach each other-and us-more about life and postmodern philosophy than a barrel full of Derridas ever could hope to; she ended the set with a heartbreakingly funny, hypnotically repetitive recital of a part of a song made famous by none other than Dean Martin: "when the moon hits your eye." And I'm here to tell you the audience knew it did. Other awesome performances took place on the BPC stage yesterday as well: Gary Sullivan's grandmother was hilariously portrayed as doing things with her gastrointestinal system that would qualify her for a Barnum and Bailey acrobatic contract, and employed his voice in ways that made me sometimes wonder if he was channeling beings from another dimension and it all starts to remind me of a comic from my chlldhood called Plastic Man; Kimberly Lyons read some of her most deftly charged, nostalgically lyrical works excellently with the Orchestra as well (who were also in top form today, by the way, under Drew's able baton}; Mitch Highfill read with that terrific baritone voice of his from his upcoming "Abraham Lincoln" (from new publisher K. Silem Mohammad) chapbook *Mothlight* as well as one poem from his new chapbook-Rebis- just out from seasoned publisher Christina Strong's Openmouth Press, and Brenda Iijima surprised the audience with handstands, bravely defying ringing cellphones and crying babies with poetry that for moments still somehow transported me back to recent quiet states of reverie in the varied moods of Cape Cod's waves and clouds, partly, it seems, by means of her frequent mentions of sunscreen; Jill Stengel was followed by Sean Cole, whose wit and polished verbal pyrotechnics concluded this day of shining performances with the glittering bright finish it well deserved.

I left sorry that I had only been able to attend only one of the Boog City events, as this one well qualified for one the best sawbucks I've ever spent. And I keep reading that ubiquitous mag in newsprint form published by David Kirschenbaum with pleasure every time I find it..

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Ha-Ha America: Antonioni and the Importance of Being Earnest

New Beauty from the Old World

via wood s lot

Boog City Festival: The Penultimate Event

SUNDAY AUGUST 5, 1:30 P.M., 3:45 P.M.
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
NYC
$5 1:30 p.m.

The Future of Small Press Publishing
curated and moderated by Mitch Highfil
l
featuring David Baratier, editor Pavement Saw Press (Columbus, Ohio)
Bob Hershon, co-editor Hanging Loose Press
Brenda Iijima, editor Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs (Brooklyn)
Jill Stengel, editor a+bend press (Davis, Calif.)

Readings and musical performances
3:45 p.m.-The Poetics Orchestra
4:15 p.m.-Kimberly Lyons
4:30 p.m.-Gary Sullivan
4:45 p.m.-Brenda Iijima

5:00 p.m.- break

5:15 p.m.-The Poetics Orchestra
5:35 p.m.-Jill Stengel
5:55 p.m.-Mitch Highfill
6:10 p.m.-Nada Gordon
6:25 p.m.-Sean Cole

Directions: F/V to 2nd Ave., 6 to BleeckerVenue is at E.1st St.
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