The Desert City

New Blog....

2009-01-04T11:26:00.003-05:00

So I'm hoping to start doing some blogging here as well, but in addition, I've started a new blog called Durham Has the Worst Roads in the World -- it's sort of a civic action, rant, sort of something or other -- with luck, informative and also entertaining...

Obama for President

2008-10-16T08:29:00.002-04:00

On behalf of the Desert City and myself (well mostly just me cuz, well, I'm all there is), I am happy and excited to announce our support for Barack Obama for president.

Don't forget to vote Tuesday, November 4.

Best wishes to us all.

Review of Key Bridge

2008-10-01T10:31:00.001-04:00

Wow, great review of KB over at Tarpaulin Sky by Joseph Harrington. Thanks so much to Joseph and Christian Peet for publishing it.

xo

Upcoming Readings....

2008-09-13T19:11:00.002-04:00

Here they are, friends:

Chapel Hill, NC: Wednesday, September 17, 9pm, Jack Sprat Cafe, 161 E. Frankin St.

NYC, NY: Thursday, September 18, 6pm, ACA Galleries, 529 W.20th St., 5th Flr.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn: Friday, October 24 (United Nations Day!!), 7 pm, Stain Bar, 766 Grand St.

Someday I'll start blogging about something, but here's something -- isn't this just the way with the information age? It used to be everybody had a blog and they wrote at length about their thoughts and etc. and etc. and they talked about what they did and etc. and etc. and now everybody's got a twitter feed and I know what you had for breakfast. What is the history of america? Someday it'll start with cornflakes.

xo

Me on the Radio....

2008-08-04T13:56:00.002-04:00

Jeff Davis graciously had me on his radio show, Word Play, yesterday afternoon up in the mountains of Asheville. It was a lot of fun -- thanks, Jeff! We talked about Key Bridge, my recent collaborative writing with the beautiful and brilliant Anastasia Sea, various traditions in contemporary poetry, typewriters, Greensboro fun, the band Invisible, and many many more topics.

Give a listen if you've got a few......

Brian Howe on Key Bridge in Fanzine

2008-07-28T12:07:00.002-04:00

My dear friend Brian Howe wrote a really generous and insightful review of KB and Chris Vitiello and Tony Tost's new books. Great company to be in and a great mind to think through the work. Many, many thanks, Brian....

Some interesting things....

2008-06-23T21:56:00.002-04:00

Annandale Dream Gazette

Work By Adam Good:

Lecture 2 - What We Think When We Think About Thought
video: http://vimeo.com/1184308
materials: http://www.flickr.com/photos/asgood/sets/72157605665242803/

Lecture 1 (excerpt) - The Database of Descriptions
video: http://vimeo.com/1151832
materials: http://www.flickr.com/photos/asgood/sets/72157603989571675/

Ryan Eckes's Old News

Dwight Riverbottum

New Alice Blue, New Alice Blue for You...

2008-04-14T19:04:00.002-04:00

There's a new Alice Blue and it has many fine poems, a bundle of sticks all suitable for walking, a staff of thousands of words, which is to say, poems by

christian peet, robert jacoby, matthew savoca, erica lewis, andrea kneeland, serena rose chopra, corey mesler, merida gorman, trey moody, john findura, ken rumble & donald dunbar

all those people -- some of my monologues in there which make crooked walking sticks, but even walking in circles gets you somewhere sometimes....

Texas Pictures

2008-03-26T15:45:00.003-04:00

I photo-document my life fairly sporadically and unpredictably. Fortunately, I took a bunch of pictures while I was in Texas last fall for a couple of readings arranged by the dear and wonderful Farid Matuk and Scott Pierce. They also took me dove hunting in Comanche, Texas. What a strange and wonderful trip. Here are the pics.

Many, many, many thanks to Scott, Farid & everyone who came out to the readings and for drinks and for everything.....

Jonathan Williams

2008-03-17T11:13:00.002-04:00

Jonathan Williams -- a wonderful poet whose work over the last several years has continued to inspire and guide my own, the publisher of Jargon Society books whose list is a who's-who of the second half of 20th American poetry, and as generous and intelligent man as one can be -- passed away last night.

Reading in Nashville & Oxford, MS End of March!

2008-03-12T14:19:00.002-04:00

The Southern Swing:

Poetry @ The Writing Studio, with Tim Earley & Ken Rumble
Friday March 28, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Alumni Hall 117, Vanderbilt University

Trobar Ric Reading Series

Oxford, MS

Saturday, March 29th, 7:00 p.m.

at the home of Chris Hayes & Alicia Casey

for more info contact: tdearley@olemiss.edu

Thanks to Tim E. and Tom O. for setting these up!

Fun times, Fun times...

2008-03-09T17:27:00.001-04:00

Pics for my peops....

Batimore.

March 8 Minor American.

xo

Big Fun in Baltimore Plus a Punch in the Head

2008-03-03T10:44:00.004-05:00

So much fun in B'mo this weekend -- I think I laughed from the moment I arrived to the moment I left (and then I cried because I wasn't there anymore (sigh.)) Awesome Kate Pringle came with me and made the miles speed on by (or was that my lead foot?) Gina opened the reading with a knock-out set and I walked about with her old chap (new one coming soon) and the new--most excellent--issue of the tiny. Justin read for like 3.5 minutes from his new & terrific book all about pirates. I hit my head into his fist I was so mad he read for so short a time. All our friends were there and all our friends are beautiful. Thanks to Michael Ball who should win several awards for doing what he does, and thanks to everyone for coming out! and shouts to Rod, Mel, Jamie, Maureen, Cathy, April, Lili, Chris T, and Dustin Williamson who came all the way from NYC only to leave haunted with the echo of my cackling laughter filling his head -- thanks everyone!

I'll be in Nashville and Oxford, MS, later in March and Philly in later April and St. Louis in early May. Maybe see you there?

xo

I'm Reading in Baltimore this Saturday!

2008-02-24T16:40:00.002-05:00

Saturday, March 1st, with justin sirois & Gina Myers, 8 o'clock PM, ie reading series: CARRIAGE HOUSE, 2225 Hargrove Street, Baltimore, MD. 21218

justin's got a great new book out -- Secondary Sound, & Gina Myers has a new chapbook coming out later this year. They also walk with righteousness.

See you there....

Reading in Durham, NC, with Anne Boyer this Weekend, Saturday, January 12th

2008-01-09T15:29:00.000-05:00

And did I mention my birthday is January 29th? I'll be a pair of consecutive numbers; you'll be a exquisite Now & Later.

This Saturday! January 12th! 8:00 pm! Ken Rumble & Anne Boyer are this month's Minor Americans!

Click here for details and big love to Kate & Maggie.

Elsewhere.....

2007-12-20T11:06:00.001-05:00

More about Elsewhere generally soon, but in the meantime, the residency application season has opened.....

Elsewhere Artist Collaborative
2008 residencies for artists, writers, and cultural producers

Elsewhere, an arts production site and experimental museum in downtown Greensboro, NC, is seeking artists, writers, and cultural producers for residencies during its Spring, Summer, and Fall 2008 seasons. Set within a former thrift store housing a 58-year collection of American surplus, thrift, and antiques, Elsewhere invites experimental creators to utilize the immense collection of objects to pursue site-specific material, conceptual, and/or technologically-based projects. Elsewhere's building—two storefronts on the ground floor, a 14-room boarding house on the second, and warehouse on the third—provides dynamic architectures for the creation and installation of works. Artists live and work within transforming installations; these interactive environments become platforms for re-conceptualizing the theory and practice of art-making as an ongoing process of exchange in community. Experimenting with museum-as-medium within a store where nothing is for sale, Elsewhere offers an unparalleled framework for art practices, processes, and productions outside the traditional gallery, museum, and residency systems. The complete call for artists, residency brochure (PDF), and application deadlines are available at http://www.elsewhereelsewhere.org/residencies.html. Email George Scheer, Collaborative Director, at residencies [at] elsewhereelsewhere [dot] org for an application.

DEADLINES

Spring: April 1st to May 31st (final deadline January 25th 5pm)
Summer: June 1st to August 31st (final deadline February 22nd 5pm)
Fall: September 1st to October 31st (final deadline May 23rd 5pm)

If anybody has any questions about Elsewhere, particularly as they relate to being a writer/artist/poet in the space, feel free to drop me a line.....

I'm Reading in Portland, OR, This Sunday!

2007-12-06T15:23:00.000-05:00

Click here for more details!

Hot Turkey!

2007-11-23T10:42:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Didi and Amy I'm in the new sexy issue of Mipoesias! (and I'm wearing a sailor suit!) A million thank yous to my good friends Mario Gallucci who took all those pictures and to Alex Maness who took some others pictures and generally helped a lot (read: he was my spritzer) and Dorothy Cowan who provided the legs and scantily clad body and lots of sex appeal and Jenny Maness who put up with three dudes in her living room at 1:30 in the morning one of whom was only wearing a dictionary (those pics didn't make it apparently.) Much love to you four, you make G'bo an infinitely brighter place.

And Cheryl Townsend reviewed Key Bridge! Thanks to Cheryl and Mipo (again (and again.))

And the number one encourager, her awesomeness, Jules Cohen & his awesomeness Justin Marks (I believe?) chatted about KB over at the Informalists blog a ways back.

And also thanks to John Hewitt who had some nice things to say about KB over at the Writers Resource Center awhile back.

And many, many thanks to the delightful, talented & funny as hell Ms. Megan Volpert who reviewed KB and interviewed me for the summer 2007 issue of New Delta Review. And big thanks to the editors who published the whole thing -- I had a few things to say apparently. Maybe I'll post it here at some point...

And wow, so much going on lately -- I had such a great time giving readings back in October -- more on that soon -- I've also been spending a lot of time at this wonderful artists' collective, collaborative space here in Greensboro called Elsewhere -- it's a 60 year old thrift store that's been converted into a artists residency/installation/museum/theme park (what the theme, Gene?!?!?!) Being there has been really wonderful, lots of writing coming out and a fair number of projects that fall more in a visual arts category I think. I mean, I'm doing a lot of writing that I like but don't plan on producing more than one copy of. I'm making writing that is not made for reproduction. It's fun and kinda scary and really wonderful -- Elsewhere is a magic place.

More about all these things soon.

Fall Readings!

2007-09-24T20:52:00.000-04:00

I'm probably coming to your town this fall, folks -- see below! And if you're in a place near these places around these times and you feel the deep need for a Rumble reading -- chances are good we can work something out.

Don't be shy....

Greensboro, NC: Tuesday, October 9, 5 pm, UNCG Faculty Center on College Avenue

Brooklyn, NY: Friday, Friday, October 12, 7:30 pm, The Fall Cafe, 307 Smith St, between President & Union

Austin, TX: Thursday, October 18, 7 pm, 12th Street Books, 827 W. 12th Street

Dallas, TX: Sunday, October 21, 7 pm, Paperbacks Plus, 6115 La Vista Drive

Lincoln, NE: Saturday, October 27, 7 pm, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, 12th and R streets on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus

Kansas City/Lawrence, MO/KS: Sunday, October 28, click here for details

Baton Rouge, LA: Saturday, November 3, 10 - 5 pm, Louisiana Book Festival, @ the Louisiana State Capital and other nearby locations

Portland, OR: Sunday, December 9, 7:30 pm

St. Louis, MO: Thursday, May 1, 8 pm, Schlafly Bottleworks, 7260 Southwest Ave. (at Manchester)

Many thanks to all the fine folks that are setting these up!

Translation

2007-08-30T09:16:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I accepted what I've been wondering for awhile: 24 Hour Breakfast is a translation project. I generally and very loosely look at poems through the filter of "poems that describe the world/experience in a way that reveals the fantastic" and "poems that describe the fantastic to reveal the world." I prefer the former really, but then there's translation -- a third thing? not a metaphor for what is, referring constantly back to the "source," but a new complete thing that's neither a description of the world or an analogy for the world.

I've got a bunch of readings this fall: NYC, Austin, Dallas, Lincoln, Baton Rouge, New Orleans (maybe) & Portland. Maybe you live in one of these places? You should let me know, maybe?

xo

Cinco Preguntas Para Me....

2007-08-07T09:25:00.000-04:00

Poet & new Greensboro resident Matt Mullins has included me in his five questions project
-- thanks, Matt! I'm up here.....

And babies, it's HOT in the South....

New Post @ Any Book

2007-07-15T20:36:00.000-04:00

It took me a little while, but viola! Any Book.

On the Radio, just can't wait to get on the radio...

2007-07-09T21:58:00.000-04:00

Okay, I'm going to be on the radio tomorrow to talk about Key Bridge! I gotta say -- these interviews and all this stuff is really pretty fun. It's not so much the having my voice on the radio streaming into the homes of millions -- it's just that radio interviewers are good (it's their job) at asking interesting questions about the people they're talking to. And what's better than a smart person asking you smart questions about yourself???? Who cares if it gets on the radio! I just want to live with a professional interviewer!!

WFDD, 88.5 FM Winston-Salem, NPR affiliate, Tuesday, July 10, 8:50am & 1:50pm.

You'll hear it there first.

Wrap & New Key Bridge Review!

2007-07-08T22:02:00.000-04:00

Adam Sobsey reviewed Key Bridge in this week's Independent Weekly!! Thanks a lot, Adam! Wow, it's really so heartwarming to get all this positive feedback about the book; I'm super grateful once again.

And yay! Tim Earley and Susan Briante brought the Desert City to Greensboro in style. Both terrific readings by Tim and Susan, a good little crowd, some of the Triangle folks made it out, we had it in the big gallery, we stayed up till 4 trying to "define" sexy, and the in-joke of the night was coined early: "this little boy named Jose."

Thank god for Jose and poetry! And many, many thanks to Susan and Tim for reading and everyone for coming out.

Below are the introductions:

2. “Love,” writes Tim Earley, “is a rose by any other name and sticks you / with its plastic thorn. Sure it doesn’t hurt, / but sure who’s asking it to?” Like these lines from “Jing Poem,” Earley’s poems in his first book, Boondoggle, relentlessly seek to illuminate the gaps between what we experience, how we talk about it, and the profound isolation that results from our inability to reconcile the differences between those two worlds. Words are not the thing they name, but they are thorny, sticking things.
3. Tim Earley is a North Carolinian by birth and the grace of god, and he currently lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina, with the literary theorist Sallie Anglin. When not teaching at Catawba Valley Community College, Earley spends his time slaying the forces of evil that spawn continually in the virtual world of role playing video games. No simple “meat shield,” Earley enjoys playing characters that are, like his poems, more complex.
4. Along with the complexity of Earley’s poems is a deep longing for the world. Images, scenes, people, and landscapes continually capture his eye, but as he tries to describe them, the words get in the way, and he’s lost in a tangle of language as the tactile world slips away. He writes, “There are childhood / days when the body really is not / a body and you are more of a green wisp / among the earth and still sweat. / … / One day I will touch each person’s / shoulder in a gesture / of sincere understanding and warm fellow-feeling, the sun real as an eye. // Today is Belgium.”
5. Earley’s poems have appeared in Fascicle, Chicago Review, jubilat, Conduit, and other literary journals. He’s twice been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and in 2005 Main Street Rag Press published his first book, Boondoggle. In the fall, he enters the English PhD program at the University of Mississippi.
6. While often words confound the speaker’s efforts to communicate, experience, and understand, there are nearly as many moment when the absurdity of language as revealed by Earley creates glorious visions, visions not exactly of the tactile world but of a marvelous parallel world that sheds light across all these divisions. “More town business / is what you need, and a livelier step. / Everything in the country is orange, though, / rust & toads & dirt, the days eat / all the pieces of your sky.”
7. Please welcome Tim Earley.

8. “Witness the aesthetics of 6 lanes of bus fumes, cluttered / sidewalks where claustrophobic anticipation works its corkscrew. / The US Border Inspection Station yawns, high priest / of star makers, gargoyles and liquor stores; / shaman of hundched shoulders, street debris, buckets of dirty water / or warm tortillas, a hastily ironed shirt, the sunshine muse.” The poems in Susan Briante’s first book, Pioneers in the Study of Motion, are interested in places, locations, and borders, the consequence of ideas like “place” and “location.”
9. “They come down from the mountains like clouds, like christs, and wander into the cities. In addition to the difference in sea levels, there is the stark gap of languages.”
10. Currently an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Dallas, Briante spent seven years living in Mexico after quitting journalism. There she began to write poems and became involved with the literary journal Mandorla, one of the foremost journals of innovative translation.
11. Briante’s poems have roots and spread like vines; her lines leave trails over the landscape she criss-crossing in an attempt to stitch together what otherwise seems otherworldly: “Between he window washer and curb, a galaxy swirls. // Between windshield and rag, office towers sway. // Old ladies pluck orange candies from pink market tubs. // Passionflower vines capture red and blue wavelengths of light. // Any search requires a preposition as in: ‘Estoy buscando a mi amigo.’”
12. Briante can’t escape the things of this world and doesn’t want to; instead, these poems take stock, reveal, revel at times, and insist that the borders we keep around our thinking, our lives, and our spaces, insist that those borders are permeable: “There is Tupperware buried under that building. Tupperware and tuna fish cans and bulk mailings and dental floss and unmatched socks and dice and sppons and cuff links and office supply catalogues and bolts and coke bottles and combs under that building. / In the Holland Tunnel, tiles glisten white as alveoli. / The glass is wired.”
13. The visions Pioneers in the Study of Motion offers are not like those of the Oracle of Delphi; they are visions that reveal the sweat, oil, guns, and work behind the next bag of grapes we toss in our shopping carts.
14. Please welcome Susan Briante.

Briante & Earley, 07.07.07 @ 7pm! Greensboro

2007-07-03T15:37:00.000-04:00

Who: Susan Briante, author of Pioneers in the Study of Motion, makes three egg omelet with two eggs, straight from Texas with a chainsaw.

Who: Tim Earley, author of Boondoggle, weaver of mouse tails, hirsute pointer.

What: Desert City Poetry Series, New in Greensboro, Old as Dirt.

When: 07.07.07 @ 7:00pm, This Monkey is Going to Heaven.

Where: Green Hill Center for NC Art, 200 N. Davie St. Greensboro, NC, the Sparkle in the Heart of the Emerald City.

Why: "Pills linger on the tongue like moths on water" "I was, for my age, spry with a hammer."

See you there.....

Susan Briante

Tim Earley

Green Hill Center on Google Maps

Susan Briante & Tim Earley, Saturday, July 7th

2007-06-28T09:03:00.000-04:00

Okay, I pulled down the tents, loaded the camels, and have moved the Desert City to the Emerald City, my current place of residence: Greensboro, North Carolina!

And to celebrate, on Saturday, July 7th, at a time to be announced, Susan Briante, author of Pioneers in the Study of Motion, and Tim Earley, author of Boondoggle, will read from their recent work.

Both terrific poets, both shower regularly.

The reading will be held at the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, 200 N. Davie Street, downtown Greensboro, across from Center City Park.

And the extra treat is that we've got a rare and incredible exhibition of the work of ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu on display right now. A stunning collection.

