What a Night

Another reading has come and gone, but what a reading! Randall read nearly all new (as in a couple months and even a couple hours old) work and further demonstrated the fruits of his now year and a half long immersion in poetry and poetics. His reading was passionate and dynamic -- a treat as always. John Taggart read liberally from Pastorelles and ended with a piece from the new Conjunctions that he wrote about Louis Zukofsky and a piece from the new Golden Handcuffs about Bob Quine. Both terrific pieces. The Zukofsky piece had quite a few deliberate stylistic nods to Zuk from one of Zuk's first disciples (surprising because, oddly perhaps, Taggart's work has never struck me as being Zukofsky-ish, in spirit yes, but not the letter.) The Quine piece -- Quine was a school-mate and friend of Taggart's -- was more classically Taggart-ian in style, swinging around the repetition of birds and birds' song. Taggart also re-wrote Harold Bloom's line about the "anxiety of influence" as the "anxiety of cannabalism."

Incredible readings all around -- Taggart's been a big influence on me for a few years now. I find his work intensely beautiful, incantatory, oracular, passionate, and intellectual simultaneously. So much that he achieves is what I'd like my own work to do. It was really a pleasure and honor to host him. Wow.

The rest of the evening was similarly delightful -- I showed up late unfortunately and Joe Donahue had already started his Blue Door set. Having Joe read too was pretty fantastic. Joe, as I've said on this blog before, is one of my favorite poets and readers. I've seen him maybe 5 or 6 times now? over the last 2 or so years? I could hear Joe read once or twice a month and find new stuff everytime.

Todd and Laura laid out a killer spread including chili that smelled so good that I brained myself on the cabinets trying to get a sniff. It was cold so nobody put their shirts in the freezer, but we did get lots of great stories from Taggart about all sorts of poetic luminaries. I was wearing a lot of green, and the Blue Door was a packed as I've ever seen it. Poetry life in Carrboro: swoooooon.

Marcus recorded Joe's reading and posted it here.

Anyhoo, the last DC reading of 2005 is right around the corner: November 12th: Sarah Manguso & Julian Semilian.

Below are the intros -- enjoy....

John Taggart & Randall Williams Intro

1. Announcements
a. Blue Door tonight featuring Joe Donahue & Phil Blank
b. November 12th, Saturday, Desert City with Sarah Manguso & Julian Semilian
c. January 14th, Saturday, Desert City with Ed Roberson & TBA

2. Welcome
a. Thanks for coming
b. Introduce yourself
c. non-profit, volunteer run organization – please make a donation to support the series and the poets
d. buy books to support the Internationalist
e. sign-up sheet in the back for future information

3. Thank yous
a. Internationalist
b. John & Randall
c. all of you
d. the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation
e. the North Carolina Arts Council
f. the Orange County Arts Commission

4. Tonight, though, we’re here to see John Taggart & Randall Williams

5. “floating / untethered // crows then / maypoles // lassoes and paper / thin joints // light now / tissue now // a junk horse / rebuilding.”
6. Randall Williams lives in a cabin in the woods in Hillsborough near a large pond surrounded hardwood forest. Some day he might float a bonfire out in that pond that would light up pages from which people might read poems.
7. “are you earth or geologist? // From the basement, permits / to touch unpainted sculptures // didactic or otherwise cross-legged / an electrical outlet makes the bed possible / the moon looks so ridiculous again”
8. Once Randall put himself into two boxes simultaneously. One spun in the air and held his vague form; the other bounced from a screen as light.
9. “each thought contains a thousand ignorable vistas / and one California diner // what is operative is often / the static point of relation // a salt shaker, for instance”
10. Randall’s ukulele came from Hawaii; Randall was with it; the ukulele was not afraid even though Randall once owned a car called a Fury.
11. “I sliced through various roots. It lifted its legs as if bound, hog tied or stretching. Left eye, right eye, left eye, right eye. Do they really think violent acts are not surrounded by household objects? It appeared to be leaping. If there’s one thing chickens are good for”
12. Randall has guns, and his guns are two places simultaneously: one, the gun is in your hand; two, the olive can jumps.
13. “Cicada, open this ambition / I am frightened of firings / I am moved by cold pocket watches // Confounded by severances”
14. Randall has been out of North Carolina for only a small part of his life; North Carolina has never been out of Randall.
15. “Could we please just save the unborn of Baghdad? Gaseous globe, ambition, her father is a theme sweater made of state lines while I am crumpled light. Black ink on a white tortoise shell, my fingers slowly enter the crowed noon. George lays a card on each swan’s back.”
16. Randall has many chickens; most of them are actually roosters; he eats one occasionally.
17. “A rope descends in such a way as to make the stage real. Ten thousand eyes on a plastic box. And inside this box, a tiny bit of sky formed into thighs. // When your hair meets dusk, I am a pinprick coming through a wooden box camera.”
18. Randall’s poetics is one of extreme pressure, extreme pressure and openness, extreme pressure on language and extreme openness to a fluid view of myth-making – Randall’s poetics is like the pond he lives near and the boxes he appeared in and the ukulele which follows him and like the Fury and like his simultaneous guns and North Carolina and his chickens
19. “to see (see) white / her lines / of 34 / fabricated, odd / what every phrase is not // a bursting forth cyclically / onto the deck / through the ghosts”
20. Please welcome Randall Williams.

