Super Arrow No. 3

Super Arrow's editrix-with-the-mostest, Amanda Goldblatt, asked me and a few other Issue 2 contributors -- Chris Dennis, Phil Estes, and MC Hyland -- to have a conversation about collaboration for Issue 3. You can read it here!

Check out Issue 3 here, and read an excerpt from the editor's letter below.

This issue is our largest yet, clocking in with 25 contributors. This has to do, in part, with our folio assignment this issue, TOGETHER NOW, which asked writers and artists to offer collaborative projects. Tamiko Beyer and Soham Patel offer a poem written on two different typewriters in two different states, while Jeremy Allan Hawkins and Brian Oliu sent e-mails to make prose across the Atlantic Ocean. Lauren Bender, Theresa Columbus and Megan McShea sat together to fill a single page with words. Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney are old hands, having used e-mail and a formal constraint to make together-work since 2006, while Teseleanu George and Hector Pineda literalized collaboration by making two collages. And last but not least, our inaugural audio contributors, newly marrieds Seth McKelvey and Chelsea Rice used response improvisation to combine poetry and piano. (Congrats, guys!)

Returning guest stars Becca Klaver, Chris Dennis, Phil Estes and MC Hyland – known best to us from their breathless words in Issue No. 2 – unite to talk about the happy and strange proportions of collaboration in our second CONVERSATION.

This, of course, is to say nothing of the sweetly daring, brisk and dangerously awesome work of J.A. Tyler, John Bradley, Feng Sun Chen, J. A. Gaye, Caroline Klocksiem, Sophia Kraemer-Dahlin, Dolly Lemke, Ben Nardolilli, Nick Ripatrazone, Sean Thibodeau, Bill Nace and Amelia Colette Jones. Each piece is a universe or polaroid unto itself, gesturing to the big things, meditating on the minute, getting at texture and experiment in some of our favorite ways.

scrawl on the wall

at Miranda July's Your World of Text.

now if only this guy knew how to drive a plow

A large snowman stands in the middle of the street in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn, N.Y., Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2010. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

faves of 2010 mix

Dreamin' of the 90s and friends with cable come January

Probs the best kind of award to get is the one you've never heard of

Hey look, "Direct Address" gets a Crispy. Or is it "Crispie"?

In any case, I like crispy things, like Doritos and bacon and snap-crackle-pops.

She & Him & Conan: A Few of My Favorite Things

"The Femme Outré & Other Real Fakers: Going Gaga for Artifice and Femininity in the 21st Century"

Thanks to Meghan Vicks and Kate Durbin, I have an essay up at Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga. Here's an excerpt:

When artifice is seen as the opposite of authenticity, naturalness, reality, and openness we forget (or maybe, never knew) the fact that artifice and femininity have had an uneasy relationship for most of modernity. Giggles, skirts . . . blanched deference, hesitation . . . the trappings of femininity have been “optional” in theory for a long time, but not until the late twentieth century in some privileged countries on this planet did girls and women start to have a real choice about how girly, womanly, or feminine they wanted to appear. Indeed, in some cultures in 2010, the costumes of femininity are enforced by armed guards. And beyond that, modern western culture has long policed the idea that it is “natural” for women to behave in modest, flirty, or coy, ways – that it is “natural” for women to be artful – as in, conniving and strategic. What you do, Gaga, that is so magnificent, is to realign these costumes and mannerisms of femininity with artifice instead of naturalness, thereby calling into focus – and celebrating and redeeming – the unnaturalness of it all.

Delirious Hem Advent Calendar Is Back

None other than Daniela Olszewska is curating this year!

Check out poems by Dana Guthrie Martin, Melissa Severin, Kirsten Kaschock, and more....

Chapman: Is there a poet or writer (alive or dead) you’d like to collaborate with?

Bejar: Maybe I could’ve held my own on rhythm guitar in Anne Sexton and Her Kind . . . though I never heard them play.

[Work in Progress]

McSweeney on MFA students & the "use"lessness of art

oh shit, she said it!--

That insistence on ‘productivity’, ‘efficiency’, ‘use’, and ‘care for form and function’ is exactly the kind of capitalistic/industrialist language which erects a mask of ‘positive’ ‘values’ around a rapacious system and against which the so called indolence and narcisism of the Artist—as emblematized/scapegoated by the MFA student—revolts against. In which case I say, let’s not let these assholes set us against each other and shift the attention off their own always justifiable ‘values’. All writers, all Artists, those in academia and those outside, should all stand shoulder to shoulder in pursuing the useless expenditure of Art, whether that uselessness takes the form of MFA studies, or community workshops, or slams, or presses, or Youtube reading tours, or anarchic in-house performances, or library reading series, or self-published blogs,or just writing a poem in your notebook, crumpling it up and trashing it, if $65million dollar jets is what ‘productivity’ and ‘efficiency’ and ‘usefulness’ and ‘care for form and function’ look like.

--Joyelle McSweeney, "Lay off the Motherf$%ing MFA Students" @ Montevidayo

Robby Hecht's "Real Someday"

from his forthcoming album! Includes some footage of his forthcoming family-in-law, a.k.a. mine: