Tom Beckett's A Love Letter to my Blogroll: The Sequel

Chopin Nocturne 27 (Number 1) Artur Rubinstein

Old Crap Mulch Pile- Steve Tills (Black Spring)

Poem 12-04-08- Steve Tills
*************

Recent dreams by Chris Tiefel, Ryan Vine, Stan Apps, Anne Boyer, Brian Salchert, Robert Kelly and Anne Gorrick on
Annandale Dream Gazette

**

-from Ron Silliman's Blog Thursday, December 18
"3. What other poetry-related blog or website should I check out?

There are so many. But let's point to The Annandale Dream Gazette, the only site I know of devoted to the unconscious of poets."

Contradicta




When things get too complicated the starting point disappears into the tangled pile leaving me in confusion with glum stares.




*******



Count one friend for every time you admitted you were wrong.

Contradicta




The successful marvel at what they know and what they've done. The wise are inspired by what they don't know and haven't done.



**********




Monsters detract from our willingness to find something to like in everyone. Maybe we shouldn't let them do that.

Two Dreams

Annandale Dream Gazette

Thanks to Lynn Behrendt

**

Jan Peerce singing Bluebird of Happiness (You Tube)

Marinetti's Birthday on

Radio Godot Dec 22

Jordan Davis reads Drew Gardner- Lemon Hound

via ululations

Jacob Russell on Silliman's Alphabet

" What is sadder than the small book of well-wrought
poems, none spilling over to the next page even, each pretending to its own completeness."

Ron Silliman: The Alphabet. ZYXT, 985

LIfe by Ernst Herbeck translated by Gary Sullivan and Oya Ataman

"Life

The life of the chickens is red.
The seism of compassion is red.
Life is beautiful.
Seism of the hearts in the body of dogs.
The life of the heart is dear.
The life makes the heavens heer.
Life would like to be longer.
may love live slower.
slowest life is long."


read more on Gary Sullivan's Ernst Herbeck site

***************************

Il Pleut by Apollinaire conceived by Gregory Vincent St Thomasino, digitalized by Mary Ann Sullivan

Il Pleut

*************************

Derailing The Sublime: On Alan Davies Odes

Joe Brainard's Pyjamas

via Pantaloons

*************************

In October 2008, Stephen McLaughlin, Gregory Laynor, and Vladimir Zykov published Issue 1, a 3,785-page document featuring almost as many poets. The pdf was posted at forgodot.com. The poems were produced by a poem generator called Erika, or Erica T. Carter.

The ISSUE 2 document is a collection of the blog posts and comments that responded to the project and/or responded to responses about the project and/or responded to issues that were raised within the discussion (419 pages).

Issue 2

via Pantaloons

MiPoesias

Some Recent Links

Green Integer Blog-Contradicta, with collages by Toni Simon

Venepoetics (Guillermo Parra)-Contradicta translated into Spanish

Gregory Laynor- poem beginning with a line from Nick Piombino

Gregory Laynor-poem ending with a line from Nick PIombinol

Stan Apps on Sarcasm

"There are few legitimate responses to a world in which idealistic narratives are repeatedly used to devastate communities, where devastation is routinely applauded as long as it is for the sake of ideals. With ideals like these we don’t need enemies..."

Read more:
elective annoyance

Notes from Underground


Life as it is lived today underground at times feels impersonal to the point of sterility. This atmosphere results not only from the dire warnings loudly and constantly announced over the loudspeakers in every car, contrasted with wistful advertisements recommending schools for dental assistants or college degrees, but also the atmosphere of trauma within which we have regularly lived has dampened nearly any sort of spirit of connectedness that might be mustered. No one can remain light for very long under these conditions, while the efforts of the nightly tv comics elicit more of a sense of generosity and determination than shared hilarity. The homeless on the train asking for change this week seemed a notch more desperate than usual. Maybe it's just the full moon. Obama's promises of hope notwithstanding, now hovering on the edges of the future, even spontaneous pleasantness and brief polite interchanges, while intensely welcome, still feel strangely alien, or even surreal, after a few moments. Next to me, near my seat, two very small children cling to a vertical metal supporting bar and act themselves, that is, very silly. The parents smile warmly towards them and chat about quitting caffeine. The wackier the children behave, the more serious the passengers become, certainly not annoyed, since the kids were not in the least bit being disturbing. The children were happy, that was all. These moments reveal our social conditions far more than any news broadcast will ever be able to encompass. I think about the bank teller that I go to regularly who demanded I rewrite my signature to match my ATM card even to withdraw a small sum of money and the man who asked for five dollars for the seat he has vacated in Barnes and Noble. It was a try at a joke, and my silence made him add; "Only in New York." Crossing the street in Brooklyn after leaving the train station a car cuts me off rudely. As we hurtle towards a holiday unlike few in many decades in New York, it will be awhile until we feel the emotions that we might expect after such a startlingly uplifting election. I think about my visit with my old friend Alan today and how the conversation, once again, turned towards the Weimar era. We talked about novels by Alan Furst, Tana French, Joseph Kanon and Candace Bushnell that point up moral ambiguities in times like these, recent and long ago. On the bus home, I think the subway is a good metaphor for how I see this period. For the moment, most emotions have gone underground, and as we move inexorably down a dark tunnel, over a route we know all too well, while images of light at the end of that tunnel have yet to appear, we think about them as they have been suggested, yet we seem to endlessly slow before arriving anywhere, holding mainly to an attitude set to endure what is likely to remain a bumpy ride for quite some time.

Green Integer Review- Contradicta collaboration with Toni Simon


Green Integer Review



**************

Nada Gordon Decorates The World

Ululations

Phillip K. Dick Predicted a Black President

In 1966, Phillip K. Dick published The Crack in Space which had, as one of its characters, a black Presidential candidate, Jim Briskin.

From Phillip K. Dick's 1966 novel The Crack in Space:

"But it was inevitable. Sooner or later, there would be a Negro president....'I don't agree with you,' Briskin said, 'I think there'll always be a hate organization like CLEAN, and there'll always be people to support it.' After all, CLEAN had a point. they did not want to see a Negro president, and wasn't it their right to feel like that? Some people did, some people didn't; that was perfectly natural. And, he thought, why should we pretend race is not the issue? It is, really. I am a Negro. Verne Engel is factually correct. The real question was: how large a percentage of the electorate suported CLEAN's views? Certainly, CLEAN did not hurt his feelings; he could not be wounded; he had experienced too much already in his years as a newsclown. In my years, he thought to himself acidly, as an American Negro.
A small boy, white, appeared at the booth, with a pen and a tablet of paper. 'Mr Briskin, can I get your autograph?'"

******


Otoliths issue 11

"Debt springs eternal in the human bank"

"Interior Demolition" (mp3 on Penn Sound)
[From Light Street, Zasterle Press, 1996]

Interior Demolition

Contradicta




When there is little crisis fear is a problem; when there is nothing but crisis fear is a beacon.





**********




What can easily be said puts people at ease but is rarely believable.

Contradicta




Beauty goes from what you are to who you are or it just fades away.





**********




Happiness is not the lack of sadness; it is what sadness learns to wear in order to shine.

Contradicta


There are parts of ourselves that allow no effect, either from ourselves on the world, or the world on us. These parts are the hinges on which we allow the portals between ourselves and life to swing, open or closed, as need be.




******************



Nothing is the place in which everything breathes or stands, moves or falls.