21. In “Pastorelle 7” John Taggart writes, “the problem is not finding a rock there are / many // the problem is not turning / into a rock // the problem is a problem of how / far how far can I throw myself” and in his earlier collection When the Saints he writes, “the subject was roses the problem is memory / that was the subject roses piled to burn / … / the problem is memory the problem a problema / the problem a problema a problem to find / a problem to find the unknown”
22. Of the many problems that Taggart’s work engages one of the more fundamental is, as he says, the problem of finding the unknown within what we know, the problem of extending beyond the forms we know into a place where discovery is possible, even inevitable.
23. From “Inside Out”: “It is you who have to hear it is you who have to hear it / is you who have to sit under the singing of the bird it is / you who have to sit in the court of / the bird to assent to the singing as prayer / being heard it is you who have to / sit in a kind of silence in a kind of / silence in which the singing may endure in / which the singing only the singing may endure in you.”
24. John Taggart is the author of the poetry collections When the Saints, Loop, Standing Wave, Peace on Earth, and others, most recently he published Pastorelles which the late Robert Creeley described as “making particular the mind and heart’s persistent need.” In addition, Taggart is the author of Remaining in Light, a study of the paintings of Edward Hopper. He also was the founder and editor of the acclaimed literary journal Maps. A two time NEA Fellow in Literature, several years ago he retired from the interdisciplinary faculty at Shippensburg State University in Pennsylvania.
25. He writes in “Henry David Thoreau/Sonny Rollins”: “for two years / alone with the alone // alone with the alone saxophone / in the air / alone in the night air and high above the East River / heimarmene and black water of the river // without a you to do a something to me / without a song in the air.”
26. Poetry’s roots are in song, and Taggart writes at those roots with the use of repetition that calls to mind the evolving melodic phrases that give shape to much improvised music. It is his use of repetition that has become a hallmark of Taggart’s work and for many years set him apart from any of the various contemporary poetic camps.
27. “To breathe through the mouth to breathe through the / mouth to breathe to sing to / sing in the most quiet way to / sing the seeds in the earth breathe forth / not to whisper the seeds not to whisper in the earth / to sing the seeds in the earth the most quiet way to / sing the seeds in the earth breathe forth.”
28. We might wonder where Taggart’s focus on form and repetition might originate, and to find an answer, we might just look around, look around and see the fundamental way in which we are part of and reside within an endlessly repeating and varying form.
29. He writes in “At the Counters’ Ball”: “after the ball is over back in their counting houses / the counters will be counting what’s lost // and all the counters are laughing because I asked Emily ‘do I repeat / myself’ and she said ‘very well’ and they’re dancing”
30. Please welcome John Taggart.

John Taggart & Randall Williams This Saturday, October 22nd, 8pm, Internationalist Books

Please spread far and wide....

Who: John Taggart, author of Pastorelles, Loop, When the Saints, Standing Wave, and many others; two time NEA literature fellow; scholar of the paintings of Edward Hopper; can dance a jig on the point of a pin.

