pomo expo

The Making of Americans -- Reading the Unreadable Stein This Weekend!

2012-01-18T17:34:00.000-05:00

Come on down to Triple Canopy's new digs at 155 Freeman for a marathon reading of Gertrude Stein's 1,000-page novel, The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress. Readings go all day and night, Friday through Sunday.

I read at 7:15 p.m. on Saturday, January 21, right before Caolan Madden, who first informed me of this awesomeness.

The entire list of readers is here.

Here's the official info from Triple Canopy:

In celebration of the opening of 155 Freeman, Triple Canopy is pleased to present a marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s enormously long and allegedly unreadable novel The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress. Over one weekend, an invited list of New York–based artists, writers, publishers, scholars, and other collaborators will gather in Greenpoint to perform the entirety of Stein’s text in a continuous read-in, expected to last 48 hours, more or less. (A list of participants has been posted here.)

Gertrude Stein and The Making of Americans have been central to conversations between literature, art, and publishing for more than a century; and those histories and connections are, in turn, central to Triple Canopy’s publishing and programming in Greenpoint, online, and elsewhere. Stein composed The Making of Americansfrom 1903 to 1911, though it remained unpublished until 1925, in an edition of 500. The novel wasn’t reprinted in full until 1966, by Fluxus artist and poet Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press (New York), making the book available to a new generation of writers and artists. From 1975 to 2000, Paula Cooper Gallery hosted marathon readings of The Making of Americans around New Year’s Eve, including Higgins, Alison Knowles, and John Cage, among many others. Triple Canopy’s read-in will revive and update that tradition, marking the continuing, branching (if largely subliminal) course of Stein’s book through our culture.

The current edition of the novel, published by Dalkey Archive Press, will be available for borrowing or purchase throughout the read-in. Refreshments will be available, seating will be comfortable, and walk-ins are welcome.

Transportation/address:

155 Freeman St., Greenpoint, Brooklyn (photo of the temporary storefront below)

-G train to Greenpoint Ave.; walk north on Manhattan Ave. and turn left on Freeman

-From Manhattan: L train to Lorimer, transfer to G

-(The 7 train is not running to Manhattan this weekend)

Gina Abelkop's Darling Beastlettes

2012-01-11T12:35:00.001-05:00

I've been following Gina Abelkop's work since her manuscript was a finalist in Switchback's Gatewood Prize in 2008. Gina edits her own feminist press, Birds of Lace, which also publishes the journal Finery (zine-style with CDs included sometimes, too!). She had piece in the Delirious Hem forum I curated with Kate Durbin, SEAM RIPPER. And now her first book, Darling Beastlettes, is coming out! You can read sample poems and preorder it on the Apostrophe Books website, and watch the trailer for it below.

'Darling Beastlettes' by Gina Abelkop: a book trailer/short film in two distinct universes from Birds of Lace on Vimeo.

Exciting Switchback news

2012-01-04T16:24:00.003-05:00

Results of the Gatewood Prize over at our blog!

The 2011 Mix

2011-12-30T13:02:00.001-05:00

You can download a zip file of my fave songs of 2011 mix here.

Here's the tracklist:

These times are rich

2011-12-04T14:43:00.001-05:00

with amazing poems. Here are some I read and loved this week, in new issues of jubilat, Fence, and Barrelhouse, and on Poem-A-Day at poets.org:

Sandra Simonds' three poems at Barrelhouse
Ben Fama's "[TODAY IS FULL OF HARSH NOISE AND EVERYTHING ELSE.]" at jubilat
Ariana Reines' "Baraka" at Fence
Hoa Nguyen's "Swell" at poets.org

I also love jubilat's new video and indexing features. Ben's poem, for example, is indexed as--

Fama, Ben

football, American

hair

time

video

--which is hilarious and also helps explain why I like it.

Delirious Hem Adventskalendar is back!

2011-12-03T14:55:00.001-05:00

Susana Gardner is blowin' up my feed! After completing Dusie 5, she went and created the fantastic Delirious Hem Adventskalendar, which features an amazing woman poet reading you one of her poems every day. So far: Anne Boyer, Shanna Compton, Lina ramona Vitkauskas. Many more to come!

Dusie 5 is here!

2011-11-22T20:05:00.001-05:00

Andy and I wrote a collaborative chapbook, SEER / SUCKA, for the Dusie Kollektiv. We're still making the physical copies, but in the meantime, you can read it here, along with the rest of the chaps in the fifth and final kollektiv!

Thank you, Susana Gardner, Marthe Reed, and everyone who made this issue happen.

Mantasias and Boypufts; or, Longer Histories

2011-11-21T17:01:00.001-05:00

There's an interesting discussion of Seth Oelbaum's "The Right To Be A Monster: Boys, Girls, and the Stay Puft Marshamallow Man" going on over at Montevidayo right now. I just posted this long comment and thought I'd repost here!

--

I think it's pretty easy to read statements like these as being an attack on the Gurlesque:

"Girls didn’t start the gurlesque: boys did. The gurlesque foundation isn’t pink: it’s blue. Boys are being written out of a club that they made."

"Fight back, boys! If girls want to engage in warfare, then they’re certainly entitled to do so. But shouldn’t boys have the right to strike back?"

Or, rather than saying "attack," I might call it a simultaneous deflation and colonizing of the Gurlesque. Squashing its marshmallow and stuffing it in the hollow of your cheek.

From the start, the history of the Gurlesque in the blogosphere has included lots of people (men and women, boys and girls) saying things like, "The Gurlesque doesn't exist," "I don't believe in the Gurlesque," and "Why can't boys be Gurlesque?" For those of us who have been paying attention to these ideas for going on 10 years now, this can get very tiring. I could probably cite Danielle's comments from five or six different blog posts in as many years, but suffice it to say that this is territorializing and colonizing and yes, penetrative behavior.

And to again take the long view, it was only 89 years ago when Joyce declared that The Waste Land had ended the idea of "poetry for ladies." Poetry itself has long been seen as a a feminized or effeminate force, and man poets have grappled with that perception in various ways, some defensive, some ingenious.

Perhaps Seth's performance here is an instance of the poet reasserting his masculinity via cum-in-poetry's-face. There's a history of this, too -- although "Projective Verse" was useful to a lot of women poets, it's hard to ignore some of Olson's language (convoluted as it often is!):

"And when a poet rests in these as they are in himself (in his physiology, if you like, but the life in him, for all that) then he, if he chooses to speak from these roots, works in that area where nature has given him size, projective size."

But I think Seth's mantasias (I said it!) or boypufts are aiming at something a lot more interesting than that. So, instead of the shock of Holocaust metaphors or why-aren't-boy-poets-doing-this or the avant-garde call to arms of "No retreat, no surrender! We must fight for our privilege to be the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man," why not forget about doing violence to the Gurlesque and concentrate instead on funneling that energy into acts of creation?

My theory is that an aesthetic rooted in violence is preventing you from getting there, Seth, and while I understand "radical negativity" and all that jazz, it's simply not as interesting to me as radical world-making.

An aesthetic of violence is also totally bound up in historical avant-garde discourse, which also aimed to deal with that pesky threat of The New Woman -- I mean, this was Marinetti in 1909: "We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice."

Sound familiar? See Loy's "Feminist Manifesto" and her early poems for creative responses to this language of destruction.

And last, I wanted to emphasize that aesthetic violence and physical violence both exist -- and are related, of course -- but they are not the same thing. They exist on different ethical planes, and to pretend any piece of writing, performative or not, exists in an ethical black hole, is to perform the role of the ignorant child, certainly. So maybe Seth has achieved his goal, but I still find it irresponsible.

Beat Poets

2011-11-21T12:06:00.000-05:00

Robert Hass, former US Poet Laureate, in The New York Times:

NONE of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is “remonstrate.” I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm.

[...]

On Thursday afternoon when I returned toward sundown to the steps to see how the students had responded, the air was full of balloons, helium balloons to which tents had been attached, and attached to the tents was kite string. And they hovered over the plaza, large and awkward, almost lyrical, occupying the air.

[more]

I Would Never Raise My Hand

2011-11-20T14:16:00.001-05:00

For Kate Durbin on her 30th/"last"/NYC birthday, in convo with her “PARDONMYWHOREMOANS":

I WouldNever Raise My Hand

In class, she is mute. At home, shescreams I HATE YOU at her parents.

—Kate Durbin, “PARDONMYWHOREMOANS”

I wouldnever raise my hand in class. I would whisper the answer to the boy sitting infront of me. I would never speak Spanish in Spanish class. I would scrawlmusical sentences. The teacher liked my handwriting, asked me to write theplacecards for her sister’s wedding to José Greco, famous flamenco dancer.