Anny Ballardini's Fall Folio

"Don’t blame me!... It all started on Alan Sondheim’s WRYTING-L list. Dirk Vekemans has to be blamed. His Autumnal poem made the long list of answers that followed. I therefore had the idea of gathering the poems. Not only, I also forwarded an invitation to the WOM-PO and New Poetry List, and to several chosen Poets. Here is the Harvest in its colorful unfolding. I do hope you will all enjoy it."

fieralingue

*********************

Nico Vassilakis on Mike Burakoff's video of Free Fall

Verse in the eye

When you’re drawn to focus. When you’re moved to veer. The trigger’s pulled before you know the question’s near. So ask what looking gives you and twist the eyes reply. The function of its thinking immediate, yes, immediate. This the staring won’t deny. Your brain answers while swerves align, as-best-it-can-it-should, that it knows a further capsule driven, I say driven, further into focus. That your eyes dart here and there as things of interest do & that coming here and leaving have left a stain on you.

Issue #1 Faux Anthology

I would just call it-The Unbearable Lightness of Issue #1. There is something about that huge sudden ironic parody that calls for instant recognition of the non serious nature of the intervention. This is the "unbearable lightness of blogging" as I have termed it, par excellence. A poetry circus wagon blows in, warm wind and ill wind, spins a few sails, shakes a few tails and blows out: a party with real laughs, a few growls and roars and some intense conversations where you recognize a lot of people, don't know some, you figure "everybody" was there, but of course that's not literally possible. The feeling is, maybe they were out of town or something, or just couldn't make it, but not that they were deliberately excluded. I know I would have felt left out had I not been mentioned. But since I was I do get into that lightness, but it is a blue lightness while still feeling nostalgic for the more private days of the whole long stretched out thing- getting an invitation, figuring what to send, waiting to hear, then getting accepted. But in this party atmosphere it's just all so quickly thrown together, no time, so quickly check how my poem was dressed and acted, ok, did I see some friends, yeah, their poems are ok. So then it's over, and there's the hangover of- what did I do, did I actually write that thing, no way, nobody did, a computer wrote it. After all, it is the era of the machine. So what did I say- I'm not sure how I feel now. Then the party really starts and everyone talks about it for days. No, not like a reading or an opening, more like a bash, or an old fashioned happening where people were only half aware of what was going on. Maybe all the evidence has already been put away and the place has been swept up. Maybe a few people actually kept their party favors and others left and forgot them. But now there's a memory, that Godot thing that gets talked about. People have been saying that we are in a time warp in that in New York now, that we are in a repeat of the Weimar era. Maybe this Godot thing is our cabaret- rude, crude, risque, funny, a little dark, with music by Kurt Weill and a set by Kirchner, Grosz or Hannah Hoch. I had even written in the comment section of Issue 1, "There has been talk of a poetry bailout. Is this it?" It looks like the powers that be are plotting to send the whole batch of us poets and day workers out onto the streets as in *The Threepenny Opera* while "citibank" robs everybody blind. And then we'll listen to the barrel organ sound, in the city while the sun sinks low.

*****************************

On a trade basis, the "Godot team" is making hard copies of the anthology available. You send a chapbook and postage and it's yours. Here's the link:

Sending for Godot


****************************

After writing that line I had to go and reread the poem I was thinking of by Alfred Noyes:

The Barrel Organ (1938

The Art of Prediction

It is fascinating that Nassim Nicholas Taleb the author of The Black Swan, the biggest best selling non-fiction book of 2007, who is extremely skeptical about the value of predictions, could have published this statement last year:

"As if we did not have enough problems, banks are now more vulnerable to the Black Swan and the ludic fallacy than ever before with "scientists" among their staff taking care of exposures. The giant firm J. P. Morgan put the entire world at risk by introducing in the nineties Risk Metrics, a phony method aiming at managing people's risks, causing the generalized use of the ludic fallacy...A related method called "Value at Risk" on the quantitative measurement of risk, has been spreading. Likewise, the government-sponsored institution Fanny Mae, when I look at their risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry, their large staff of scientists deemed these events 'unlikely.'"(p.225)

New on 9thst Labs: Visual Poetry by Nico Vassilakis

Between: The Art of Collaboration, by Douglas Messerli

Green Integer Blog

Some years ago, Douglas Messerli invited a group of poets to send him poems linking his work to theirs, in many instances writing through poems he had written incorporating their work into his. As part of a mammoth ongoing memoir project, each book encompassing one year of his life, Douglas here writes about the year 2000, the year in which he launched this project, that included a poem of my own, based on work of his.

*

Some months ago, Geof Huth courageously blogged about his open heart surgery, a post that included photos of the event. Here Douglas MesserIil writes about his recent prostate surgery, an operation that strangely followed his writing a beautiful piece about his father's death of that disease.

Contradicta




There is imagining without doing and there is doing without imagining. Neither require much in the way of patience or courage.



**********************


You can chart a world of nuance between harsh and firm, between certainty and empathy, between the truth and what is apropos.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger: Sharon Mesmer on Poetry and Theory in The Brooklyn Rail

"Poetry has become an overscheduled toddler run ragged by ambitious, bickering parents, its very existence a compromised simulacrum of their disharmonious projections and expectations". In this article, Sharon Mesmer identifies an issue that has also been troubling me for a very long time. The causes have been argued and discussed by poets and others for years. Mesmer focusses on the addiction to "debate" as one of the problems, a topic I have taken up on *fait accompli* countless times. The last time I wrote about this during the presidential debates of 2004 it was becoming very clear to me that the "debate" model was failing to inspire and sputtering to a halt.(Time March's On, 3/2/04) This year Obama and Biden are likely to impress and the other team to depress. But in the poetry world, it's getting tiresome. Don't get me wrong. The 70's poetry debates, following the breath of expressive freedom of the 60's, were invaluable, even, at times, beautiful to contemplate. But after more than 25 years of echoes, the model is wearing thin. If there ever was indeed a "politics of poetic form" that political point has been more than made. It has been paddled around to death and is now choking off the poetry, or at least focus on the poetry. The assumption is that creating controversy creates interest. In the case of contemporary poetry, the reverse is happening. Instead of making the poetry scene vibrant, it is making it soggy. The arguments are not snappy, they are stale. Although Sharon doesn't say this, and may not even be thinking this, to me this debate form in poetry is a masculine, tennis or racket ball oriented adaptation of dealing with issues of concern to poets. Game over. What would I substitute? Responding to the work of specific poets thoroughly, carefully, lovingly, angrily, lightly, whatever. Making observations and arriving at conclusions based on actual poems, not the strategies of your "team" with the endless arguments about the dynamics, the advantages and disadvantages, the importance and unimportance of "types" of poetry. Let's give it a break, guys.

This just in from Crag Hill re: Free Fall by Mike Burakoff and Nick Piombino

Poetry Scorecard

The 2cd Annual Welcome to Boog City Festival Complete Listings

I will be reading on Sunday, September 21st
Unnameable Books
456 Bergen St.
Brooklyn

Free

1:00 p.m.-Julia Cohen
1:15 p.m.-Tisa Bryant
1:30 p.m.-Ana Božičević
1:45 p.m.-Yoko Kikuchi (music)
2:05 p.m.-Corrine Fitzpatrick
2:20 p.m.-Nick Piombino
2:35 p.m.-Stacy Szymaszek

Free Fall/A.I.R. Gallery History Show/Nicholas Manning reviews Mark Young's Selected In Jacket/New Books from Otoliths

The video of my collage novel Free Fall-video and music by Mike Burakoff- is now up on Nicholas Manning’s poet's video blog, The Continental Review

Nicholas Manning has also posted a short announcement and appreciative comment on his weblog: The Newer Metaphysicals

Thanks to Nicholas Manning for posting the video and to Mark Young for publishing the book under his Otoliths Press imprint.

