Two Summer Recommendations

Toni and I are off to Chelsea today, but last night's jaunts are worth telling you about. We saw
The Shapes of Space at the Guggenheim and Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare Theater in Central Park. Total cost: $2 with $7 more for the chicken sandwich we ate during the en'tracte at the play.

Both events were very enjoyable. They led to a lively discussion regarding Ontology. The R & J is the first in 40 years in the park. Mercutio and Juliet were terrific and all the parts were played well.

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An Invitation from Simon Pettet

Friday June 22 at 7.00 pm.


You are cordially invited...


SIMON PETTET and
JOHN COLETTI

will be reading

at the Bowery Poetry Club

308 Bowery, NYC 10012 (212.614.050)
between. Bleecker & Houston,
(F or V to 2nd Ave / 6 to Bleecker Street )

For Farfalla Press Free Broadsides for the first 50 attendees! -

Blogkatie Blog


Another Katie Degentesh type subway experience. Heading for Manhattan on the #3 train I kept trying to read my book and getting interrupted by these long spiels by the conductor over the loudspeaker system. Just as I began getting bored with his cloying and cheerful "have a nice day" he added: "As the hotdog man said to the Zen Master, 'make me one with everything.'

New review of *fait accompli* (Factory School)

venepoetics

I am deeply grateful to Guillermo Parra for the work he has put into this special review.

Contradicta


Among the greatest sources of happiness is to possess the means within to resist unhappiness.

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

Without the capacity to distinguish the trivial from the crucial, wisdom is useless.

Contradicta


The novice plays to the invited guests, the master plays to the gallery.

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

Listen well to the disputes of the philosophers within yourself, but never sit at their feet.

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Thanks to Jordan Stempleman for the link to
Otoliths new releases including *Free Fall*
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to Lally's Alley for Another quote
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to This cruellest month for the link to James Sherry's classic "She''ll be comin' round
and to
Limetree for the same.
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Something Worth Fighting For
Taking on Alzheimer's

*Free Fall* is now available through the

Otoliths storefront

Some images from *Free Fall*
E-ratio #4
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Sheila Murphy interviews Peter Ganick on Ex-Val

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Brooklyn's, In Fact, New York's Best Bookstore Now Has A Blog

Adam's Books

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This just in from Mark Young in Rockhampton, Australia

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They have been delayed a little by production problems, but Otoliths is pleased to announce the balance of its quarterly round of books — Nick Piombino's by now legendary "visual collage novel" Free Fall, Sheila E. Murphy's first integrated linear & visual collection The Case of the Lost Objective (Case) & Rochelle Ratner's memoir / found text / poetry journal Leads.



Free Fall

Nick Piombino

168 pages, full color

ISBN: 978-0-9803-6590-0

Otoliths 2007

$35.95 + p&h

URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/755973

"Free Fall was created in several steps beginning in July, 2001 when I collected a stack of advertising posters off buildings on the streets of Amsterdam. The serendipity of a period of rain had caused many of the ads to blur and run and to have already partially removed themselves from the walls. In a series of visits I tore down quite a number of them, and before coming back to the US, made a selection. Once back in New York I xeroxed a number of copies of the poster fragments in order to work out mock-ups of the collages, and purchased a 5"X7" artist's sketch book to paste them into. Over the years, since creating my first collages in the late 60's in Rapallo, Italy, I had begun several collage books, none of them completed, so I had some idea of what I wanted to do. I did further xeroxing in Provincetown, Mass. in August. Sitting outside a small cottage near the Wellfleet bay, I made the entire series of 154 collages in about a month. For this edition, the collages were scanned in during March and early April, 2007.



The creation of Free Fall was bookended by two tragic events. The first was the suicide of a popular musician in Holland, Herman Brood, shortly before I arrived in Amsterdam. About ten days after the completion of Free Fall came the events of 9/11.