Who: Randall Williams, poet, anti-war activist, freelance journalist; author of 40 Days; dwells in a cabin in Hillsborough; ate five cans of Spam one night and woke up in possession of a silver '74 Corvette.

What: Desert City Poetry Series, second of two October readings, double play: the fall classic.

When: This Saturday, October 22nd, 8pm, 2005.

Where: Internationalist Books, 405 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC, here, there, and everywhere.

How much: $2 donation requested to support the series & the readers.

Why: "The subject was roses the problem is memory / in the end the problem is a song / the problem a problema a problem to find / to find as in to extract from" "I decided to sing to the dead fox."

See you there...

Upcoming readings:

November 12th, 8pm: Sarah Manguso & Julian Semilian

January 21st, 8pm: Ed Roberson & TBA

*Internationalist Books

*John Taggart

*Randall Williams

Contact the DCPS: Ken Rumble, director
rumblek at bellsouth dot net

The Desert City is supported by grants from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Orange County Arts Commission.

from "Inside Out"
by John Taggart

1
You have to hear the sound before you play the sound.
You have to hear you have to you have to hear to
hear you have to give you have to give ear you
who have you who have ears you who have ears to
hear you have to give ear to hear the traveller you
have to you have to you have to give ear you who have
ears to hear the traveller who is a bird to
hear the traveller who is a bird who so sings.
If you call out to the bird and if you call out
to the bird and wait on the bird: the sound is there.
You have to hear the sound before you play before
you move before you move the hands before you move
with the hands you have to hear the sound before you
move before you clap before you clap with the hands.
If you call out to the bird and if you call out
to the bird and wait on the bird: the sound is there.

You have to hear you have to you have to hear to
hear you have to give you have to give ear you
who have ears you who have ears to hear
you have to give ear to hear the traveller to
hear the traveller who is a bird who is a bird who
so sings who is not visible who cannot be
handed about who is a bird who sings who is
a bird who is invisible who cannot be handed about.
If you call out to the bird and if you call out
to the bird and wait on the bird: the sound Is there.
Before you move before you move the hands before
you move with the hands you have to hear the sound before
you move before you move with before you clap with the
hands before you clap with the hands for joy.
If you call out to the bird and if you call out
to the bird and wait on the bird: the sound is there.

You have to hear you have to you have to hear to
hear you have to give ear you who have
ears to hear you have to give ear to hear
the traveller to hear the traveller who
is a bird who is a bird who so sings who is
not visible who cannot be handed about who cannot
be broken who is a bird who is invisible
who cannot be handed about who cannot be broken.
If you call out to the bird and if you call out
to the bird and wait on the bird: the sound is there.
Before you move before you move the hands before
you move with the hands you have to hear the sound before
you clap before you clap with the hands for joy
before you move with the vibration in the air.
If you call out to the bird and if you call out
to the bird and wait on the bird: the sound is there.

You have to hear you have to you have to hear to
hear you have to give you who have
ears to hear you have to give ear to hear
the traveller who is a bird who is a bird who
sings who is not visible who cannot be handed
about who cannot be broken who is a bird who
is invisible who cannot be handed about
who cannot be broken who cannot be reassembled.
If you call out to the bird and if you call out
to the bird and wait on the bird: the sound is there.
Before you move before you move the hands before
you move with the hands you have to hear the sound before
you clap before you clap the hands for joy
before you move within the vibration in the air.
If you call out to the bird and if you call out
to the bird and wait on the bird: the sound is there.

"Beautiful Duchess"
by Randall Williams

Beautiful duchess, you are memorabilia and a pair of crow eyes. Red and black flecks cover my tilted leaves. Two black squares joke a rain of sorcery and wood. I have disassembled the tanning bed, the silver hamper and put them into a box. Two blue Recycling bins mediate my view of the Republicans across the street. My viewfinder yields sound: a river of needles, an ocean of birds, I-40 outside Amarillo. Meager, meager, North Carolina, our hands are what we have. Awkward temples, coasts in migration, verbs bellowing in sentiment and sediment. Can we be fed by the familiar? Can we chart below the temporary? Invisible closings, stationary and snaking, encircle me like crushed jacks. Young Southerners are not smiling, but gritting their teeth. And yet. My sleeping turns the rooster’s crow into a guitar riff. Airwaves fearlessly stretch into silence and obliterate logjams of sonicity. Beautiful duchess, entry without aftermath, I throw woven bottomless baskets into the street before your house.