***********************


A.I.R. GALLERY: The History Show
Archival materials from 1972 to the present
Curated by Kat Griefen & Dena Muller
at Tracey/Barry Gallery, Bobst LIbrary,
Open Monday - Friday 10am-5pm
70 Washington Sq. South, 3rd Fl.
September 16 - December 12, 2008

Opening & Panel at Tracey/Barry Gallery
Tuesday, Sept. 16, 6pm – 8pm
“How A.I.R. Changed the Art World: Feminist Intervention Over 37 Years”
Panelists: Dotty Attie, Carey Lovelace, Carolee Schneemann, Corinne Robins & Joan Snitzer


**************

Nicholas Manning reviews Mark Young's Pelican Dreaming: Selected Poems in
Jacket


*************


When the original emailout for this September septet of new books from Otoliths reached four pages, I decided it was time to compromise, to send just the basic details out, & post the extended play with full blurbs & jpegs of the front covers to my blog, gamma ways . The direct URLs for the books are given below. The full catalog can be found at The Otoliths Storefront Otoliths .

Mark Young

E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The Final XIV Interviews + One
Tom Beckett (curator)
372 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9805096-1-8
$19.95 + p&h
URL: Final XIV Interviews

The Evolution of Mirrors
Martin Edmond
108 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9805096-6-3
$12.50 + p&h
URL: Evolution of Mirrors

When You Bit...
Adam Fieled
72 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9805096-3-2
$12.50 + p&h
URL:When You Bit

Longfellow Memoranda
Geof Huth
148 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-9-2
$13.50 + p&h
URL: Longfellow Memoranda

Novaless
Nicholas Manning
160 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9805096-2-5
$13.50 + p&h
URL: Novaless

Tales From The Hinterland
Caleb Puckett
60 pages
Cover design by Mary Ellen Derwis & Joe Balaz
ISBN: 978-0-9805096-4-9
$10.00 + p&h
URL:Tales from the Hinterland

RED
Marilyn R. Rosenberg
56 pages, full color, 9" wide x 7" high, coil bound
ISBN: 978-0-9805096-5-6
$19.95 + p&h
URL:Red

Contradicta



Those long accustomed to unqualified success-- or to unquestionable failure--tend to share one quality in common: an air of indifference.




*******




We are nothing more or less than the sum of our enthusiasms.



******************

Mark Young's Pelican Dreaming Selected Poems 1959-2008 (Meritage Press)

$24 at Lulu

These poems, read together in this excellently selected book, speak and sing to and of and with each other. Their humor and humanity, frankness and wealth of example and reference work together to create an appetite of readerly curiosity to want to keep reading and thinking, laughing, and connecting, and with this a desire to get to know the poet more, to come back to particular poems more and more.

Mark Young is the editor of Otoliths and Otoliths Books and lives in Rockhampton, Australia

"Chaos Theory Does Hollywood"

"Have just watched Blade Runner
on DVD, enjoyed it as I
always do even though
a small part of me sits there
running a reality check. It's
the risk you take when
writing about the future:
having it reviewed at a
point that is closer than the
conception. Pan-Am
didn't even make it to 2001
let alone the time this movie
is set. The arse has fallen out
of the yen & though Sony
still owns Columbia not everytone
speaks Japanese & most of the
noodle bars are owned by
immigrants from Vietnam or
Mainland China. Two days ago
I bought an album by Youssou
N'Dour & the next day
Senegal surprised by beating
France in the opening round
of soccer's World Cup. Maybe
that's the way to influence
the universe. Don't just
make the movie, change
something small in the
real world & eventually
the film may be seen
as cinima verite by the time
its time has come. Forgo
those fastfood franchised
tie-ins. Instead give
everyone a butterfly to kill."

OCHO 14 still available for download, here

OCHO 14

******
Keep Dreaming

Annandale Dream Gazette

Contradicta




I've never yet read a book or a poem or seen a film or a play that truly captured what it feels like to live. If one of them did, few would read it or go. it would veer too often and too rapidly from being profound one moment and idiotic the next, mesmerizing one moment and anticlimactic the next, exhausting one moment and energizing the next, inspiring one moment and horrifying the next, etc.




***********


Not everyone likes writers or artists who try to be different, but many do. It's the ones that succeed at it that nobody likes.

Hardy Hip-Hop


I found this poem by Thomas Hardy and couldn't help but copy it out and post it here and on the poetics listserv. Jerome Sala and others described it as rap-like, Maria Damon compared it to Iggy Pop.



Thoughts at Midnight

Mankind, you dismay me
When shadows waylay me!-
Not by your splendours
Do you affray me,
Nor as pretenders
To demonic keenness,
Nor by your meanness,
Nor by your ill-teachings
Nor your false preachings,
Nor your banalities
And immoralities,
Nor by your daring
Nor sinister bearing;
But by your madnesses
Capping cool badnesses,
Acting like puppets
Under Time's buffets;
In superstitions
And ambitions
Moved by no wisdom,
Far sight, or system,
Led by sheer senselessness
And presciencelessness
Into unreason
And hideous self-treason....
God, look he on you,
Have mercy upon you!

part written 25 May 1906

(published in Hardy's last book of poems "Winter Words in Various Moods")

Contradicta






The more someone makes us laugh, the more we think their jokes are funny. So it is not the jokes we find funny, it is the person.




**********



Unless someone can make us laugh, they will never be taken seriously.

From Otoliths 10: Tom Beckett interviews Nico Vassilakis

Interview

******

Otoliths 10


******

Patti Smith: Dream of Life, NY Times Movie Review

Boog City's 5th Annual Small, Small Press Fair

(announcement from David A. Kirschenbaum):

Exhibit at Boog City’s 5th Annual Small, Small Press Fair
(with Indie Records and Crafts, too)

Sat. Sept. 20, 11:00 a.m.-8:00 p.m.

at day 3 of the 2nd annual
Welcome to Boog City poetry and music festival
(complete fest info below)

Cakeshop
152 Ludlow St.
NYC

$15 for a table

The first 2.5 hours, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m. will feature performances by authors from the tabling presses
(exact amount of time per press TBD when the number of exhibiting presses is set)

Door charge for attendees is $5

email editor@boogcity.com or call 212-842-BOOG (2664)
to reserve your table today

Featuring nonstop performances throughout the day

with readings from

Jen Benka
Todd Colby
Ryan Eckes
Elise Ficarra
Eric Gelsinger
Stephanie Gray
David Hadbawnik
Bill Kushner
Douglas Manson
Kristianne Meal
Sharon Mesmer
Carol Mirakove
Kathryn Pringle
Maureen Thorson

and music from

A Brief View of the Hudson
Double Deuce
Heart Parts
Phoebe Kreutz

------------------

And here’s what’s happening the other three days of the festival:


Thurs. 9/18, 6:00 p.m. sharp, free

ACA Galleries
529 W.20th St., 5th Flr.
NYC

minor/american (Durham, N.C.)

Elise Ficarra and Kathryn Pringle, eds.

With readings from minor/american authors
and a musical performance


Fri. 9/19, 7:00 p.m.-1:00 a.m., free with a two-drink minimum

Sidewalk Café
94 Ave. A
NYC

Readings from

Jim Behrle
Bob Holman
Gillian McCain
Daniel Nester
Arlo Quint


Poets’ Theater performances
curated by Rodrigo Toscano


For its 20th anniversary
Lou Reed’s New York album performed live by

Babs Soft
Liv Carrow
Dead Rabbit
Dibson T. Hoffweiler and Preston Spurlock
Prewar Yardsale
Todd Carlstrom and The Clamour
Wakey Wakey


and solo sets from

Dead Rabbit
Dibson T. Hoffweiler
Todd Carlstrom and The Clamour


Sat. 9/20
Cakeshop

(see above)


Sun. 9/21, 1:00 p.m.-7:30 p.m., free

Unnameable Books
456 Bergen St.
Brooklyn

Ana Božičević
Lee Ann Brown
Julia Cohen
John Coletti
Corrine Fitzpatrick
Edward Foster
Rachel Levitsky
Eileen Myles
Simon Pettet
Nick Piombino
Kyle Schlesinger
Stacy Szymaszek

Edward Foster and Simon Pettet in conversation

with music from

Yoko Kikuchi

and a panel on "Action Poets" curated and moderated by Kristin Prevallet. This will be a forum for people to discuss intervention, performance, conceptual street agitations, and more.