I wouldnever raise my hand in class. I don’t speak your language I was a girl in aforest with three other girls and we made up our own. I would sign into AmericaOnline, get cryptic IMs from nerdy boys. They tried to psych me out but I keptgetting better grades. I had all the answers why should I tell. When I wantedI’d whisper but I would never raise my hand in class.

I won promqueen, it was one of my stunts. I wore whatever I wanted and the next year Iwore my prom dress to school. There was a stage in the cafeteria, a boy wascalling out questions. I would never raise my hand in class but I would raisemy hand in the cafeteria. I raised my hand and my dress was leopard print andshimmering and strapless and with the force of my arm going up for the firsttime in centuries my boob popped out.

I wouldnever raise my hand in class, for fear of people looking. I blush from allgazes, it is because I am pale and the gaze is always lubed-up. I wore whateverI wanted but those corridor glances were sidelong, I would never raise my handin class. It was a role I couldn’t play.

In theseminar room I wait for the pause. I speak when I want but it is not alwaysappropriate. Who would raise her hand to say something inapropos? You just sayit, you whisper in the ear you wait for the sidelong glance. You just say it,your speech is hysterical, schoolyard coolspeak, 90s ironic, academy jargon invalley-girl patter. I don’t speak your language I was a girl in a forest,sister-talk brutal and covert.

I wouldnever raise my hand, the effort it would take would smash me like meat under amallet. I’d be thin for the grilling, I would never.

Halloween Poet Parade hosted by Bloof Books!

2011-10-28T23:08:00.000-04:00

Sunday, October 30
6:00pm - 9:00pm
West Village, NYC

A parade of poets through the West Village, on the eve of All Hallows' Eve.

Costumed performances by...

Hanna Andrews
Shanna Compton
Marisa Crawford
Nada Gordon
Jennifer Michael Hecht (new addition!)
Becca Klaver
Jennifer L. Knox
Mark Lamoureux
Sharon Mesmer
K. Silem Mohammad
Danielle Pafunda
Jennifer Tamayo

Map with route and reading points will be available at a later date, but we will likely be hitting Washington Square Park, Jefferson Market & Library, and other public spots in the West Village. (March with us, or meet us along the way.)

Start/End stop:

THE FOUR-FACED LIAR
http://www.thefour-facedliar.com/
165 West 4th Street,
(Between 6th and 7th Avenues)
New York, NY 10014
Phone: (212) 206 8959

OPEN MIKE portion after parade finale. (Sign up at the event. Costumes encouraged!)

[RSVP on Facebook]

Review of LA Liminal at The Rumpus

2011-10-19T19:24:00.000-04:00

Thanks, Lauren Eggert-Crowe, for calling the me of LA Liminal "a woman who failed Manifest Destiny."

True true true.

Here's the review.

Krystal Languell's Call the Catastrophists

2011-10-06T13:58:00.001-04:00

is now available from BlazeVox, hurrah!

The first thing I love about these poems is that they are breathless because they are urgent:

A process occurs when you give up your language and start calling things by new namesbut there’s not a term for how new phrases infiltrate your reflex it starts with thegutturals and when you try to give it up try to back out the primal language dialects butyou will understand shouts of surprise from the last place to wipe clean.

The second thing I love is that they are unflinching, which also makes them really funny -- humor of the delightfully-dark variety:

when I hear the word culture I reach for my checkbook

There's lots more to love.

My review of Gina Myers' A MODEL YEAR

2011-10-01T11:31:00.002-04:00

is now up in the October issue of Open Letters Monthly. Here's an excerpt:

A devoted elegist throughout A Model Year, Myers knows that the simple act of placing a real object in a poem becomes an elegiac act, one that evokes that thing upon each reading while marking its disappearance in the real world. In the elegists of the micro (Williams, Berrigan) and macro (Kafka, Rilke), Myers finds solace and poetic company. Their words, too, become the stuff of this world.

Read the rest here, and buy A Model Year from Coconut Books!

Matt L. Rohrer Chapbook Release Party 10/9!

2011-09-29T14:41:00.001-04:00

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

2011-09-27T22:06:00.001-04:00

anybody wanna propose something with me?

*

Brooklyn Aesthetics: A One-Day Conference

St. Francis College, 180 Remsen Street, Brooklyn, NY11201

Saturday, April 21, 2012

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

Forgenerations, 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 betterand for worse, reflect the hopes and aspirations (and sometimes failures) ofthose who live in them. Arough-and-tumble politics has developed in the borough, a hurly-burly of civicpride, 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 cinematicstorytelling.

Thisconference will explore Brooklyn topics as varied and multi-faceted as theborough itself. Papers on any and allaspects of Brooklyn aesthetics are welcome; those submitting proposals areencouraged to think broadly about the topic.

Some possible areas of inquiry are:

· Brooklyn Poetryafter Whitman

· The BrooklynNovel

· Brooklyn Artistsand Their Works

· Cinematic Storiesof Brooklyn

· Brooklyn Memoirs

· Dance in Brooklyn

· BrooklynBridge/Coney Island

· BrooklynLiterature After 9/11

· Fashion andDesign in the Borough

· Working ClassHeroes

· Gentrification

· Religion andReligious Communities in Brooklyn

· Brooklyn:Geographical Location/State of Mind

· LiteraryFriendships

· Brooklyn Playsand Playwrights

· Brooklyn inPhotography

If you have questions, orwould like more information, please contact the conference organizer, Dr. WendyGalgan, at wgalgan at stfranciscollege.edu (please note that this e-mail willconvert to wgalgan at sfc.edu on December 12, 2011). She can also be reached by telephone at718-489-3441.

Please submit proposals of nomore than 500 words to conference@sfc.edu. Deadlinefor proposals is December 30, 2011.

Rural Chic: "Common Ground Fair Style"

2011-09-25T19:03:00.000-04:00

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"

2011-09-22T12:15:00.003-04:00

It occurs to me that I am America.

I am talking to myself again.

--Allen Ginsberg

Sundown Song for Troy Davis

2011-09-21T19:24:00.001-04:00

& 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!

2011-09-10T13:00:00.000-04:00

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 â€“ 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

2011-09-09T14:54:00.001-04:00

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

2011-09-09T01:08:00.002-04:00

Wild Flag - "Romance"

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

2011-09-02T15:51:00.001-04:00

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."

This guy

2011-08-07T20:38:00.006-04:00

gazes into his navel and is blinded by the threat of other people's names and so tattoos them there:

Or maybe this chart is like an enema that flushes out disparagement of real live people by pretending they are "personas" only.

They are personas, too, but they are people.

Or maybe it is an assflower or a dickprint.

Whatever it is, let's try to think of some bodily metaphors that aren't "douche" and "menstrual."

I'm not gonna link to it; I took that site off my blogroll a few months ago when it started to make me feel uneasy almost every time I read it (misogyny, lack of substance, comment trolls).

Some similar testimonials are going on now, on Facebook and blogs.

Bone Bouquet Issue 2.2!

2011-08-07T19:11:00.003-04:00

Bone Bouquet is . . .

. . . edited with style & guts by Krystal Languell & co.

. . . perfect-bound, just perfecto, and fun to hold in the hand.

. . . willing to publish my essay on Alice Notley's Disobedience (2001) alongside crazyawesome work by Marisa Crawford, Daniela Olszewska, Rosa Alcalá, Gina Myers, Deborah Poe, & more.

You can read sample work or buy the issue for a mere six clams here.

Submit here.

oh look Daniela relaunched her blog

2011-08-07T00:18:00.003-04:00

and the ice cream's still bloody.

Oh and did you hear Artifice mag's new imprint is going to put out her first full-length book of poems, Citizen J?

I wonder if she will do those creepy Happy Monday posts again?

Dusie 5 Videos

2011-08-05T11:18:00.003-04:00

Deborah Poe was kind enough to take little vids at the Dusie 5 reading at Zinc Bar last night. Here's mine, and links to the rest:

Cara Benson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPuNDGA_PCk
Maria Damon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBpNuI5VeuM
Amanda Deutch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eac4OTQrGHE
Jennifer K. Dick: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yblKFaXYZko
Deutch & Dick: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XGnQ4eCLIY
Marthe Reed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvvxWweCZeA
Micahel Ruby: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsO48vgWLC8
Kathrin Schaeppi 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOqiHA4I564
Kathrin Schaeppi 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGMah7udK10
Vincent Zompa 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnctpzR4WzM
Vincent Zompa 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE5fTP7NSNw
Susana Gardner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtrkG7Rj35s

Items!

2011-08-02T15:58:00.005-04:00

Item #1: AK & I moved to this new spot in Brooklyn and are keeping cool 'n' mellow in the crossbreeze:

After being away from regular internet for just a couple of days, suddenly what I missed looks like a discernible pile instead of a vanishing stream. Here's some stuff:

Item #2: Caolan Madden is reading for The Folding Chair series on her birthday tonight -- you should come!

