Extract From Sea of Mary, 2009

by Alex Bowen, an essay on Barbara Kruger, & more in /seconds.

Elisa Gabbert

broke up with pshares and left via The French Exit.

Save My Workshop!

Hey everybody--my workshop this Saturday might get canceled due to low enrollment, so I appreciate you spreading the word!

Call now to register! 414-263-5001

"Sense & Nonsense: A Poetry Workshop" with Becca Klaver
Saturday, May 30, 2009, 12am-4pm
Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 East Locust Street
Milwaukee, WI 53212

($40/$35 WP Members; includes ticket to 7pm Switchback reading)


Through a variety of sensory and nonsensical experiments, in this workshop we will explore our relationships to each of the traditional five senses (especially those we take for granted), consider the additional senses that poets rely on (sixth, seventh, seventeenth), examine synesthesia and other sense-related poetic topics, and indulge in nonsense. Experiments may or may not include flâneuring, blindfolds, taste/smell/touch-tests, and speaking in tongues, or in Stein. Participants will be asked to bring a few simple supplies to aid in the experiments, and will use the material generated to compose one or more poems or short texts by the end of the workshop.

Switchback Events This Week

Thursday, May 28, 2009

SWITCHBACK BOOKS FUNDRAISER
Irish Eyes Bar
2519 N. Lincoln Ave. Chicago, IL 60614
773-348-9548

7 p.m.

$2.50 Beers
$5.00 Motherpeace Tarot Readings

All tips go directly toward the production of our next book, The Haunted House by Marisa Crawford, 2008 winner of the Gatewood Prize as selected by judge Denise Duhamel.


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Saturday, May 30, 2009

Workshop, Reading, & Small Press Focus
Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E. Locust St. Milwaukee, WI 53212
414-263-5001

12-4 p.m. | Sense & Nonsense: A Poetry Workshop w/ me
7 p.m. | Reading w/ Brandi Homan, Kathleen Rooney, & me

Walking distance>>>
Nessun Dorma (On the menu: Formaggio sandwich, fresh mozzarella, provolone and roasted red peppers on the Asiago ciabatta loaf with pesto.)
Fuel Cafe (On the menu: Cheesy Tomato, "Fuel’s famous gooey sub. The best mozz & provolone, fresh tomato & onion melted with Italian herbs & olive oil on a toasted sub roll." They forgot to mention the El Rey tortilla chips.)
Stonefly Brewing Co. (On the menu: It's Bacon!, "Thick sliced Usingers bacon dredged in Stonefly Brown and Blonde batter, deep fried and served with Stonefly Stout mustard." Welcome to the Wauk.)
My mom's Tai Chi studio (On the menu: swords!)

B-Ho on V-Daily!

(ah, the power of a Nat Sherman sense memory)

JerseyPo

from The New York Times:

Last month, Mr. Merwin won a second Pulitzer prize for poetry — the fourth New Jersey poet to win in the last 10 years, a streak that is unmatched of late by any other state, and one that raises the question of whether it is more than just a happy coincidence.

[...]

Something else is going on here, I think, and there’s a number that explains it: 566, the number of municipalities in New Jersey, more per square mile than any other state. It’s the same number that explains so much else about our state — its economy, its politics, its landscape, its psychology, and why it has provided such a rich trove of stories for newspapers like this one. Poetry is compressed language, a density of meaning in a small space, and we are a compressed state, a density of communities in a small landscape.

Destroyer EP: Bay of Pigs

yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

Side A: Bay Of Pigs (13:37)
Side B: Ravers (7:50)

"Ravers" promises to be "a casual rumination on parties, political parties, madness and suffering (for one’s art)" (NB blurring of "parties" and "political parties")

Villain's on Wednesday

I Can't Tell You

how moving it was to finally walk through the Art Institute of Chicago and see not just "great" work featuring the female body--


Gerhard Richter, Woman Descending the Staircase

--but "great" work by women artists:


Eva Hesse, Hang Up

Granted, it wasn't until we hit 1960, but still: FINALLY!

I knew this was something important to me intellectually, but when I physically walked through the galleries and came face to face with works by Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Eva Hesse, and others, I was nearly moved to guerrilla tears.

You should go. It's free till the 22nd.

Destroyer

Favorite band of
girls on their periods
bit-part comedians
& me.

"tonight is not your night"--OR IS IT

	SUN . 5/17/09 ( 9:30pm , $12 buy ) Destroyer (solo) (Canada) label: Merge,Misra,Catsup Plate related: Bonaparte,Hello, Blue Roses,The New Pornographers,Swan Lake Sonoi related: Manishevitz The Empty Bottle is excited to present a special event with acclaimed Canadian singer songwriter DANIEL BEJAR performing songs from his project DESTROYER solo. A true aesthete, BEJAR crafts eloquent, baroque pop music that belongs as much to this century as it does those preceding it, creating sublime compositions that are both masterful and singular. In the years since DESTROYER first graced our stage, BEJAR has become a magazine cover icon for gorgeous, anthemic folk-pop songs with a delicately romantic persona. Sedate indie pop three piece SONOI opens.

I'll keep you updated

Via Gapers Block:

The audience should expect Dan, an acoustic guitar and a set list showcasing his vast catalog of Destroyer, New Pornos and Swan Lake songs. Fingers crossed, he busts out the same new material that has numerous message boards all-a-tizzy!

San Francisco, May 9, 2009

"Still the Second Sex" by Katha Pollitt

In countries that provide more help to people and to families, women are still unequal, but there's a lot less stress. It's a scandal that the U.S. has no national health care, public daycare system, paid maternity leave, or paid sick leave. It's a scandal that so many women are poor and socially isolated, that sex ed is hostage to religious nuts, and that access to consistent and respectful reproductive care is so spotty that more than half of pregnancies are unintended.

Double X

I like that Slate's new web mag, Double X, says it's "founded by women but not just for women." I think of Switchback in those terms, and I'm also really excited that it exists, since I read the XX Factor blog regularly. Here's Double X's "About Me" statement:

Double X is a new Web magazine, founded by women but not just for women, that Slate launched in spring 2009. The site spins off from Slate's XX Factor blog, where we started a conversation among women—about politics, sex, and culture—that both men and women listen in on. Double X takes the Slate and XX Factor sensibility and applies it to sexual politics, fashion, parenting, health, science, sex, friendship, work-life balance, and anything else you might talk about with your friends over coffee. We tackle subjects high and low with an approach that's unabashedly intellectual but not dry or condescending. The blog is at the heart of the site, but we also publish essays, reporting, and other features.

The Gurlesque Goes On & On

1) Lara Glenum clarifies again. I loved reading this post, but I'm starting to get the feeling that there will always be people willfully misreading the Gurlesque (especially in blogland), trying to make it "fit" with what they (think they) already know about poetry and women and women's poetry. And this has to do with the nature of the theory (Whaaa, this theory is not "universal"--a.k.a. androcentric--so must be faulty! [And, just to complicate things, the Gurlesque is faulty!--"open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple and changing"]), so is maybe inevitable. I'm excited for the anthology to come out and I hope people will read it before blogging about it.

2) Ron Silliman on Chelsey Minnis's "almost manic surrealism."

Laurie Anderson

'cause when love is gone
there's always justice
and when justice is gone
there's always force
and when force is gone
there's always Mom
Hi Mom!

Cat Angel

She said the wings, which have bones inside, make her pet look like a "cat angel" and believes these malformations are the result of sexual harassment. "A month ago, many female cats in heat came to harass him, and then the wings started to grow." she explained.

由于圣 Gyros

On this week's Delirious Hem "This is what a feminist [poet] looks like" forum

I've had a really strong reaction to the "This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like" pieces posted over at Delirious Hem this week.

At first it was something along the lines of, Oh wow, this is so cool, hooray for this!