Hosted by Boog City editor David Kirschenbaum
For more info: 212-842-BOOG (2664) * editor@boogcity.com

--
David A. Kirschenbaum, editor and publisher
Boog City
330 W.28th St., Suite 6H
NY, NY 10001-4754
For event and publication information:
http://welcometoboogcity.com/
T: (212) 842-BOOG (2664)
F: (212) 842-2429

Walking In Circles Before Lying Down, by Merrill Markoe

My last few days in Provincetown were sad because...they were my last few days! Yet not too sad to find myself cracking up when reading, while simultaneously admiring Merrill Markoe's hilarious and absorbing Walking in Circles Before Lying Down, which I found while browsing the wonderful shelves of the Provincetown library. The main character of the book Dawn, after fleeing an impossible relationship and various impossible living situations, finds herself thinking she is talking to herself when she is actually talking to her dog. When her true love dies, that is, her dog, she finds a substitute, Chuck, who is jealous of her former dog, and the book continues with Chuck rescuing her from various  weird situations, while she works in a dog day care center (while all the dogs there continuously supply Dawn with advice and barbed comments about what they smell and what they see but mostly what they'd like her to feed them). My description cannot do justice to this wacky, wonderful book, but I recommend it highly. Merrill Markoe has worked as a consultant to Sex And The City, and David Letterman, she has won tons of emmies, but broke free of her comedic tv writing career to write novels, an admirable, though no doubt stressful, while generous decision, especially for readers who love great, funny novels. This book is not only recommended, but prescribed! It is good for what ails you.Goodreads listings

Nicholas Manning Reviews Gary Sullivan's PPL in a Depot (Roof):

Galatea Resurrects #10

**********

Kristina Marie Darling reviews Catherine Daly's Chantreuse/Cantatrice (Factory School) Galatea Resurrects #10

**********

Charles Bernstein reviews new book by Al Filreis in

The Boston Review

**********

Pessoa in the Rain

What a pleasure to have had The Book of Disquietude to read during a summer rain. Now that the rain is over, the words do not seem the same, but as it did, I thought of blogging a few quotes as I read and thought of Pessoa writing them, and listened to the thunder and the rain...The moment passes, always, and Pessoa kept mourning this, yet we still have his words:

"O alcohol of grand words and long phrases that raise the breathing of their rhythm like waves and then crash smiling, with the irony of twisting snakes of foam and the sad magnificence of shadows."

"To realize a dream, it's necessary to forget it, to divert our attention from it. To realize is thus to not realize. Life is full of paradoxes, as a rose is of thorns.
"I'd like to construct the apotheosis of a new incoherence which could stand as the negative synthesis of the new anarchy of soul. I've always felt that to compile a digest of my dreams might be useful to humanity, which is why I've never given up trying. The idea that what I did in the real world might be profitable offended me and left me dry and withered..."

"The rain continued to fall sadly but with less force, as if seized by a cosmic weariness. There was no lightning, and only very occasionally would a distant, short roll of thunder harshly rumble, haltingly at times, as if also weary. Suddenly, or so it seemed, the rain let up further...."

"Rain, rain, rain...
Constant groaning rain (...)"

The thunder and rain have now begun again.


Quotes from The Book of Disquietude
by Fernando Pessoa
The Sheep Meadow Press, 1996
translated by Richard Zenith

Check out Didi Menendez' blog: Men and Women of the Web

and thanks to Didi Menendez for the interview:

Men of the Web

**

OCHO 14 is available online, here: OCHO 14

Contradicta

Do not go gently into that good night. Stay home and call for takeout.

**************

The most awful argument can be ended by the most awful joke.

Wallace Thinks Again: Poetry About Poetry

                                Groovy

There's a scene in Eugene Eustache's movie The Mother and The Whore (1973) in which Jean-Pierre Leaud sits in his room and listens to an entire record. You see him moving the tone arm onto the disc and quietly enjoying the whole record by himself, nodding his head to the rhythms, smiling, thinking, staring into space. I thought of this scene when reading, recently, Edmund Wilson's autobiographical novel published in 1929, I Thought of Daisy. There are so many good things to be said of this novel, but reading it I couldn't resist the idea of blogging the entire sequence during which the narrator lets himself into his friend Daisy's apartment, and, finding her not there, decides to wait for her, during which time he plays a record on her phonograph:

    "There was a phonograph beside me on the table: it was a small cheap portable one. I regarded it with hebetude. Without Daisy, it seemed as depressing as the glasses, as the garments, as the magazines. But involuntarily grasping at a last resource against despair, I picked up the heap of phonograph records, lying half-shuffled, like a battered pack of cards. Scrupulously I pushed them even and ran through them, reading all the titles: With You in Paradise, from Pretty Kitty, sung by Bee Brewster; Ben Bolt, by John McCormack; Chanson Hindoue, Saxophone Solo; So's Your Old Man, Fox Trot, by Fred Casey and His Burglar-alarm Boys; La Forza del Destino, Red Seal, Duet by Caruso and Scotti; Mamie Rose, Fox Trot, by Jake King and his Eight Kentucky Mocking Birds. I remembered that Mamie Rose was the fox-trot which Daisy had so offended by playing, the night of Ray Coleman's party, when Rita had been reciting her poems. I got up and put it on the machine.
    "The record, I noted, as I wound the crank, had been made by the American Melody Company. It was a pale and unpleasant brown and seemed to have been molded by river mud. Remembering the handsome victrola which I had seen at Ray Coleman's apartment I pitied Daisy a little; yet she had had the right sort of bravery, the bravery to go free when love had passed! The only needles I could find were buried in an ash-tray under cigarette butts and burnt matches, and it was impossible to tell the used from the new. The first I tried began with a blurt, a hideous stuttering blur. Still dominated by Rita's tastes, I felt that turning on the phonograph would be like drilling with a dental engine: Rita had not cared for popular music- had thought lightly of even the Rosenkavalier!
    "The second needle turned out no better, but I let it go; and presently Mamie Rose emerged as a kind of fiendish jig, running itself off at impossible speed; too fast, too nasal, too shrill. I made an effort to regulate it and only effected a harrowing descent of pitch, like the grasping and discordant howl of some demon from inside the machine crying out an intolerable agony at being compressed from one tempo to another. I listened for the first night I had met Daisy, but merely succeeded in having my heart wrung by the first night I had heard Rita's poems. The spring of the little phonograph held only for a single winding, so that the record began too fast and was already running down before it came to the end; but, what was worse, it had no horn, so that the demon inside the box, beating in its cramped black prison like a panic-stricken bat, had to squeeze out, as it were, through a crack- the little aperture at the base of the "arm." No wonder it chittered and squealed so thinly, like an unwinding wire of sound, like a wire, rusted, wry and eaten, worn away so that it seemed almost snapping, or so rough that it would stick and stammer over some echolalic phrase! So completely had the music been robbed of resonance that it seemed a mere memorandum of music, as if some writer in sound had scribbled down the skeleton of an orchestration, with the brasses brief tin-whistle blasts and raspings, the strings a jotted jingle of cicada chirpings, and the tympani scored as tiny explosions and echoless crashes of glass. And the "vocal refrain," when it suddenly began, had as little in common with the human voice as the noises of the instruments had with music: it gave the effect of some mere momentary modulation in the quick mechanical jiggling of a railroad train- it was a sharper shrillness, a more insistent iteration: There she goes- Mamie Rose- She-loves-me! Don't seem to show it!- How do I know it?- It's A.B.C.-She's- a crackle of high-pitched syllables ending with aggravatin'-But when I want a little lovin' she don't keep me waitin!- She's proud and snooty- But she's my cutie- She tells me- a second slip of dulled and driven cogs- That's how I knows- Mamie Rose- She-Loves-me! The jazz departed, with redoubled violence and complexities of deformation, into a last frantic charivari- then, after a brief unpleasing flourish, was bitten off as abruptly as it had begun.
    "I lifted the needle, clicked the little catch and went over to the window..."

New Review of *Forget Reading* by Anthony Hawley

CutBank Reviews

Penn Sound Daily Rss Feed

Penn Sound Daily

Hey, I Was Just Getting Used to Conceptual Poetry and Now We Have Conceptual Invasions

"A Shell spokeswoman hinted at the kind of work the companies might be engaged in. 'We can confirm that we have submitted a conceptual proposal to the Iraqi authorities to minimize current and future gas flaring in the south through gas gathering and utilization,' said the spokeswoman, Marnie Funk. 'The contents of the proposal are confidential.'"

Deals With Iraq Are Set To Bring Oil Giants Back

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Conceptual Poet Lives by Nicholas Manning

My Poem "The Sky Is A Painting in Black and Red (12 Dreams)"

is now available in the latest OCHO (#20) as a PDF
edited by Kemel Zaldivar
and for $8 in printed form from Mipoesias

and on The Annandale Dream Gazette edited by Lynn Behrendt

PRESENT TENSE


a play by Charles Borkhuis
part of the Tiny Theatre Festival (6 one-acts) at The Brick Theater


directed by Gabriel Shanks,

featuring Frank Blocker & Ben Trawick-Smith
Stage Manager: Jeni Shanks
Design: Allen Cutler


May 23 and 24 | 8pm | $15
at The Brick Theater, 575 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg
(L Train, 1/2 block from Lorimer Stop)
RESERVATIONS: 866-811-4111
http://www.theatremania.com

Two characters find themselves slipping in and out of parallel lives through "wormholes" in the space-time of the play. One believes he has dozed off at home with a book on his lap and the play is a curiously lucid dream. The other is convinced that their performances in front of a live audience are desperately real. Panic starts to set in as the play's complications and reversals become increasingly fascinating and frightening.

Rauschenberg's Goat

poemeleon

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Kaz Malanka interviewed by Gregory Vincent St Thomasino on Word for Word on Mathematical Poetry

Bob Grumman on mathmaku and mathematical poetry generally Word for Word (presented by Gregory Vincent St Thomasino)

OCHO 14

with work by Charles Bernstein, Alan Davies, Ray DiPalma, Elaine Equi, Nada Gordon, Mitch Highfill, Brenda Iijima, Kimberly Lyons, Sharon Mesmer, Tim Peterson, Corinne Robins, Jerome Sala, Gary Sullivan, Nico Vassilakis and Mark Young

is now available as a free download at Mipoesias.

"A terrific read from cover to cover." -Ron Silliman's Blog. And Nick Manning wote, in his review in the current issue of Jacket-"The value of Nick Piombino’s vision is that we are invited to accept this volume’s most vital paradoxes: the true fury of its moment."

Published by Didi Menendez, the print edition of OCHO 14, with a cover by Toni Simon, is available for $10.99, exclusively at Lulu

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Rachmaninov- By Andrew Lundwall

Goodreads

The art of reviewing, hey, the fact of book reviewing has taken a lot of hits in recent years. not the least of which is the closing down of poetry reviews at Publisher's Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, and long, long ago, the sad disappearance of Geoffrey O'Brien from the poetry book reviewing scene, the end of Tembor, due to the tragic early death of Leland Hickman, which featured terrfic critical writing from Joseph Simas, Ghino Tenger and many others. Geoffrey, of course, has been busy writing his own books, among others *The Phantom Empire" about the history of film, which I scored recently, complete with review and author photo, at the Strand for $1.

Thankfully, the web, in particular, Jacket, the blogging scene-and even the SUNY poetics list, has brought us some fine critical writng from, of course, Ron Silliman, Amy King,Gary Sullivan, Tim Peterson, Michael Lally, Nada Gordon, Ray Davis, Nicholas Manning, Sharon Mesmer, Mark Wallace, K. Silem Mohammad, Charles Bernstein, Jack Kimball and many others, most notably recently Douglas Messerli and his critically absorbing and autobiographically revelatory Green Integer Blog.

Not that long ago, a new phenomenon emerged on the web, that at first appeared to consist of little more than lists of favorite books on a site that echoed successes by other well known web "friendship" groups. When you join Goodreads, people may nominate themselves as "friends" or you may suggest yourself as a friend to other members, by going through the friend lists on your friends' sites, checking yourself off there for a request to be automatically emailed to someone, who can then accept or reject you. Possibly to distract myself from other work to be done, or perhaps to show off my library, of which I am quite proud (there is, among many other prized items my signed book by Theodore Dreiser), I joined up. One day, in a fit of inspiration I listed over 750 items from my library.

Anyway, lately I haven't been spending that much time on the thing, or on this thing for that matter, having been busy on some other projects, and having fallen in love with reading novels by women which I am now consume addictively like so many delicious, or ordinary boxes of chocolates. I seem to have become a gourmand of this genre, not a true gourmet. But when I got an invitation recently from Marcella Durand to become her "friend" on Goodreads. I noticed that John Ashbery was listed on her site. When he recently agreed to be my friend on Goodreads I thought to myself: wow, this is getting really interesting.

One of the features of Goodreads which you can receive if you choose to (you can also suspend it if you want) is to receive recent book reviews from your friends. I am not ashamed to admit, that while I do tend to read books, even for years, by types, I like to read almost any kind of book review, the same way I will read anything in front of me at the breakfast table, including whatever is on the cereal box, particularly if it happens to appear in front of me and there is nothing else to read. I don't always read the reviews that now pour in daily in my email inbox from Goodreads, but I have been reading every single one, by somebody who has named themselves, interestingly, tENTIVELY, acONVENIENCE. I noticed, and was struck by the sensitivity and generosity of a group of reviews he did about books by Alan Davies. He claims he is going through his library alphabetically, and reviewing books that catch his eye. Today, for example, he reviewed "In Celebration of Ourselves" by Seymour Rosen and said:

"Ah! The front cover gives a pretty good explanation: "All of us have to reveal our inner selves once in a while - Sometimes that just might mean smiling at a stranger for no reason - or whistling - A rarer breed likes to dress up as cabbage leaves or sunflowers - or wear Hawaiian leis or diapers - But there are few authorized times for that - What do you do when you have a full Samurai outfit and no place to go - Or a bird's-eye view of Sydney tattooed above your kidney - How do you say - I am alive - if you are a sixteeen-year-old ghetto kid - That's only the beginning - California has always had more than its share of - grand eccentrics"....A great, GREAT bk. Kinetic sculpture race, 'outsider' architecture, costumes, murals, folk sculpture, graffiti, neon, church fronts, shaped buildings, giant donut signs, art cars, homemade ads, all sorts of fascinating signs of creativity largely done outside of the art world. Oddly, my copy has rubber-stamped inside: 'NOT FOR RESALE DISTRIBUTE THRU BALTIMORE CITY HEALTH DEPARTMENT'".