Item #3: Brandi & I did an interview with Liz Hildreth for Bookslut about Bobcat Country and LA Liminal -- read it here!

Item #4: Matt L. Rohrer has a new website.

Item #5: Check out Gabriel Specter + his public art at the New York Daily Beast.

Item #6: You can stream the new War on Drugs album here.

Item #7: Wild Flag has a trailer for their upcoming debut album:

Item #8: Drew Barrymore directed the teenage gang-angsty video for Best Coast's "Our Deal," featuring iCarly, the new Teen Wolf, Maeby Fünke, Hit Girl, Troy from Community, and more:

Get More: MTV Supervideo, Music, Best Coast

group blogs

2011-07-29T14:06:00.002-04:00

"Group blogs are like trying to sleep like a little prince in case somebody looks in your window."

--AK

it's nice when the senator writes back

2011-07-26T17:26:00.005-04:00

Dear Ms. Klaver:

Thank you for contacting me regarding funding for the arts. I completely agree with you that funding artistic creation and performance is important and worthwhile.

I am, and have always been, a strong supporter of the arts, both the performing arts - music, theater, and dance - and the visual arts. Throughout my career in Congress, I have consistently voted in favor of grants for artistic endeavors, including funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and as your Senator, I will continue to do so.

New York has always served as the center for the arts in the United States, and as such it has benefitted more from Federal funding than any other state. If we are to remain the leader in the arts world, it is critical that New York continue to receive its fair share of Federal dollars.

Again, thank you for contacting me regarding this important issue. Please feel free to contact me again if I can be of any further assistance on this or any other matter.

Sincerely,
Charles E. Schumer
United States Senator

Send your own email to your senators and congresspeeps asking them to vote against cutting funding for the NEA here; it takes two minutes, and the email is already written for you, although you can add a personal message.

Eleanor Friedberger's Last Summer

2011-07-12T17:18:00.009-04:00

can be your last summer, too, if you forgot about, or forgot to enjoy, the heat-sweet of the summer of '10, when we started to think about the 90s a lot again and became the tweens of a new millennium. It was my first full summer in New York, and there's a lot of New York in these songs, so they're getting me for that reason, too.

It's out today, and Merge is streaming the whole thing here.

But you should really buy it, 'cause this "From the Desk of Eleanor Friedberger" notepad comes free with purchase:

My favorite tracks are the no-regrets "My Mistakes," the desert-miragey "Inn of the Seventh Ray," and "I Won't Fall Apart on You Tonight," which staves off till tomorrow whatever might've happened last summer.

Here's the video for "My Mistakes," of the genre feminist-quotidian-hilaritas, one of my faves since I just made it up:

(Note sax!)

The Baroness @ Jacket2

2011-07-10T23:30:00.007-04:00

<-- "To Djuna"!

Tanya Clement and others on Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven:

We locate and situate her poetry in previous and current literary trends by introducing three previously unpublished poems, new and groundbreaking biographical facts concerning the Baroness’s German poetry, a rereading of her Dadaist poetry that situates it within the frame of feminist performance art, and a contemporary poetic response to her work.

Check out the feature, "Dropping the Baroness in the middle."

On Kim Gek Lin Short's Run

2011-07-07T00:16:00.002-04:00

You can read my review of Kim Gek Lin Short's scary-fantastic chapbook, Run (Rope-a-Dope, 2010), by going to the Denver Quarterly reviews site and scrolling down to the bottom, or by going straight to the PDF.

Undead Influence + Notley's Doctor Williams' Heiresses

2011-07-03T17:48:00.008-04:00

There have been a bunch of fascinating, infectious conversations about influence over at Montevidayo recently, and since influence is something I'm thinking a lot about for a PhD exam reading list on concepts of innovation & avant-garde movements, I'm trying to sort out some divergences between the received models of influence &/vs. what Danielle Pafunda, Joyelle McSweeney, and others are proposing.

I'm just culling their terms here, and creating a too-simple binary between old & new, but it's helpful for me, anyway, to see them all together in conversation, so I thought it might be interesting for others:

Received ways of talking about influence

receiving
inheriting
aping
reclaiming
recovering
genealogical
archaeological
patrilineal
diachronic
property
profit
literary progress
"familial, incestuous, kinship, property-based, gift-exchange, legacy" (DP)
"literary forebears, elders, teachers, or even people" (JM)
"flow, flux, fluidity, and fluctuation, saturation and supparation" (JM)
"innundation with a fluctuating, oscillating, unbearable, sublime, inconsistent and forceful fluid" (JM)

Proposed ways of talking about influence

anachronistic
synchronic
infectious
lawless
viral
mutating/mutagenic
deformed/deforming
monstrous
translating
eating
cannibalizing
rupturing
leaking
spilling
contaminating
toxic
undead
uncanny

What's so exciting to me about the latter list is that it fucks with Time, big time. Hope to have more to say about that later. For now, this from Alice Notley's Disobedience, to link back up with more on her below: "Time is another manly construction" (69).

And again, I know it's not in the spirit of the latter cluster to put concepts that want to infect and spread into an orderly list, and I also know it's messy to title the first list "received ways" in the context of the second list, but since I'm not advocating for one over the other so much as sorting loosely, I hope to get a pass, or to get schooled in a better way of sorting. (And I suppose, when one's ideas travel virally, one never knows how they'll mutate.)

It's worth noting, too, that the concepts in the latter list aren't all "new" -- there's a conscious reclamation of dead metaphors going on here. It's "the usable past," but the process of using the past isn't cheerful and utilitarian (American?): it's more like an exhumation, like wanting to live with a corpse. And the corpse is decidedly undead instead of dead in this schema.

[A tangent: Poets and theorists are always going to take their metaphors from the physical world -- biological, mechanical, technological, etc. -- but I have to admit that I have a very basic resistance to this that I haven't been able to fully articulate yet. What would it mean to make (in words or pictures) new models of influence that don't look like something pre-existing, something you can point to (family trees, viruses)? I don't know how to do this yet but I'm in training.]

This spring, I wrote a seminar paper on Alice Notley's Doctor Williams' Heiresses (published by Lyn Hejinian's Tuumba Press in 1980), a lecture which opens with this amazing perversion of influence, which seems worth sharing here.

For Notley, influence is queer, androgynous, incestuous, mortal-meets-divine. Her story of influence is also a story about the New York School, but not one told straight. And, as the title of the lecture indicates, it's especially about the generation of women that includes Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Waldman, and others, and it asks how they came to be (here they're the daughters of "male-female" poets that we think of as male poets, such as Frank O'Hara, who mate with goddesses, "evaporative non-parental types"), which is also something I wonder about, in the form of trying to study it in a scholarly sorta way.

Notley plays on mythological genealogies such as Bulfinch's, and so satirically troubles the act of trying to make any sort of lineage that looks like a family tree. (I'm also really interested in its tone, but don't have many tools in my tone-kit yet; anybody know of any great theoretical essays on tone, especially that known as the tongue-in-cheek??)

Okay, here 'tis, click to enlarge:

Songs for Girls Reading & Party: This Friday

2011-06-28T12:34:00.001-04:00

Neko Case & Nick Cave cover The Zombies' "She's Not There"

2011-06-26T16:10:00.003-04:00

via KCRW:

Lost & Found on Harriet

2011-06-25T14:33:00.003-04:00

I love this interview with Ammiel Alcalay and Ana Bozičević, and not just 'cause it gives the history of a class I took with them at the CUNY Graduate Center last fall (though it feels very Lost-&-Found to give a history of this class!).

There's lots of great thinking and writing about New American Poetries in the interview, and here's something I especially loved from one of Ana's responses:

Naming is powerful and we should question how we name poets. Something di Prima emphasizes in her work is the personal, rather than collective, approach to poetic heritage – and following that trail back with her was incredibly rewarding. It did lead me to the collective eventually – to her peers and precedents – but by a different route. The scenic route traced by the person who built the road. It was a way to recontextualize her path on its cultural and political map… Once such work of re-classification that came out this year is Duncan’s amazing The H.D. Book. This is the sort of work I think Lost & Found is looking to do. Canonization strikes me as a process similar to beatification – an exceptional individual is made idol. I hope some of the materials we publish can reverse that process, and the reader may find themselves scratching their back with the poet-saint’s fibula. Somewhere between the dumpster and the reliquary is the living archive.

This Kathleen Hanna CNN interview

2011-06-24T14:09:00.005-04:00

is cracking my shit up:

"I Kissed a Girl" was just straight-up offensive. The whole thing is like, I kissed a girl so my boyfriend could masturbate about it later. It's disgusting. It's exactly every male fantasy of fake lesbian porn. It's pathetic. And she's not a good singer. I don't want to trash other women. I mean, I think Jason Mraz is horrible. It's not just like I hate other women performers. Jason Mraz, and the new James Blunt song is the worst thing that has ever been created on the face of the Earth.