Based on the art of its streets, Free Fall insistently invokes the celebratory character of this tolerant, life affirming city." Nick Piombino



The Case of the Lost Objective (Case)

Sheila E. Murphy

84 pages, color

ISBN: 978-0-9803-6592-4

Otoliths 2007

$20.00 + p&h

URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/840898


This vibrant collection of new work by Sheila E. Murphy encompasses both lineated and prose poems. In addition, for the first time, selected prints of Murphy's visual poetry, some included in private collections and in gallery exhibitions, are presented in book format. The range of work within these pages attests to the versatility and depth of this poet, and invites being read aloud to reveal the full range of perception and innovative use of language.



Leads

Rochelle Ratner

128 pages

ISBN: 978-0-9803-6591-7

Otoliths 2007

$12.50 + p&h

URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/830227

"The germs of this book began in 1977, when I visited friends in London. As a child, I'd been told I had a speech impediment, but I vehemently refused voice lessons. Then, in a London pub, talking with a friend from the Lancashire/Yorkshire border, it was almost as if I fitted in at last. Without realizing it, I'd probably inherited aspects of my grandmother's accent. And I'd never missed her as much as I did at that moment. That was when I began planning a trip to Leeds, where my grandmother was born and spent her childhood. I knew I had to write about it, and began a series of poems as the journey took shape. Once there, I copied from books and records I'd found in the Leeds library. I began writing down what people said. What I hadn't expected was that, as I later tried to shape the materials, I would find other peoples' words more powerful than my own. Poem? Journal? Memoir? Found text? Think of Olson's Maximus or Paul Metcalf's writings." Rochelle Ratner



They join two other books the other books brought out in this round, Tom Beckett's curation of E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: the First XI Interviews which was launched early in response to popular demand, & Mark Young's Falsely Goethe, a collection of 101 "day poems".



The First XI Interviews .

Tom Beckett (Curator)

252 pages

ISBN: 978-0-9775604-9-3
Otoliths, 2007

$16.95 + p&h

URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/778361





Tom Beckett's E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S website has become, since its inception in 2005, an important source of information on contemporary poetry and poetics. This book brings together the first eleven interviews from the on-going series, augmented by bionotes and almost one hundred pages of self-selected examples of the interviewees' work.



The interviewees (some of whom later reappear as interviewers) are Crag Hill, Thomas Fink, Nick Piombino, Sheila E. Murphy, Eileen Tabios, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, K. Silem Mohammad, Geof Huth, Barbara Jane Reyes, Paolo Javier, Stephen Paul Miller and Jean Vengua.The other interviewers are Tom Beckett, Ron Silliman and Mark Young.





Falsely Goethe

Mark Young

108 pages

ISBN: 978-0-9803-6593-1

Otoliths 2007

$10.00 + p&h

URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/830205



Day fifty



Today the
postman brought
me "Ventriloquism
for Dummies".


"As a matter of fact, I can't remember laughing as much reading any book of poetry before, especially not any book of putative light verse. These poems, though, are not just about joking when they joke; the jokes are, like the one above, tiny metaphysical statements. They unwrap language, reality, even pop culture (a beast a bit different from reality, even if related to it). The shortest of these joke-poems are as perfect, intellectual, and literary as the best Stephen Wright one-liners. The joke-poem is an instant of insight, a Zen koan." Geof Huth, from a post at dbqp:visualizing poetics .





These & other Otoliths books, including print copies of the e-zine are avaliable from The Otoliths Storefront .

On My Desk

Michael Lally's *March 18, 2003*
(a couple of brief quotes}

"...Is that why now it's life I'm obsessed with?
Or is that because when I watched
the second plane crash into the second tower on TV
a thin blue tube hung from my urethra,
attached to a clear plastic bag, the remnant of a
cancer operation the week before,
unaware an old friend was on that flight,
at that moment incinerated,
a woman who was kind to me when
she didn't need to be?
How many people have died
before you got a chance to tell them what you meant to?
Does it seem there's
not enough
sometimes because it is
too much?
Haven't I said and written more than once
that poetry saved my life?
Did it for you?
Wasn't it the only thing that could stop the war
in my heart and head
over where I thought I was being led
by the clan and neighborhood
and extended family of cops
I was born into a the beginning of another war
when the prognosis was bleak for *our* side?....
Did anyone ever discuss how we obliterated
Dresden,for no strategic reason, or caused
more civilian death and devastation there and
in the fire bombing of Tokyo than with
the atom bombs we dropped?
Why didn't I know that General Electric
got off with a fine and hand slaps
for colluding with the Nazis or that IBM set up
the Nazi record keeping or that we refused
to bomb the railroad tracks that carried the
freight cars full of Jews to their destruction?"