Even if you know you'll never read even a fraction of the thousands of books you will find out about on Goodreads, it's a fascinating enterprise, not the least of which is the opportunity to list books you think others should know about. There are tons of books, by the way, for which there is only one listing, while there are others, like The Great Gatsby, that has 69, 760 listings, and, "the Curious Incident of A Dog at Nightime" which has over 39,000 listings, Charles Bernstein'a A Poetics has 39 listings as does Ron Silliman's Age of Huts; Elaine Equi's Ripple Effect has 20, Gary Sullivan's Elsewhere 1 has 10, Tim Peterson's When I Moved IN has 11,Brenda IIjima's Around Sea has 9, Nada Gordon's Folly 9, Kim Lyons' Saline has 8 and my fait accompli 7.

Goodreads is easly accessible on Google, of course.

prepublication launch & performance
Monday, May 5, 8pm (New York)

**Blind Witness: Three American Operas -- Charles Bernstein**

Forthcoming from Factory School
Blind Witness brings together in one book Bernstein's libretti for Blind
Witness News, The Subject, and The Lenny Paschen Show written for
composer Ben Yarmolinsky in the early 1990s.
Bernstein & Yarmolinsky will perform sections of the operas along with
Deborah Karpel, soprano; Nathan Resika, bass; Silvie Jensen, mezzo-soprano
Ishmael Wallace and Elizabeth Rodgers, piano
introduced by Joel Kuszai
Medicine Show
549 West 52nd St. (between 10th and 11th Ave.), New York
$5 admission
Reservations requested to ensure seating: 212-262-4216
This program is funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, a
state agency.
*
Advance copies of Blind Witness will be available at the launch at a
special discounted price
Blind Witness can be ordered now prepublication direct from Factory School:
http://factoryschool.org/pubs/blindwitness/

Contradicta




Whatever else it is, thought is a kind of touch, and if it is not felt it is not known.





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We imagine harmony, live in dissonance and think in the whirlpool between the two.





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Spring In This World of Poor Months:-Ange Mlinko in The Nation

The Brooklyn Conservatory Community Orchestra

A question from a young woman about the Prospect Park West bus led to a conversation about The Brooklyn Conservatory Community Orchestra for which she plays the cello, not an easy instrument to move about on city streets. Checking out the link (above) she told me about, I realized she was on her way to a rehearsal at that moment. When she told me that the orchestra is now rehearsing a Brahms symphony (#1, my favorite, in fact) I decided to definitely try to make the June 8th Concert, right nearby on 7th Avenue between 4th and 5th Street (John Jay High School).

By the way, the link includes Debussy's lovely Girl With the Flaxen Hair played by the First Street Woodwind Quintet, among other selections by the BCCO.

Contradicta




Insight is the hardest thing to find, the hardest thing to keep, one of the few things that last, and the only thing that makes things last.





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Thoughts are whispers, voices, footsteps, echoes overheard in a darkened room.

Dustin Williamson

reviewed *fait accompli*, the book, in the current Poetry Project Newletter.

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Jacket 35 is out with Nicholas Manning's review of OCHO 14.

Blogging as Thinking

Gary Norris' DagZine is back!

Contradicta


The secret of art is in knowing how, at the right moment, to seize what is important in what seemed unimportant and to reduce to its essential unimportance what was apparently so damned important before. It's the secret of happiness also, by the way.




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I thought I was becoming less confused until I noticed those who are not confused and then I became even more confused.


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New E-Book By Nico Vassilakis

GAMMM

The Form of Things

by Peter Ciccariello

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SEGUE READING SERIES
MARCH 29

Saturday: 4PM-6PM
308 Bowery, just north of Houston

$6 admission goes to support the readers



RODRIGO TOSCANO & MARK WALLACE
Rodrigo Toscano’s latest book is Collapsible Poetics Theater, which won the National Poetry Series 2007. Toscano is a poet and the artistic director and writer for the Collapsible Poetics Theater (CPT). His experimental poetics plays, body-movement poems, and polyvocalic pieces have recently been performed in San Francisco, and Alexandria, Virginia. Mark Wallace is the author and editor of a number of books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. A collection of his tales, Walking Dreams was published in 2007 and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion is forthcoming in 2008. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University San Marcos.

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""Beyond the Waves; Feminist Artists Talk Across Generations"
Sunday, March 30th, 3-5pm
Panelists: Susan Bee, Emma Bee Bernstein, Mira Schor, Carolee Schneemann, Brynna Tucker at The Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum
Free & Open to Public (With Museum Entry Fee) - 3:00 - 5:00 PM

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A.I.R. Gallery Gala Celebration & Exhibition
ART MUSIC FILM POETRY FASHION
Friday, March 28, 2008, 6-9 pm
Puck Building 295 Lafayette St.
(SE Corner of Lafayette & Houston, Manhattan)

Tastings of some of NYC's best food and wine. Participating restaurants include: Yushi Sushi, Vogues Chocolate, Daisy Bakery, Ito-En Teas, PT (Italian Cuisine), Mojito Restaurant, Ivy Bakery, La Palapa, Thai Palace & more.

A.I.R. and Art and Living Magazine are very pleased to award three outstanding women art professionals and three galleries the Art to Life Award for their passion and commitment to advancing the status of women artists: Judith Brodsky, Ferris Olin, Dr. Elizabeth Sackler, ACA Galleries, Flomenhaft Gallery, P.P.O.W. Gallery

A.I.R.'s first annual Gala is the highlight of a series of events celebrating women in the arts during National Women's History Month. The centerpiece of the Gala is a retrospective of artists who have exhibited work at A.I.R. Gallery over the past 36 years. Works by the artists who have not shown at A.I.R. but have actively supported our mission over the years will also be on view.

The Gala exhibition and art sale will be on view from 5PM until 9PM, featuring a special preview from 5PM to 6PM for collectors, curators, critics and the general public.

Feminist Fashion Show , produced by former A.I.R. Fellowship Recipient Enid Crow returns as part of this exciting evening!

Featuring music & poetry, including V. Da Nessa Monk and Eileen Myles

Nicholas Manning reviews Ocho 14 in Jacket

Elsewhere


and


Text Loses Time by Nico Vassilakis

in

Galatea's Resurrects #9

Contradicta




Go ahead and jump to conclusions, then try to skip the conclusion part.





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Life is a crossword puzzle with too many boxes, and too few hints.

Everybody's Heading For

Big Bridge 2008

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Elephant Hearts Tonight at the Zinc Bar

These two poets win the award for lyrical sensitivity combined with urban wit:

Godfrey + Lyons

3/2 reading at Zinc Bar

starts at 6:30 (not 7pm as announced previously)

see you there

Kl

Sustainable Aircraft: a new online poetry review edited by Josef Kaplan

reviews of: Michael Gottlieb (by Alan Davies), Stacy Doris, John Ashbery, President of the United Hearts, others

Sustainable Aircraft

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Barrett Watten on Lytle Shaw's *Frank O'Hara*

in

Artforum Online

When Barrett Watten is at his best, as in this lively, readable review, his writing reveals the "pleasure of the text" as much as Barthes, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling or Hazlitt in their heydays. A real treat.

Make Art!

As almost everybody knows, singer/actors Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova just received Oscars for their song "Falling Slowly" from the film *Once.* Well, despite its unrelieved sentimentality, I loved the movie of the same title, which is about street musicians (last week, *fait accompli* featured Kathleen Mock, a real life street musician whose music is of the first order). Glen Hansard ended his thank yous, with the aside, "Make art!" This thought, and the attitude with which it was presented, was very much in keeping with the spirit of the movie. He also mentioned that the film was made in three weeks for $100,000.

