Matt L. Rohrer Chapbook Release Party 10/9!

This is gonna be so much fun -- please come out to celebrate the release of Probability of Dependent Events, which you can read at the Beard of Bees site here.

Brooklyn Aesthetics Conference CFP

anybody wanna propose something with me?

*

Brooklyn Aesthetics: A One-Day Conference

St. Francis College, 180 Remsen Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Brooklyn.  Borough of stevedores and seamstresses, lawyers and landlords.  Birthplace of a truly unique aesthetic, one which integrates poetry and dance, architecture and memoir, old-school politics and contemporary novels into a lively, ever-changing and always exciting landscape bookended by the Brooklyn Bridge and Coney Island and encompassing areas as diverse as Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn Heights and Gravesend. 

For generations, artists and writers have lived in, looked across the river toward, complained about, and extolled the virtues of, Brooklyn.  Architects and engineers have taken this “broken land” and turned it into a series of neighborhoods which, for better and for worse, reflect the hopes and aspirations (and sometimes failures) of those who live in them.  A rough-and-tumble politics has developed in the borough, a hurly-burly of civic pride, neighborhood affiliations, and national issues.  And then there are the movies: from The Lords of Flatbush through Last Exit to Brooklyn to Do the Right Thing and beyond, filmmakers have developed their own aesthetics of Brooklyn cinematic storytelling.   

This conference will explore Brooklyn topics as varied and multi-faceted as the borough itself.  Papers on any and all aspects of Brooklyn aesthetics are welcome; those submitting proposals are encouraged to think broadly about the topic. 

            Some possible areas of inquiry are:

·         Brooklyn Poetry after Whitman

·         The Brooklyn Novel

·         Brooklyn Artists and Their Works

·         Cinematic Stories of Brooklyn

·         Brooklyn Memoirs

·         Dance in Brooklyn

·         Brooklyn Bridge/Coney Island

·         Brooklyn Literature After 9/11

·         Fashion and Design in the Borough

·         Working Class Heroes

·         Gentrification

·         Religion and Religious Communities in Brooklyn

·         Brooklyn: Geographical Location/State of Mind

·         Literary Friendships

·         Brooklyn Plays and Playwrights

·         Brooklyn in Photography

If you have questions, or would like more information, please contact the conference organizer, Dr. Wendy Galgan, at wgalgan at stfranciscollege.edu (please note that this e-mail will convert to wgalgan at sfc.edu on December 12, 2011).  She can also be reached by telephone at 718-489-3441.

Please submit proposals of no more than 500 words to conference@sfc.edu.  Deadline for proposals is December 30, 2011.     

Rural Chic: "Common Ground Fair Style"

Arielle Greenberg Bywater is working the style-watch circuit in Waldo County, Maine!

Check out "Barefoot Guy" and many wonders of nature & culture at her new blog, where you'll also find plenty of "love for traditional country living and street style."

"It Occurs To Me That I Am America"

It occurs to me that I am America.  

I am talking to myself again.   

--Allen Ginsberg

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Sundown Song for Troy Davis

& for Austin, who loves Lorca & justice

Bed-Stuy sunset, five-till-seven
Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Call to prayer goes up right on time
Rain comes down out of nowhere

At seven in the evening
A las siete de la tarde

Yellow window bar-hatch
Traffic camera flashbulb

Light me up, light us up, I AM
TROY DAVIS and magical thinking works magic

¡Eran las siete en todos los relojes! 
¡Eran las siete en sombra de la tarde!

No one knows where Lorca's body rests
if it does; there is always too much doubt

"squinting in California sunlight": David Trinidad's Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems now available!

As a totally biased former student of David's, I come here to tell you that this book is a BIG DEAL!  More than with a lot of new & selecteds, these poems are going to give you a sense of a full, deeply-perceived, playful, impassioned life. And there'll be plenty of poetry gossip, too!

“This magnum opus confirms David Trinidad's place in the poetic firmament: he is simply the best we have. A worthy successor to James Schuyler, Trinidad writes soulfully and sometimes photorealistically about the melancholy threshold where dolls and stars become inner objects -- dirty, glamorous, destructible. Jacqueline Susann meets Sei Shonagon? Trinidad manages to combine neo-formalist abstraction with dripping, gorgeous figuration: Bonnard's wet dream.” — Wayne Koestenbaum

 “This is a volume celebratory in tone, panoramic in scope, funny and genuinely moving. Trinidad is at the center of what's relevant in his art. And this collection is more vital and more enjoyable than any single performance he has given thus far.” — D.A. Powell

 “...Trinidad attends to the present to see into the past with such needle fine precision it's like encountering a perfectly appointed movie set where personal memory crosses intimately with cultural memory. Poetic form in Trinidad's hands is a metaphor for staking a claim on the material world even as it slips away in a shimmery Hollywood dissolve – a desperate, doomed reclamation of all that can never be held long enough.” — Robyn Schiff



PS. David's reading at the Poetry Project at the end of the month with Anselm Berrigan.

PPS. "Evening Twilight" was the Verse Daily poem for September 9, 2011.

PPPS. Here's a great DT poem that Hanna chose for poets.org:

9773 Comanche Ave.
by David Trinidad
In color photographs, my childhood house looks fresh as an uncut sheet cake— pale yellow buttercream, ribbons of white trim squeezed from the grooved tip of a pastry tube. Whose dream was this confection? This suburb of identical, pillow-mint homes? The sky, too, is pastel. Children roller skate down the new sidewalk. Fathers stake young trees. Mothers plan baby showers and Tupperware parties. The Avon Lady treks door to door. Six or seven years old, I stand on the front porch, hand on the decorative cast-iron trellis that frames it, squinting in California sunlight, striped short-sleeved shirt buttoned at the neck. I sit in the backyard (this picture's black-and-white), my Flintstones playset spread out on the grass. I arrange each plastic character, each dinosaur, each palm tree and round "granite" house. Half a century later, I barely recognize it when I search the address on Google Maps and, via "Street view," find myself face to face— foliage overgrown, facade remodeled and painted a drab brown. I click to zoom: light hits one of the windows. I can almost see what's inside.

Save St. Mark's Bookshop

Last month, I snapped a photo of the bestseller list at St. Mark's Bookshop because it included so many books I love already or am excited to read, and because I was so impressed that these were the bestsellers -- not just word-of-mouth recs or critical darlings. Where else are people buying these awesome books the most?

Now St. Mark's is having trouble paying the rent, and there's a petition up here that takes 10 seconds to sign. Here's what it's asking:

The St Marks Bookshop, a vital Lower East Side cultural institution, needs a rent low enough to survive. Join the Cooper Square Committee petitioning Cooper Union, the bookstore's landlord, to give St Marks Bookshop a lower rent.

Please take a few seconds to sign the petition!

Girls in the Record Store

Wild Flag - "Romance"

Video for Destroyer's "Savage Night at the Opera"

Destroyer - Savage Night at the Opera

I won't spoil the ending, but Dan Bejar does appear at the last minute, with a woman who must be Sydney Vermont.

It's an homage to C'était un Rendezvous (It was a date) by Claude Lelouch (1976), according to some commenters on Vimeo. Here's that video, a single-shot ride through Paris at dawn:



More Dan B. surprise appearances: a pretty straightforward video interview from the Pitchfork Music Festival, mixed with amazing-sounding footage from the performance of "Blue Eyes" at the fest. There's this hilarious moment when he looks directly at the camera and says, regarding sitting down and writing a song, "Never try."