Reading Post-Game

Still woefully behind, but I plow on as long as the whiskey is wet....

Brent & Tessa were terrific a little over a week ago now -- Tessa's work has some echos of Michael Palmer in it: lyrical, intelligent, obsessive at times. Brent -- well, see the post below. The main thing I'll say is that Brent does good inter-poem banter. You reader frequenters will know that it is not always a common skill. They were both great -- we had a good crowd, and as always, a great night at the Blue Door. Ted Pope read and shook his hips; Laird Dixon displayed his chess sets, flying pigs, and water buffalo. By the end of the night we were putting our shirts in the freezer and trying to say "Czeslaw Milosz" and "Robert Haas" with our mouths full of crackers.

Thanks to Brent, Tessa, Todd, Laura, Ted, Laird, and everyone who came.

Mr. Tost wrote up a little something something on it here -- thanks, Tony!

At any rate, Chris Vitiello did a great job of introducing Brent, but I don't have the transcripts of it. I will, though, post my intro of Ms. Joseph, and it is below.

Stay tuned and don't forget: John Taggart & Randall Williams! This Satuday, October 22nd! 8pm Internationalist Books!

Brent Cunningham & Tessa Joseph Intro

1. Announcements
a. Blue Door tonight featuring Ted Pope & Laird Dixon
b. October 22nd, Saturday, Desert City with John Taggart & Randall Williams
c. November 12th, Saturday, Desert City with Sarah Manguso & Julian Semilian

2. Welcome
a. Thanks for coming
b. Introduce yourself
c. non-profit, volunteer run organization – please make a donation to support the series and the poets
d. buy books to support the Internationalist
e. sign-up sheet in the back for future information

3. Thank yous
a. Internationalist
b. Brent & Tessa
c. all of you
d. the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation
e. the North Carolina Arts Council
f. the Orange County Arts Commission

4. Tonight, though, we’re here to see Brent Cunningham & Tessa Joseph

5. “The new girl is a story / The new girl is a net full of lobsters // A spilled glass of marbles / A floor slick with oil // Her face is an etching / Her bones dense as fossils // One eye is an angel’s / No color at all” – Tessa Joseph is not the new girl, but she did write the poem, called “Crush,” with these lines: “She will love you until you are sticky. / She will drink all your schnapps. // She will drop you. She will / kiss your eyes.”
6. Joseph may not be the new girl from the poem, but she does know all about lobsters having grown up in Maine – what she has been doing in the middle of North Carolina for so many years now is anyone’s guess. She has, though, found ways to occupy her time, chief among them being her work on a doctorate in English at Carolina, leading the Area Two faculty of the North Carolina Governor’s School, teaching hot (Bikram) yoga to the Triangle’s most flexible, and enthusiastically engaging with the local poetry community.
7. Joseph’s geographical history echoes throughout her poems – references to maps, places, houses, and landscapes abound: “The desert is a tin of air.” Physical, poetic, and metaphoric lines connect and recross these spaces – at times literally as in “October 2”: “What use / thumbing tacks to the map with thread between? Always, the line // slacks into curve: some grace there.”
8. At times the map is also a history as in “We Used to Live”: “Seventeen paces between house and outhouse, / twenty-four from house to fire-ring. Behind, // gunshot, cicadas’ swell.”
9. Amongst these lines Joseph also traces circles of intimacy, pockets of domestic connection that the maps lead into and away from. In “Entertaining” she writes, “You’re a honey. Thank you. /…/ For talking to // my awkward friend. // For upsetting the toothpicks. / You are precious… You are. No you are… Oh you / enchant.” And in “Toward”: “One day I wake up and I am from another country. / Everything that comes out of your mouth is in some other language, // and it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, all / before between beneath and of this and toward that.”
10. Joseph’s is a lyrical geography which calls to mind the work of Michael Palmer and A. R. Ammons. She writes in “Portrait of Something”: “The frame’s / always the weather, pale, / paper-dry, beyond // consideration.” And in “Encyclopediac”: “Love, oh love. Blue milk sliding / down the backs of your legs… A breath / moves over the desert, through / a sheet of glass with red light sinking / down it.” And, as if to define this lyrical impulse, she writes: “Grace loops / and shimmers. It does not direct.”
11. And so there is a tension in Joseph’s work between the map, the directions, the intention, the desire and the burned reality explored in a poem like “Walking Around the Ruin”: “Ghosts of windows where windows are gone.” Between these things, lyricism moves like a mother of sorts: soothing burns with beauty and teaching lessons with the sharp edges of words: “Your head is full of sharks, bees, / severed limbs, and other // nesting things.”
12. Finally, the narrator has moments of clarity in which the necessity of this trinity that cycles through the poems becomes clear as in “The Hands of the Dying” in which the narrator addresses a lover about death – “It takes something, doesn’t it, / to grin and flop // and do you last. Something, / to wear that old thing well … Oh, lord, / love, there is so much going, so much going, / so much going / on.”
13. Please welcome Tessa Joseph.

Cunningham's Bird & Forest

Woefully behind these days -- so I'll post this that I intended to post and finish awhile ago over a glass of whiskey here at DCHQ:

For Brent & Tessa's reading I am not going to have the pleasure of introducing Mr. Cunningham, that will be someone else's job. It is a little disappointing, though nevertheless the right decision. I really enjoy writing (and delivering) the introductions -- it's a great excuse to get really deep into a poet's work and think through it, how to present it, how to sketch useful outlines of it without giving too much "away," etc. As someone who feels like he doesn't read enough and wants to read more, the introductions provide me with a venue in which I have to read; it is, in effect, my job to read at that point.

I am not doing the introduction for Brent though, so I don't have that excuse, which is too bad because Bird & Forest is terrific. So I thought I'd spend a little time here writing about what I might have written about had I had a reason to write an intro for Mr. C.

(I'm feeling a rambly in my head, so I suspect that'll come through in my writing here today.)

So I'll start by quoting several lines that I copied down in my notebook while reading B & F:

"must I ask until I die why I live"

"Before our empire was founded, decisions were made using the lightning, swords, and birds of the natural surroundings. A rock was wrapped in a cloth and hurled into the canyon. // Things are different now. But how are they different? We find that the rock is now covered in mirrors."

"the soft arms of death"

"the caterpillar eating through its future"

"Do you think no child in the village dreams of being the idiot?"

"free to distinguish movement from motion"

"Even when forest burns up, its trees do not panic. And this is also true when that smaller flame, the bird, sweeps through its branches."

"Whatever is bequeathed a single word will slide down a funnel to the general."

"Writing has only solved the problem of mute human blood. But logic goes into your mind, possessing it, until you are free."

"Language doesn't become strange by torturing it. It becomes strange by giving it a task too simple to complete."

This last quotation serves as the guiding principle in this work in many ways. There is no question in this collection that language is strange -- the question is how to reveal the strangeness. What I most like about Bird & Forest is the heartbreaking and sincere pathos that runs below all these poems. Brent said at one point during inter-poem banter that he liked ~to write at the place where sincerity and facetiousness were nearly indistinguishable, even to himself as writer.~ He hits that point many, many times in this book; I find it very compelling particularly in light of the intellectual dexterity that he also brings into these poems.

(Again, I'm sorry to ramble without any helpful examples or anything to back up what I'm saying -- the jist is that the book is excellent: go check it out.)

So I imagine the speaker of these poems (and they are "spoken" poems in a rather fundamental way (some are even orations, but even most of the others seem to be "spoken" by a speaker as opposed to something less "speaker" focused (you know, it's like some poems just seem like they exist in a space and from a place that would never be spoken -- these poems are not like that.))) At any rate, the speaker of these poems is highly intellectual and steeped in post-structuralist theory and philosophy, floating in a troubling sea of relativism and plagued by hyper-self-consciousness. The speaker is also someone who, despite the intellectual awareness, wants something "real", something to matter, something that isn't just an empty surface with no depth -- the speaker, even as s/he relentlessly attacks meaning and meaning-making, desperately wants to have something like meaning.

It's this mix of intellect and pathos that I find really compelling about the book -- it's quite heartbreaking.

On the other hand, the book is often also funny as hell.

At some point, I'd like to get my thoughts more coherent about Bird & Forest, but man, am I behind....