from *March 18, 2003*
a poem for peace
Drawings by Alex Katz
59 pages
Edizione Charta, Milano, 2006
first published by Libellum Books

Michael Lally had some kind words to say recently about the book version of *fait accompli* on his blog
Lally's Alley.
It was also an occasion for a, classic Lally riff- well worth reading- on his ideas and personal experiences concerning poetry, poetics and poetry communities.

Vanishing Texts

Beckett's *Unprotected Texts* are rapidly vanshing-get 'em while you can [via Soluble Census]

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I'll be reading on Thursday, June 7th at 7:30 at the Ceres Gallery 547 West 27th Street NY NY 10001 (212) 947-6100 with Corinne Robins. The gallery is featuring the excellent work of Carol Goebel.


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On My Desk

When I received my library copy of The Selected Letters of Stephane Mallarme, I opened it to a letter to Odilon Redon. Mallarme wrote to Redon on February 2, 1885: "A highly mysterious sympathy made you depict in that delicious mad hermit the poor little man who, in the depths of my soul, I'd like to be; and I'll hang this drawing on its own on a wall of my memory so I can judge the others in a more disinterested way. The head of Dream, that marsh flower, illuminates, with a light known to herself alone and which cannot be pronounced, the whole tragic lantern of ordinary existence..."

**

Yesterday I happned to visit Mercer Street Books & records (206 Mercer Street) and walked straight into *To Myself: Notes on LIfe, Art and Letters* by Odilon Redon, Braziller, 1986. Lately I've been obsessed with the music of Robert Schumann. If you've never heard the early piano works of Schumann, like Papillons, op.2 and Davidsbundler-Tanze, op. 8, you have a major treat waiting for you. I opened the book to this passage (about Schumann): "'Be a noble artist', Schuman said, 'and all the rest will be given to you.' It is because he was noble himself if one understands by "noble" the absolute unselfishness, generosity, expansion and the vivid exuberance of a full and strong soul. Schumann has given his fruit: he has given it, as the apple-tree gives apples witout personal wishes, and without regrets. He has given his heart and his thought, his works, his life in the same way as those who suffer for others, and therein lies the supreme grace, the characteristic sign of profound genius. One cann say this about everybody; one could not say this about somebody like Berlioz, for example...(December, 1915)

By the way, Debussy wrote of Berlioz in *Monsieur Croche* his book of articles about music: "Incidentally, the work of Berlioz, through he pre-occupation with color and incident, became at once a subject for artists; one might even say without irony that Berlioz has always been the favorite musician of those who do not know much about music."

**

St,-John Perse, *On Poetry*, translated by W.H. Auden, Bollingen Series. (Nobel prize acceptance speech, December 10, 1960. "Poetry rarely received public homage. The gulf between poetic creation and the activities of a society subjected to material bondage grows ever wider,..the poet keeps us in touch with the permanance and unity of Being. And his messsage is one of optimism. To him, one law of harmony govers the whole world of things. Nothing can occur there which by its nature is incommensuable with man. The worst catastrophes of history are but seasonal rhythms in a vaster cycle of repetitions and renewals. The Furies who cross the stage, torches high, do but throw light upon one moment in the immense plot as it unfolds itself through time. Growing civilizations do not perish from the pangs of one autumn; they mrerely shed their leaves. Inertia is the only mortal dange. Poet is he who breaks for us the bonds of habit."

Contradicta




Every moment offers its part of a nimble, affectionate melody that counters contentious disharmony.


****



But once in a while play a strong, harsh chord to discourage the bullies.



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Dreamers of the World, Unite


pseudpodium


Ray Davis has some kind words to say about *fait accompli*, blog and book.