And then as the week went along I became troubled as I realized that not only was it cool, but that I had been starving for it.

I never experienced a 1970s consciousness-raising group, but I imagine that those were something of what this forum has been for me.

Elizabeth Treadwell wrote in her piece: Take for example all our corporate storytelling and our profit-driven notions of beauty. What if the energy and resources currently spent on these consumerist abstractions were instead reserved for the localized articulation and idiosyncratic ornamentation of our stories and selves?

That is partially what it's been for me: an articulation of that economy, a carving out of that space.

Danielle Pafunda reminded me: I think we should all start taking up a freaking huge amount of space.

This was something of the "conclusion" that came out of the Feminist Presses roundtable I organized for the Lifting Belly High conference in September 2008. Space has been cleared for us by the last generation of feminists. Are we taking it up, or are we letting it close back up again?

Delirious Hem takes up gorgeous, dense space. Switchback -- our events, our blog, and of course our books -- does, too. So does writing and publishing my own work. But now that I've gotten the chance to read the stories of contemporary feminist writers, I'm ravenous for them -- I want them every day. I don't want any more silent histories.

I also want to extend huge thanks to Danielle for organizing the forum. I'd like to say I don't know why women don't write and share these sorts of things every day on their own in blogland, but I do. First, there's something very powerful and power-generating about doing it en masse. Second, these women are busy tending to their children and their partners and their students and their clients and that can fill up days and weeks in no time unless someone steps in and asks you to clear some time for something else. And you sometimes have to pretend it's "work" instead of the fun it is (it's both) in order to find an excuse, an hour here or there to work on it. 500 pounds and a room of one's own.

I know there are more forums planned (I plan to co-organize one, too), but I hope this topic gets a second run, because I imagine there are plenty of women [poets] who thought they weren't feminist poets until they read this -- just as there were contributors who thought they weren't feminist poets until they entered grad school, until they were employed by a bureaucracy, until they sat down to write their pieces.

A note on blog comment boxes: It's a thrill to see these filled with women's opinions. I can feel, but can't yet quite articulate, how the rhetoric shifts when women enter into comment-box conversations. It seems to me that comment boxes are sometimes like city streets at night: women know they shouldn't go alone, know they risk danger -- leering eyes, men who do not know how to listen in earnest but would rather hear themselves talk. I hope many more people -- women and men, but especially women -- will comment here.

Teens on the Edge of Space

Gracias a San Gyros.

Jessica Hopper's Article on Jane's Addiction

in the Reader had me cracking up and nodding vigorously in recognition:

That’s not to say Jane’s Addiction weren’t fair stewards of the turning of our innocent years. They bequeathed us a loose pagan permissiveness, injecting junkie patois into eager corn-fed hearts during that twilight time before heroin started killing people you knew and fell back out of fashion, back when slap bass was not yet wholly offensive—you know, the good ol’ bad ol’ days, when wearing an outfit consisting of nothing but a panty girdle, a rosary, and combat boots (as Farrell did) was a good way to show everyone who the real freak was.

Also note the dudes (her word and mine -- is there any other?) in the comment box who are intimidated by her hilarious, fiercely-wielded vocab.

O May O My

O Mercury

rec room presents: "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"

TONIGHT!
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
8:00 p.m.

Black Rock Bar
3614 N. Damen Ave. (@ Addison)
Chicago, IL 60618
www.recroomers.com
FREE

Curated by Katie Hartsock

It’s a beautiful day for a neighbor—except when it’s not. Whether we live lawns away or narrow alleys apart, we’re exposed to—sometimes literally—a spectrum of experience through the people we arbitrarily spend most of our lives beside, above, or below. Rec Room invites readers to share their tales of neighborly bliss and woe, and everything in between.