More soon.

Cunningham & Joseph This Saturday, October 8th!

Tomorrow poetry lovers, tomorrow.....

Dates Decided!

The spring season is coming together -- a little tentative still, but so far it looks like

January: Ed Roberson (most tentative date) & TBA

February 11th: Claudia Rankine & TBA

March 25th: Ron Silliman & TBA

April 22nd: Emmanuel Hocquard & Rosmarie Waldrop

Been on the phone with the French Embassy a lot lately -- gotta say it makes me feel pretty cool, but I'm dorky like that.

Cunningham & Joseph This Saturday, October 8th!

Please spread far and wide....

Who: Brent Cunningham, author of Bird & Forest, founder of the Poets' Theatre Jamboree, Small Press Distribution shaker & mover, knows how to say "eclipse" in 17 languages including English.

Who: Tessa Joseph, editor of the Carolina Quarterly, doctoral student at UNC-Chapel Hill, former student of A. R. Ammons, can wield ostrich feathers with wild abandon.

What: Desert City Poetry Series, first of two October readings because Oh my gosh they're all so good.

When: This Saturday, October 8th, 8pm, 2005.

Where: Internationalist Books, 405 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC, everything else is somewhere else.

How much: $2 donation requested to support the series & the readers.

Why: "Language doesn't become strange by torturing it" "She will love you until you are sticky. / She will drink all your schnapps. // She will drop you. She will / kiss your eyes. She will make you a poet."

See you there...

Upcoming readings:

October 22nd, 8pm: John Taggart & Randall Williams

November 12th, 8pm: Sarah Manguso & Julian Semilian

*Internationalist Books

*Brent Cunningham

*Tessa Joseph

Contact the DCPS: Ken Rumble, director
rumblek at bellsouth dot net

The Desert City is supported by grants from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Orange County Arts Commission.


"Evening at the Hotel de Sade"
by Brent Cunningham

The fear of death pervades us, I declared, plunging my knife into the table grain.

Don’t make me laugh, Robert replied. Make you? Shall we say lead me in that direction. You jest. Strangely not. Then you underestimate me.

My dear Robert, said Robert (for we were both named Robert), you must admit that within this narrow blink of existence it is common to mark our singularity with such drama as you just exhibited; in short, for all that, we’re animals.

The very idea turns my stomach, I replied. Does it? It does indeed. Please go on, for your position fascinates me.

I did not hesitate to go on, but spoke at such extraordinary length I lost my faith of concluding. My friend, I concluded, you may wonder how life is for me.

Less and less, said Robert. In general? Au contraire. But I’m an exceedingly curious case. My dear Robert!

Does it not interest you, I remarked, that I go from city to city, chased by dogs, denying the most apparent truths imaginable?

I have specific information, said Robert, that you have never been chased by dogs...

Swelling with confidence and vigour, I rose to respond, only to discover that twenty Roberts now swam in front of my eyes. My legs gave out; the roast overturned. Dimly I heard Lucy rushing down the stairs, impossibly free of her ropes...


"Walking around the ruin"
by Tessa Joseph

i.
There are no more movers No more
filing in and out Packing in layers of wax

Start with the housefire

that jerked its leg in your throat Start with that

saltstained river which was both enough
and not enough to move you That door

open on a kitchen, burning oil you could smell

Start with the houses you’ve wanted that you haven’t had

Their smokeshriveled doors Heatbucking floorboards
Ghosts of windows where windows are gone


ii.
A crowd on a green and dripping barge We were in procession

Through the buoyed stones Slate walkway Blue front door

There was a stone mantel. We always kept things on the stairs.

Two feet Slap the water One instant Perfect


iii.
There were twenty five windows
We paid for them
Paid for them Put them there

Not like eyes Not like anything
but windows
Like quarries, spiked deep No

There were twenty-five windows
A shelf of little boxes
We filled them Or not I saw

it happen I saw each box hinge
on flame


iv.
Small archaeology, this cellar: tins of morphine tool-hung wall
ancient chessgame

And the details, tiny pictures, curving voices map the last of the passages
Tell me how it is there What it is like

I visit the river every day and it too is small, too small

A house is the space the size of the word it is lamp and street and bread and rooster
and also wider, having

wider arms