Gary (Sullivan) and Nada (Gordon)

stopped by yesterday to watch the debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with us. As you know, if you read Nada's blog, she enthusiastically supports Hillary. The debate was ok, Toni's pasta dinner was great, and Gary and Nada were as much fun as ever. What is truly exciting is that Gary gave me an early printing of his book of plays *PPL In A Depot* coming out very soon from Roof Books, two of which were published in OCHO 14 which I guest edited with much help from Toni, who did the cover. Speaking of covers, this one is awesome, a tracing from some wall graffiti which Gary had photographed. Mac Wellman wrote of these plays: "Gary Sullivan's PPL in a Depot is a collection of pataphysical dramas- each a delight to read, and presumably to watch- if from a safe distance. A gleeful and slightly spavined collection of fast-moving and un-pindownable plays in a nastily wicked vein. They could be called poetic, but the author whould probably prefer to be shot than thought poetic. How can you not love a play called 'Written in Styrofoam'?"

God, I love these plays. They will make you think and laugh at the same time, or will teach you how.

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Heather O'Neill's *lullabies for little criminals*, Harper 2006

What *David Copperfield* was for the 19th Century and *The Catcher in the Rye* for the 20th, *lullabies for little criminals* could or should be for the 21st.This is childhood painted against a black sky, where a fat full moon glares at you grumpily or shimmers its silver smiles and falling stars lift, then break your heart.

Heather O'Neill's story *The End of Pinky* in The Walrus

Heather O"Neill profile in Quill and Quire

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Kathleen Mock Rides Again

If you are a subway commuter in New York there is little doubt that you have more than once stopped to listen, with pleasurable surprise, to Kathleen Mock's lovely, vibrant voice wending its way between the roars of trains entering and leaving the station. It was quite some time ago that I first chatted with her and bought a CD. To my delight I heard her again playing yesterday at the 96th Street station on the #3 train. This time I bought another CD of hers, which she told me consists of songs written in her 20s. She loves singing on the subway now as much as she did when she started 18 years ago. Kathleen Mock website, including NPR interview, here: Kathleen Mock

Out of the Past: Lucy Lippard talks about Eva Hesse with Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt
6/5/1973- Artforum, February 2008

This month's Artforum features a fascinating interview that Lucy Lippard held with Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson in 1973. For Robert Smithson and Eva Hesse fans (are there any art lovers over the age of 50 who aren't?) this is a definite must-read. I couldn't resist copying out some sections to post. Of course it led me to remembering my own brief meeting with Smithson at Max's Kansas City in the early 70's. I was introduced to him by a friend, the artist Wayne Timm who I had met in Provincetown in 1962. Reading this interview also led me to thinking about the fact that by the early 1980's I had lost five heroes as a result of untimely deaths: Buddy Holly (I was at a Crickets concert in 1957), Robert Smithson, John Lennon, Ted Berrigan and Phillip K. Dick. All of these heroes were prophets who typified and emcompassed their eras in their work and who also very accurately anticipated the future by means of their astounding innovative creations. In this interview Smithson shows the impressive scope of his insights.

"Robert Smithson: I think all perception is tainted with a kind of psychoanalytic reading. In other words, somebody who's having Oedipal problems, it's going to come out in the perception, or it's going to come out in the making, the kind of work they choose to do. I got into a sort of psychoanalyzing of landscape perception in that [Frederick Law] Olmstead piece."

"Lucy Lippard: Yeah, true, You go back in, in order to come back out- the labyrinth."

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"Robert Smithson: But my high school art teacher said to me that the only people that become artists are women and cripples."

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"Robert Smithson: Society at large has a kind of flattening effect in terms of its rationality, the kind of rationality that more or less keeps things going. It's very totalitarian, because it flattens everything out. We're sort of witnessing that with the Watergate situation, or that's breaking down. There's a kind of real artlessness about these people; they're really people without art. They control. The artist is in some other realm. The artist is involved with some kind of enchantment. In the other world, that whole enchantment is crushed with some kind of efficiency, and that efficiency is now catching up with itself."

"Nancy Holt: I think the more awareness you have, the more difficult it gets. Part of the motivation for smoking dope or drinking is to dull what can be seen, felt, and perceived, and I'm sure that that extends into other areas of life. I'm sure that we're all blocking off large segments that we can't deal with in any given moment. It might be like dimming in and dimming out."

"Robert Smithson: There's a kind of terrorism involved in the whole situation. How much can you take? I thought it would be very interesting if tornadoes came into New York and ripped it up. But I think the art world is a sort of tribal society with its totems and taboos. No human can withstand too much emotional stress. Taling about Eva [Hesse] that stress is sort of objectified into this totem."

New at Penn Sound

Thanks to Danny Snelson, Charles Bernstein, Al Filreis and others at Penn Sound for the great job in updating and presenting my sound files- I hope you will have a chance have a look and a listen soon

Penn Sound

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Text Loses Time by Nico Vassilakis

a review on

fantographic books
by

Eric Reynolds

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The Remains of the Poet

Peter Ciccariello

New Sound Files at Penn Sound

J. Henry Chunko
Danny Snelson has been updating my sound files at Penn Sound, "segmenting" them, as he explains it- which means you can listen much more easily to individual tracks- has some very kind words to say about this blog- which was a very nice thing to happen on:: fait accompli's:: fifth birthday!

Thanks, Danny

"Ah, Squares": Big Window Features the Art of Toni Simon

Big Window

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Douglas Messerli Opens New Blog

Green Integer

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critiiphoria #1

Critiphoria

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"Nobody is well known. Look at the Unknown Soldier: everybody knows him"

Francis Picabia

("I Am A Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, Provocations"
translated by Mark Lowenthal; MIT Press)

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger


Things are cooking up in the poetry world lately; so many readings and publications it is hard to keep track of them all. This past weekend there were readings at Adam's Books, The Museum of the City of New York, The Bowery Poetry Club and other venues including the AWP conference that included Carla Harryman, David Shapiro, Anne Waldman, Jeff Encke and many, many others. You'll have to check elsewhere for the scoop on the AWP.

I did attend the Counterpath reading (see list below) at the Bowery Poetry Club and listened with pleasure to Anthony Hawley, Laynie Browne, Jen Hofer, Marjorie Welish, Peter Gizzi, Forest Gander and many others.

Earlier on Friday I had lunch with Anthony Hawley whose acquaintance I made last year at the reading for Gina Meyers' Tiny, issue #3 at the Poetry Project.

Anthony and I met for lunch at the Moma Snack bar. Over excellent soup and salad Anthony I swapped stories about our childhoods and other things. Anthony has a new book from Counterpath that last year published his terrific Autobiography/Oughtabiography. After Anthony left for further AWP activities close by MOMA at the Hilton I stayed to look around. I liked the Latin American show, but particularly enjoyed a piece by Rodney Graham titled Rheinmetall/Victoria 8. This film depicts a 1930's German typewriter found in a junk shop screened using an ancient projector.

Rodney Graham

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Lanny Quarles

has opened a new group blog

Havmophunic Transolutions

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Don't Miss

Douglas Messerli's *My Year 2005: Terrifying Times (Green Integer). Douglas Messerli has embarked on a massive memoir project that is inventive, comprehensive, funny and fascinating. By means of brief essays juxtaposed with each other disjunctively he is both tracing his own and cultural history from 2000-2010. Each year is given a theme that Douglas traces by means of reviews, autobiographical anecdotes, interviews and other sorts of short pieces. 2005 was "terrifying times." This year he told me. over lunch and coffee at recently at Molyvos, is called "Into the Gap" which is a phrase that describes the dangerous missions of counter-spies who put themselves out in the open to bring out their adversaries. This is time travel par excellence and well worth reading and collecting. From the Table of Contents: "How to Destroy your Children", "Three Hitchcock Structures", "Applause, Applause", "The Prom King", "How ROTC Saved My Llife", "How I Learned to Write Immorally", "Nine Nights in New York", "Making Things Difficult: An Interview between Charles Bernstein and Douglas Messerli", "Two Words by Julien Gracq", "Standstill", "The Hole Missing Robert Creeley", "What Have We Reaped?", "Something Wicked", "Longo's Empire", "The Imperfect Medium", "Answering the Sphinx", "The Necessary Remedy", "Living Darwinism", "Singing the Body Electric", "Borders without Borders", "Starting Over"

**

Literacy and Longing in L.A. by Jennifer Kaufman and Karen Mack, Delacorte Press
My review on Goodreads

bookshelves: currently-reading (edit)
review: Ever since reading Peter Moore's terrific novel Los Angeles, one of my novelistic holy grails became the search for new witty novels that take place in the silver screen behemoth. For me, Los Angeles is to New York what Paris is to London, our mirror opposite, our ambivalent companion. That grail has been more than satisfied, for the moment, by the literary team Jennifer Kaufman and Karen Mack's *Literacy and Longing in L.A.* For denizens of Goodreads this novel may well be the most sheer literary fun they've had in years, because essentially it is about them. This is a book about, for and by literary gourmands, compulsive readers and book collectors whose lives, let alone "free time" are based on the desire to read. The main character, Dora (named after--guess--Eudora Welty) has recently divorced. In blatant identification with her alcoholic mother, whose husband, Dora's father, left when the two sisters were around 8, Dora loses herself- to the reader's great joy- in an endless reading fest that she writes about in great detail. Dora's husband is a wealthy CEO who is ravishingly handsome but who admits to being "bored by Shakespeare." After a few years of tedious social events, Dora leaves him for her books, bathtub and bottle of wine. A mad affair with a bookstore clerk/playwright brings her to her senses--and more books. At the end of the tome you find a 10 page single spaced list of books mentioned in the text.

Counterpath Press at the Bowery
Poetry Club starting at 7 on Friday, Feb. 1st.

Anthony Hawley
Laynie Browne
Linda Norton
Cole Swensen
Martine Bellen
Bruce Beasley
Gillian Conoley
Forrest Gander
Peter Gizzi
Jen Hofer
Elizabeth Willis
Claudia Keelan
Timothy Liu
Suzanne Paola
Bin Ramke
Donald Revell
Carol Snow
Marjorie Welish


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Reading at the Museum of the City of New York Sunday 2pm Honoring Rudy Burkihardt and Yvonne Jacquette

reservations required

Museum Reading

Notebook, 1/27/08

Wanderers

Awareness, whether of past, present or future experience appears as a shimmering. Things maintain solidity but even our awareness of our own bodies sustains this ghostly, discontinuous quality. Everything in time plays hide and seek with us. Perhaps if we could be sure of a purpose for existence the accumulation of a myriad of moments might assume some permanent outline or shape. But without certainty of proven purpose, comprehension of material manifestation must remain sporadic. The perpetuation of this fleeting significance of experience constantly returns us to various shadings of desire or despair. In order to reconceive these aporia as graspable entities we are led to evolve forms of metaphysical measure. But even our senses of success in such strivings remain occasional and tentative. Life is a voyage whose ports offer countless discoveries but whose goals remain elusive.


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This just in from Mark Young

Otoliths 8


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New Interview Issue from Mipoesias includes an interview with Gary Sullian by Rodney Koeneke
Mipoesias

Drew Gardner's Poetics Orchestra

performed last night at the legendary Living Theater, featuring poets Katie Degentesh and Sharon Mesmer as well as the Musetry Project with Steve Dalachinsky and Ellen Christi. Christi and Dalachinsky brought back very pleasant memories and smiles for me of Keeley Smith and Louis Prima, a comic jazz duo extant no doubt well before your time, reader. Ellen Christi's jazz riffs worked well with Dalanchinsky's poetic monologues spoken in a cool undertone at the back of the Living Theater stage decked out for a Judith Malina play which is up now. One of Dalichinsky's poetic quips floated by me bringing a strong chuckle: "young and gifted, old and gifted." ( "Is botox a ball team?" he later asked, from the stage, of Sharon Mesmer, referring to a line from her performance: "I thought it was BoSox").You could see that both Christi, and later Degentesh added to their comic presences by working from the sunken bathtub which was part of the Malina stage set (Malina performs there tonight there in a two-women play at 21 Clinton Street on the Wednesday pay-as-you-wish basis). Katie Degentesh read from her recent book The Anger Scale, in the lightning fast world of blogging already an underground classic, and Sharon Mesmer read mostly from her equally awesome new book Annoying Diabetic Bitch, both from Combo.Mesmer and Degentesh are terrific poets, working in these books in the Flarf manner, who happen also to be superb performing poets as well; i would even go so far as to say they are each fine comic actors who write their own hilariously parodic material that strikes home on many levels of complexity: poetic, personal, social and philosophic. Sharon told me that she has performed before with bands and enjoyed it. I heard her ask Drew to invite her back and I hope he does. The members of the Orchestra were in top form as well, melodically rich, rhythmically diverse and meticulously coordinated both with each other and with the poets, under the able baton of Drew Gardner. Mesmer and Degentesh's voices also blended well together yet each has her own unique and individual peforming style. I hope Drew brings them all together again soon.

Speaking of bitchin' books...

Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books)
Sonnetailia (Roof Books)

Thursday, January 24
8pm
Mehanata Bulgarian Bar
113 Ludlow Street
NYC

F/J/M/Z trains to Delancey/Essex
Free admission until 10:30
Cash bar
Eugene Hütz of Gogol Bordello DJ-ing at 10:30


Drinkin’!
Dancin’!
Rockin’!
Aww yeah!

More info:
Mehanata
Virgin Formica
[from Virgin Formica- Sharon Mesmer]

By the way, Nicole Peyrafitte, who was in the audience, will be performing at the Zinc Bar on Sunday, January 17 with Belle Gironda at 6pm. Having lived these many years in Albany, raising two children with poet-blogger-translator-traveler-professor Pierre Joris, she now resides in Brooklyn, where, like so many other poets these days, she unquestionably wants to be.

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This Just In from Tom Beckett:

An Ex-Val Interview with Jessica Grim

Reviews of OCHO 15 published by Didi Menendez

The Montserrat Review

Why Do We Hate This President? Let Us Count The Ways

Lally's Alley

This Just In from Drew Gardner

--FRIDAY, 1/18--

I'll be performing at the book release party for the release of
Jackson Mac Low's Thing of Beauty:
From 6:30 - 8:00pm, CUE Art Foundation, 511 West 25th Street, NYC

Readers/performers include Charles Bernstein, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge,
Katie Degentesh, Mitch Highfill, Chris Mason, Joan Retallack, Anne
Tardos

www.cueartfoundation.org


--TUESDAY 1/22--

Drew Gardner's Poetics Orchestra @ The Living Theater

I'll be conducting The Poetics Orchestra, 8:00pm, The Living Theater,
21 Clinton St., NYC

featuring: Gene Cawley, Ty Cumbie, Steve Dalachinsky, Katie
Degentesh, Francois Grillot, James Ilgenfritz, Daniel Nester, Sharon
Mesmer

with: Ty Cumbie's Musetry Project!

http://www.livingtheatre.org/livingmusic.html

Didi Menendez has a blog

Sardines and Orange

Contradicta






Those who always know where they are going are not very interesting when they get there.




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Only that which is freely given can be freely taken.

Toni Simon- the Mipoesias Art Gallery

Free Fall- the Mipoesias Art Gallery

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Contradicta



Ask your feet to take you where your mind won't go.




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Understanding the world and its needs may tell me why I should give; but it is understanding myself and my own needs that tells me why I am able to give.

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Tom Beckett discusses Jean Vengua's new book of poetry Prau