With readings and performances by:
Dan Alberti
Jason Bredle
Paul Durica
Katie Hartsock
Tricia Hersey (a.k.a. Lady Terror)
Valerie Jean Johnson
Parneshia Jones
Becca Klaver
Paul Martinez Pompa
John Murillo
Garrett Prejean
Jacob Saenz
Fred Sasaki and Jacob Knabb
Erin Teegarden

Hey Look

it's me, talking about feminist poetics with my mouth full of tamales. Again.

Deliriously Hemmy!

Featuring:
Monday May 4: Mary Biddinger, Anne Boyer, & Brandi Homan
Tuesday May 5: Megan Kaminski, Becca Klaver, & Majena Mafe
Wednesday May 6: Gina Myers, Martha Silano, & Leah Souffrant
Thursday May 7: K. Lorraine Graham, Mytili Jagannathan, Elizabeth Treadwell, & Sarah Vap
Friday May 8: Teresa Carmody & co.

Curated by Danielle Pafunda

My Favorite Band

Destroyer : Sunday, May 17 : Empty Bottle : Chicago, IL

"The True and Untrue Confessions of Olena Kalytiak Davis"

She is deadly serious in her inquiries and in her desire to authentically express the full range of her convictions, qualifications, contradictions, failures, and desires. In the process, while she structures her poems associatively, she almost always accounts for the structure of a poem, and rarely loses sight of a central conflict. Her work is often dizzying, even breathtaking, all the more so because of her self-effacing playfulness, her conversational change of expressions, and her probing emotional intelligence; and in the mode of Frank O’Hara’s poems, she is frankly sometimes a laugh riot.

--Ira Sadoff

"the whole psycho-spiritual spectrum"

I've always felt that poetry begins in a powerful emotional seed. Some artists are more inclined to bury this emotional energy than others; I prefer to bloody the backsteps. Is that love? Let's say it's Eros, the friction of creation, working the language. Before I realized who I loved, that I was a woman who loved women, I loved words. For me, the transfusion was simple — to be alive has always meant to be in the service of love, and not for the kicks of it but for the whole psycho-spiritual spectrum. What else is poetry for if not to serve love? I suppose one could answer that poetry has many functions, but what gets a poem going, what is a poetic voice, and how does the voice become trustworthy? It's got to sound human, filled with the burden of reality. It's the simple notion that poetry must be embodied, and not in the sense of promoting one's personality. You can't tell from Akhmatova's intimate work whether she was moody in the mornings and charming at night; you can't tell from Dickinson what her smile was like; you can't tell from reading Lorca whether he was fickle, etc. Yet, paradoxically of course, all is revealed by the finest poetry in the sense that we feel the person deeply. Gesture and comment and music and tone reveal information about the speaker, whether she or he knows it or not. Certainly the Language Poets — and now this group includes everyone who can no longer write about the self without a pause—have made us reconsider the value of the personal in art, and this correction was necessary given the solipsism into which American poetry had fallen. In other words, the world must be as present in a poem as the voice adoring, declaiming, disowning, or forgiving it.

--Jane Miller

Question Everything; Or, Make It Up

Filling up my bottle at a drinking fountain
I hear a phone ring, muffled but just a foot away--
Hello?
Someone's behind the wall
and I hadn't sensed or imagined him

Too hard to see what we're not looking for
too much to X out, blot out, and shield
and of course what you're looking at might not be
what you think you're looking at at all

Fig. 1. I wrote drinking fountain for your sake but
when I look at the machine I think bubbler

Fig. 2. If he holds the camera at the right angle
others might see a prison, too
in all his photographs of what he calls prison
but no one will see his friend inside
as he does when he stares at the facade
and besides, his friend is not in there
though he could be in there too
as in a dream

And what we think is documentation
can be a gallop of imagination
or blind belief in placards and engravings

Someone once told us question everything
but we find that boring
and make it up instead
and we are called poets
and cast out of the great republics
without binoculars or metal detectors
mad enough to go around looking for
daily invisibilities

the kindness of strangers
love's sliding attentions
a hand-to-hand virus
the fear at week's start
the room where you used to live
in a city where you used to live
all your walks through the park
and what bunkers below