It's also smart and feminist and has a lot of interesting things to say about the 90s!

Also, here's the story of how Kathleen Hanna and Kurt Cobain graffitied a fake abortion clinic and she came up with the title "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and much more. It an amazing story:

What are your songs for girls in their 20s?

2011-06-21T17:18:00.005-04:00

Mixes from Brandi Homan, Daniela Olszewska, and Kate Durbin are now up at Songs For Girls In Their 20s.

Send yours to beccavista at yahoo dot com!

"Pop Time" up at Gaga Stigmata

2011-06-19T15:41:00.002-04:00

"Pop Time," my poem for Lady Gaga's video "The Edge of Glory" (and also a Song For Girls in Their 20s), is up at Gaga Stigmata.

Thanks to Meghan Vicks for getting it up in pop time!

Songs For Girls In Their 20s: A Reading & Party

2011-06-16T17:14:00.004-04:00

Friday, July 1, 2011

6:00-8:00 p.m.

Soda Bar
629 Vanderbilt Ave.
Brooklyn, NY

Songs For Girls In Their 20s is a literary & performance event and 30th birthday party for me.

The reading will go from 6:00-8:00 p.m., and the party will continue for a long time afterward.

First, these readers will read a poem, sing a song, or do something else evocative of being in one's 20s:

Andrew Koszewski
Brian Pietras

Caolan Madden
Claire Donato
Dustin Luke Nelson
Hanna Andrews
Heather Berlowitz
Krystal Languell
Lily Ladewig

Marisa Crawford
Matt L. Rohrer
Michael Leong
Mónica de la Torre
Nicole Steinberg

These poets will be heard via mp3 missive:

Arielle Greenberg
Daniela Olszewska
Danielle Pafunda

Dolly Lemke
Kate Durbin

Then, I'll read some of the poems I've been writing to music this year, which I call Songs For Girls In Their 20s.

Your emcee will be Andy.

Come on down!

JT's [Red Missed Aches] Launch Party: This Tuesday!

2011-06-08T17:24:00.003-04:00

Switchback Books

presents

Cathy Park Hong & Jennifer Tamayo

Reading & Book Launch for Jennifer Tamayo's

RED MISSED ACHES READ MISSED ACHES RED MISTAKES READ MISTAKES

Tuesday, June 14, 2011 | 6 p.m.

Pete's Candy Store | 709 Lorimer St. | Brooklyn, NY | Subway: Lorimer St. L

[Red Missed Aches] feels defiantly unfinished, adhering to a DIY feminist punk aesthetic so that it is more rough assemblage than bound book, a palimpsest that provocatively revises female sexuality and citizenship. Tamayo's debut collection is a daring and astonishing work that refuses borders.

--Cathy Park Hong, judge of Switchback Books' 2010 Gatewood Prize

A writer, artist, & performer, JENNIFER TAMAYO is slowly becoming a human being. Her manuscript, Red Missed Aches Read Missed Aches Red Mistakes Read Mistakes,was selected by Cathy Park Hong as the 2010 winner of Switchback Books’ Gatewood Prize. [Woooo doggy!] JT’s art & writing have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in Delirious Hem, Futurepost, The New Delta Review, Contrappostos, andJacket 2. She is the Managing Editor at Futurepoem and teaches art and poetry to students in Harlem.

CATHY PARK HONG’s first book, Translating Mo’um, was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution, was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was published in 2007 by WW Norton. Hong is also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in A Public Space, Poetry, Paris Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, Harvard Review, Boston Review, The Nation, American Letters & Commentary, and Denver Quarterly. She is an Assistant Professor at Sarah Lawrence College. Her third book, Engine Empire, will be published in 2012.

[Red Missed Aches] will be available at a special discounted price!

switchbackbooks.com/redmissedaches

Danielle Pafunda "In a Sentimental Dude"

2011-06-03T15:24:00.006-04:00

To be sentimental is to risk being at large in the world. Its potential for failure appeals to me more than its potential for success. It occurs to me that several of my women students this spring noted their fear of embarrassing themselves via sentimental or melodramatic writing, via excess. But all I want to do is embarrass myself that way! What a girl! What a kid! How embarrassing for a grown thinker, how obvious for a woman.

Read the rest at Montevidayo.

Read some other great responses to the V.S. Naipaul debacle from Roxane Gay, Diana Abu-Jaber, and Sarah Sarai.

Listen to a response from today's Weekend Edition.

And take The Guardian's quiz challenge: "The Naipaul test: Can you tell an author's sex?" to see if you, like Naipaul, can clairvoyantly "read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two [...] know whether it is by a woman or not."

the whole pie approach

2011-05-31T22:01:00.007-04:00

Sometimes people ask, or wonder without asking, why we publish only women at Switchback. I have about half a dozen different standard answers for this, but two of the most common are:

1. Our definition of "women" is really broad, so we're working to open up that definition, rather than shut down the types of work we're interested in.

2. Since we know the women-to-men ratio is not 50:50, by publishing only women, we're doing our part to increase the number of women poets published overall, across presses. Adding more deliciousness to the whole pie.

If you'd like to see a picture of this pie, then of course VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, an organization I'm a small part of, too -- send me your women's literary events for the calendar! -- is the place to go. VIDA's just released its latest count, of the Best American anthologies. See below how imbalanced Best American Essays has been over the years, and check out the rest of the results here, as well as an accompanying conversation between Amy King, Erin Belieu, Danielle Pafunda, Cheryl Strayed, and Adrienne Su here.

SEAM RIPPER's last round

2011-05-24T13:40:00.005-04:00

Just in time for Bob Dylan's birthday, it's SEAM RIPPER's last round!

Check out new work from Ana Božičević, Jillian Mukavetz, Stacy Gnall, and me, plus my concluding essay "'We Feel Sartorial Joy': Last Thoughts on SEAM RIPPER."

"just a road": Lauren Eggert-Crowe on fauxstalgia & LA Liminal

2011-05-13T17:41:00.004-04:00

Over at Lauren Eggert-Crowe's Valentina in Orbit, she retypes "The Mexico It Would Take," LA Liminal's first poem, and defines fauxstalgia as "this concept of being nostalgic for a time you didn't even enjoy when you were in it."

On Facebook she told me that fauxstalgia seemed to be the unifying theme of LA Liminal, and she's probably right.

I told her about nostalgio, the term Andy & I invented for being nostalgic for the moment you're in, before it's even passed -- already feeling yourself missing the present moment.

Other people probably call that "being happy."

Don't let this Friday the 13th pass you by.

Jennifer Tamayo's [Red Missed Aches] Now Available For Preorder!

2011-05-04T12:06:00.002-04:00

Jennifer Tamayo's Red Missed Aches Read Missed Aches Red Mistakes Read Mistakes is now available for preorder on the Switchback website.

[Red Missed Aches] is a perfect-bound, double-impression color (black and red), 8.5" x 8.5" book of poems, images, and some things in between.

Switchback Books

May 15, 2011
ISBN-10: 0978617266
ISBN-13: 978-0978617264

$18.00

Visit the Switchback site to purchase the book via Paypal.

From judge Cathy Park Hong's citation:

Jennifer Tamayo's writing is cacophonous, rude, and stripped. She uses equal measures of English, Spanish, and Spanglish; she landmines her poetry with malapropisms so the music is startling and pleasingly discordant. [Red Missed Aches] feels defiantly unfinished, adhering to a DIY feminist punk aesthetic so that it is more rough assemblage than bound book, a palimpsest that provocatively revises female sexuality and citizenship. Tamayo's debut collection is a daring and astonishing work that refuses borders.

SEAM RIPPER: So Hot Right Now

2011-04-25T18:12:00.003-04:00

Visit Delirious Hem to check out the next batch of pieces for SEAM RIPPER: Women on Textual & Sartorial Style!

Marisa Crawford | from Reversible
Khadijah Queen | 3 Poems
Jackie Wang | THE SKIN-CLOTH: Race, Fashion, Hygiene, Writing, and Embodied Movement Through Space
Danielle Pafunda | from The Book of Scab
Dolly Lemke | Orsino and Joanna: left to their own adornments
Yvette Thomas | The Panoply of Silk
Amy Boutell | Behind the Scenes of My Novel-in-Progress about Vintage Fashion & Surrealism
Anna Lena Phillips | desiderata
Nicole Steinberg | From a Closet of Grief
Jessica Bozek | "trunk to the blow": a poem-dress
Lily Ladewig | 5 Hats
Jennifer Tamayo | CUSTOM & CLOTHING
Danielle Roderick | The Pantsuit
jojo Lazar | 4 Poems
Susan Yount | Socks of Fire
Angela Veronica Wong | On Looking Like

Should All Submissions Be Read Blind?

2011-04-18T15:11:00.005-04:00

A few minutes ago, in response to Kathleen Rooney's Facebook post (in response to Amber Tamblyn's response to Kathleen's post on Harriet in which she reps Switchback's Gatewood Prize, among other topics), I wrote the following:

Tina Fey's "dream for the future" that Tamblyn quotes ("that sketch comedy shows will become a gender-blind meritocracy of whoever is really the funniest") is also my dream for the literary world ("that journals and presses and magazines will become a gender blind meritocracy of whoever is really the best"), but "funniest" and "best" are always value judgments completely conditioned by context. (Who have you seen be funny on TV? Dudes. Who are you taught to read in school? Men.) So, sadly, it's still a dream, not a reality, and it's a dream that the stats from VIDA (and "Numbers Trouble" a few years back) shook people out of. And although we have pledges from many editors to do better, we still don't have a lot of solutions being thought up, which is troubling. Look what happened when symphonies started holding gender-blind auditions: http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/01/0212/7b.shtml
So, until wider change comes about, women-only presses and journals are still necessary.

My response to people saying "Things should change" is usually to ask, "How can we start making the change happen right now?"

And so now I'm wondering what would happen if we took the example of symphony orchestras and asked presses, magazines, and journals to make their submission systems blind. When there was a lot of brouhaha on Foetry.com and elsewhere about judges choosing former students, etc., the CLMP created a recommended guideline that member presses could adopt, which asked former students or close friends of the judge to refrain from submitting. This language is now standard in many contest guidelines.

What if it became standard to read submissions blind, which programs like Submishmash could help editors do easily?

This doesn't solve the issues of soliciting writers, or writers who send query letters to certain types of publications, but it seems easy enough for small presses, magazines, and journals.

What do you think?

Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book

2011-04-15T20:11:00.009-04:00

I took a class at the CUNY Graduate Center last semester -- with Ammiel Alcalay, and also with Ana Božičević, Tim Peterson, Seth Stewart, Kyle Waugh, Caolan Madden, sometimes Erica Kaufman, and many others -- where we learned about H.D. through Robert Duncan through Diane di Prima, who came to visit our class. It was as mystical as it sounds.

Duncan's H.D. Book wasn't out yet, but we seemed to be working our way toward it. It came out in January from the University of California Press, and now Lisa Jarnot has a review of it up at the Poetry Foundation. Here are some excerpts that put into writing some of the things I've heard about Duncan as a larger-than-life figure, and the book as a sacred text:

Duncan’s confidence as a thinker and talker and writer was generated partly by his adoptive parents’ belief that he had been incarnated from the realm of Atlantis.

*

He constellated H.D. as his mother (and Freud as his grandfather by default).

*

Jack and Harvey’s insistence that The H.D. Book had some kind of cosmic significance loomed large in my imagination. I was 20, provincial, and ready for adventure. Duncan too gave hints of some secret that was hidden in H.D.’s work—he sensed that she was privy to some mysteries. In a 1960 meeting with her, she told him that she had fallen into a Roman Mithra cult in London during World War II and had “seen too much.” Whatever it was, I wanted to be in on it. Over a period of weeks I quietly xeroxed all of Duncan’s writings on H.D. and handed them to Harvey. When he died in 1991, the project seemed lost. But another member of our circle rescued it. In 1995 it arrived in my mailbox on a floppy disk, with no return address. Some years later it showed up on the Internet under the imprint Frontier Press.

That bit about the floppy disk and the internet is a piece of the story I hadn't heard before -- so wild.

I haven't read The H.D. Book yet; my suspicion is that it's something you should read in pieces over a long stretch. Anybody wanna have a book club? There really are reading groups forming for it around the country. If only I still lived in Milwaukee.

SEAM RIPPER Launches

2011-04-10T15:30:00.011-04:00

SEAM RIPPER: Women on Textual & Sartorial Style

Read Kate Durbin's introduction, "Revenge of the Slip Dress Sluts," and check out pieces from Rosebud Ben-Oni, Dana Teen Lomax, Gina Abelkop, and Elisa Gabbert over at Delirious Hem!

It’s my belief that my unwavering allegiance to glitter is the most radical stance in my career.

--Kate Durbin

Nudists aside, there is no opting out of fashion.

--Elisa Gabbert

Nothing was purchased in the creation of this work.

--Dana Teen Lomax

Make us imitate the burlap in the corner. Beg to be broken in.

--Rosebud Ben-Oni

Fashion lords over this house of tribute with a bright and stealthy eye.

--Gina Abelkop

Destroyer at Webster Hall, 4/3/11

2011-04-04T15:31:00.005-04:00

Dan Bejar holds the microphone like it’s a cigar, leans on the mic stand like it’s a cane. He said it was an album about “American communism” and he’s a crazy kindly old dictator.

A woman in yellow-glowing box seat to the right of stage bangs on the glass.

Dan Bejar crouching down and smiling while trumpet + pedals turn Destroyer into a jazzy noise band, then “Brown paper bag, don’t stop me now, I’m on a roll.”

New York City woooos loudly at “New York City just wants to see you naked, and they will." We're implicated but we love it and it was probably Kara Walker’s line anyway.

People kinda dance.

Dan Bejar avoids addressing audience as usual, but when he does it’s, “It smells like the islands in here. . . .” I think it must be some kinda Canadian expression, but A gets it. DB: “It’s a good thing.” I thought there were smoke machines; maybe it was just smoke.

The guy in the restroom spraying disinfectant, handing you paper towels, selling granola bars from Costco-size boxes.

Me suspecting “Savage Night at the Opera” and “Poor in Love” don't get played because they’re not Kaputty enough, which also might make them the songs longtime Destroyer fans love the best.

“My Favorite Year” makes up for it—one of my favorite songs of 2008, Kaputtified.

The drummer takes a picture of the sold-out hall, the band leaves, the cheers keep steady, the band slowly fills in for “Bay of Pigs” encore.

Girls screaming and throwing red underwear on stage: Destroyermania invades America!

Stella, Stella, and whiskey.

Photo: Brooklyn Vegan.

Distilled/poemified version here.

Switchback Books Launches the Gatewood Prize 2011!

2011-04-01T14:18:00.000-04:00

The Gatewood Prize is Switchback Books' annual competition for a first or second full-length (48-80 pp.) collection of poems by a woman writing in the English language. It is named after Emma Gatewood, the first woman to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail.

2011 JUDGE: Harryette Mullen

READING PERIOD: April 1-June 1, 2011

HARRYETTE MULLEN's most recent books are Recyclopedia (Graywolf Press, 2006) and Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California Press, 2002), a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Mullen was the 2009 recipient of the Academy of American Poets' Fellowship Award. She teaches African American literature and creative writing in the English Department at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Please visit the Switchback website for more information and guidelines.

Download the contest flyer [PDF].

Please re-post and spread the word!

Thank you!

Hanna Andrews & Becca Klaver, Editors
Whitney Holmes, Managing Editor
Dolly Lemke, Assistant Editor
Brandi Homan, Board President

RU NaPoWriMo

2011-04-01T01:39:00.002-04:00

Me 'n' my Rutgers pals are at it again this April. Visit us here:

SEAM RIPPER: Call For Work

2011-03-29T01:25:00.003-04:00

Kate Durbin and I are curating this feature for Delirious Hem, and it's gonna be faaahhhbulous.

Won't you consider submitting?

SEAM RIPPER: Women on Textual & Sartorial Style

Emily Dickinson’s dress.

(Photo: Jerome Liebling, Mt. Holyoke Art Museum.)

This Delirious Hem feature calls for women poets and writers to submit texts and images that examine the relationship between writing and fashion in their lives. Please submit:

1. A brief text that comments on, enacts, or somehow examines the relationship between your clothing and fashion accessories, and your writing and writing accessories.

2. Images (1-5) that display this connection.

We imagine that these texts and images will take all sorts of forms, from poems to prose sketches to photo shoots to close-ups of fabrics and textures. You may choose to include your body in your images, or not. You should interpret these guidelines as loosely as they are intended; if you have questions about a particular idea, feel free to email the curators at the email addresses listed below.

Submit to curators Kate Durbin and Becca Klaver (kate_durbin at yahoo dot com, beccavista at yahoo dot com) by April 15, 2011. Please include a short bio.

Delirious Hem:

http://delirioushem.blogspot.com

Kate Durbin and Becca Klaver talk about poetry and fashion:
http://www.h-ngm-n.com/h_ngm_n-11/becca-klaver-on-kate-durbin.html

Please forward and re-post!

wherein I cuddle up with my dream dictionary

2011-03-16T13:23:00.004-04:00

at We Who Are About To Die.

women directors + the dollhouse + the dewclaw

2011-03-11T15:20:00.004-05:00

Flavorpill features 10 women directors you may not have heard of, including two I love -- Nicole Holofcener (Lovely and Amazing) and Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy). Excited to learn about Lena Dunham; just saved Tiny Furniture on the Netflix queue. Also featured: Catherine Breillat of Kate Durbin's The Ravenous Audience fame!

If you're in Chicago next Friday, check out the new series The Dollhouse, hosted by Dolly Lemke and featuring Daniela Olszewska, Whitney Holmes, Kathleen Rooney, and Edwin R. Perry! While you're at it, please wear a BexMask so I can pretend I'm there. [Facebook event page]

Issue 3 of the journal The Dewclaw reads so good, with contributions from Amina Cain, Kate Greenstreet (+ video poem), Noelle Kocot, and Kocot introducing Damon Tomblin's Sonata #2. Claire Donato, Jeff T. Johnson, and Evelyn Hampton perform the editing magic.

Akilah Oliver (1961-2011)

2011-02-24T21:22:00.012-05:00

From the Poetry Project website:

We have just learned that our beloved friend, poet, teacher, performer, activist, mother, sister, Akilah Oliver passed away in her home in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, N.Y.

Akilah Oliver was born in 1961 in St. Louis and grew up in Los Angeles. In the 1990’s she founded and performed with the feminist performance collective Sacred Naked Nature Girls. For several years, Akilah lived in Boulder, Colorado, where she raised her son Oluchi McDonald (1982-2003) and was a teacher, activist and beloved member of the community at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Recently, in New York City, Akilah taught poetry and writing at The New School, Pratt Insitute and The Poetry Project, where she also served as Monday Night Readings Coordinator in 07-08. She was a PhD candidate at The European Graduate School and a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative.

And a poem from A Toast in the House of Friends (Coffee House, 2009):

Destroyer on Fallon

2011-02-23T10:53:00.001-05:00

Just in case you thought Destroyer was turning its back on those Thief days and finally giving in to the commercial music machine, NB leather jacketed back to the audience. Jokes!

“Having a Coke With You”

2011-02-15T23:22:00.004-05:00

a Frank O’Hara celebration
for Court Green 8

Wednesday, February 16th
5:30 pm

at Hokin Hall
Columbia College
623 South Wabash, Rm. 109

Contributors to the Frank O'Hara dossier include:
Denise Duhamel, David Emanuel, Elanie Equi, Kimiko Hahn, Jennifer Karmin, Becca Klaver, D.A. Powell, Elizabeth Robinson, Larry Sawyer, Anne Waldman, and more.

There will be a slide show of New York photographs from the 50s complemented with Frank O’Hara reading his work. A selection of contributors will then take the stage to read their poems. As an added touch, the evening will close with a raffle of Coke key chains, candied cigarettes, and bottles of Coke.

This evening is free and open to the public. For more information, call 312.369.8139. If interested in purchasing copies of the journal while at the event, please have cash on hand.

Sponsored by
the Department of English
Columbia College Chicago
english.colum.edu/courtgreen

Claudia Rankine's Open Letter

2011-02-15T12:38:00.001-05:00

From claudiarankine.com:

Dear friends,

As many of you know I responded to Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change” at AWP. I also solicited from Tony a response to my response. Many informal conversations have been taking place online and elsewhere since my presentation of this dialogue. This request is an attempt to move the conversation away from the he said-she said vibe toward a discussion about the creative imagination, creative writing and race.

If you have time in the next month please consider sharing some thoughts on writing about race (1-5 pages).

Here are a few possible jumping off points:

- If you write about race frequently what issues, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages do you negotiate?

- How do we invent the language of racial identity--that is, not necessarily constructing the "scene of instruction" about race, but create the linguistic material of racial speech/thought?

- If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do so?

- If you don’t consider yourself in any majority how does this contribute to how race enters your work?

- If fear is a component of your reluctance to approach this subject could you examine that in a short essay that would be made public?

- If you don’t intend to write about race but consider yourself a reader of work dealing with race what are your expectations for a poem where race matters?

- Do you believe race can be decontextualized, or in other words, can ideas of race be constructed separate from their history?

- Is there a poem you think is particularly successful at inventing the language of racial dentity or at dramatizing the site of race as such? Tell us why.

In short, write what you want. But in the interest of constructing a discussion pertinent to the more important issue of the creative imagination and race, please do not reference Tony or me in your writings. We both served as the catalyst for this discussion but the real work as a community interested in this issue begins with our individual assessments.

If you write back to me by March 11, 2011, one month from today, with “OPEN LETTER” in the subject heading I will post everything on the morning of the 15th of March. Feel free to pass this on to your friends. Please direct your thoughts to openletter at claudiarankine dot com.

In peace,

Claudia

openletter at claudiarankine dot com

Songs For Girls In Their 20s

2011-02-14T23:20:00.003-05:00

is now a blog, and will be updated until July 1, 2011, when I turn 30.

1st Annual Justin Bieber Kontakion Contest

2011-02-13T14:17:00.001-05:00

Judge: Daniela Olszewska

1. Write a kontakion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontakion). Preferably, the poem will be about Justin Bieber; but poems about other celebrities will be accepted as well.

2. E-mail the kontakion to: josephpatrickwood at gmail dot com by Tuesday, February 15th.

Submissions will be read blindly.

Winner gets a t-shirt or something nifty like that.

Roundup: The Count | Why Not Contemporary Recovery Projects? | Some Editors Who Are Gonna Try Harder

2011-02-11T15:57:00.012-05:00

Alyss Dixson has done a great service by compiling many of the responses to VIDA's The Count and its dismal data.

There's a new response at Slate from Katha Pollitt today, too:

Both sexes see life through a gendered lens, after all. But while women are constantly reminded that their views are only partial, men have the luxury—in life as in grammar—of thinking they represent humanity, tout court. So while male editors may say they wish they had more women writers, women are always going to be an afterthought for them, an add-on, a specialty item—dance criticism. As in those studies that show men overestimate the number of women in a group—one-third feels like half, half feels like a majority—a big piece by a woman two years ago feels like it was published last week, and one or two pieces by women feels like half the magazine. [read the rest]

[The Count at vidaweb.org]

Scholars who study African American or women writers have been performing "recovery projects" in full force since the 60s and 70s, recasting the canon in a way that better represents the important literature that was forgotten, hidden, or repressed. For example, no one would argue, now, that Their Eyes Were Watching God shouldn't be regularly assigned reading in high schools and colleges. But of course, for many decades, no one had ever heard of Zora Neale Hurston.

There are so many reasons why high-quality work gets forgotten. Taste, as we know, is subjective. (I can say "high-quality" knowing very well that to certain editors, "high-quality" simply means "looks like the rest of the stuff we publish mostly by white guys.") The numbers, on the other hand, are objective data. Just as much as being a tastemaker, it is an editor's job to make sure his or her publication includes diverse voices, includes work by people who don't look and talk and write just like him or her. If the literary canon can be rebuilt by scholars getting their hands dirty in archives and cemeteries (see Hurston link above), why shouldn't today's editors see it as their job to do the same for their contemporaries? It is their job, after all. I and many small press or literary magazine editors I know work for free, but for (probably) all of the editors of the magazines counted, editors are getting paid to make these choices.

I'm happy that several editors of magazines that VIDA counted have already expressed their determination to try harder. As Pollitt points out in the article above, it may only take an editor 20 minutes a week to redress imbalances and make sure that the voices of women and other underrepresented groups are heard in important venues. Moving toward these changes will only make their magazines that much richer.

Rob Spillman at Tin House:

The bottom line at Tin House is that we are aware of the gender disparity, we are concerned about these numbers, and we are committed to redoubling our efforts to solicit women writers. Personally, I am deeply tuned into the reality of gender inequality: I am married to a short story writer, and my fifteen year-old daughter is a drummer in a feminist punk rock band. Since the start of Tin House twelve years ago, I have been committed to publishing the best work I can find. Agents of female writers, publishers of female writers, and especially female writers, please send us your work. We really want your work.

Christian Wiman at Poetry magazine:

We might have ten poems by ten men in one issue and one twenty-page poem by a woman. Who is getting more attention in that instance? The main point we’re trying to make is that we are very conscious of the distribution between men and women poets, but we think more in terms of space devoted to the work rather than simply a tally of names.

Still, it’s not equal, and it ought to be. The VIDA results seem to us a useful and necessary warning. For our part, we’re going to begin trying even harder.

SAY YES

2011-02-08T21:44:00.000-05:00

so i don't forget all the good things happening all at once

2011-02-07T13:07:00.005-05:00

1. The Presses With a Mission panel, with Switchback, Ugly Ducking, Action, and RedBone, is well attended, although scheduled for 9:00 a.m. Thursday!

2. Switchback (re-)unites in DC from homes in Chicago, Denver, and Brooklyn, and co-hosts a fabulous reading at Madam's Organ with Coconut and Horse Less!

3. The international publishing world responds to VIDA: Women in Literary Arts' THE COUNT, which reveals gross (as in GRODY) gender disparity in bylines and book reviews in national publications.

4. Daniela Olszewska gets sick and misses AWP and we miss her, but that doesn't stop her new chapbook, Citizen Jane (-X) Trains for Many Different Kinds of Careers, from bursting onto the scene!

5. Arielle Greenberg & Rachel Zucker's HOME/BIRTH is released and gifted to my sister!

6. The "I Am A Natural Wonder" buzz has finally built to this: Lily Ladewig and Anne Cecelia Holmes's chapbook, free to read at Blue Hour Press!

7. Michael Leong writes a supersmart review of the first print issue of Bone Bouquet!

8. Small Desk Press & Switchback Books bunk together at AWP and then co-host fabulous reading THIS WEDNESDAY 2/9.

9. The little nonprofit football team that could, the one owned by 12,000 more people than live in its 100,000-person town, wins the Súperból!

I Who Am Now Published Author

2011-02-06T13:12:00.006-05:00

D. Dubs Lichtenberg of The Ancient Book of Hip fame was kind enough to ask me to participate in his We Who Are Now Published Authors series over at We Who Are About To Die.

You can read it here!

Dan asked me what some of the pillars of LA Liminal were and I said:

Debunked fables, Santa Ana winds, crossfires, underworlds, beer, self-implication, spectacle, quitting smoking, dreams are poems, Manifest Destiny, superimposition, Southern California Gothic, American Beauty, Arrested Development, down-home midwestern elitism, playing with shards/matches, tropicalia-loves-melancholia, why can’t we all just live in one big house together.

Lizzy Acker's contribution to the series is already up! You should buy her book Monster Party from Small Desk Press! It has a piece called "Futurism" and a piece called "Shark Week" right afterward, whatta one-two punch, and she stayed at the same hostel-slash-inn at AWP as me and Small Desk editors M&M, Marisa Crawford and Matt Rohrer.

Along with Jennifer "JT" Tamayo and Sarah Fran Wisby, we're all reading together on Wednesday in Brooklyn; please come!

A Thousand Voices

2011-01-30T14:39:00.005-05:00

Read Theresa Rebeck's disturbing, funny, and moving tale of misogyny in the theater world, which she presented at the Laura Pels Theater on March 15, 2010. Here's an excerpt:

And then I began my career as a professional playwright, where I was told that since I’m a woman, if I write about women, that meant I had a feminist agenda and that’s BAD. I also got told that when I write about men, since I’m a woman, I clearly have a feminist agenda, and that’s bad too. I couldn’t write about anything without hearing that I had a feminist agenda. It turned out that being a woman playwright was just in itself suspect; if you were a woman playwright by definition you had a feminist agenda, which was so bad, it annihilated the work itself. The other word for woman playwright might as well be “witch.”

As an aside let me add that I would rather be called a witch than a man-hater. Honestly, “man hater” really does need to be simply OFF THE TABLE. It bugs the shit out of me. I have a husband and a son and a lot of men in my life whom I love a lot and it’s creepy that people would toss that ugly accusation at anyone in the jovial spirit of name-calling. Someone actually called me that at a party a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to hit him. BUT I DIDN’T. Anyway, if you need to call me a name, “witch”--the preferred insult would be “witch,” or “madwoman in the attic” is also acceptable.

[...]

Here is what the numbers say to me: if we lived in an ideal world, the balance of new plays produced in theaters all over America would come out to, roughly, 50:50. The Dramatists Guild [...] tracks the percentages of women and men who enter graduate school as playwriting students, and it also tracks the numbers of people who apply for membership, and those numbers either stick to the 50:50 ratio OR there is a higher number of women. So in the ideal world, those women and men who are over the years developing their craft as playwrights should rise though the system at an even rate. This is not what is happening. Women are being shut out, at different levels of development and production, and you end up with this crazy 17 percent number, which seems to be the highest percentage we can get to, year in and year out. Seventeen percent of fifty percent is thirty four percent of a hundred percent. (Bear with me, I’m not making this up, I’m actually pretty good at math.) That means that sixty-six percent of the best plays by women—the plays that SHOULD be rising to the top, the plays that in a fair world would move into the culture as the stories we are telling ourselves—sixty six percent of women’s stories are being lost. Every year.

I'm reading at EARSHOT tonight

2011-01-28T15:27:00.001-05:00

EARSHOT!

Join us at Rose Live Music in Williamsburg, Brooklyn!

Friday, January 28, 7:30 PM
@ Rose Live Music

[map]
Admission: $5 includes a FREE DRINK!

Hosted by Nicole Steinberg

Featuring:
Melissa Stein (Rough Honey)
Becca Klaver (LA Liminal)
Keith Lubeley (New York University)
Florencia Varela (Columbia University)
Tim Gomez (Sarah Lawrence College)

ROSE LIVE MUSIC is located at 345 Grand Street in Brooklyn, between Havemeyer and Marcy. Visit their website for directions: http://roselivemusic.com/.

EARSHOT is a bi-monthly reading series, dedicated to featuring new and emerging literary talent in the NYC area. Visit http://www.earshotnyc.com/ for more information or e-mail Nicole Steinberg at earshotnyc@gmail.com

Book Notes at largehearted boy

2011-01-28T15:05:00.004-05:00

I love the Book Notes series at largehearted boy, and I'm really psyched to be a part of it. You can read about the songs that filled my playlist as I wrote LA Liminal here.

And, in a convenient coincidence, you can hear several of the songs on NPR's Beyond California Dreamin' mix, of which they write: "if you're expecting a sunny soundtrack full of California girls, surf and sun, you'll be surprised by the melancholy clouds that enshroud some of these songs."

That's what I'm talking about.

Madam's Organ Is the Spot

2011-01-25T10:58:00.005-05:00

Check out the flyer for our Switchback/Horse Less/Coconut AWP reading! (Click to enlarge.)

Next Friday (2/4), I'll be reading at Madam's Organ at 6:00 for Lame House & Binge, then again for Switchback at 7:00.

Save the date: Small Desk Press & Switchback Books Reading!

2011-01-22T14:40:00.000-05:00

Wednesday, February 9th

8:00 p.m.

bookthugnation

100 N 3rd St (b/w Berry and Wythe)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY

Featuring:
Becca Klaver
Jennifer Tamayo
Marisa Crawford
Matt L. Rohrer
Sarah Fran Wisby
Lizzy Acker

naturally wondrous

2011-01-19T12:37:00.003-05:00

First I met Lily through Marisa. Then Lily wrote an awesome review of Marisa's The Haunted House, our latest Switchback book. Then Lily asked some of us to submit to the blog. Then I met Anne and heard Lily and Anne read from their I Am A Natural Wonder chapbook (forthcoming from Blue Hour Press). Then Justin from Blue Hour Press whipped up some gorgey designs for Jennifer Tamayo's [Red Missed Aches], our next Switchback book, begging to go the the printer right this second. Then I wrote two poems for the I Am A Natural Wonder blog, and one of them is up today. Moral: together, we are naturally wondrous.

400 pages of feminist poetics now

2011-01-07T12:14:00.007-05:00

From the editors:

A Megaphone collects a number of enactments that Spahr and Young did between the years of 2005-2007. In these enactments, they attempted to think with the playful dogmatism of a feminist tradition that they call "crotchless pants and a machine gun" (obviously referencing Valie Export) in order to locate what might still be useful today about the somewhat beleaguered "second wave" feminist traditions. To that end, Spahr and Young lectured in Oulipian slenderized baby talk about figures such as Carolee Schneemann and Marina Abramovic; they counted the numbers of women and men and tansgendered people in various poetry anthologies; and they invited writers from outside the US to talk about being a writer where they live (over seventy-five writers from Puerto Rico to Morocco to Croatia to South Africa to Syria to Micronesia to Korea responded). Also included in A Megaphone are discussions of that always contested relationship between feminism and "experimental" poetry by Julian T. Brolaski, E. Tracy Grinnell, Paul Foster Johnson, Christian Peet, Barbara Jane Reyes, Dale Smith, and A. E. Stallings. The book ends with a (soma)tic writing exercise from CAConrad, one designed to encourage readers and writers to create open, yet still meaningful, feminist alliances.

We like to think of A Megaphone as a shout-out to the feminist work that writers are already doing and to work that they might do in the future. Maybe work that they do together, even if they do it at separate desks. It desires a big sticky, messy feminist web.

*

$20 or $18 with free shipping if you order it before February 15, 2011.

Yogurt Mountain Birthday Club

2011-01-06T20:50:00.001-05:00

Train cases, blue lung, marines uniform underwear, correct pronunciation of caesura, suicide tree house cult, koi ponds, psikhushkas, doll with a head at both ends, how to defer student loan, yogurt mountain birthday club, Gwendolyn Brooks, can a penis literally break in half(?)

and other things Daniela Olszewska has needed to Google while writing poems for workshop

@ McSweeney's.

Destroyer "Kaputt" Video

2011-01-06T14:28:00.001-05:00

Let's stay confounded.

Tim Dlugos, David Trinidad, Eileen Myles, & more

2011-01-06T13:21:00.005-05:00

[click to enlarge]

Paintings by Philip Monaghan

Readings of Dlugos' work by David Trinidad, Eileen Myles, and Brad Gooch

Opening Reception

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

6:30-9:00 p.m.

Fales Library and Special Collections
Tracey/Barry Gallery
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
New York University
70 Washington Square South, Third Floor
New York, NY 10012

Get a sneak peek of the catalog.

little LA video

2011-01-03T17:27:00.001-05:00

Super Arrow No. 3

2010-12-31T13:20:00.006-05:00

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

2010-12-30T14:28:00.000-05:00

at Miranda July's Your World of Text.

now if only this guy knew how to drive a plow

2010-12-29T20:52:00.003-05:00

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

2010-12-26T15:12:00.002-05:00

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

2010-12-20T23:59:00.000-05:00

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

2010-12-20T22:39:00.005-05:00

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

2010-12-11T15:06:00.001-05:00

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

2010-12-07T12:59:00.003-05:00

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

2010-12-03T15:50:00.003-05:00

None other than Daniela Olszewska is curating this year!

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

2010-12-02T18:38:00.004-05:00

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

2010-12-02T16:29:00.004-05:00

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"

2010-12-01T00:31:00.001-05:00

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

tempting

2010-11-29T23:48:00.002-05:00

I'm reading in Cambridge in a coupla weeks

2010-11-28T23:07:00.002-05:00

SMALL ANIMAL PROJECT
hosted by Jessica Bozek

Claire Hero, Becca Klaver, and Julia Story will read at Outpost 186 (Cambridge, MA) on Wednesday, 12/15. 8 p.m. Small donation suggested.

Bios, photos, deets!

"Chinatown"

2010-11-24T00:33:00.003-05:00

You can download the first track from Destroyer's Kaputt by right-clicking here. Here's a roundup of what's being said about it out there:

a groovy soft-rock turn. Intriguing...

marks a return to melody in a way that's almost but not quite totally ironic [...] like most things Bejar does, it manages to give voice to that thing that you can't quite deal with yet.

It’s not my favorite on the record —

The track, which is going on our Tuesday Night 8:54 PM chillout mix, is as smooth as the Wednesday before T-Giving is long.

This is probably the best Hall and Oates song Hall and Oates never wrote.

ha ha ha, these quotes must make Dan Bejar laugh.

My questions include:

1. Do these quotes make Dan Bejar laugh?

2. Who is playing the sax? is that a "real" sax?

3. Who is that woman singing and is this the first woman who's ever sung on a Destroyer song and will there be more of this on Kaputt?

4. Will Kaputt in general be more Destoyer '09 (Bay of Pigs), less Destroyer '10 (Archer on the Beach)? The blippity-blip sound effects make me think so.

Just Kids Wins National Book Award

2010-11-18T12:15:00.007-05:00

This is my favorite book of the year, and the book that probably affected me the most, though in mysterious ways. Reading it was like holding a magnet that pulled a bunch of synchronicities my way. The book entered my "real life," and my life imprinted on the book. And it made me feel New York differently. And it made us put a big pad of paper back on the wall. And it brought me to the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel with friends one night (the doorman pretended we had to pay $100 each, then laughed and let us all in).

Some of the award ceremony follow-up that I've read treats Smith as if she's "just" a musician. Even The New Yorker seems surprised that Patti Smith is so literary, but of course she has books of poems, too! (I prefer the songs and the memoir -- sort of like Dylan and his Chronicles, which also gives an amazing look at NYC bohemias past, though a decade earlier.) The Patti Smith in Just Kids is a writer and a visual artist and a rad outfit-compiler; then she meets the right people and suddenly becomes a musician. The way she tells it, it's almost by accident, or some sort of fate-pull. That story is barely told, actually -- though I hope she'll write another book and tell it fully.

Also Patti Smith looks different in every photo I see of her, which further proves her shapeshiftiness!

Hear Smith read from Just Kids (the part where Allen Ginsberg thinks she's a boy; the part where she writes a final letter to Robert Mapplethorpe) at the NBA finalists reading.

Listen to the story about Smith's win from today's Morning Edition. From Rachel Syme's report of the evening:

Smith also made every guest swoon when she gave a teary defense of the book as a physical object. "There is nothing more beautiful than the book," she said. "Please don't abandon the book." The applause in the room after her speech was close to thunderous (the sound of 1,300 hands clapping to save the book business is a loud one) and Smith seemed to win two awards at once: an NBA medal, and the room's heart.

Go see Smith tonight at B&N Union Square.

Difference sounds different

2010-11-07T01:19:00.000-04:00

Matt L. Rohrer interviews Eileen Myles about Inferno (A Poet's Novel) at We Who Are About To Die:

MLR: I feel like the book addresses the fact that your writing deals with the personal as political, while also being overtly political. You address “otherness” in terms of race, gender, sexuality, very openly and candidly, and even talk about sort of getting props for it (at a reading in Germany). Can you talk about your motivation behind the both of these types of political writing?

EM: I mean I can’t not write about these things. They’ve shaped my experience. Being a lesbian in the poetry scene or even just female, being white and from a certain class and NOT wanting or even being able to assimilate really shapes your experience and brings you into a certain relationship to the world. I’m amazed constantly by the things I hear and see and only feel grateful that I have a medium in which to express them. The political is vital all the time. It’s the edge that begs to be exposed and hang out there in the sun. And stuff that feels necessary to say, to write about always has enough energy to be sung, to have a rhythm somehow. Difference sounds different.

Women are throwing the best poetry parties

2010-11-06T13:41:00.005-04:00

For centuries poetry was discussed without anyone mentioning that, in fact, the focus of the discussion was poetry written by men; the same, of course, is true of art and music. In the 20th century, though, it became increasingly difficult to ignore the contribution of women to poetry, but for those ambitious for their work to be recognized, there was always the dilemma of whether to play it as “one of the boys” for whom “the mind has no sex” or to emphasize their gender at the risk of being ghettoized.

But now, it seems, women poets have no compunction about setting themselves up as the mainstream. And who can dispute them? As a couple of recent anthologies from the U.K. and U.S. demonstrate much of the strongest, most daring poetry is being written by women; it’s we men who have to decide whether we want to try and crash their party.

--from "The Verge of a Language," Barry Schwabsky's review of Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics (Saturnalia Books, 2010) and Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets (Shearsman Books, 2010) in the Brooklyn Rail

Kate & "Max, Livin' the Life"

2010-11-06T00:29:00.006-04:00

My Own Eyes by M+K Greenstreet

One of my favorite poets, Kate Greenstreet, included a DVD with her latest book, The Last 4 Things. Now, one of my favorite husbands-of-poet, Max Greenstreet, has made a film using the leftover footage from Kate's videos, plus some new footage and photographs and audio of Kate reading and Max interviewing her.

I love this movie for lots of reasons:

1. The sound of Kate's voice.

2. The peek we get into the Greenstreet Home & Studio (historical marker plaque forthcoming, no doubt).

3. The gentle Americana of it all. The shots from the car, the singing along to "Like a Rolling Stone" (as if I wasn't won over by this movie enough already!).

4. The bit at the end about "cinematic moments," and realizing you've loved the light and sound of the film all the way through.

5. The feeling of real partnership, that Kate + Max = greater than the sum of parts.

5. 8:48

6. 25:02

And visit the "about" page for My Own Eyes, which answered a lot of my questions--e.g., "What is that white stuff on the blue plate?"

You can also watch the film on Max's site.

Oh and here's something I wrote a couple years ago about Kate's first book, case sensitive.

Destroyer's Archer on the Beach

2010-11-04T12:22:00.006-04:00

So, "Archer on the Beach" is printed on the LP sleeve as if it's a broadside, and "Grief Point" is pretty much a spoken word piece, so I'm gonna go ahead and call this Destroyer's first ambient poetry album.

(The hopelessness of the future of music… The pointlessness of writing songs for today… V-Drums… The superiority of poetry and plays…)

You can listen to "Archer on the Beach" at Stereogum.

Friendship

2010-11-04T12:18:00.003-04:00

National UnFriend Day, November 17

‎"A friend is someone you have a relationship with, not someone who asks which Harry Potter character are you." -- Jimmy Kimmel

‎"Contact information, what does that mean? Friends know where others friends live." -- Diane di Prima

"Describing Description" at As It Ought To Be

2010-10-29T11:25:00.002-04:00

Lezlie Mayers was at the reading I did at USC last week, and she was kind enough to ask to reprint "Describing Description" from LA Liminal as today's Friday Poetry Series feature for As It Ought To Be. Thanks, Lezlie!