Ray: gather ye damn rosebuds, put together a book and get it published!

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"SHE'LL BE COMING' ROUND"

by James Sherry



She'll be comin' round the mountain when the shell sometimes is empty
She'll be comin' sometimes and the shell is an evasion,
when she comes round the mountain
to put in an appearnce
and this is the introduction we're all trying' to come 'round to.

She'll be drivin' six white and well-bred young mares,
She''ll be trying' to be comin', when one of the horses slips on a curve,
but the traces hold her up
like a beautiful horse about to describe
the great vehicle she'll conduct, when she comes.

And we'll all go out to meet her when the well is dry and cracked
and the water is too neutral to hold
even a chance encounter when we're tryin' to be comin'
and breathe too much or that's what I
heard when tryin' too hard to meet her, when she comes.

And we'll all have chicken and dumplings in a context
of the human shell, water in the trough,
the gopher holds, how hot leather is in the desert mining town
except to the horses,
when she comes."

from *Part Songs* by James Sherry
Roof Books, 1978

On My Desk

Selected Letters of Stephane Mallarme, edited and translated by Rosemary LLoyd, Univ of Chicago, 1988

"Leo d'Orfer 27 June, 1884

It's a real punch, momentarily blinding, that abrupt demand of yours: "Define Poetry." Bruised,I stutter:

*Poetry is the expression, in human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious meaning of the aspects of existence: in this way it confers authenticity on our time on earth and constitutes the only perpetual task there is.*

Farewell, but you owe me an apology."

"Paul Verlaine 8 December 1884

Of course. [Verlaine had written Mallarme apologizing for not sending a free copy of his book of poems,* Jadis et naguere*, but explaining that the publisher opposed such a move on the grounds that even for a poet the cost was not too high. Verlaine asked Mallarme to explain this to their mutural friends]. Basically the poet has no other choice; and his destiny becomes too ironic by far if he has to provide free copies to the hundred readers who would otherwise allow him- I won't say to live!- but to have bread or cigars. In future this will have to become standard practice between colleagues, and, something that's tacitly understood".

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George Burns, *Gracie, A Love Story*, GP PUtnam's Sons, 1988

"Sex is certainly a very important part of any marriage. Gracie and I had a wonderful life together, and a wonderful marriage, and sex was part of it, but not the major part. Probably the most important thing about sex is that it helps sell a lot of books. I have to be honest. I was a lousy lover. Fortunately Gracie married me for laughs, not for sex. Of course she got both of them- when we had sex, she laughed.

Gracie and I always had a nice time together, but after we'd made love she never gave me a standing ovation. In our marriage- I suspect in every marriage- the really important things became, "How do you feel?" "Is the soup hot?" "Want to see a movie tonight?" These are the things that keep a marriage together."

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Poetry on You Tube by Nico Vassilakis from the

Continental Review

and

DIPTYCHS a book of visual poetry is out from Otoliths.

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New poem by Ray DiPalma from The Harvard Review

Rae Armantrout and Elaine Equi

read at the BPC on Saturday, hosted by Tim Peterson and Erika Kauffman. This was the last reading of the season. When I arrived I found standing outside at the door Michael Lally, Anne Waldman, Jerome Sala, and Elaine Equi. Soon after, Abigail Child and others arrived. Plenty of people were inside already. After a few minutes of chatting Tim Peterson came to the door and waved us in. I needed to ask Michael for his New Jersey address as he has a particularly important cameo in my book *fait accompli* and I wanted to mail him a copy. This was surely one of the best readings of the year, if not the decade. Both readers read from new books. The place was packed. Elaine and Rae are close friends and have no doubt been following each others work closely for many years. Both write gnomic, terse poems of infinite wit, shrewd social critique and verbal grace; Rae seems to draw more from irony and Elaine from pop culture but these are only surface qualities. Hearing them together, you realize how much their combined work encompasses what is most treasured and loved in contemporary poetry:aphoristic insight, humor, pungent, but not complaining, satire, compressed imagery and sophisticated, imagistic word play. And this isn't even half of it. There is also not a small amount of tough love and self mockery. I could go on and on but they don't and that is one of the things we like best about them, no? Rae is a fairly infrequent visitor so may I share with you the inscription I wrote in the copy of my new book, I brought for her? OK, I will, thanks:

Dear Rae: Listening to your reading I thought of two things I wanted to tell you about your poetry. 1) It is sharp, but it doesn't wound, so this is maybe one of the reasons why my mind allows your words to go in so deep. 2) One of your poems says that you heard a couple bickering and why not. I am married to poetry and we have plenty to bicker about- and why not? Love, Nick

Next BPC reading is in October.

Contradicta






There is no firm feeling of accomplishment until your friend has emphatically explained to you all the reasons you should have it.




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



It is one thing to appropriate some ideas here and there, but it is completely another to lack the means to discover your own.

Support Small Presses and Magazines:

It's Not Too Late To Sign The Petition To

Stamp Out the Rate Hikes
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Peter Manson's Links

On My Desk


Paul Gauguin, *Noa Noa* , NIcholas L Brown, 1919

"Tehura, immobile, naked, lying face downward flat on the bed with the eyes inordinately large with fear. She looked at me, and seemed not to recognize me, As for myself I stood for some moments strangely uncertain. A contagion emanated from the terror of Tehura. I had the illusion that a phosphorescent light was streaming from her staring eyes. Never had I seen her so beautiful, so tremulously beautiful. And then in this half-light which was surely peopled for her with dangerous appariations, I was afraid to make any movement which might increase the child's paroxysm of fright. How could I know what at that moment I might seem to her? Might she not with my frightened face take me for one of the demons and specters, one of the Tupapaus, with which the legends of her race people sleepless nights? Did i really know who in truth she was herself? The intensity of fright which had dominated her as the result of the physical and moral power of her superstitions had transformed her into a strange being, entirely different from anything I had known heretofore."

****

Sylvia Plath reads-, Caedmon, 50 minute cassette

The Poetry of Sylvia Plath/Stanford




****

Anne Sexton: the voice of the poet, 60 minute cassette, 64 page book

"Tonight I will learn to love you twice;
learn your first days, your mid-Victorian face.
Tonight I will speak up and interrupt
your letters, warning you that wars are coming,
that the Count will die, that you will accept
your America back to live like a prim thing
on the farm in Maine. I tell you, you will come
here,to the suburbs of Boston to see the blue-nose
world go drunk each night, to see the handsome
children jitterbug, to feel your left ear close
on Friday on Symphony. And I tell you,
you will tip your boot feet out of that hall,
rocking from its sour sound, out onto
the crowded street, letting your spectacles fall
and your hair net tangle as you stop passers-by
to mumble your guilty love while your ears die."

Anne Sexton reads


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Ernesto Priego, who makes his home in Mexico City, now a student in Britain, opines on mouth-watering
Fish and Chips, a la Roland Barthes


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Mark Young, who makes his home in Australia, muses on the oddities of discovering John Cage's *X writings* at book fair in Rockhampton, and takes note of how much I am enjoying his *Falsely Goethe* (Otoliths). By the way, when Kimberly Lyons, Nada Gordon and Gary Sullivan were visiting here last (speaking of mouth watering) to feast on Toni's awesome baked chicken and fries, and store bought Key Lime pie-at the moment Gary was talking about Tom Beckett, Kim had opened Mark's book to his poem that refers to Tom's *Unprotected Texts* gamma ways

(from *Falsely Goethe* by Mark Young)
"*Day twenty-one*

Today the
postman brought
me Tom Beckett's *Unprotected
Texts*. Special delivery.
Bubble wrapped
inside a plain
brown envelope. I
opened it up. That
print smell was
wonderful."


""Day ninety-six*

Today the
postman brought
me a new edition of *The
Selected Works of
Signumd Freud.* It's
full of what
appear at first glance
typos- though on
reflection perhaps
deliberate. Esp. when
you find such lines as
'...he dreamt his
mother fucked
him into bed.'"

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New on Penn Sound

On My Desk


Cesar Vallejo, *Aphorisms*, translated from the Spanish by Stephen Kessler, Green Integer, 2002

**

"I love plants for the root, not for the flower."

**

"Nature creates eternity of substance. Art creates eternity of form."

**

"My simple anarchy, my great pain composed of joys."

**

"Aviation in air, in water and spirit. Its laws are different in all three cases. The spirit soars the more it weighs and sinks into itself. The heavier the spirit, the higher and farther it flies."

**

"CAREFUL with the human substance of poetry."

**


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Frank Hlton, *Baudelaire in Chains: A portrait of the artist as a drug addict*, Peter Owen, 2004

"'There are moments when I'm seized by a desire to sleep for ever; but I cannot sleep anymore, because I'm always thinking...So, to sum up, it has been *demonstrated* to me this year that I could really earn money, and with application and persistence, a lot of money. But the disorders already mentioned, unceasing poverty, a new deficit to make up, the wearing away of my energy by little worries and finally, in a word, my tendency to reverie have nullified everything.' For reverie, read 'opium'. The former is a favourity euphemism for the drug among all the literary opium users of the time. For Baudelaire, it means a phantom world of dreams and plans and projects for poems,plays, articles, novels, stories- all revolving endlessly in his mind, repetitively listed among his papers but rarely developed beyond that point."

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Tom Beckett on Prime Time

Nicholas Manning announces "The Continental Review: videos of and by poets; the first issue includes a video by Tom Beckett.

a loaf of bread, mark woods' blog, a jug of wine and thou beside me singing in the wilderness; ah wilderness were paradise enow

**

*fait accompli*, the book: Four Years in the Making, with a cast of about six; me, Toni Simon, Gary Sullivan, Bill Marsh and Octavia Davis, iwth an assist from Nada Gordon- and, now, hopefully, you, the readers, who have visited or clicked on this blog, over 300,000 times since February, 2003


*fait accompli* has been available for free for over four years. If you feel an urge to support this blog, please consider buying a copy of the book based on it, published by Factory School, titled *fait accompli* If you don't find it at your bookstore you can buy it from Small Press Distribution or Factory School. Based on many of the responses I have been receiving so far, I feel confident you will appreciate having it.

Contradicta





Sadness offers a hundred words and explanations while happiness has but few and is inexplicable.





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




It is easier to lose love than passion, but it is sadder to lose passion.

Contradicta


Rise above the petty thoughts which viewed as pains will unite into chains.



**********



Anger, hurt and cruelty are helpless without each other.




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Penn Sounds Radio Buzz

Charles Bernstein interviewed re: Penn Sound on San Francisco radio

On My Desk

Again, from Mark Young's terrific *Falsely Goethe*, Otloliths

"Day Fifteen

The pretend gypsy
who is also a
genuine mother
figure tells me
that a storm
composed of the
active ingrediets
from soft handwash
lotions is brewing
again. Expect
more of the same,
she says, unless I
can deliver to her
a 1950's-themed stereo-
scopic 3D extravaganza
of America's entry
into racing's victory
circles within the
next three days. She
also says she has
messages from
all our ancestors."

Otoliths Lulu Storefront
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Did you know David Shapiro was a child prodigy on violin and still plays?

from David Shapiro, New and Selected Poems, (1965-2006),The Overlook Press, 2007

*Friday Night Quartet*: 1, ST. BARNABAS

"My mother said
All surgeons want to do is surge.
And as one took the staples from her skull
She said, Neurosurgeons are not nice.

Mostly blind and leaning against a wall
She told my father, Irv, you can be replaced
God forbid I should sit where I want to sit,
And what's wrong with this chair pray?

Sitting and crying, she said
This is not Chekhovian
Or Tolstoyan David.
This is annoying.

Lying on the angiogram cot, strapped down and hot and bloody,
My mother said, The worst words in the English language
Are these David- Don't move.
And what do you think the best words are: Here's some water.

My mother said,
I'm not wavery because I have a wall
And I love it-
Walls are convenient because they don't move...."

David Shapiro Overlook Press