And speaking of Toshiko, here's a picture of her endorsing my book Key Bridge:

Here's a shot of the gallery installation of her work (it's all really big and all made out of clay):

Oh, and I'm thinking about having the reading at 5:30 pm -- is that a ridiculous time to have an event on a Saturday??? Dare I scoff at tradition????

More info soon.....

Coming Soon @ Any Book

2007-06-08T13:38:00.000-04:00

Working on a dual review of The Poker #8 and Saltgrass #1 over at Any Book; I been busy with the lifes, so a little slower than I'd like, but I should finish by the middle of next week at the latest....

xo

Me & Key Bridge @ Kate Greenstreet's Blog

2007-06-02T10:09:00.000-04:00

Kate Greenstreet included me in her great little first book interview project -- what a treat!

You can find it here, and it includes information about my tour from a month or so ago and other musings on the literary life.

Thanks, Kate!

xoxo

Lately....

2007-06-02T10:07:00.001-04:00

...this wee blogger's been working to go to the real down under.

On Influence & Literary Thievery

2007-05-27T10:15:00.000-04:00

I often write, think, and talk about the work by other's that has influenced me. Key Bridge owes much to the work of C. S. Giscombe, Charles Olson, and George Oppen, and I rarely -- if ever -- downplay that influence.

And I often refer to some version of the quotation attributed to Eliot about "bad poets borrowing and good poets stealing" as a way of explaining (justifying?) the echoes of other poets' work within my own.

Here, by the way, is the entire Eliot quotation:

"One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion."

I talk openly about my influences as a way to recognize and repay my debt to those writers. I also do it so that I can show other people other ways in: "if you like this, see this...."

But I realized that attributing my work in that way has been in part from modesty. It's not that I no longer want to be modest, but I do want to and have been thinking about influence lately and thinking that while I owe a debt to those writers that I should also think more about where my thinking fits into that writing.

Much of my writing arises from my response to the work I read -- I read something, am troubled by it (not in a good/bad way), and then I start writing. My aim is not imitation though; I'm almost always trying to understand something in the original work through my own writing. So my work ends up having points of overlap with the other work but is also very much the product of my thinking.

Good art helps its audience see other places that they can put their attention, good art is a door to a hall with more doors. So if someone reads Harryette Mullen and begins to write poems seemingly full of surface descriptions, surface descriptions that explode into a labyrinth of criss-crossing connotations, if someone opens that door, that's the point, right?

Key Bridge Concordance via Amazon

2007-05-24T10:18:00.001-04:00

Okay, this is cool -- below is Amazon's concordance of the 100 most frequently used words in Key Bridge:

above always angles another away bark below between birds black blue body boy bridge buildings call cap car circles city dark diagonal distance does down dream edges end even eyes feet find georgetown get girl going green hand head hill jenny key know land leaves light lines location long look love loved man map mean memory metaphor name near niggers night nothing now open park past people place potomac put red river road room say see seeing shadow should skin somewhere sound space stars still streets suburbs talk tea thing time tree turns two wait watch water white without years

My Hummer (Of Course)

2007-05-15T09:49:00.000-04:00

Was in DC this weekend and had much, much fun. Saturday night was the Nancy Kuhl and Elizabeth Willis reading courtesy those wacky and wild DC poets. Both terrific readers -- what fun and lots of good conversation afterwards about the benefits of observing others' attention and Writing from the New Coast. Then Sunday with Mom for mothers' day; I do have the best mom ever by the way. Then Sunday night with Brian and Ashley to see LCD Soundsystem play at the 9:30 Club -- loved it, loved it, loved it! Then getting up at 6 am Monday morning, so I could drive back to NC and put in a half day of work!

A photo essay with beer movies to be seen soon....

What fun -- I'd do it all again!

So I haven't really posted much about my recent tour; I have written about it in an interview that will be up sometime soonish though, so I think I'll just let that come out.

And what else, still working on setting up the West Coast tour -- looking pretty good so far: LA, Humboldt, SF, Portland, and a couple of maybes.

I have a Northwest swing shaping up for early October, a Texas leg for mid-September, and a Southern stroll for early November.

If anyone would like to have me out to read, I'm mostly willing to go just about anywhere.

And lastly, if someone would like a review copy of Key Bridge let me know -- e-addie on the right.

Any Book

2007-05-11T00:18:00.001-04:00

The first post is here.

Amazon, Coconut & Any Book

2007-05-06T21:46:00.000-04:00

The marvelous & erudite Kevin Killian reviewed Key Bridge on Amazon! which I think is way cool!

Kevin's been writing Amazon reviews for nearly every kind of product that Amazon sells -- which is pretty much everything these days. Baby food, khaki shorts, books, etc. have been reviewed by Mr. Killian. It's really lovely to see someone use this public and so timely forum for beautiful ends. I'm not praising his review of KB here so much as I'm just so thrilled by the project when I say that is one of the most influential (literally) poetry works I've heard of in quite a few years. And the nascent Hooke Press of San Francisco recently published a volume of selected Amazon reviews by Kevin which unfortunately is already (after three months?) out of print -- hopefully, to return soon. At any rate, I was thrilled to see the review and to be a part of the project.

Okay, and I've got some new stuff (okay, just one piece) in the new-ish Coconut. It's part two of 24 Hour Breakfast. Part one's over here in Fascicle 3.

The rest of the Coconut, as usual, is really hot. I'll recommend starting with this one, this one, and this one. Lots of bodies in this issue -- good to see 'em.

And finally, for those holding their breath -- I salute you! I'm really really going to start publishing reviews over at Any Book. Win like a lobster, win like a lobster! Don't know where that came from -- need new mantra maybe. By the end of the week I'll have one up and at least two a week after that until I stop (reviews, not mantras.)

Radio to Book World

2007-04-29T19:35:00.000-04:00

A great interview with Frank Stasio on Friday on The State of Things -- really pretty fun, Frank's a good guy to talk to; he does a good interview. We talked about Lucipo, the Desert City, and Key Bridge. One of the "brilliant" things I said was "50% of what I hear is sound."

And, wow!, today the Washington Post's Book World reprinted a section of Key Bridge that originally appeared in Octopus in slightly different form (thanks Mathias & Zach!)

I'm on the Radio! Radi-oh-ooh!

2007-04-26T16:07:00.000-04:00

Live from Durham: me on the radio tomorrow, Friday April 27th, at noon!!

I'll be on WUNC's The State of Things (91.5 fm) tomorrow to talk about Key Bridge and whatever else they let me opine about. It'll be lots of fun -- and only 20 minutes of your life! Who would complain about that??

Hear poetry's number on radio voice! All others are second best!! Trust the REAL DEAL!

Me, on the radio, less, obnoxious, than me, on, the blog.

xo

ps: I'll be in Durham on Monday, April 30, to close out Poetry Month with a reading at the Regulator Bookstore on 9th Street at 7pm.

Home Again....

2007-04-23T10:48:00.000-04:00

A really wonderful trip around the East Coast and Appalachians -- wow, what fun. Thanks to everybody who helped make it happen and everybody who came.

More soon, but going to spend a little time sleeping under the desk today.

West Coast, here I come.....

Silliman Reviewed Key Bridge!

2007-04-12T11:07:00.000-04:00

Wow, it's wonderful, shocking, and just kind of crazy to be mentioned with the likes of Olson, Stein, and Oppen, but I like it...

Ron Silliman on Key Bridge

My April Readings of Key Bridge

2007-04-06T23:26:00.000-04:00

Thursday, April 12th, 7pm, Barnes & Noble, Friendly Center, Greensboro, NC

Friday, April 13th, 3pm, Hollins University, Green Room, Roanoke, VA (scroll down to April 13th)

Saturday, April 14th, 8pm, Pyramid Atlantic, Silver Spring, MD, with C. S. Giscombe & Susan Tichy

Gil Ott Memorial Award Reading Sunday, April 15th, 3pm, Robin's Bookstore, Philadelphia, PA, with Alicia Askenase, Julia Blumenreich, CAConrad, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ryan Eckes, Kristen Gallagher, Eli Goldblatt, Chris McCreary, Jenn McCreary, Bob Perelman, Ken Rumble, Joshua Schuster, Frank Sherlock, Ron Silliman

Monday, April 16th, 7pm, Robin's Bookstore, Philadelphia, PA, with Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Thursday, April 19th, 8pm, Red Weather Reading Series, 112 Walker, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA

Monday, April 30th, 7pm, Regulator Bookshop, Durham, NC

AWP: Glory. Light.

2007-04-05T08:54:00.000-04:00

Okay, so really there were three more moments of glory and light at AWP that I will write about: meeting and listening to Sawako Nakayasu read from her book of Japanese translations; hearing Reb say "there he is -- Ken! come over here," and then meeting Jill Alexander Esbaum, Anne Boyer, Daniel Nestor, Shafer Hall, and some other sweet people; and the Pilot, Black Ocean, No Tell, Octopus Books reading bLAMPLOSion! then I drove home and pulled into sleepy G'bo around 3:30 am, almost exactly 48 hours after I had left.

Deming Clarifies

2007-04-02T20:44:00.000-04:00

A very nice note from John regarding KB and the rating system -- a little excerpt below:

"As for the star rating, I've been meaning for some time to get up on the site a list of what our star rating system actually is; it's supposed to be very discriminating, anyway, kind of a one-to-Whitman thing. 10 stars, then, means an absolute classic; 7.5 means exemplary, among the few best books of the year; 5 stars means highly recommended, strong, promising work; 2.5 means not recommended; 0 of course means "stay as far away as possible.""

And after all, I did better than Mary Karr -- so thanks, John & Coldfront!

Some Reviews of Key Bridge!

2007-04-01T21:51:00.000-04:00

Having a book out has increased the number of self-googles I perform, and double bonus today!

Mathias Svalina, really one of the nicest guys I've met in a long time, had some kind things to say about the book over at his blog. Thanks, Mathias! From his review:

"It's at one moment hyperactive & horny & the next moment rent & imagistic. I think Rumble's super-power is the open parenthetical."

And there's a review up at Coldfront Magazine that John Deming wrote. It's odd because the review doesn't seem that critical really -- there are some things he doesn't like about the book of course -- but the "rating" is 5.5 of 10. Ouch!! Turn the heat down, babe! But c'est la vie and shit -- I appreciate the read and ink, and maybe they'll get rid of the ratings someday.

"The wordplay—Rumble's a Steinian at heart—mixed with the domineering image of the less-than-domineering bridge gives you the sense that the poet is willing to control as much as he can while conceding most else to question and chance."

AWP Day 2, After Coffee

2007-03-18T11:34:00.000-04:00

So after Jeff, Matt, Joel, and I finished up our coffees, and after Joel told us how Matt found Joel asleep in the shower standing up with the water on and by that point cold having churned through all the hot, after all that we went our separate ways. I returned to the bookfair and the Wren table with no fear for the guards because the guards were no longer there or they no longer cared. Today was the day for the common people to come feel the glory of and bask in the light of AWP. And there was glory and there was light.

This Is What Healing Feels Like

2007-03-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

JGP & JS & the all the cats in B'more rocking the Rock Heals.

Those kids did it again: Ken Rumble @ Rock Heals; brings a damn tear to the eyeball how sweet they are.

xo

2007-03-13T21:11:00.000-04:00

And then this happened.

AWP Day 2, Continued

2007-03-13T20:00:00.000-04:00

Memory...hazy....must...recount.....now.......before......

I got back from the bathroom and found Jeff, Joel, Matt, Kyle Petty, and Djuna Barnes playing pinochle with some worms. I sat in and turned a few tricks before we took the rope swing up to Tazmanian Helen's. She was a fine bosun with a knack for green construction. Nevertheless, we totally ruled during the "running to the helicopter with the organ in the little cooler" contest. Matt even managed a fine macrame of Edmund Spenser that featured select lines from "Faerie Queene" stitched in gold lame. Then it was off to the coffee shop for a pile of underwater breathing pellets. These made the "How to Nail an Underwater Job Interview" panel much easier to swallow. Surprisingly, we saw George Eliot there -- and dude, she's not a dude! Joel's prehensile elbows were starting to look swollen again, so that's when we decided to ride Space Mountain. Lucky for Jeff, I pulled him back to his seat before he could wack his head on the thing and get transported to the second universe where nobody knows how to spell things and ants ride babies to taxi school. Jeff looked at me and said, "God, Ken, the world thanks you." I couldn't agree more and told H.D. that very thing the next day when I found myself shining her shoes with a pair of knickers from the lamppost at the end of the world. So then I got back into my car and drove to Pickenham to raise my peacocks and shoot wangdoodles.

Man, I love AWP!

AWP Day 2

2007-03-07T21:58:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I also saw Tenaya Darlington on Friday. Tenaya graduated from Beloit College a few years before I did and was the rockstar of her generation (picking up quickly after the departure of Graham Foust (a person I did not see at AWP, though I have been passively stalking him for many years now.)) Tenaya teaches writing up at St. Joseph's in Philly now. All of the male members of my mother's side of the family went to St. Joe's; I grew up with sports banners for St. Joe's in my bedroom; I may have even had a set of sheets. I didn't go there, but now Tenaya teaches there. Life can be strange.

I also remembered someone that I saw on Friday yesterday (I remembered yesterday that I'd seen somebody friday) but now I can't remember anymore. Hmmm. I did see K. Silem Mohammad briefly, but his story is really on saturday.

I saw Jon Thompson and found out that he broke his back! It is so hard for me to understand how a person can break their back and still be walking around. Jon didn't even have to spend months in a full body plaster cast drinking through bendy straws. He walked around. He taught. He wore an exoskeleton. Wow.

I woke up Saturday morning around 7pm. I hadn't picked out what I was going to read yet, but at least I found that I was able to look at the pages in my book for a few moments at a time -- no more literary gag reflex.

I showered, got dressed (took me a little while, finally went with gray/blueish pinstripes and a green polo-esque shirt (Tanya said I looked good in short sleeves -- I fall for that stuff everytime.)

About 8, I went down to the restaurant for breakfast and to figure out what I was going to read. Two eggs over easy, sausage, hash browns, toast, and I drank every penny of my refillable $4.50 orange juice. My poor waitress finally left the juice pitcher on my table. (This was a mistake because I spent the whole panel fighting the need to race out to the bathroom.)

I found some poems, read them softly under my breath (I wasn't the only one talking to themself), and timed it out. Okay. Ready.

The panel was a reading by Carolina Wren authors to celebrate CW's 30th anniversary. It was also the launch of mine and several others' books.

I was to read and so was Evie Shockley (!), William Pitt Root, Linda Penisi, Andrea Selch, and Preston Allen. It was 9 o'clock in the morning on Saturday, the last day of AWP. Most of the 7000 people there were on the last day of a 3 day bender and facing the task of finding where they'd left all their underwear.

Which is to say we had a good, dedicated, and medium-sized crowd. As I was walking back in after trying to empty my bladder (unsuccessfully) before the panel began, I saw my old friend Jeffrey Morgan hunched over under a red baseball cap. God bless, Jeff Morgan. I was very happy to see him and rather impressed that he made it. He was looking a little green around the gills, but he perservered. Jeff is an old friend from PSU MFA school, and I hadn't seen him in a while. He's also a really good poet with a really good manuscript in the works. He and I both show the signs of the influence of our teacher at PSU C. S. Giscombe. It's a very very good influence. Which is all to say that somebody should publish Jeff's book.

I talked to Jeff briefly then sat up at the table on the dais. The readings were brief and good. I enjoyed everyone's reading -- Penisi read this great poem that obsessed about blood, Root read some terrific little poems about mines, Selch read excellent pieces about various relationships, Allen read a short story about a saxophone player and his missing baby, Shockley read a poem about two women comparing husbands -- it was all really good stuff. Then I got up there and read laregly non-narrative, non-imagey, non-poetic poems. I read well (and for the first time from a book!) and got some good cheers and feedback.

The whole time I was dying to go to the bathroom.

I had fun though -- I really enjoy reading, totally love it; I enjoy getting onstage and trying to figure out how to really connect and commune with the audience. Part of that is an imposition of will in a way, like "I am here and I am supposed to be here and I have something to say" just moving and acting and thinking as if all that is true, with intentionality. The other way, for me, is to read a piece then play the rest in response (as much as I can) to how the audience is responding. So I enjoy that performative aspect; the writing's over at that point -- a good reading is all theatre.

So the panel went well and some people said some nice things afterwards. I met Andrew Joron (and later kicked myself for not buying his new (?) collection of essays.) And talked to Lee Ann Brown. And hooked up with Jeff, Joel and Matt (other PSU'ers).

Then I went to the bathroom.

Key Bridge & AWP

2007-03-05T19:21:00.000-05:00

(I probably screwed up the spelling of a lot of people's names, so I'm sorry for that. I've got to go to bed now though, so I'll fix it tomorrow, okay?)

I got up at 3am Friday morning and drove to Atlanta for AWP. When I got there (after finding a way around the security guards perched at the escalators), I walked through the bright box of light planted firmly between the tables piled with books and the holey ceiling tiles. Lots of other people walked in streams up and down the aisles with their heads cocked down about forty five degrees to read the cards that identified each table. The people behind the table watched the people walk by to catch the moment when a walked would look up for a moment. I saw Tanya, my friend and board member for Carolina Wren, at a table near the bathroom, and when I got to the table, I saw my book! For the very first time! Wow. What fun. The rest of the weekend was pretty great as well.

I spent most of that day sitting at the table, talking with the folks that came by, being startled everytime I saw my face on the back of the book, and worrying about what to write when people asked me to sign their books (I later had a conversation with Zach Schomberg about it -- he doesn't write "dear," so far I do. I think that is the only difference between he and I actually.) Our table was pretty popular and close to the bathroom, so we saw a lot of people. I saw Brent Cunningham who was wearing very fancy shoes. Later on I called him "bitches." He objected to my use of the plural. At one point, a woman came up and said "a-ha, this is the book I've been looking for." And she picked up my book! I was pretty dumbfounded actually. Did people really know I had a book out? Aside from me? Hadn't my recent hermitage more or less wiped the memory of me from the rippling water of fame? Indeed it had, but thankfully, Carly Sachs had told this woman, a woman who taught at GW with her, that I had written a book all about Washington, DC (I did, and it's my first book, and it's called Key Bridge though that's all probably obvious information by now.) This woman, Mary, was a fourth generation Washingtonian and delightfully sharp. So we talked for quite a while about DC history, politics, graffiti, etc. Then I saw Camille Dungy who I hadn't seen in a while, and she was full of sunshine and happy to see me. We hugged and talked and then she bought my book. I signed that one (my first) and did an awful job of it. I think I wrote something like:

DEAR CAMILLE HOLY CRAPHOLYCRAPHOLYCRAPOSALDKJFHAKJSDHFKJHkjhaskj;lkhjfasjkdhfkjhdfkhfkjsfjhhfalkjs

xo,
Ken

Camille kindly recommended that I come up with like a one or two word back up message. She would not relinquish her exclusive claim to "Joy!" So I think I'm going with "Oy!" (Later, Zach wrote in his Man Suit and said that he loved me. I think people might get creeped out by that though or at least think I was being insincere.)

I also met Matt O'Donell who had a sweet little rig set up to show off his From the Fishhouse audio webmagazine. I was happy to meet him becuase he published one of my Ms. Lonelyhearts letters that I wrote to President Bush.

I also saw Randy Prunty (not for the last time.) Randy had also avoided the guards perched at the elevators. Randy was giving out cards for the reading he, Bill Lavender, John Lowther, and the Atlanta Poets' Group had organized. They had organized the reading, but as became clear later, no one could tame that reading. I was exctited about the reading because a lot of my favorite poets were going to be there, and I was going to read, too.

Then I met Mairead Byrne and watched her daughter do the "god, mom, let's go, why on earth do you think TALKING is so fun?!" Mairead was really nice and had a lovely Donegal (northwest Ireland) accent. I asked her if she was from Donegal, but she wasn't; she grew up in Dublin, and her parents were from Donegal.

Mathias Svalina came by also. I'd never met him but exchanged a couple emails with him. He turned out to be one of the nicest, most enthusiastic, and generally warm people I met the whole weekend. He has a chapbook coming out, he publishes stuff with Zach through various Octupus ventures. It's true that they are many-armed. I liked Mathias pretty much immediately. He was also full of sunshine with some shade, too.

I saw Sebastian Matthews, and we talked about how weird it was to see people who we hadn't seen in a long time (I'd seen Sebastian the week before in Asheville at a Lucipo reading at the Black Mountain College Center.) Sebastian said, "Yeah, people around here keep saying 'I remember when you were just ten years old!'" His dad is the famous poet William Matthews.

I also met Derek White who was selling his Calamari Press books -- they're good looking books, the giant squids of the micro-press world. We talked about Christian Peet though Christian Peet wasn't there.

I walked around and saw my old professors Clint McCown and John Rosenwald from afar. Clint eluded me -- purposefully? -- the whole time.

I ran into Adam Clay who was wearing stripes. He said that his table was "over there," and I said "follow the hipsters, right?" He and I later agreed to just sign our names on each others' books. All that needed to be said between us was said in the way we keep leap frogging each other in our strolls through the book fair aisles. A tether of fascination would not let us stray far from each other apparently. Or maybe it was my plantar fasceitis for which I was wearing my new running shoes even though I don't like wearing running shoes for just walking around. They are called running shoes. Adam's stride was unhindered.

I found their table, and talked briefly with Matt Henrikson and with the editor of Black Ocean books which published Zach's book and did a very nice job. It's a book that fits easily in the hand and feels good there like a stone that maybe you liked and kept for a while.

I might have met other people; I know I met other people. Some of them didn't tell me who they were. I didn't know Andrea when she came up later in the afternoon to relieve Tanya. Tanya kept saying, "and this is the author, Ken Rumble, sitting right here" when people looked at my book. Most of the people checked the picture before, apparently, accepting her statement.

I also waited for a long time in a line to get a cuban sandwich. I waited with my old professor Robin Becker who only wanted a diet coke. It was a long wait for a sandwich and longer for a diet coke. Not that the time was different just that the payoff was less. Robin and I talked about all the strange things people had done since leaving Penn State; it was like we were billiards on a pool table designed by M.C. Escher.

Later I would see Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, and we would remark to each other about the same phenomenon. She is beautiful and like bamboo with a gentle dark fountain coming from the top of her head.

I think that is the last of the people that I met that day at the conference. I checked into my hotel room about 6 o'clock to lie down for a few minutes before dinner. I held my book for a little while and kept opening it and quickly shutting it. I couldn't really read anything in it. I would start reading then quickly have to stop.

I wasn't really late to meet Andrea, Anita, and Tanya. We went to Six Feet Under which is across the street from a graveyard. They serve a lot of seafood. It is not far from the Eyedrum gallery where the reading randy & company organized was going to take place. I'd eaten at Six Feet Under with Brian Howe, Marcus Slease, David Need, and Randall Williams about a year and a half before when we were in ATL to give a Lucipo reading at Eyedrum. I ate the oyster po' boy with avocados again. It was good again.

We talked about going to AWP@NYC. Andrea's mom owns a brownstone in Manhattan. We talked about having a keg party. Tanya was very excited about the conference and generally enthusiastic. It was fun to talk to her and feel her energy about the whole thing. I thought that it was because she'd never seen so many writers and poets all in the same place before -- unless you've been to AWP or a big book festival (though even the book fests don't really compare to AWP) most of the time you just don't really see that many writers in one place. One of the emotions that the experience can cause is joy like "wow, I'm not the only guppy who chews sand!"

So we had a hard time finding a table but eventually bellied up to the bar and ate there. After all, as Andrea said, we didn't have our children with us.

I regreted several times that I didn't have a digital camera.

We finished and went over to Eyedrum and parked unnecessarily far away. John Lowther met us at the entrance. He was wearing a dapper cap tilted at a jaunty angle and looked pleased. I was happy to see him and gave him a hug. I walked in and the place was dark and about 3/4ths filled. Someone was reading. For the next four and a half hours, someone was reading. Some of the people that were reading were Peter Gizzi, Liz Willis, Rae Armantrout, Amy King, randy prunty, Joseph Makkos, Laura Mullen, Christian Bok, Alice Notley but I missed her (damn!), Jed Rasula, Bill Lavender, Jena Osman, Mairead Byrne, Evie Shockley, Lee Ann Brown, and more many many more.

Everyone read well and the audience flowed back and forth. I saw Evie for the first time and hugged her. She hadn't slept but a few hours in about three days, so I did not quiz her on state capitals. I was happy to see her, and after she read later on, the crowd cheered and hooted, and I did, too. I said hello to Christian Bok who I'd met at the last Carrboro Poetry Festival. He later read the poem about superman dying -- ka-POW! -- and I told him his performance had had a big influence on me. Later he said he wanted to steal a line that'd I'd read: "seizure suit." Then he said he was just going to steal it.

Lee Ann Brown sang a beautiful song about turning swords to ploughs. It struck me that she is a brave woman. She read a poem that meditated on New Orleans after Katrina.

Bill Lavender also read some poems about Katrina. The poems helped me imagine the terror, anger, and just sort of weird dumbness of the whole thing. Like here we are in the middle of a flooded hurricane bashed city floating around on a blow-up mattress to get from one place to another, and it's scary and sad and tragic, but also just stupid. Are we really this dumb to have not been able to do something better than this for such a huge disaster, for all these people? His poems seemed to ask. Yes, we are this dumb. And despite the dumbness of so many people on the outside of that disaster, many of the people inside that disaster survived on marvelous, necessary ingenuity.

John Lowther read a very funny piece and had a light show. It was illuminating. Yes, that just happened. I laughed a lot during John's piece. He said that it wasn't his real poetry that he was reading, but I think he was lying. What he meant was that he wasn't the real John Lowther; the poetry was not the imposter.

Joseph Makkos later gave me grief for waffling out of a fellowship at the Poetry Farm last fall. I did waffle out of the poetry farm last fall. It was a waffling time, and I was getting paid by the hour without vacation. Those are excuses; the truth is I waffled. Jospeh Makkos also made me laugh a lot during his reading -- it was crazy and chaotic and involved two microphones, voice effects, video, and music. I think if Joseph could have filled the room with a body temperature, breathable liquid that could smell like different things so that he could communicate to the human observer through every sensory threshhold then he would have.

I also saw Joe Donahue in the lobby before leaving for dinner. I was happy to see him.

I had a hard time paying attention to the poems some people were reading; these one's that I can remember fairly clearly and describe were the ones that bashed me in the head. They bashed me in a good way, and everyone else read well, but I don't remember everyone else's readings as clearly. There were 40 some poets reading that night; I hope I can be forgiven.

Amy King introduced me to Janet Holmes. This may sound infantilizing, but it is not meant to be so: Janet Holmes is really cute and little. It was only a brief meeting unfortunately, but that is what struck me very clearly about her, she's really attractive and really little. She had a lovely warm smile and seemed as if she contained an internal power plant. Energy bristled off of her. I stopped by the Asahta table a few times to try to see her again and to meet Kate Greenstreet, but I didn't see Kate at all or Janet again.

When I heard Laura Mullen's name called, I became excited because I like her poems and had exchanged some nice correspondence with her from time to time. We'd never met, but there she was wearing a knock-out of a white coat with a jagged pattern of dark lines that made patches of white sort of like the way a lake bed breaks up when the water drains away and it is hot under the sun. Later I saw her and said "Laura Mullen! I'm Ken Rumble." And she smiled and said "Ken! it's good to meet you!" (I might be making that part up) and then the separate groups that we were in pulled us apart and into the waiting taxis that took us home.

Bruce Covey read some funny poems, too. And he read on Saturday night, too, and both nights he said some really funny things and lots of people laughed, and I did, too. Bruce is really tall and when he stands at the microphone -- most of which are too short for him -- his body sort of curves to his right into this slight C shape. One of the things Bruce said was "fertilator." He said it in front of a big room full of poets and most of us hurriedly scribbled it down.

I read the first section of 24 Hour Breakfast and people laughed. Jill Alexander Essbaum, I later learned, was the one laughing at the inappropriate parts. I was very happy that someone laughed at the inappropriate parts. I had a lot of fun reading from the Breakfast.

Mairead also said something to me that I very much appreciated. She said she was impressed (I don't exactly remember if that was the word but I think something in that vicinity) that I had removed people from the Lucipo list. She said that in the US everyone talked about freedom and choices and free speech and how we were supposed to do what we wanted in the US, but that most people didn't really actually take advantage of that freedom. She said she thought that I had taken that freedom when I changed the list around. That made me feel pretty good.

I also met Max Winter at the reading; I'd gotten his book The Pictures and was happy to hear him talk about the book and read from it.

I also ran into Reb Livingston at some point; we traded witty banter and flatteries. She was winding her way through the crowd like a movie star that was just a little tired of being so famous, ahh the weight of the crown, but all with that Pittsburgh grace and iron city vinegar that makes her such a spit-fire. I would see more of her.

Miranda Lee Reality Torn slept on a nest of blankets as poet after poet took Eyedrum's stage. I was number 36 of 39. Laura Carter was last; she is a good poet. The last time I had seen her was at the Lucipo reading in Atlanta when many of us lay on John Lowther's futon at about 4am, stared at the ceiling, and laughed and laughed and pointed at the funny mountains that textured the walls.

I went home and watched the end of The Eraser; at the end of the film, there is a scene where Arnold watches a train crush the bad guys in a car. It's a simple thing -- he just stands there -- but it looks like a double or CGI. Then I watched the beginning of Bandits which is a movie I like.

The Cover of Key Bridge

2007-03-04T22:15:00.001-05:00

Key Bridge in the Library of Congress

2007-03-01T15:54:00.000-05:00

This was pretty cool to find in a recent self-google. And even better, apparently the real thing is down in Atlanta at AWP right now waiting for me.

"Bong Eggs" by Brian Howe w/ Ken Rumble

2007-02-21T23:04:00.000-05:00

Wow, my friend Brian Howe is doing this really terrific poetry/music project in which he remixes people's read poems with samples and other sound oddities from various places, filters it all through various filters, rhythms it up with various rhythms, and makes some really really killer stuff.

And he just made a piece called "Bong Eggs" from part of 24 Hour Breakfast -- "bong eggs" is a line from the poem. (And thanks to Tony for putting a link to the audio in Fascicle.)

You can find many others at his site Glossolalia.

There is also some great stuff there of Brian's own poems, poems by Tim VanDyke, and work by Rod Smith.

Brian and I will be doing some of this collaborating live in Asheville this weekend.

Brian's awesome. Thanks, Brian!

Fascicle Three

2007-02-21T22:54:00.000-05:00

Announcing the launch of Fascicle 3, the winter 06/07 issue

In this issue:

Vicente Huidobro’s major long poem, “Sky Tremor,” in its first appearance in English, translated by Tony Frazer;

a “Poets of Taiwan” portfolio, including poems, interviews, audio and video work, edited by Shin Yu Pai;

an Eritrean portfolio, edited by Charles Cantalupo, including poems translated from the Tigrinya, Tigre and Arabic, as well as photographs by Lawrence Sykes;

a new chapbook, “Sex,” by Allyssa Wolf;

extensive critical work, including David Rosenberg on Ted Berrigan, bpNichol, Araki Yasusada and “the authentic poet”; Kevin Killian on George Oppen; Roberto Tejada on Clayton Eshleman; Mark Wallace on P. Inman; a series of statements from the Subtext-Poetics group on “What’s happening in poetics”; important early essays by Gertrude Stein on motor automatism; Graham Foust on “looking,” and more;

a selection of poems by the innovative and eccentric modernist Harry Crosby, as well as DH Lawrence’s introduction to Crosby’s Chariot of the Sun;

translations of Alexei Parshchikov, Yoko Tawada, Omar Perez, Andrea Zanzotto, Roberto Castillo Udiarte, Catullus, Jean Paulhan, Oliverio Girondo, Juan Sanchez Pelaez, Lucia Estrada, and Franco Arminio, as well as a series of translations from the Chinese by Ken Chen;

interviews of Danielle Dutton and Jake Berry;

Matthew Goulish’s “Incarnation Text” and Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s “The Trapdoor: a Play in One Act”;

new poetry by Stephen Rodefer, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Tim Van Dyke, Elizabeth Robinson, Hoa Nguyen, Clayton Eshleman, Tyrone Williams, Benjamin Friedlander, Kent Johnson, Jonathan Skinner, Alicia Cohen, Dale Smith, CS Giscombe, Peter O’Leary, Anne Boyer, Robert Kelly, Eleni Sikelianos, Brian Henry, Deborah Meadows, Mark Scroggins, kari edwards, Ken Rumble, Rob Halpern and many others.

Rodney & Tarn & a To-do List

2007-02-21T22:36:00.000-05:00

A really great reading on Saturday by Janet Rodney and Nathaniel Tarn -- big thanks to Joe Donahue for setting it up. Rodney was a real discovery for me -- I'd know and enjoyed Tarn's work for awhile, but Rodney is extremely talented as well.

Wow, so much going on these days; here's a brief run-down:

1. Got a new job.
2. Really like new job.
3. Lots of work to do at new job.
4. First book arriving from printers in one week.
5. Got a reading in Asheville with the Lucipo gang this saturday.
6. Gonna go to AWP and read from Key Bridge a couple times.
7. Wanna love my two lovies.
8. Got to set up other readings for KB.
9. Got to put up a picture of my book so people can see the cool cover.
10. Got to tell everybody about this cool/awesome music/poetry mix that my friend Brian Howe did with some of 24 Hour Breakfast.
11. Got to tell everybody about the awesome new Fascicle.
12. Got to have some fun.
13. Got to stop making to do lists.

More on all these things soon....

Nathaniel Tarn & Janet RodneyThis SaturdaryFebruary 17th, 8pmInternationalist Books

2007-02-12T12:36:00.000-05:00

Please spread far and wide....

Who: Nathaniel Tarn: poet, translator, anthropologist, and editor; author of thirty volumes of poetry, and numerous translations (including acclaimed versions of Pablo Neruda, Victor Segalen, and others); Selected Poems 1950-2000 published in 2002 by Wesleyan University Press; selected essays in poetics and anthropology Views from the Weaving Mountain published in 1991 by University of New Mexico Press; specialist in Highland Maya studies and the sociology of Buddhist institutions; one of Marcel Duchamp's chess partners.

Who: Janet Rodney: digital artist, poet, and letterpress printer; author of four books of poetry, including Orphydice, Atitlan / Alashka, and the meditative memoir The Book of Craving; fifteen year resident of Spain while a journalist, editor, translator, and interpreter.

What: Desert City Poetry Series, you never thought it would never happen.

When: This Saturday, February 17th, 8pm, 2007, the year formerly known as "next year."

Where: Internationalist Books, 405 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, same place, fresh air.

How much: $2 donation which will contribute to the hospital bills of Philadelphia poet Frank Sherlock. Current contribution information available here.

Why: "Rite of return / elegant orange "bird" / shines on my memory / flying the sun from west to east" "you are right, / at this time the mind / is a mirror to the sun / the heart a coal / bright in, the wind, / nothing / is mine / but the ride"

See you there....

Nathaniel Tarn

Janet Rodney

"Ancestors"
by Nathaniel Tarn

"At the exact site of the Lituanica's tragedy, in the forest of Soldin, Germany, the Aero Club of Lithuania rented for ninety nine years a . . . circle-shaped area and erected a monument. (The
inscription:) "Here died as heroes the Transatlantic Flyers Darius & Girenas " (July 15, 1933) . . . After World War II, that part of Germany was annexed to Poland and Lithuania was occupied by the Soviets."

Small provincial town
in "my" fathers' land
at creation's edge -
border post deserted,
a line of lindens,
opposite post deserted,
no crossings anymore
as there once were
between old world and new.

"God's Playground" here
as they used to call it:
what does He play with
what is the message of a life,
what is the information,
what can the play mean
from bit to life, and back?

Other end of town:
small sunlit graveyard field
edged with small jungles:
hazels, apples, roses, ferns,
nettles, mushrooms, herbs -
loud with warblers,
storks overhead
birds of my secret childhood.

Rite of return
elegant orange "bird"
shines on my memory
flying the sun from west to east
back to its homeland,
the two boys clean
pure-blooded heroes -
narrative simple
a nation's testament
torn out of anonymity
the double fit
thanks X and gentle Y.

When was "our" departure:
before the warning signs
were clearly witnessed
or very near the terminus
of possibility -
by which way forward
under the lindens
was it to left,
was it to right
they went from east to west
and to what purpose
to what end in "me"?

Scrabble to read the graves
four hours the heat increasing.
Small stone book-shape -
third the way down from top -
grips one pointed gravestone
(like a clown's hat)
perhaps a sign of "us"
whose trade was bookbinding.

When not finding's no matter -
this is community -
"my" people sunk into
"our" people floating here
their stones on the grass sea.
So that it does not matter
if name sings here or not:
what is a name inside oblivion?

Not enough money
to buy the right equipment
homed into heroism:
arrival no arrival
a crash short of the goal
in a "great neighbor" country,
the whole scene under glass
shrine in its own museum
when it had been subtracted
out from the swastikas.
Crowd size at funeral
never yet seen in all of history.

Behind the pointed grave,
thick trees spread darkness,
huge long-house trench:
a thousand hidden there -
but not by natural
demise - shot in the neck:
it will take lifetimes
to read those dead.

Came to the sky
these luftmenschen too early
against the grain
of their determinations.
Now I'm at table:
Gorge at my life deep sun!
Take down the charming pilots
and too "my" ancestors!

In the town,
"they" who are always present
holding a festival
of later generations.
Midway between creations
all ate and drank the same
heard the same blood beat
of excremental music -
we paid them no attention.
How many of "their" fathers
might have helped
to fill that field?

"Their" flyers:
nothing as infiltrated
as "our" sallow legions
storm troopers in their time
would soon dispose of.
How could a record flight else
among so many
bring home the corpses
embalmed,
later, hidden for years
from various oppressors
until again, an independence.

While it is on record
(those who don't sleep or dream)
that in a neighbor town
"they" stood on rooftops
many smiling
to watch the shooting circus.

from /Crystals/
by Janet Rodney

I.

The time
of which I write

is a memory

of getting back
to Mother Earth, mouth
pressed to hers, desire's
irresistible

curl of lips
when love
for Father Water
is strongest

I look for his eye and hear
a hellish laughter
as from outside

up from the ocean.

II.

Long after all horizons
have proved themselves mortal

I see my rider shadow
galloping along the beach,

it is August, lead-bellied
gulls rise toward the Rock

where Atlantic currents
and Mediterranean mix

wild roses
corrupting on its face,

you are right,
at this time the mind

is a mirror to the sun
the heart a coal
bright in, the wind,

nothing
is mine
but the ride

before the sequence
vanishes like lead

drawn down
thru deep water.

XV. The Androgynous Principle (A)

In a small dream
in a small room
in a small town in New Jersey

I am on the make,
a huntress stepping out
of fathomless woods

her small breasts
are smooth
as riverstones
her own phallus, a knife
hung around her neck
instrument
of delight.

The prey this evening
is elusive:
she would like to be

worthy of her victim
who doesn't appear
to cruise these parts
this hour

would like to give her body
to the victim of her choice
precisely when he, the hunted,
steps out of her

moves in, penetrating, manly,
fucking in blindness
bringing them news
of light.

XVI. The Androgynous Principle (B)

Each day the sun
rises inside her eye
looking

for new fields,
at night drops
like a coin into water, she

is blown back by
darkness, her coat of shells
catching a light

from below
where he is hidden,
shining in water he waits

while she
dangles her clothes on a tree,
descends to the edge,
water rising slowly up

her body
between her thighs
he drinks her.

XVII.

Here we are
and all we see
is more

than ourselves,
the failing leaves
and flowerheads
float on the canal
like scales of carp

downriver
here we are and more,
wind driving thru
the cracks of our windows
bringing on the cold
we know

from our skin
(and over hard ground walk
the circuit of each other)

that winter
has made it
our way again

Old Introductions

2007-01-12T08:52:00.000-05:00

Apparently I'm feeling nostalgic today despite not actually feeling nostalgic (?) At any rate, below are the introductions I wrote for the poets who visited the Desert City over the last couple years.

They're in reverse chronological order, so they go like so

1. Emmanuel Hocquard, Rosmarie Waldrop, Juliette Valéry

2. Ron Silliman & Selah Saterstrom

3. Ed Roberson & Todd Sandvik

4. Sarah Manguso & Julian Semilian

5. John Taggart & Randall Williams

6. Brent Cunningham & Tessa Joseph

7. Brenda Coultas & Marcus Slease

8. Lee Ann Brown & Carl Martin

9. Lisa Jarnot & Andrea Selch

10. Kent Johnson & Patrick Herron

11. Cole Swensen & Chris Vitiello

12. Standard Schaefer, Marcos Canteli, Rachel Price

13. C. S. Giscombe & Jon Thompson

14. Aaron McCollough & Tony Tost

15. Joe Donahue & Jim Brasfield

Enjoy...

Old Introductions: Rosmarie Waldrop, Emmanuel Hocquard & Juliette Valéry(Introductions by Chris Vitiello)

2007-01-12T08:51:00.000-05:00

This spring, Randall and I have been typing sentences.

That’s not typing like on a typewriter, but categorizing sentences into types, and then using those types as such, or reading the work of others with those types in mind, to see if an idiosyncratic or authorial logic will become evident.

I’m not sure where Randall is with his list of types, but I’ve seen long bulleted lists in his notebook. Myself, I’m a simple man, and I’ve settled into four sentence types that seem to have all other kinds of sentences subcategorized within one or more of them. I’ve been using this quartet as a blunt object on my writing. My types are:
• direct commands
• fact statements
• direct observations
• questions

I’m not sure that questions is actually a type, because you can write a sentence of one of the other three types as a question, but…

The consequence, for me at least, in this typing endeavor, is that my writing has become so artificial that it goes flat sometimes. I find it to be exactly what I set out to write, and really quite dull, at the same time.

Now, I am resolved and committed to artifice. I always want to be aware that language is a system of inherently arbitrary and meaningless signs linked metaphorically to signifieds, and that poetry is a tradition with sets of inherently arbitrary and meaningless conventions and assumptions. A critic once dismissed the work of John Baldessari with the comment “That’s not art; that’s just pointing at things.” Well, I point at things, and I point at the pointing. It’s what I do. And now I am able to write three, or perhaps four, kinds of sentences.

Now, Rosmarie Waldrop likewise points and meta-points, and her writing is overwhelmingly conceptually and aesthetically rich and vibrant. It’s an energy transfer. I sit down at the desk to read from The Reproduction of Profiles, and before I know it I’m outside the house, walking, with the book open in my hand, looking for trees to climb or something. How does she do it?

In her writing, the inextricable artifices of language and poetry are not assumed to be transparent. She is complicating the language at all turns, and in a way that not only reveals the language as a code, but reveals code itself as an artificial system. These prose poems in her trilogy The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, and Reluctant Gravities continuously open as you read them, and they meta-open as well.

Two sailors throwing dice on the quay will not make a monument, but there you sat reading a paper in its shadow. You said once we had a language in which everything was alright, everything would be alright, and your body looked beautiful while a fisherman tied his boat to a post, looping his rope through the rings without getting tangled in problems of representation or reflection. Nobody looked at you except for the water which, though it has no shape, is heavy with mirroring that of others. These images, however, are hard to get hold of, sunk as they are at the bottom of the alphabet.

You can read this as narrative prose, enjoying the interpersonal and romantic twists of the I and the you. You can also read it as an essay on, and an example of, problems of representation and reflection. Or you can admire the aesthetic and conceptual craft of the ornate shifts and transfers from one philosophical issue to another – several in every sentence. These poems are not so much accessible as imminently available, receivers rather than transmitters of ideology.

Hers are the kinds of books in which the word count of your marginalia would exceed her primary text. When you read Waldrop’s work, you de-condense her condensation, and this is how the energy transfer happens. And you can unpack these poems in many different ways, setting up very different residences in the poems in the process.

Only a person who contains multitudes can make these kinds of artifacts, and Waldrop indeed contains multitudes. I don’t know how many books she has written (I have more than 10 in my library) or how many she has translated (again, more than 10 such books in my house) or how many she has published (easily I have 30 Burning Deck books), but these numbers do not matter. Rosmarie Waldrop is someone who gives. She has devoted a life to readers, to those who read.

And tonight, she will read for us. Please welcome Rosmarie Waldrop.

In the opening of his 1947 essay “My Creative Method,” Francis Ponge writes about his disappointment in ideas:

Ideas as such seem to me what I am least fit for, and they interest me little. You may well reply that right now we are dealing with an idea (an opinion)… However, ideas, opinions, strike me as determined in each of us by something quite different from free will or judgment. I don’t know anything more subjective, more epiphenomenal…

On the other hand, objects, landscapes, events, individuals of the external world give me much pleasure. They win my trust. For the simple reason that they don’t need it. Their concrete presence and evidence, their density, their three dimensions, their palpable undeniable aspect, their existence – all this is my sole justification for existence, or more precisely, my pretext; and the variety of things is what constructs me.

At first this seems very similar to the William Carlos Williams “No ideas but in things” concept, but Ponge extends it. He establishes a category in the interstice between ideas and things that he calls “observations, or… experimental ideas” – he’s using the word experimental in a scientific rather than aesthetic sense here. It seems to Ponge that he can agree on certain established facts and definitions because these are both abstract and phenomenal, though he acknowledges that language gets in the way here:

Why is there this difference, this unthinkable margin between the definition of a word and the description of the thing designated by the word? Why is it that dictionary definitions seem to be so woefully lacking in concreteness, and descriptions (in novels or poems, for example) so incomplete (or else too specific and detailed), so arbitrary, so capricious? Couldn’t one imagine some kind of writing (brand new) which, placing itself more or less between the two (definition and description), would borrow from the former its infallibility, its indubitability, and its brevity; and from the latter, its respect for the sensory aspect of things…

Quite simply, Emmanuel Hocquard produces this “brand new” kind of writing, not by locating it between the poles of definition and description, but by commuting or vacillating between them at an ultrasyntactic speed that makes a connection. This is the eighth sonnet in A Test of Solitude:

Viviane, there has been the canale, and there is
the burnt stump.
Between the two, thirty paces, seventeen iron-
woods and eight seasons gone by.
What operation in mathematics or logic can
count at the same time in meters, trees and
years?
Should one even try?
Would somebody with sense go and add up
bread and feeling?
It’s like saying: I remember the islands.
Here, however, is an intention, tied to a film
project – the sequel of the voyage – a matter
of going from the canale to the burnt stump.

By writing in this brand new way, Hocquard extends Ponge’s extension of Williams, into an ethics.

This is a little reductive, but instead of taking Williams’ objectivist opposition of ideas and things, or Ponge’s phenomenologically framed poles of definition and description, Hocquard nests these oppositions into the operational area of interrogation, and posits the impossible area of negation all around it. Hocquard is not presenting a way to think, or even a way to write – he’s presenting a way to exist, even while acknowledging the fundamental lack of an explanation of, or purpose for, existence. Let’s face it, being alive is difficult (interrogation), but what’s the alternative (negation)?

Hocquard’s book Theory of Tables is his equivalent to Ponge’s essay “My Creative Method.” In its afterword, Hocquard describes his method for writing the book. In his travels he collected pebbles, beach glass, fallen bits of facades -- fragments of the external world – placing them in white envelopes upon which he noted the time and place of their collection. Later, he emptied the envelopes out, separately, onto tables, and contemplated them, writing his observations and interrogations. As he says, “I had become, in sum, the translator of pebbles.”

Here is the 34th sequence of the book:

A name becomes clear
A name is extinguished

You had a name for this

You don’t remember which anymore
you have lost this name
can this take its place?

This is not an image of this

If the reply is this
what is this? is a question with no object

A question has no object

Does this clarify this?

Please welcome Emmanuel Hocquard.

Old Introductions: Ron Silliman & Selah Saterstrom(Tony Tost Introduced Ron)

2007-01-12T08:49:00.000-05:00

5. “Willie called his daughters into the dining room. He picked up a dining room table chair and threw it into a closed window. The window shattered. He said, “That’s a lesson about virginity. Do you understand?” to which they replied, “Yes sir.””
6. Selah Saterstrom’s first book, The Pink Institution, documents a family history that is grotesque in it’s adherence to a sexual code, both physical and gender, that is conveyed in a series of such lessons which are often far more violent than something like a chair through a window.
7. The narrator describes the “Make out game” she was forced to play with her cousin Ruth which involved a piece of paper meant to keep their lips separate, “Ruth would gather her lips around her teeth so that her lips were hard. She would push the paper with her bone mouth into my swollen lips until they were forced to part. The game ended when I ate the paper. She would not stop until I swallowed it. That was the rule.”
8. And this image, of forced and mediated intimacy, is representative of the work as a whole: familial intimacy, affection, love all transformed into weapons and wielded with pitiless abandon against mothers, fathers, sisters, daughters, and granddaughters. This is the twisted South of Faulkner and O’Connor, the world that social etiquette, “manners,” sustains, condones, and keeps unseen.
9. “thirteen bottles of liquor thirteen bottles of liquor a .44 a .44 requested strangulation requested strangulation pyre on fire pyre on fire starvation starvation self willed car accident with small child self willed car accident with small child jumping jumping tumor tumor vomit (possibly accidental) vomit (possibly accidental) severe electrolyte imbalance severe electrolyte imbalance in a swamp, alone in a swamp, alone an insane husband an insane husband an insane husband”
10. In passages such as this scattered throughout the book, the matter of fact tone of the book collapses into a howl, a howl that must be lurking beneath the narrator’s adherence to standard forms of grammar and syntax – beneath her writerly manners so to speak.
11. “It was like the moan was mud and the sounds had stepped out of it. With the moan as backdrop, the sound hovered, vibrating above my mother’s lips for probably few seconds, then the sounds folded. The backs of the sounds collapsed. Like chicken spines breaking. In a high-pitched voice, like it had been stuffed and packed with rubber balloons, she woke speaking, saying, I can talk I can talk.”
12. Selah Saterstrom’s work has recently appeared in Tarpaulin Sky, Harness, Monkey Puzzle, 3rd Bed, and in the Seattle Research Institute’s anthology, Experimental Theology. She lives and teaches writing and text/image courses at Warren Wilson College in Asheville.
13. Towards the end of The Pink Institution, Saterstrom attempts to provide some explanation for all this violence – she writes, “It was bodies, what made bodies, and what bodies made. It was illegal separation. It was back-flipping in a five-star padded room. It was the Confederate Memorial Bandstand. It was the sound of birds pecking glass.”
14. Please welcome Selah Saterstrom.

Old Introductions: Ed Roberson & Todd Sandvik(Joe Donahue Introduced Ed)

2007-01-12T08:47:00.000-05:00

5. Rune One: “Golden friend, and dearest brother, / Brother dear of mine in childhood, / Come and sing with me the stories, / Come and chant with me the legends, / Legends of the times forgotten, / Since we now are here together, / Come together from our roamings. / Seldom do we come for singing, / Seldom to the one, the other, / O'er this cold and cruel country, / O'er the poor soil of the Northland. / Let us clasp our hands together / That we thus may best remember Todd Sandvik, / The renowned and wise enchanter, / Born from everlasting Ether / Of his mother, Ether's daughter.” Or, “To be specific, / what you are about to hear / you will recover from.”
6. Rune Two: “Todd Sandvik, old and truthful, / arranges for a journey / To the village of the Carrboro, / To the land of cruel winters, / To the land of little sunshine, / To the land of worthy women; / Plunging through Wainola's meadows, / O'er the plains of Kalevala. / Fast and far he galloped onward, / Galloped far beyond Wainola, / Till he reached the blue-sea's margin, / Wetting not the hoofs in running.” Or, “The best instincts of man are / exactly what the powers of hell feed on.”
7. Rune Three: “But the evil Youkahainen / Nursed a grudge within his bosom, / In his heart the worm of envy, / Envy of this Todd Sandvik, / Of this wonderful enchanter. / Youkahainen prepares a cruel cross-bow, / Made of steel and other metals, / Paints the bow in many colors, / Molds the top-piece out or copper, / Trims his bow with snowy silver, / Then he hunts for strongest sinews, / Finds them in the stag of Hisi, / Interweaves the flax of Lempo. / Ready is the cruel cross-bow.” Or, “The subject does not actually change shape, / but is nevertheless capable of being as dangerous as a werewolf.”
8. Rune Four: “Undaunted, Youkahainen, / Quick adjusting shoots his arrow. / Swift as light it speeds its journey, / Strikes the steed of Todd Sandvik, / Strikes the light-foot, ocean-swimmer, / Strikes him near his golden girdle, / Through the shoulder of the racer. / Thereupon wise Todd Sandvik / Headlong fell upon the waters, / Plunged beneath the rolling billows, / From his dappled steed of magic.” Or, “’The god who gave you bravery gave me cunning,’ whispers the wolf / into the disembodied ear on the pathologist’s table.”
9. Rune Five: “Youkahainen thus boasted: / "I have slain old Todd Sandvik, / Slain the son of Kalevala, / That he now may plow the ocean, / That he now may sweep the waters, / On the billows rock and slumber. / In the deep sank the magician" / And this his mother answered: / "Woe to earth for this thine action, / Gone forever, joy and singing, / Vanished is the wit of ages! / Thou hast slain good Todd Sandvik. / Slain the ancient wisdom-singer, / Slain the hero of Wainola, / Slain the joy of Kalevala."” Or, “Without fear, wade into this confusion, / dealing here a fracture, here a bite, and here a slight contusion; / crack obstinate heads together, pull the concussed foes apart.”
10. Rune Six: “Meanwhile from the cruel salt-sea where he had fell / Todd Sandvik raised his wounded brow and asked / “Must I swim the sea forever, / Must I live, or must I perish? / What will happen if I perish, / If I sink below the billows, / Perish here from cold and hunger?" / And thus the bird of Ether answered / "Be not in the least disheartened, / Place thyself between my shoulders, / On my back be firmly seated, / Well do I the day remember / Where thou didst the eagle service, / Thou didst leave the birch-tree standing. / And thus Todd Sandvik was borne to the shores of dismal Sariola.” Or, “animals looking more and more intelligent -- / the only thing going on / is a free-for-all over other dead animals.”
11. Rune Seven: “Todd Sandvik, lone and weary, / Straightway fell to bitter weeping, / He could not find a woodland foot-print, / That would point him to the highway, / To his home in Carrboro. / Meanwhile, Northland's young and slender maiden, / With complexion fair and lovely, / the maiden, Laura, rose in beauty, / the tasks this maid had ended, / when from the meadow's distant border, / Near the surges of the great-sea, / she hears our hero’s wailing from the waters, / Hears his hero-voice lamenting. / Laura thereupon made answer, / “Weep no longer, Todd Sandvik, / Grieve no more, thou friend of waters, / come to my friendly home and fireside; / Thou shalt live with me and be welcome, / Thou shalt sit at my table, / Eat the salmon from my platters, / Eat the sweetest of my bacon, / Eat the whiting from my waters." Or, “imagine words strung out across darkness, / and the silent spaces between them and the emptiness that binds a snowfall together, / or turns a hundred starlings rising from a wire into a single flock.”
12. Please welcome the great magician, Todd Sandvik.

Old Introductions: Sarah Manguso & Julian Semilian

2007-01-12T08:46:00.001-05:00

5. Julian Semilian writes, “last night at the poetry reading I was a smash! // the fans flung themselves at me, they bounded off with such abandomnet that it neared ascension to a fabulous idolatry, a tango of such maniacal spiral soaring that I had to simply step back not to snap.”
6. Tonight at this poetry reading Julian Semilian will be a smash, and we, his fans, will fling ourselves at him.
7. “the fan, one whooshed overhead like a police helicopter & slammed athwart into the frail body of a frenchman, a sapsucking saprophyte of the baudrillard strain, who’d gone on just before me, you know the sort, painting the quarter-moon with the mane of reigning algebra czars, for vampirically powdered post rock & roll refuse in fishtorn nets, posturing disciple of de sade.”
8. Somehow we do know the sort of people that Semilian describes, his cadre of circus born citizens who shamble in and out of these poems like a hurrying father who has forgotten his keys and then his wallet and then his briefcase and then his lunch.
9. “She had red curls and if you touched them they’d feel like copper sponges. Her rump was round and tight, a pre-crumb Madonnna rump, she was probably twenty-seven then but she’s still older than me now … her seams slashed us, supplicants, like sabers across the classroom, while the bristle on the calves shot out through the fabric like backlit orange barbed wire.”
10. Like models down an infinite catwalk, Semilian’s sentences saunter out at a jaunty angle without promise of a period out and into acrobatic twists sure to claim gold in the floor routine a few summers from now in Beijing.
11. “You must stop fantasizing me as a lion doing those horrible things to you, especially when your wish is to be devoured. I realize you don’t really want me to devour you, it’s just a fantasy to get you off, you can’t help yourself – and none of us know where these fantasies come from – but still, it puts a strain on me. I want to be good, I want to be human, but when you fantasize like that I am seized, in spite of my good intentions, by a desire to rush over and do to you exactly what you fantasize.”
12. Semilian’s life has been a sort of fantasy. Born in Romanian, he escaped that country as a young man and eventually made his way to Los Angeles where he worked for 24 years as a film editor on dozens of major motion pictures. In 1998 he moved to Winston-Salem and joined the faculty of the film school at North Carolina School of the Arts. In 2004 he joined the Lucifer Poetics Group. He has not been the same since.
13. “I was mingling once again at a level where Life & Death abscond, in a blissful tango of candelabras, on a honeymoon of seamy expectations! // in reverie I was whisked on the train by the male impersonators as the rouged, spiked, and powdered pubertine 17th century abyssian ambassador to rome.”
14. Semilian might be an ambassador from Neptune – if so then his books Transgender Organ Grinder, A Spy in Amnesia, and Osiris with a Trombone Across the Seam of Insubstance should be viewed as an elaborate and visionary plan for the hybridization and betterment of two species related solely by their desire for the deepest depths of the weird.
15. “Yes, I said yes, and I swallowed it slowly till I felt it shifting inside me as my very own persona, as my ballet of disobedient iguanas, till it became my own brand of irregular balletics.”
16. Please welcome our dearest irregular ballerina Julian Semilian.

17. In “Poem of Comfort”, Sarah Manguso writes: “So, love, look away from the dying marsupials, / for I am about to invent a distracting brand-new dance / to deliver you from all the thundering disparity of the world.”
18. It is not so much a delivery from the world that Manguso provides, but rather the clear view, a clear view of the disparity and the thundering and fearful magic of the world.
19. “how can they know / what it is to save me, drowning in a lake / moving like boiling soup because the earth / spins and shakes and refuses to die, refuses / to fly heavenward and meet its cold moon.”
20. Sarah Manguso is an Aquarius with a Scorpio moon, the author of The Captain Lands in Paradise and the forthcoming Siste Viator, a regular contributor to The Believer, and last night she met the mayor of Carrboro.
21. “The bright obvious shines in his body. / Here comes the electric, the burning mystery!”
22. There are mysteries that Manguso’s work reveals as in “It’s a Fine Thing to Walk Through the Allegory” in which she writes: “The real meaning moves from the specific to the general / but writing even a hundred poems about the same deer / is not necessarily about God.”
23. But for every mystery revealed, another is discovered – the end the narrator seeks is always out of grasp, each exit is an image in a mirror; whether this funhouse is actually fun or simply terrifying is difficult to determine.
24. “Sometimes I think I understand the way things work / and then I find out that on Neptune it rains diamonds. / On this world you can get out of work early, unclog the drain, hear music / … / I wouldn’t like to be / that planet. But if I had to I would take it, / the decades of punishing rain, and the fires / on neighboring planets I would watch, / thankful I was never touched by them, / and that the diamonds were mine.”
25. In these poems, the diamond rain is far more real than the clogged drain. The sheep laughing in the parking lot, the muse in a silver pick-up, the nightmares of geniuses, the frozen blue pyramids falling from the sky, and the horse, that may be the end of the world, that horse covered in equations in the shape of horses.
26. “The Arc de Triomphe is real. The Jardin des Tuileries is real. The Eiffel Tower is very real. The carafe of wine, the remains of dinner, the bill: all real. None are necessary to your life.”
27. What is necessary is love, magic, beauty, experience, intimacy, all of which flee and return, lose and gain proximity like the heavenly bodies in their orbits that Manguso often invokes, these flee and return with time though there is a danger that they are always an illusion.
28. “I may sob for true love now, / but just around the corner a truer love awaits. / I may sip drinks through a straw and roll under the table, / burbling drunk, but what’s coming next is the truest sin, / the shiniest car, the softest bed, / the swingingest partner at the sock hop / dancing and enchanted under the sea, and my own true destiny.”
29. Who’s coming next, please welcome, Sarah Manguso.

Old Introductions: John Taggart & Randall Williams

2007-01-12T08:44:00.000-05:00

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.

Old Introductions: Tessa Joseph & Brent Cunningham(Chris Vitiello Introduced Brent)

2007-01-12T08:43:00.000-05:00

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

Old Introductions: Brenda Coultas & Marcus Slease

2007-01-12T08:42:00.001-05:00

6. Brenda Coultas writes, “Something brown, square, and made of fabric, can’t remember what it was: clothes on hangers as if for sale and hanging on gate in snow, tilted firescape held up with rope, mail cart with bucket inside, lump under cover next to shopping cart chained up” and so opens her poem “Sightings.”
7. Like many of Coultas’s poems, “Sightings” concern is with the physical, with cataloging the detritus of our lives: the contents of dumpsters, trashcans, junk yards, dumps, and, in “The Bowery Project,” the contents of New York City’s flophouses. The “lump under cover next to shopping cart” described in “Sightings” is likely one of the many thrown away people drifting at the edges of our periphery that Coultas’s work rigorously documents.
8. She writes, “Some will say it’s all been done before, and that other have done better but still I stack things up. I don’t think about it, I put blinders on but hope that through accumulation they’ll form a pattern out of chaos.”
9. Coultas is the author of A Handmade Museum which was selected by Lyn Hejinian as the 2004 Poetry Society of America’s First Book Award winner. This year she was selected as a Fellow by the New York Foundation for the Arts. A former farmer, carny, taffy maker, park ranger, waitress in a disco ballroom, and the second woman welder in Firestone Steel’s history, Coultas is also the author of the short story collection Early Films.
10. “My own tale is of walking and observing, of imagining. I was not homeless or passed out on the sidewalk, but maybe I was drunk on the Bowery once… I must have been drunk and fallen asleep and must have gotten a blanket or newspaper out of the trash and must have found a box and curled up in it and I must have built a shelter just for one night … I must have hid my face from people, which is what I do when I feel ugly or unhappy and I must have been ashamed and so although all this time I was living in full view of the public, nobody saw me.”
11. Coutlas reveals what a radical act the placing of attention can be, how we choose what we see, that our attention is incomplete. Her work cannot be reduced to something as simple as “One man’s trash another man’s treasure,” instead she is interested in the much more compelling project of revealing what happens when we see another person as trash, what is lost in the act of overlooking.
12. From this exterior, material world, Coultas travels inward: she writes in “Seedhead” – “Are we on time for the mixed breed competition? I entered as a hybrid. My human gene was spliced into a watermelon. The melon cries when cut. My sheep are organ trees. // Mr. Sheep I’d like to get to know you. Hey, I mean we’re gonna be close, like really really close. Hey you who bear my spare liver, put down that whiskey!”
13. In “Memory Jar”, she writes, “Proof exists in the smallest and most mundane of gestures. Shadows, the smell of flowers, electrical shorts, mirror reflections. It’s the most rational and common acts that yield evidence of the spirit.”
14. And so Coultas’s Handmade Museum is enacted: piece stacked on piece, word on word, the most forgettable parts of human experience documented and brought into the account, a collection of evidence meant to map the intangible human spirit.
15. She writes, “To you the reader / Be sure to carry a rose to a fire house / to carry a lit candle down the street / to hang a banner / to wear a ribbon / to visit a hospital / to walk by the wall / to read the wall // The to follow the plume of smoke as close as possible to the source.”
16. Please welcome Brenda Coultas.

17. “dame demon dunce / elf ego / lame larp latty / mangle mame / natty narp nana / oana oana / paddy paddy plarp” writes Marcus Slease in “Dandy Flap,” “voanna voanna / wana wana wance / zoanna zatty” – indeed.
18. Marcus Slease was born in Northern Ireland, moved to Las Vegas, educated in Utah, and landed a few years ago in Greensboro, North Carolina, with a penchant for the frayed edges of language, the places where tongues get tied on the edge of the unspeakable.
19. “the president / is an accident-prone Afghan puppy in a series of / children’s checkers / w/sham ex- / pressions of / false grief / in the / silent city.”
20. Slease does not have a puppy, but he does have some kitties, and he is a member of the Lucifer Poetics Group, has read in the Carrboro Poetry Festival, been published in Fascicle, GutCult, Octopus, Backwards City Review, and is a veteran of two cross country reading tours.
21. “Get out of words, if you can. There’s not nothing when no one speaks. Here we are on an island of unthinkable closeness.”
22. There is no getting out of words for Slease – the language of the world is always intruding into these poems, the language of commerce, of pop culture, of advertising, of philosophy, of the surreal, of history, German, English, Latin, and slang – all these tongues joust for position within his poems.
23. “the Latin for seethe. the German for broken. the Spanish for upsurge. in other in otter we trust. rough house & bed living. the Russian for clock. the Irish for bell.” “have rug: will bum. have soap: will rub. have socket: will poke. have saint: will faint. have choice: will voice. have claim: will amp. have humps: will bump. have prong: will wrong.”
24. With all these tongues at his disposal, Slease creates freakish worlds that often seem eerily like our own world except that in his worlds oxygen has been replaced with nitrous oxide.
25. “My mother gave a hoot and knew the stakes. More and more men headed toward the lake and formed a daisy chain while others welded jazz into the ceiling. This is getaway wreckage for the not so physically fit. Inside the house: a model 1 bed with a lime green sheet and some nervous toiletries. Unfortunately the landlord was besieged after a supernatural attack.”
26. Slease has been a great presence in the local poetry community despite his uncanny ability to find and buy any book worth owning within a two hundred mile radius of whatever position he might occupy.
27. He writes, “I used to be / very funny but / now I’m / very beautiful”, which is not, of course, true: Marcus is very funny and very beautiful.
28. Please welcome Marcus Slease.

Old Introductions: Lee Ann Brown & Carl Martin

2007-01-12T08:40:00.002-05:00

4. As the preeminent literary critic Ken Rumble once wrote of Lee Ann Brown, her poems combine “adroit ability with an expansive range of styles.” And I was right. Or as Brown writes herself, “It’s about really listening to /// When I listen to myself // I hear the world” and later, as if a skipping record, “The single solitary singer // is not -- // is not tuned into // one frequency only.” And thus it is in these poems that the speakers, and there are many, see the possible inside every impossible.
5. Lee Ann Brown is a poet, film maker, and publisher and received her early training in these trades here in North Carolina. Raised in fair, windy Charlotte, Lee Ann has returned recently for a residency in Asheville. Her first collection of poems, Polyverse, was selected as part of the New American Poetry Series in 1999; her second book, The Sleep that Changed Everything, was published in 2003 by Wesleyan University Press. Lee Ann also holds what some might call an honor: she was the very first poet presented in the Desert City Poetry Series.
6. “Desire is the ground / from which we act,” she writes in “Desire Device” and that theme, desire, coupled with a belief in the incantatory power of words fills Brown’s poems with transformations: “I didn’t know how / this little / song would / end / the last stanza not right / until last night / when / to change the form / to Leonine / everything / like the form / is changed / a long long line / like your sweet kisses / which liquefy / my limbs / & get better & better / impossibly / real.”
7. Play – playing with words, ideas, forms – is the method of these transformations – she writes, “way past way -- / Outer space – Meditation’s intensities // Convert play’s determining eye -- / To sight.” And later, “She said I had a ‘language problem’ / but I am just trying to let gorgeous risk in.” And again, “set down your paying work & / tongue & groove / me again.”
8. The aim of all this play is to mix and join, to create communication in the sense of communion with people and the world – she writes in “Sustain Petal”: “Come on, you who remembers your dreams / who acts upon them in this world / come you who I often and silently call / so that I may be with you / Come and sustain me / and I will sustain you / with what sustenance I have / with the curls of revolutionary quiet / with lovely baroque convolutions of thought / … / Make a new life / for those around us fully / and for those / to come // to come / To.”
9. Please welcome Lee Ann Brown.

10. In “The Vision” the opening poem of Carl Martin’s most recent collection, he writes: “The shrill, militaristic scream / of a bird / over the Baltic sea / is as dented, gray / as a warboat’s hull, its white wind / … / Watchfires at sea are an illusion, / a desert’s swill mirage / spilling into the sailor’s eye. / … / Rain seeds the water with red. / A corpse like a scarecrow rises in the sky” and thus begins a gothic journey, terrible and wonderful, through myth, history, and love. “Love terrifies when you need / one who hates, despises her love. / A cobra is poised / in the cave of Tristan and Iseult / where cherub-fresh cheeks / and liars tip the chalice.”
11. Like Lee Ann Brown, Carl Martin was raised in North Carolina, Winston-Salem specifically where he still lives. It is there where I met Carl several years ago in March when he appeared in the Desert City for the first time. Martin set out to become a painter during his time at Maharishi International University, but upon discovering the poetry of the great John Ashbery, he instead pursued poetry, creating a poetic style with roots in the baroque and expressionism. For this innovative style, Martin has received high praise from poets as diverse as Ashbery himself and formalist John Hollander.
12. The lush and surreal world that Martin describes is haunted. He writes in “Salvation’s Wraith,”: “Betrothed to silk, white lace / the long wands of the trees / bend, annoy, as they await / the promenade of bees, / … / She’ll not starve us at the well / whose maiden spirit’s wrist, / hand extended towards us, / flows with milk.” And later, “Harmonious sister with red hair, thick limbs / that sink into a death, / I Can’t imitate your teetering dance, / or sanely will your image away! / Your sinuous ballet sweeps through these halls.”
13. This velvet world is the product of a vision that recognizes that the eye is an active participant in creation. He writes in “Jupiter Flower”: “I fly like hawk or oriole over fields / of hay, the Jupiter flower / glistening soft and blue. One eye piercing sunlight, / the other stuck in the clouds.” And, “In the poet’s mind, birds click / like castanets, around the wrists / of a dancing gypsy.” And in “The Day in Graz” he writes: “The song of the trees rustles toward me: / a chameleon’s key / in the rusted lock // that whistles in the air / like wind, / and reveals a glimmering hand / bent like the neck of a swan.”
14. Through all these beautiful scenes, fearful and awed, the narrator – like Dante’s Virgil – guides us as if, as he writes in “Conversation”, with “someone whispering to us in the dark / room with the tiger spotted lily.”
15. Please welcome Carl Martin.

Old Introductions: Lisa Jarnot & Andrea Selch

2007-01-12T08:40:00.001-05:00

5. “With a chainsaw, my girlfriend is Evel Knievel,” writes Andrea Selch in a line that exemplifies the blend of worlds that Selch’s poems distill into a solution: the worlds of domesticity and motherhood, a world of lesbian relationships and identity, the world of American entrepreneurism, pop culture, and personal and public histories. Through all these worlds the narrator is guided by desire, by passion: she writes, “Oh you honey dew / come back soon. Who cares / if it’s true but while it’s new / I’d rather my two hands / were full of you.”
6. In the not so regular world of the day to day, Selch serves as the president of Durham’s Carolina Wren Press, is a mother of two, is fluent in at least two languages, and recently returned from Philadelphia where she gave a reading with poets Erica Hunt & Evie Shockley at the Kelly Writers’ House. She earned a PhD from Duke University for her thesis on a period in the early 20th century when national radio networks kept poets on salary. The author of the chapbook Succory, Selch’s first full length collection of poems, Startling, was released last fall.
7. It is to changes in Selch’s worlds that the poems’ eye is drawn. In “The Lithuanians” she sketches the shifting passions of several generations within a family. She writes of the older generation, “It was Paris where these two exchanged vows. / And afterwards, raw oysters in their stomaches and drunk on champagne, / doctor and doctor walked the Champs Elysees / and talked of buying art.” After following this couple through their lives on the Upper East Side, the poem ends “Now, instead of quartets and Grade-A beef, / the table is set with peanut butter sandwiches, buffet style.”
8. In “Christmas at Home,” she writes, “I used to be the butch one, but now / she lifts whole oaks and splits them with one blow.” And lastly in “1979: Tearing Down the Morris House on Perth Avenue” she writes of the startling evolution of a family home into a monastery into a building waiting for destruction: “In the wet bar stands a marble altar and walnut kneeler; / the gown room's been a dormitory; the closets, vestiaries.”
9. Throughout these changes her poems locate and search for a place of stability, connection. She writes of another mother’s visits: “every afternoon / they come here: five slender gray ones, / coffee muzzles, white tails twitching. / The two who just two months ago were fawns / dare to nibble on the lawn”, and a home decorated for the winter: “the front door creaks under garlands and wreaths. / This year we won’t brave the river or cross the woods.” And finally in “First Words to My Son” she writes, “here, let me take the bannister, / study each stair: Let nothing disturb you / nor ruffle a single russet hair.”
10. Please welcome Andrea Selch.

11. “I am barbecuing eucalyptus pigs of hills and brightly colored housetops, I am waiting for my senses to come back, I am a cabbalistic moment all in black, I am your drunken Irish brother and the plantains on the lawn, I am the tourists hoarding sharks teeth, I am the empty grain silos of Bernal Heights and god, and I am you on the back of a motorcycle crossing Dolores in the pineapple groves of Elvis Costello, sleeping all night, inside the artificialist lagoons, beyond the palm trees, I am a drag queen named Heather not quite ready for New York.”
12. I am Ken Rumble, and I am introducing you to Lisa Jarnot.
13. “I will make you understand, I, being who I am will make you understand who I am, on a Sunday.”
14. This Lisa Jarnot is the same Lisa Jarnot who wrote a poem called “Lisa Jarnot.” This is the Lisa Jarnot who wrote three books – Some Other Kind of Mission, Ring of Fire, and Black Dog Songs – all by Lisa Jarnot.
15. “You, armadillo, the dark and stately shape of armadillo, the street the shape of armadillo.”
16. “I am traveling to edges made of night, I am not sure where I am and I am traveling to edges made of rock in the avocado night, I am traveling to the edges to the plane to where I am to cross the parking lot to stand upon the median to edges made of rock in avocado night.”
17. This Lisa Jarnot is knitting hats – she is not knitting hats now – she is knitting hats, one each to commemorate each US soldier killed in Iraq. Lisa Jarnot is sitting in this room and uses her web log which is sitting in cybespace to protest the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan and the current administration, the Lisa Jarnot who wrote the poem “Swamp Formalism” for Donald Rumsfeld who has received several letters from Lisa Jarnot.
18. “As if they were not men, / amphibious, gill-like, with / wings, as if they were / sunning on the rocks, in a / new day with their flickered / lizard tongues.”
19. And for Dick Cheney, “Dumb Duke Death”
20. “chimp chore / damp dank / death do / dead deal / duck”
21. The poems written by Lisa Jarnot take small moments -- mammal moments, bird moments, love moments – moments Lisa Jarnot has seen, read, and heard about, takes these moments and peels them like an artichoke, peels moments and words and mammals and things like artichokes because there are so many things and artichokes and words and mammals and words like everything mean everything.
22. “They lover to go on unmistaken, that they loved to not to be gratuitous or cry, that they loved the fortitude of yaks, that suddenly they loved the whiskey and the sunlight and the key, that they loved the corn cow and the cow corn that it ate, that they loved the cat food as it rolled across the floor … that they knew they loved the river that was made where people dream.”
23. An agoraphobic writer named Robyn Taylor is not Lisa Jarnot, but Lisa Jarnot pretended to be Robyn in the award winning film The Time We Killed directed by Jennifer Reeves about the days in New York after September 11th. Robyn says in that film, “Terrorism got me out of the house, the war on terror drove me back in.”
24. The following lines written by Lisa Jarnot sum up some ideas of Lisa Jarnot: “In this most perfect rhyme / that takes up what it sees, / with perfect shelter from the / rain as perfect as can be … in these most perfect habits / of the waving of the trees, / through this imperfect language / rides a perfect brilliancy.”
25. I am Ken Rumble and I am asking you to please welcome Lisa Jarnot.

Old Introductions: Kent Johnson & Patrick Herron

2007-01-12T08:39:00.001-05:00

5. As the American social critic H. L. Mencken once wrote, “The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.” By this definition, we have fewer better examples of a radical poet than Carrboro Poet Laureate, Patrick Herron, and few finer documents of such radicalism as Herron’s recently published The American Godwar Complex.
6. Herron writes, “Damnation! Freedom is not the right to put asunder the views / of any one star that glows and stands in one nation under”
7. Among a variety of things more and less sordid, Patrick Herron is the poet laureate of Carrboro, a position which under his leadership has become a life-long appointment. Herron also established last June the Carrboro Poetry Festival, an event which was so successful it has quickly achieved the status of legend. In addition to starting the Poetry Festival last summer, Patrick found himself the father of a lovely Herronista, Sophia.
8. While Herron’s poems often attack our country and culture’s failings – such as in his poem “Anus II: The George W. Bush Rap” where he writes in the voice of our president “Deceit is what I bring, and what I excrete is right-wing / crap. I’ll bitch-slap your ass if you don’t make me king” or in his poem “Rwanda” where he writes “America: your mind mauls the earth, strip mine the plain with plain strip malls, your time yet another vulcanized tread on another mother’s back” -- alongside poems such as this are Herron’s poems that explore the fear of our increasing inhumanity in our technological age.
9. He writes, in a section of his manuscript Be Somebody, “you pass right through 01 / whether ghost or spirit. Degrade me / Force me to digit your binary spine. / Can you hold 01? 01 is infinitely // less than air.” In another poem “If” Herron writes of the death of a friend, “if you filled empty picture frame cut from ash you built me / if you died friend but carved me no mask I may wear to face these calling stars.” And then in “Zero Zero” he writes, “sometimes you get to wondering too late / just how it is you are born to a certain life / one day there you are you are there whereever it is, a / dirt floor, a hospital bed, in front of a television / to the tune of a brash jingle. place x. or maybe you wake up / decide to join a monastery and find a new family because you are / lonely.”
10. It is Herron’s passion, whether expressed in his poems as anger or fear, that makes Patrick such a worthy and dedicated advocate of poetry and authentic human interaction.
11. He offers the following advice in “Politiku 1”: “Word from our sponsors: / please place your television / on the ocean floor.”
12. Please welcome Patrick Herron.

13. About Kent Johnson, Stanton High’s Coach Bob Mason said: "Defense and rebounding are two of the foundations in our program. Kent epitomizes how we value these aspects of the game. He never backs down from a challenge and is always ready to go after opposing post players." It is this exact persistence which Mason describes that has launched Johnson into the winner’s circle of American Poetry time and time again. Or to use Dr. Johnson’s own words, “Form**emptiness (Buddhism, blah, blah, blah.)”
14. When Kent, a 6’5”, 200 lb power forward with an average of three rebounds a game, isn’t busy teaching “Spanish and remedial English” at Highlands community college in Illinois, he dedicates himself to the safety of his fellow poets. He writes in a poem titled for his contemporary “Peter Gizzi”, “And I always / want to wave my arms and yell, really loud: / "Watch out Peter Gizzi, you young and handsome / minstrel, watch out-don't be like Michael / Jackson and let your hair catch on fire!"”
15. Though allegations exist that would cast doubt on the content of his real intentions towards his fellow poets – see the appendix to The Miseries of Poetry his Traductions with the late, single-horned Alexandra Papaditsas – Dr. Johnson is reknown for his “intriguing ideas for creating realistic ground cover, trees, bushes, rocks, water and other scenery details which are ideal for beginning model railroaders.” Or in other words, “I got drunk with Kent Johnson in Monroe, Wisconsin, and I'm one of the publishers of this book. So maybe those two things will disqualify anything I say here. But for the record, which erases itself every 15 seconds, these little Miseries are to die for.”
16. Kent Johnson established K.J. Transportation in 1973 with one tractor-trailer hauling tomato paste for Ragu Foods. It is in the midst of these long nights, that his work for Ragu Foods became the inspiration for his study of the Japanese form of poetry known as the Renga, the resulting mastery of which he put to Stygian use in his editing of the moving volume Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada. Quoting that volume: “She told me then that the master of the house had left for a certain location in town and that I had better look for him there pronto, if I desired to speak to him // everybody was fucking overjoyed to see him, as if he had returned from the dead.”
17. All is not grey in the life of Kent Johnson, however, to quote his obituary, “He worked in construction and cement finishing. He loved fishing and living near mountains and rivers.”
18. In addition, Dr. Johnson has written some of the most memorable poetic critiques of the current war in Iraq. His poem “Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Or Get the Hood Back On” powerfully invokes our complicity with the atrocities committed in that conflict; he writes, “Hi there, Madid, I’m an American poet, twentyish, early to mid-thirtyish, fortyish to seventyish, I’ve had poems on the Poets Against the War website … I voted for Clinton, even though I know he bombed you a lot, too, sorry about that, and I know I live quite nicely off the fruits of a dying imperium … And because nothing is simple in this world, and because no one gets out unscathed, I’m going to just be completely candid with you: I’m going to box your ears with two big books of poems … and I’m going to do it until your brain swells to the size of a basketball and you die like the fucking lion for real. You’ll never make it to MI because that’s the breaks; poetry is hard, and people go up in flames for lack of it everyday.”
19. Finally we might imagine, now, Kent sitting at a bar, cigarette in hand, watching a thick perfect smoke ring floating away, while he intones, “Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.”
20. Please welcome Kent Johnson.

Old Introductions: Cole Swensen & Chris Vitiello

2007-01-12T08:37:00.000-05:00

5. In The Nature of Things, Francis Ponge asks, “What is the nature of man?” He answers, “Language and Morality.” Few poets are as dedicated to that exploration of the moral use and consequence of language as one of tonight’s readers and my dear friend Chris Vitiello.
6. In Vitiello’s poems, language use is fundamentally a moral question. At its root, language is a lie; the word chair is obviously not a chair. So what, though, does the word chair create? make happen? Is it morally right to accept the falsehood loitering within every word? Questions like these guide Vitiello’s examination of language and morality. By pushing words and phrases that we normally take for granted to their rational ends, he attempts to find language which has an absolute relationship to the thing it represents. What he most often shows us is the uncanny and surreal world that lurks and is created by our words.
7. He writes in Irresponsibility, “Am I supposed to write that it rained? // One, two, three, four, five, six // What rained?”
8. Chris Vitiello lives in a plum colored house in Durham with Vicki and Iris Vitiello. He is the author of Nouns Swarm a Verb published in 1999 and was a founding editor of one of the 90s most highly esteemed literary journals, Proliferation. He earned an Master of Fine Arts degree from the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He is currently a member of the Lucifer Poetics Group and the head, though he will deny it, of a poets’ theatre group called The Theatre of Consecutive Thinking. His range of interests and projects is too long to list but they include home repair, automatic flip clocks, Marcel Duchamp, pin-hole photography, bird watching, letterpress printing, Romanian folk music, modern dance, cinematography, the work of Matthew Barney, cooking, and a semi-annual writers’ retreat called “working vacation.”
9. Vitiello’s most recent poetic project is a work titled Irresponsibility. The question that predicates the book is whether or not the writing of poems is a morally responsible act. From this question, he turns his intellect to consider the way language and poems represent nature, human relationships, poetry, art objects, and language itself, how, finally, language reveals only itself.
10. Like language, “The coverage of the taxi explosion / shows the exploded taxi” and “To see the wind I look at a tree” and “You shouldn’t have to fight boredom” and “Writing this erases what it actually is” and “I see this: The puddle’s reflection of trees against sky repeatedly jitters and stills / I say this: ‘It is raining.’”
11. His quest is always to find something real in language, to find something other than words below words. In this drive, Vitiello is a sort of a rational mystic and poems serve as a set of instructions to guide himself and his readers to actual life beyond the page. He writes, “This is a poem / The poem happens outside the poem // Poems happen outside / poems / //Poems aren’t / poems.”
12. It is not clear if it is possible, in these poems, to escape the endless and fantastic maze that our words make for our minds, because of course, we can only describe the means of that escape with more words.
13. Vitiello writes, “The car is smoking / I knew / the car smokes / All you have to do is pay attention and it’s not that simple.”
14. Please welcome Chris Vitiello.

15. “The world is beautiful and now it is a single thing and this renders it silent so that the light can pass through in any direction, altering the nature of motion, and everything that moves is newly legible though unsayable; one said it would be possible but another turned around quickly and is still turning.”
16. The unsayable, the indescribable, the world beyond words, without terms: the paradox of describing beauty so profound that it is beyond description: this is the territory Cole Swensen seeks to enter in her poems, as a geographer of unspeakable wonder.
17. “There is indeed the unspeakable, and it can’t show itself; this is the real.”
18. A finalist for the National Book Award in 2004, the author of nine collections of poetry, a translator of contemporary French poets, winner of at least five other prestigious literary awards, member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop faculty, and political activist.
19. “Landscape is light alone. Some white coming up from behind which like a pendulum will come to entrance” and “I saw someone leaving / and I saw the world, which was meant only for background, come to life” and “into the blazing city // that all the white boats are leaving, a city sailing / into ages, please repeat: // 1) The city is white / 2) Most cities are white / 3) The white thing you see if you turn around quickly // often far away, often far out to see, though at time across a plain, a shimmer, or as if silt falling, fine-grained, a counting sand, a seed well-timed”
20. Light, in these poems, is our teacher, is that which makes everything possible. Light as an ally, the unifier; lighting, lightning, the state to which Swensen asks us to aspire.
21. “Land becomes art through applied joy and shock” and ““The natural extension of the hand / is the world is / reflected in its proper motion.”
22. Humanity in its highest state: the world and of the world. The poems uncover the work of painters, inventors, scientists, philosophers, the moments when we reach into the real, unsayable world and bring something back into life.
23. “Walking unravels the muscle that connects / the earth to bone, / feathers it out like a braid unskeined, / the leaves never fall straight down, even / when you think not one bit of air is moving” and “Philolaus the Pythagorean who believed / the sun a vitreous body / oddly / built of cast-off centuries with all their pictures in place” and “Poussin: the angel is still there but Joseph looks back at her in fear while Mary simply looks back and the child, simply, at us. Behind it all, an impossibly intricate world that turns the sun blue.”
24. Humanity, in these poems, as the recipient, creator, and beneficiary of beauty of creation, humanity in the singular.
25. “Face after face across this expanse. Extend and turn. If you turned around you’d be facing a forest” and “the face that underlies a landscape is only perceptible from a train. Einstein knew this and ‘the world has a face that looks back at you, and it is your own.’”
26. Cole Swensen is a humanist, a historian and celebrant of human achievement, an archeologist of the undeniable, inevitable recurrence of beauty in us and in the world.
27. “We begin with the proposition that the world is beautiful” and ““You can now see the world as a single streak, something built of transparent speed; pure white of the sort they say no one person, unaided, can perceive.”
28. Please welcome Cole Swensen.

Old Introductions: Standard Schaefer, Marcos Canteli & Rachel Price

2007-01-12T08:35:00.000-05:00

5. “azoradas / imagenes fijas // cobran un punto de claridad sobre la nieve / al reunirlo todo /// cuando se ajustan incluso mis / ojos lo advierten: luz sombra fisicamente / enrejadas // esta atencion / del cuerpo / ensambla lo mirado” writes Marcos Canteli in “pespuntes” which is dedicated to the great American poet Robert Creeley. Or as Rachel Price has translated the poem, called “Backstitches” in English: “astonished / frozen images // assume a pointed clarity on the snow / gathering all together /// when they adjust even my eyes / take notice: light shadow physically / latticed // this bodily / attention / assembles the seen.”
6. Marcos Canteli has had an eventful few weeks recently: he passed his graduate school preliminary exams at Duke, he got married (congratulations), and his third collection of poetry Su Sombrio was awarded the Ciudad de Burgos award, one of Spain’s premiere literary prizes.
7. With Rachel Price, Canteli has been working on translating his work into English. Tonight we are lucky enough to hear both the Spanish and English versions of the poems.
8. Canteli and Price met at Duke where she is also in graduate school. Price is pursuing her doctorate in the Literature Program and just yesterday finished her own preliminary exams. In addition to translating Canteli’s poems, she is working on a translation of the Brazilian poet Francisco Alvim. Her translations or poems and short stories and her own critical essays have been published in magazines and journals including the American Poetry Web.
9. Like those of Robert Creeley to whom “Backstitches” is dedicated, Canteli’s poems “assemble the seen” through “bodily attention.” The world of the self that is felt and the world of the other that is seen are connected by a mirrored physicality. He writes further in “Backstitches”: “that an air arise in the exterior on par with / this lung / the fall a cross / of eyes and ears as it fades.” The thread, the stitches, is thought: “the skin / lit up, its creases seared in / thought.”
10. The persona of these poems is an explorer, a searcher who opens layers of ambiguity. He writes “Morning and night I would hear birds to find myself trembling in the road with the corpses of the smallest of animals.” Later, in “Morning: Hintz Road” he writes “or the faces / on the sidewalks, they say we were once / like that was there / another morning like this one? your / anorak comes suddenly to me / or mine / on your body.”
11. Knowledge is concrete in these poems; while the mind ponders, events unfurl despite the mind’s grasp or lack of the significance. He writes “a traffic / of images that would come to be / real not here but on / their way, doubling / that time / when the real perhaps may be only / that time.”
12. The bind, finally, is that between the delicate images that Canteli suspends within these poems he writes “Passing into breathing I understand that my place is this gathered skin, exempt from words.”
13. Please welcome Marcos Canteli and Rachel Price.

14. “After an evening spent splitting quarks to quills, one solitary oval grew weary and slipped his fingers between the covers of a crude and common book.”
15. Standard Schaefer is not an oval, though he splits quarks to quills in his poems.
16. “The angel of history is the power to retaliate, possibly to disappear / if even into little sweaters stitched for birds, but I’m sorry to disturb you - / I thought we might share this – nothing to lose except our conundrums.”
17. Standard Schaefer is the author of Nova, which was a National Poetry Series selection, and Water & Power, which is forthcoming for Agincourt Press, both of which revel, in fact, in piling conundrum on top of conundrum.
18. “syllables whistle / decimals escalate / refuse to be partient or have anything to do with still or silt / on sideways afternoons in a vacant republic while letters float through the slit in the crown but end at concrete and crickets / as they collide in the cortext / where an alphabet begs to go on”
19. Standard Schaefer works as an independent journalist, contributing regularly to Counterpunch.org; he works as a teacher of creative writing and also as the non-fiction editor of the New Review of Literature; his syllables do, in fact, whistle and will collide in the cortext.
20. “a fugue state where figuration is saturated and not a big dark carpet / but a satellite of blue becoming a habit / of sight // while, we, like satellites / orbit the other side of the broom / a kind of vindication against science, / and its secret, immutable ballet.”
21. Standard Schaefer served as the editor of the literary magazines Ribot and Rhizome; his poems have appeared in Fence, New American Writing,and Aufgabe; his poems are, in fact, an immutable ballet in which the company is composed of characters derived from an intellect that rarely lacks something in which to find interest.
22. “The impossibility of giants and generals in the same room, much less the same man.”
23. Standard Schaefer lives in San Francisco with his wife, Paris, and their two beagles; his poems prove the possibility of giants and generals, astronomers and starlets, historians and alcoholics, Bacon and Beckett.
24. “it’s never too soon or early to begin”
25. So we shall begin now.
26. Please welcome Standard Schaefer.

Old Introductions: C. S. Giscombe & Jon Thompson

2007-01-12T08:34:00.000-05:00

5. “Give witness,” writes Jon Thompson in his poem “Absolution,” “Give witness to those things beyond the eye / that define the complexion of each day / the vast tissue of connections / that decides each act.” The poems in Thompson’s just published first collection of poetry seek and give shape to that “vast tissue of connections.” His poems reveal, as he writes in “Under Water”, “a tale of tiered temples and cloistered beauty / on the very brush-stroke of cruelty.”
6. Fortunately for us, Jon lives and teaches just down the road in Raleigh. He teaches 20th century British and American literature at NC State, and during his tenure, has mentored some of the best young contemporary poets, including Aaron McCollough, Todd Sandvik, Tim Botta, and Jon Minton.
7. He also serves as the editor of the literary magazine Free Verse which consistently features thought provoking work in a range of aesthetics. He was also recently named the editor of Parlor Press’s Free Verse Editions Poetry Series.
8. Tonight we are celebrating the publication of his first volume of poetry The Book of the Floating World published in October.
9. The poems in The Book of the Floating World revolve around a series of photos of Japan during the US’s post WWII occupation taken by Thompson’s father. From these touching off points, Thompson writes of history and the world and “the unnatural musical light … breaking / in waves / over a future which is unaware.” Thompson’s poems circle our pervasive lack of awareness, our inability to see sideways in time the way a poem or a photograph can.
10. This sideways view pervades the poems in this first collection. He writes in “Double Exposure,” a poem that begins watching a man rummage in garbage, he writes, “he knows he is just in time to witness the art / by which he becomes the eater of trash / the user of refuse one of the lucky ones / and his only response is the leaden impassivity of his face / this accident he knows / but he is unaware of the accident of double exposure / whereby suddenly he is standing in a radiant field / that stretches for days / to reach some steeply-wooded mountains.”
11. In the end these poems evoke the impenetrable, unspeakable moments that cause the present. Thompson’s task – to speak the unspeakable – is impossible, but this task is met with a worthy eloquence. He writes in “Thresholds”, “the story of ascending smoke which is his story / a story in which he does not exist / a story in which the photographer of the photographer does not exist / a story in which the I that writes these lines / does not exist / a story in which the photo fades with the smoking tree / a story in which the story gets in the way / of the story that cannot be told.”
12. Please welcome Jon Thompson.

13. “I have no complaints loud or soft but know // that ceremony gets complicated out past the gates // to the city, in those integers out there it gets // uneven (meaning connected, factual, // chancy & unconnected) // hardly a blessing.”
14. Cecil Giscombe is the author of the poetry collections Here, Giscome Road, Inland, and At Large. His first non-fiction book, Into and Out of Dislocation, is a record of his search in British Columbia, the far far north, for a man who may have been a relative. His second non-fiction book, Traveling Public, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.
15. “to be at odds w/ nothing in my life / at loggerheads w/ no man or woman / to have no ritual, no quantity of value here / or over there / no gift / at something or for / anyone // but approaching as if from / close in / as if from far away, either one / (visible”
16. He is a professor at Penn State University and organizer of the Mixed Blood Reading series. He has won a Fullbright Scholarship, a fellowship from the NEA, a Pushcart award, and was selected by Adrienne Rich for the Best of American Poetry Anthology.
17. “culture was more than indefinites, it was an archipelago // of colonies, all names / had fled from memory & from the map both, // I saw typescript loose in the air all around our location when we spoke / in the dream, // the sentences disembodied but readable”
18. Born in Dayton, Ohio, he received degrees from SUNY Albany and Cornell. He has ridden his bike close to 70,000 miles in the last 25 years, waded through Penn’s Creek with his bike on his back, and shipped his bike by plane and train into and out of several different countries.
19. “To me, image is any value in the exchange. Pleasure’s accidental. In any event, it’s hard to measure and harder still to memorize, pleasure. Image stands in. To me, voice is that which gets stuck in the head, effected voice, or in between the teeth, the hiss of love.”
20. Cecil is my dear friend, mentor, and poetic compass.
21. “Having wanted to drive out to the edge, right out // to the mutest edge out there, // the mutest edge, the emptiest soundstage, // out to the invisibility there, out // to all that “up” there in Canada that took place up there-- // Giscome, B.C. all unincorporated now up // on the Upper Fraser Rd.”
22. Please welcome Cecil Giscombe.

Old Introductions: Aaron McCollough & Tony Tost

2007-01-12T08:32:00.000-05:00

5. Throughout the various forms – and there are many -- Aaron’s poems take runs a belief, a faith really, in love. These are not love poems, though at times they are; instead these poems examine the ethics of love, the mandate to love one’s neighbor, and the fragments of prophetic vision one receives when walking through the world with love. Aaron writes in his poem “Having Rooms,” “I may not say my love is light // my love is light / I cannot see” and later in “Democrack Pistols,” he asks “make but one body / perfect; so every particular human is but a member or branch of humankind living in the light … a fit and compleat Lord of the Creation.”
6. Aaron is a southerner by birth and inclination who is currently on hiatus at the University of Michigan. On, as he calls it, the “thinking man’s dole” Aaron is working on his doctorate in Elizabethan literature and theology. This is the last, perhaps, stage in his education which has also included a Masters from NC State, a bachelor’s from the University of the South, and an MFA from the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
7. In addition to his own writing Aaron is the editor of Gut Cult magazine, the mind behind the Flowers that Glide web log, and genius, some might say super-genius, behind Good Gog records. He is the author of Welkin, winner of the 2002 Sawtooth Prize and Double Venus. His third collection, Little Ease, is forthcoming.

8. “The pieces of a day hang like mirrors?” writes Aaron in “Hence These Alarms,” and it is from these day pieces that he creates poetry, in a nest of jumbled fragments held together often by a delicately constructed iambic line.
1. The poems move from fragmented vision to fragmented vision as if we are seeing, as he writes in “Common Places”, “through breaks in a screen.”
2. He describes a torture room in “National Hotel”: “steel and leathern / fixings // touching / the battery and bedsprings,” to the German town of Mainz where Gutenberg began printing, to a quiet morning breakfast: “we reach us generous endive / we make us coffee.”
3. Aaron’s eye sees value in the combination of disparate images: the cherry tree in the yard: “not a lot of sunlight on the cherries; / orange almost to the stem then deep red / aureoles”, to bee hives “letting go some bees today / the old man kept in slatted wooden crates / obtaining to the husbandry of bees.”
4. The drive to encompass vast ranges of landscape rises from a profound understanding that it is in the entirety and unity of creation that one finds beauty and purpose. The title of his second collection, Double Venus, highlights this belief in the fundamental and simultaneous singularity and multiplicity of us all. Aaron’s goal in his poetry is to help us reach the point where we are, as he writes in “Having Rooms”, where we are “understanding / ourselves as / one presence / beyond the shadow.”
9. Please welcome Aaron McCollough.

10. A highly esteemed critic of poetry once described Tony Tost’s first book of poetry as “a congeries of brazen worlds, inhabited by wide-eyed lost souls.” These souls are weeping animals, irate mothers, a narrator who “lives in the clouds, only to find [himself] thirsty”, another that thinks “being nice did not always work like magic” while flying through a windshield, Friedrich Nietzsche, a blind dog regarded “as most would a storm”, semi-sentient beards, and a woman named Agnes who at times is an airport waitress, “the sign pointing up the road”, and a Delphic oracle.
11. We’re quite fortunate to have Tony living here in the Chapel Hill area. As one of the most intelligent and talented young poets writing today, Tony has been an exciting part of the literary community. He is generous with his intelligence as demonstrated by the candor and vigor that he brings to his entries in his web log, the Unquiet Grave.
12. Tony came to the triangle from Missouri via the University of Arkansas where he received his MFA. He also picked up his wonderful fiancée, Leigh, whom he will marry in early June.
13. Tost’s first book, Invisible Bride, won the highly coveted 2003 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is also the editor of the poetry journal Octopus. His own poems have appeared in poetry journals like Fence, Spinning Jenny, Typo, among others.
14. Like the surrealists, Tony’s poems seek truth in experiments with the strange, in a derangement of the senses that might lead one to the universal truths. The uncanny images in which these poems traffic are haunting because we see something almost more than real in their irrationality. Such that when he writes “I was once a small place filled with hats” we can understand exactly what he means; that this is not a metaphor, but a true statement that can be said no other way. And so it is that Tost’s poems feel inevitable; each move from image to image, line to line seems like the inexorable movement of the sun.
1. He writes, “We talked (and bruises had been sprouting on our legs like light-green dandelions)” and later “I was born holding a demons hand. This is why I always enter a room dancing” and even later “winter absorbs a man in such a way as to nearly dissolve the wolf inside him.”
2. In each line of Tony’s poems a new cosmology is formed as when he writes in “Unawares” “If two objects are neaby in one direction, then a world separates them in the other: the ghost distance” and then “He walks into the bedroom. Agnes is asleep; before him is another Tony. This one looks like a ghost and patiently writes in Tony’s notebook.”
15. The original title for Invisible Bride was Unawares and it is this idea that both titles express: the shadow world, the ghost world that exists a half step behind the world we think we live in – this other world that creates the one we think we inhabit. He writes “I, too, shall wear my own howling. But tonight I am dressed like a man.”
16. Please welcome Tony Tost.

Old Introductions: Jim Brasfield & Joe Donahue

2007-01-12T08:31:00.000-05:00

# Last January when I introduced Joe in the Desert City I compared his work to the of T. S. Eliot; after getting to know Joe’s better, it’s clear to me that the other great 20th century poet Donahue can be aligned with is Robert Duncan, who mapped the coincidence of the physical, spiritual, and mental landscape in his poems. Duncan writes in one of his most famous poems “Often I am permitted to return to a meadow / as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, / that is not mine, but is a made place, // that is mine, it is so near to the heart, / an eternal pasture folded in all thought / so that there is a hall therein // that is a made place, created by light / wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.” It is in this same meadow, or field, that Joe Donahue’s poems begin their search: their exploration of creation, of all of our own individual realizations of the world which in turn manifest the greater world of which we are all a part.
# It’s great to have Joe Donahue here not only to read tonight, but as a member of the Triangle community. Over the last several months, Joe has become an invaluable mentor for many of us local poets here, a trusted source of information and an intelligent and wry bar companion.
# During the day Joe teaches literature and writing at Duke. He came here most recently from Seattle after spending many years in New York where he received his PhD from Columbia University
# Donahue is the editor of several anthologies regarding contemporary poetry as well as the author of five collections of his own work. Among his collections are World Well Broken, Terra Lucida, and in spring of 2003 Incidental Eclipse. Among other things, tonight we are celebrating the publication just last week of his sixth collection of poems In this Paradise, published by Carolina Wren Press.
# Incidental Eclipse is singular in it’s ability to pull together such loosely connected images as a woman, Christ-like, that “steps onto the lava flow,” a fighter pilot explaining the magic of “ducting” : “suddenly beyond our range a continent would flash then disappear”, and the transcendent moment “At dawn all distance comes to a burning point our bodies no more than invisible currents where the light turns gold as ice on a mountain.” Donahue asks for reconciliation of these contradictory images through science and prayer: “Let autopsies open the chambers of our hearts. Let men of science find in our nerves the likeness of pillar and scourge”; “Come to me, truth of the sun, through some opening in my head.”
# Continuing the ambiguity explored in Incidental Eclipse, the clear and shining geography of Joe's latest collection, In This Paradise, is continually being created or destroyed. In each case, visions of Eden shine between the cracks in perception. From their origin in a wasteland, these poems hold out simultaneously the paradise we live in as it is being destroyed, and the paradise we are moving towards, that we are becoming. Donahue's roving eye finds that every fragment of divinity, of truth, "continues the Creation. // Every scrap & tatter of a true image / proves the world has never yet been complete."
<>Donahue’s poems read like passages that have been lost from holy scripture; they intimate an architecture of a shadowy paradise. Donahue does not provide a map for this paradise -- but where he looks, hidden continents appear.
Please welcome Joseph Donahue.
# At the root of Jim Brasfield’s poems is the belief that nothing is more strange, magical, and delightful than the sticks and stones of daily human life, that through the most careful observation of experience we can receive revelations. In his poem “Only to Listen” for example, a seemingly random assortment of night sounds is revealed to be a traveler from another life. He writes “I woke with a story from the dark. / I met a household of disbelief.”

1. Originally from Savannah, Georgia, James Brasfield has spent the last seventeen years in State College, Pennsylvania, teaching at Penn State University.
2. He has received an artist’s fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has twice been a Fullbright Scholar in the Ukraine.
3. During his time in the Ukraine, Jim met and began to work as a translator with the Ukrainian poet Oleh Lysheha.
4. Their collaborations were eventually published in 2000 by Harvard University Press as The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha, for which manuscript they won both the Pushcart and the PEN Awards in Translation.
5. His own poems have appeared in the Agni, Black Warrior Review, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Poetry Wales, among others.

# Whether it’s in his translations or his own poems, Jim’s aim is for the sublime and, like Emerson, the ecstatic. In “The Chair and the Pipe” a poem that imagines a conversation between Van Gogh and his brother Theo, Brasfield writes “Snow falls, each flake a crystal petal. // Each branch gathers up its layer. / Seeds from the sunflower / lay eclipsed in the frostburnt herbs.” From within this vision of ice and fire and ash Van Gogh sees “the still deeper shades of black unending” waiting to be created with sacks of ash into “garden, field, and sky.”
# What hinders access to the ecstatic state is our disbelief that it exists. Though it is always there, we seldom return to it. In Brasfield’s “The Blue Cottage” he represents the state of transcendence as an empty house found in the woods “Past the peonies / about to blossom, the roses in bloom, you pressed / your open hands to the clean glass, / resting your forehead on your spread fingers. / Each point of touch was an island of flesh on the pane. / You felt no fear, no anxiety of return.”
# It is, ultimately in Brasfield’s poems, a “return of the recognizable” – what the world around us provides, gives us access to, is the real world, the eternal world of sublime and ecstatic experience.
# Please welcome Jim Brasfield.

In Need of the Healing: Zombie Poems on Rock Heals

2007-01-05T20:14:00.000-05:00

Putting the "brrrrraaaaaaiiiiiiinnnnnzzzzzz-uuuuuhhhhhhhh" in contemporary poetry since ought-4 or so: Rock Heals & my zombie poem.

Thanks, JGP!

If you haven't seen it already (but you probably have)

2006-12-29T21:37:00.000-05:00

From the Sinkhole Files

2006-12-22T13:57:00.000-05:00

Doesn't get much better than this.

George W. Bush is a War Criminal

2006-12-06T08:40:00.000-05:00

This shouldn't be news to anyone paying any attention to the news for the last, oh, 5 years.

He leads an administration that pursued a policy based on fraudulent information that has destabilized a sovereign nation, a policy pursued without the approval of the United Nations and without the cooperation of more than a handful of states who received large amounts of support in return for their rubber stamp approval of this policy.

The situation in Iraq makes me sick to my stomach, and all I've seen is pictures of what it is doing to the Iraqis.

Increase troops, decrease troops -- Iraq is in a civil war that will likely go on for years and spill out to many other countries.

George W. Bush is responsible for that.

I'm all for impeachment, but what I really want to see is Bush sitting in the Hague dock on trial for crimes against humanity.

New Email Address

2006-11-22T11:33:00.000-05:00

Hey folks,

I got a new email address recently -- it's over to your right under my name and such. So if you've been looking for me or emailed me over the last several months or something like that -- drop me another line at the new address.

Also, I'm particularly looking for Craig Laubach and Jeff Morgan -- Hey y'all, sorry for the long silence various things conspired against a prompt response, and now I don't have your email addresses. So shoot me a note, and I'll respond quickly.

xo

Hey-ho! Let's go!Vo-te!!

2006-11-07T08:34:00.000-05:00

Hey everybody,

It's voting day in the USA -- so go on down and vote!! It's fun!! Take your kids too!!

Here's some useful info for North Carolinians:

North Carolina Board of Elections

Where to go if you don't know your registration status and you live in NC.

Fun, fun! Vote, vote!!

xo

Brian Howe & Friends @ The Nightlight: The Video

2006-11-06T10:09:00.000-05:00

Wow, this is a pretty terrific little film by the fabulous Amy White & Keith Weston.

And great poems and readings by

Brian Howe, David Need, Dianne Timblin, Brad Land, Laura Jent, Chris Vitiello, Chris Salerno, Patrick Herron, Rodrigo Garcia Lopez

Would that I had been there.....

xo

Last Eve with Evie

2006-10-29T13:41:00.000-05:00

Evie Shockley has been my North Carolina poet friend for longer than anyone else here, and she's a great one, and I'm lucky to have a lot of great ones here. We met in the spring of 2002, a few months before the Desert City began. So seeing her read last night and holding her book in my hands, it was like watching a family member get well deserved success. And to top it off -- Evie smoked it. She read with a confidence that was compelling -- here was an artist communing with their work, making a third thing from the dyad of writer and artifact.

An excellent after party hosted by Leigh & Tony Tost in their sweet little house on Duke street (complete with a pair of rockers on the porch (plus a couple of nice chairs to sit in.)) Tony's got a study I immediately started to covet. He's also got several pairs of hand weights (dumb bells) in the corner. Is the Tost beefing up for a rematch with the reigning king of all competitive physical contests? (meaning me.) He may write better poems, publish more books, leave a larger mark on the history of literature, have less BO, and lack my hideous growths -- but goddammit, I'll put his wrist on the table or pop an eyeball trying.

Talking, eating cheesecake with our bare hands, singing along to The Magnetic Fields and Randy Newman (don't want to hurt no kangaroos), we ended the evening with a round robin reading by David Need, Tony, Brad, Tim Earley, and myself. What a wealth of poetry -- woke up with lines in my head miles long.

Sweet, sweet. So the 2006/2007 Desert City schedule will be coming out soon; the start's been slow around here, but we've got some good stuff in the works.

Here are my intros for Evie and Linda:
Evie Shockley & Linda Pennisi Intro

1. Announcements
a. Reception & Booksigning after the reading
b. After Party at the home of Leigh & Tony Tost.

2. Linda Pennisi writes, “Soon they were having coffee / and she was telling him about the guy / who kept brining her down. / No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t / get away for good.” And stories like this – of a woman trapped in an abusive relationship or a girl abducted from the woods and, on the surface, less traumatic events like playing Mary in a church nativity play – these stories form the backbone of many of the poems in her latest collection, Suddenly, Fruit.
3. The ribcage of these poems, however, is illustrated by the title of the poem I just quoted: “Persephone Meets Christ.”
4. So, along with threads of domesticity, art, faith, sex, and age, the myth of Persephone embroiders these poems as in “Form,” a poem about watching a poetry reading, “Tonight / Persephone is the forsythia. / She comes in yellow bursts / from tongue-tip and fingertip; / a million pores zing open / to birth a star-blossom each.”
5. Pennisi writes, in these poems, the gaps between the sentences in the myths; she writes the story that lies between the period and the following capital letter, and we can see that our lives are myths and the myths are our lives.
6. William Pitt Root writes of Suddenly, Fruit, “[it has an] attentive languor and a spell of authenticity that is intoxicating and sobering in the same draught. [It is] an impassioned elixir.”
7. Please welcome Linda Tomol Pennisi.

8. It’s hard to resist reading you the entirety of Evie Shockley’s opening poem from her new book, half-red sea; it’s a poem the grabs your coat’s lapels and pulls you in fast, close, and rough; the book doesn’t let go until it’s closed. I’ll quote just a few lines, though, from “possibilities of poetry, upon her death”: “ars poetica, rough ship, drag / me from world to brutal word, / mental passage. (write.) be / a wail of a sound, surfacing / to fountain dark water found / in valleys of the shadow of breath.”
9. And these poems breath in and with the rarified air of such greats as Gwendolyn Brooks, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Phyllis Wheatley, and the mysterious woman “e” about whom Evie writes, “I am named for a poet who never in her lifetime / published…her / poems read like grocery lists. I need—a dozen eggs / --a tub of lard—loaf bread—fatback—and rat poison / for the rat who sleeps in my bed.”
10. And as Shockley’s poems work around and within this framework of her literal and figurative ancestors, her poems enact hallucinatory forms like the way a grocery list can become a death threat.
11. In her poem “A Thousand Words”, the word “torture” forms a frame around words that make up the subtext of the current administration: “torture shower camp station ghetto inner city tenement project projectile target practice black brown beige torture.”
12. Sonnets spice the mix but sonnets turned from their European roots to the service of the ones who were once enslaved. As in “blue-ing green: the sonobiography of miles davis”, she writes “blue flame the first thing he knew :: / st. louis blues with dizzying rules :: / blue devil makes his pointed debut”
13. And then a sales pitch that sounds startlingly possible: “martin luther king, jr. day / getaways! // need a tan? try our white flights! / ride first-class on a one-way ticket out / of the city!”
14. Along with these sharp social critiques, encomia for the ancestors, and whip-smart satires, half-red sea presents “simple”, and lovely, love poems.
15. In “apples and oranges: an allegory,” Shockley writes, “so I’m on the lookout for a good apple, okay, / a really good one, / a you-ain’t-had-no-apple-like-this apple. // and find myself with an orange. // now it’s not what you’re thinking…. I had not given up all hope of ever putting my hands / on a good apple / some of my friends had damn good apples … I’m still an apple person, myself / an apple person who knows that // all oranges are not alike. / there’s some / like apples.”
16. Please welcome my dear friend Evie Shockley.

Shockley & Pennisi, This Saturday, Oct. 28, 8pm, Durham Arts Council!

2006-10-24T09:48:00.000-04:00

Please spread far & wide...

Who: Evie Shockley, author of just published a half-red sea, scholar of African American and Gothic literature, a dear friend, give her three words and she brings back a six-course feast.

Who: Linda Pennisi, author of just published Suddenly, Fruit, director of the Creative Writing Program at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, threw a hook into a book and pulled out all the stops.

What: Desert City Poetry Series & Carolina Wren Book Launch, together again, the way we were, for old time's sake, just like yesterday.

When: This Saturday, October 28th, 8pm!

Where: Durham Arts Council, PSI Theatre, 120 Morris Street, Downtown Durham!

Why: "A ballerina will not stop / inserting her foot / into a pink shoe" "I'll stone you from the heart out"

How Much: Free & open to the public!

See you there....

Evie Shockley
Poems.
More Poems.

Linda Pennisi

"elocation (or, exit us)"
by Evie Shockley

the city is american, so she
can map it. train tracks, highways slice through, bleed
only to one side. like a half-red sea
permanently parted, the middle she'd

pass through, like the rest, in a wheeling rush,
afraid the divide would not hold and all
would drown – city as almighty ambush –
beneath the crashing waves of human hell.

the city's infra(red)structure sweats her,
a land(e)scape she can't make, though she knows
the way. she's got great heart, but that gets her where?
egypt's always on her right (it goes

where she goes), canaan's always just a-head,
and to her left, land of the bloodless dead.

"Somewhere in a Dark Auditorium"
by Linda Pennisi

A ballerina will not stop
inserting her small foot
into a slim pink shoe,
criscrossing silk ribbons
over the bone of ankle.
Sometimes I slip into the inside
of her body, where the soul
wells into the walls of that cup
the music, quivering there
like a diver in a swarm
of tropical fishes, her shape brushed
with undulations of hunger
and wonder, a hundred bodies
of tremulous light. The dancer's shoes
fill with flesh; her flesh
brims with music. What can she do
with such hunger, such sadness?
What can her body do
but tremble and spill
into dance?

Evie Shockley, Durham Arts Center, Saturday, October 28th

2006-10-16T08:57:00.000-04:00

Local favorite Evie Shockley will be returning to our GPS coordinates in just a few short weeks to celebrate the publication of her first book, A Half Red Sea. Stay tuned right here for more details. And perhaps something from our newsroom....

Anybook Review Blog

2006-10-11T09:21:00.000-04:00

Okay folks,

So I'm getting ready to make good on a promise I made awhile back: my Anybook review blog will be live sometime in the next two weeks (I'll make an announcement.) I'll be reviewing poetry books, individual poems, magazine issues, novels, short stories, some music maybe, nonfiction, scholarly work, readings, I'll leave the movies and tv shows to Silliman, and I'll review whatever else I want to. I won't be reviewing strictly contemporary stuff; it'll just be what I'm reading which lately has been a lot of fiction: Conrad, Tolstoy, Lydia Davis, and others.

The reason for the delay is that I'm working on compiling a back log of stuff. I'd like to put up three new pieces a week, so if I have six or so ready to go, I can keep that pace in those hectic times.

If folks want to send me books to review, I'll take a look and try, at the least, to review a poem from the book, but I can't make any promises.

A few things that I've been working on include the following:

Farid Matuk's Is It the King?
Lisa Jarnot's "Ye White Antarctic Birds"
Is It the King? in relation to Conrad's Lord Jim
Lakoff & Johnson's Metaphors We Live By
A longitudinal study of Juliana Spahr's work
Tony Tost's World Jelly
Stacy Szymaszek's book & work
Mark McMorris's work
A longitudinal study of C. S. Giscombe's work
Poetry books's opening poems

Be there soon....

Your Carrboro Poetry Reportwith Todd Sandvik

2006-10-04T12:15:00.000-04:00

You saw it here first, folks:

Poetry Bus October 6th 7 PM, in Durham!! This Friday!!!

2006-10-03T11:47:00.000-04:00

What: Poetry Bus!

Where: Baldwin Lofts, 107 W. Main Street, Durham!!

When: This Friday! October 6th! 7pm!!!

Who: Joshua Beckman, Matthew Zapruder, Carrie St. George Comer, David Roderick, Valzhyna Mort, Bob Hicok, Lee Ann Brown, Mark McMorris, Ken Rumble, and other local poets!!!

What else: Bring a beverage!!

What else X 2: Thanks to Carolina Wren for providing some beverages!!

Why: It's a bus!! Full of poets!!!

Rock (Truly) Heals

2006-09-27T08:52:00.000-04:00

The kind folks over at Rock Heals asked for, received, and posted a recording of the poem that they posted of mine a couple months back. Thanks, Jamie!

So now there's some St. Apples for your eye- and ear- holes. Bring the noise.

x-it

Key Bridge in the New College Review

2006-09-22T10:11:00.000-04:00

And I repeat myself: myself:

Hey, some more of Key Bridge here at the New College Review! Thanks, Standard!

The formatting's a little wonky, but c'est la vie.

Poetry Bus October 6th, 7 PM, in Durham

2006-09-19T13:13:00.000-04:00

Okay, folks, the bus--as stated--is coming. Here's some more info:

Wave Books is sponsoring the Poetry Bus tour. A big bus that runs on vegetable oil that takes poets around the country so the poets can read their poems out loud to people sitting or standing in the indoors or the outdoors.

That's it in a nutshell.

In the particular case of the Poetry Bus's stop in our fair Durham, the reading to people will take place at Baldwin Lofts in downtown Durham. The Baldwin Lofts are really right downtown--they're also my favorite venue in the tri-city area. It's a cool space with lots of brick, wood, pillars, and--well--space.

As for the readers, I'm not exactly sure yet who those people will be. I do suspect that some of the readers will be local-yocals, including (I think) yours totally.

Damn, this internets is cool -- lookee there:

Joshua Beckman, Matthew Zapruder, David Roderick, Bob Hicok, Valzhyna Mort, Carrie St George Comer, Mark McMorris, Lee Ann Brown, Ken Rumble

I found the performers list. I do think there may be more?? We'll see. But hot damn -- what a line-up! Lee Ann Brown, a two time Desert City VIP and fave with extra flavor. And the big young boys of modern poetry. And Belarusian poetry star Valzhyna Mort. And Miami's own Carrie St. George Comer!

Come knocking when the bus is ......

The Bus Is Coming

2006-09-11T14:38:00.000-04:00

Vroom-Vroom-Vroom.....

Pull up your socks.

Feeling the Healing

2006-07-27T16:01:00.000-04:00

Rock Heals, cool cats, some St. Apples for your eyeholes.

xo

From the Fishouse to Your Earhouse

2006-07-08T23:59:00.000-04:00

Back from Seattle. Moving soon. Don't tell mom.

Poems.

With sound.

Good poems.

Some of mine.

Articles return.

Soon.

xo

Harris Schools Rumble

2006-06-30T20:24:00.000-04:00

Yup, Mistah Kaplan Page Harris took me to school after seeing the Burlesque reading.

Thanks, KPH!

So many posts lately -- won't continue though; I'm off to the western provinces; happy phosphorus-burns-day or whatever -- yee, as they say, haw.

xo

Seeing Seattle

2006-06-29T17:21:00.000-04:00

Hot damn -- I'm going out to Seattle this Saturday to see Lori; she's been at the Hedgebrook Retreat Center for the last four weeks. So I'm flying up on Saturday, the first, and we're going to hang out in and around Seattle till we return on the 7th. I'm very excited.

So what's there to do in Seattle?? I've been to Olympia (the town) and Pullman (where WSU is.) Poetry readings? Freaky museums? Hot restaurants? Can't miss thrift stores? Scenic views?

Oh, and the other thing about 24 Hour Breakfast -- it's not all funny. Some parts of it strike me as funny, but some parts are intentionally meant to be uncomfortable. I've been thinking a lot about making readers (when I imagine that I have some) uncomfortable -- somewhere in the vicinity of offended, but much more subtle and disturbing. Offensiveness always seemed like a shallow version of something that was really important. Like this Nirvana shirt that I used to see around (no slight on Nirvana, just don't dig the shirt), the shirt said: "Nirvana: Fudge Packin', crack smokin', satan worshipin' motherfucker." On one level it's fairly funny -- I imagine the boys had a good laugh when they decided to put that shirt together, and I can appreciate that laugh (after all I was in a band for a year or so called Groovey Hate Fuckers (loved that band and the band name -- whut's up, Brian Howell?!?! Kevin Harrison?!?! Josh Kirby?!?!))

And I imagine that some people might find the shirt "offensive", but what is the effect of that feeling the shirt/phrase causes in people? I imagine someone seeing it would just think "goddamn punks, fucking kids are all going to hell" (except without the expletives.) The person might not ever think about it again; the shirt hasn't done much other than reinforce the prejudices that the viewer already had.

And maybe it's too much for me to expect that something like a band's tour t-shirt should aim to change the world.

So the Nirvana shirt is an example of something I'd guess some people might call offensive.

The sort of thing I'm aiming for is, I hope, something more insidious, something that makes one uncomfortable because it doesn't fit into an easily dismissable category.

I really love Scorsese's Dylan documentary (and Dylan generally (I revel in my uniquity.)) There's this part where Dylan is talking about writing "Like a Rolling Stone," and he talks about how strange and uncomfortable he was writing something he calls "a piece of bile," a piece of bile that went on to linger in the top 40. Then later he's talking about getting booed after he went electric, and he says (approximately) "I had a way of thinking about all that, it was okay, because sometimes you can kill them with kindness too."

The combination of those two explanations really has hit home with what I'm looking for in my own work these days; Dylan was fucking shit up, pushing his audience's tolerance in a way that made people uncomfortable.

So that's what I'm after these days: the uncomfortable. Sometimes the uncomfortable is really funny, but I hope it's also sometimes more than merely offensive.

Clearly I Don't Embarrass Easily Enough

2006-06-27T19:47:00.000-04:00

Hott times at the Rouge -- thanks, Reb & Carly and everybody who came!

Photos.

And more.

I am going to miss those pants.....

On a more serious note, I did read "24 Hour Breakfast" for the first time, and it seemed to go over well; apparently I'm not the only one who thinks "pizza ass" is funny.

Poetry & Stripping: Monday in the Nation's Capitol

2006-06-21T11:57:00.000-04:00

You guessed it -- this Monday, June 26th, at 8pm I'll be at the Bar Rouge courtesy of the Bulesque Poetry Hour; thanks Reb & Carly!

So the idea is that we read poems and then take off our clothes. Now why didn't I think of that??

At any rate, I've been working on my pecs and tightening the tummy -- got my man thong pressed and a good waxing from Helga.

Now that you know too much -- the details:

Reading:
Ken Rumble
Evie Shockley
Fred Pollack

Burlesque Poetry Hour
Bar Rouge
1315 16th St. NW
Washington, DC
June 26th, Monday
8:00 PM

I'll be reading some from Key Bridge, some from St. Apples, maybe some of the Monologues, but I'm most excited about reading from the new stuff: 24 Hour Breakfast; and I might try a poetry cover a la Hugo Ball via Christian Bok. We'll see....

Hope to see you there.......

xo,
Ken

Good News

2006-06-18T22:56:00.000-04:00

Hello Blogland!

So some very good, exciting news here at DCHQ: I found out recently that my first book, Key Bridge, will be published by Carolina Wren press in the spring of 2007! Yee-haw. I'm very excited about it. The book is about Washington, DC, mostly -- the history, geography, flora and fauna; it's also about the DC Snipers (Lee Boyd Malvo & John Allen Muhammad) and love and sex and whiteness and race generally and a few other things. I'm pretty stoked; it's a good little book.

More about it soon I'm sure, but for tonight, I'm out.

xo

Update Links and Such

2006-06-11T14:59:00.000-04:00

Hey folks,

Anybody got a blog, reading series, magazine, press, hankering for publicity, etc -- shoot me a link to your stuff and I'll add you. If anybody's link's dead/changed, hook me up with the new one.

Chugging along here at DCHQ, I'm putting the season together, and I'm missing LR and her sweet smile while she's enjoying a writing retreat. Look for her kick ass novel about China coming to bookstores near you....

chugchug,
Ken

K. Rumble: The Collected Works

2006-05-23T10:15:00.000-04:00

Okay, what we've all been waiting for links to all the poems, reviews, articles, profiles, and interviews by and about yours totally available here on the 3-dubyas. Thanks to the editors of all these magazines for taking the work!!

(As a side note, over the years submitting and publishing poems in journals has become a regular part of my revision process. I'll write a first draft (usually longhand, sometimes on a manual typewriter), type it into the computer eventually (revising some), come back and revise a little more a couple weeks later, then a few weeks later (about 5 or 6 times a year?) I'll go on a big submission jag, sending out everything I'd consider publishing. During this jag, I again revise before sending. But inevitably when I see the poem printed, I see typically 4 or 5 major changes I wish I'd made. It's like I see it for the first time. So I go back to the doc and revise the poem again. Usually that's the end; a few minor changes after that but not much. So the publishing of my poems is a fairly major part of my composition/revision process. Sometimes when I see the poems, I'm really chagrined by them. But most of the time, I don't get too hung up on wishing I could still change something. Most of the time even, I like that there are possibly two (or more) versions of my poems out in the world. Most of the poems I submit are part of book length projects (chap and other); with some luck, some of them will be published eventually. So the books will have the "final" drafts of the poems, and the journals will have something like a b-side version. I always dig seeing a poet's various drafts, the move from one word to another; I hope others might get the same pleasure from comparing the journal and book versions.)

So in reverse chronological order by project (St. Apples, A Monologue for Voices & President Letters, Life is Not Whatnot, Key Bridge, and Radishes & Rutabagas.)

St. Apples:

Fascicle -- here.

Coconut -- here.

A Monologue for Voices:

Fascicle -- here and here and here.

Coconut -- here.

Free Verse -- here.

Life is Not Whatnot:

Shampoo -- here.

Octopus -- here.

Typo -- here.

Fascicle -- here and here and here.

No Tell Motel -- here and here and here and here and here.

North Carolina Poet of the Week Feature -- here (scroll to the bottom.)

Key Bridge:

VeRT -- here.

Fascicle -- here.

Octopus -- here and here.

Moria -- here.

Coconut -- here (scroll down.)

Gutcult -- here.

Typo -- here.

MiPoesias -- here.

can we have our ball back? -- here.

Xconnect -- here and here and here.

Drunken Boat -- here and here.

Word For Word -- here.

North Carolina Poet of the Week Feature -- here (scroll to the bottom.)

Radishes & Rutabagas:
(man, this stuff is old.)

Word For Word -- here.

Gumball Poetry -- here and here and here.

Sugar Mule -- here.

Book Reviews:

Electronic Poetry Review -- here and here and here and here.

Rain Taxi -- here.

Feature:

Independent Weekly -- here.

Interview:

Independent Weekly -- here.

Profile/Indy Award:

Independent Weekly -- here.

Recordings of My Readings:

Spaceship Tumblers -- here and here.

Carrboro Poetry Festival -- here.

A reading in Athens, GA -- here.

Well, that's it for now -- I'll keep my eyes peeled for stuff I missed (if anything?) My other career as a dirt track racer is summarized here (I'm #87.)

Thanks again to all the editors!

All I Ever Wanted

2006-04-30T19:04:00.000-04:00

Vacation, folks. Yup, LR and I are heading to Belize for some scuba; see you all in about two weeks. I hope everyone can stand this brief break from my blistering publishing pace. In the meantime, check out the Desert City's co-director: Chris Vitiello, who kicks way much ass.

xohmxohmxohmxohm

C'est Fin.

2006-04-24T12:22:00.000-04:00

The 2005 - 2006 season of the Desert City is over; I can't imagine going out with more of a bang than Rosmarie Waldrop, Emmanuel Hocquard, and Juliette Valéry. It was astounding -- really the best reading I've ever hosted (with some stiff, stiff competition in the mix.) Emmanuel read, in French, from A Test of Solitude while Rosmarie read her English translations. It's wonderful work; spare, spare poetry that is unsuccessful at dampening the joyousness underneath the abstract postulating. As much as Hocquard wants to (and I don't think he actually wants to exactly) find some baseline for language, the world keeps intruding, keeps demanding to be there regardless of how we talk of it.

Juliette read some ekphrastic work in French; I didn't understand it, but I enjoyed hearing it. Juliette and Emmanuel co-direct Un Bureau sur l'Atlantique (A Desk on top of the Atlantic, I learned) which, among many things, works to translated contemporary US avant poets into French. Emmanuel ran a press called Orange Exports (I believe) for awhile that did the same thing. Juliette seems to be the main translator these days, and she arrived with a big bag of books that contained her translations. I went home with a copy of Rod Smith's terrific Buber poem. I'm thinking about translating the French back into English to see what happens.

Rosmarie read first from Love, Like Pronouns and then from Blindsight. Wow, Rosmarie is incredible; her poems pop with just the right blend of abstract philosophy and tactile human reality. Whereas the images in Hocquard's work have been whittled down to the minimum, Rosmarie combines the philosophy and image together often in the same line. It was a great pleasure to spend the last several days (they arrived thursday night) with the three of them.

And so another season is over; season five is just around the corner; already I've got some folks lined up: Rae Armantrout, Charles Alexander, Will Alexander (probably), Evie Shockley (probably), Chris Salerno likely from the local crowd; mostly the plans are in the air, but damn they've got a knack for settling down well.

One thing I am happy to say is certain about next year: my good friend Chris Vitiello has joined me as the Co-director of the Desert City. Chris is a good friend and great poet. I'm looking forward to having his energy and ideas to help guide the Desert City into that latter half of the first decade of the 21st century.

Todd and Laura had us all over after the reading; Rodrigo Garcia Lopes, Chris V., and myself all read (and Rodrigo played some songs.) Food was drunk, wine was eaten, my parents told everyone stories about my potty training, and we all went home in a daze.

Lots of love to lots of people for a great year.

As CV's first duty as co-director, he took the introduction reins for Emmanuel & Rosmarie' below are his fine introductions:

This spring, Randall and I have been typing sentences.

That’s not typing like on a typewriter, but categorizing sentences into types, and then using those types as such, or reading the work of others with those types in mind, to see if an idiosyncratic or authorial logic will become evident.

I’m not sure where Randall is with his list of types, but I’ve seen long bulleted lists in his notebook. Myself, I’m a simple man, and I’ve settled into four sentence types that seem to have all other kinds of sentences subcategorized within one or more of them. I’ve been using this quartet as a blunt object on my writing. My types are:
• direct commands
• fact statements
• direct observations
• questions

I’m not sure that questions is actually a type, because you can write a sentence of one of the other three types as a question, but…

The consequence, for me at least, in this typing endeavor, is that my writing has become so artificial that it goes flat sometimes. I find it to be exactly what I set out to write, and really quite dull, at the same time.

Now, I am resolved and committed to artifice. I always want to be aware that language is a system of inherently arbitrary and meaningless signs linked metaphorically to signifieds, and that poetry is a tradition with sets of inherently arbitrary and meaningless conventions and assumptions. A critic once dismissed the work of John Baldessari with the comment “That’s not art; that’s just pointing at things.” Well, I point at things, and I point at the pointing. It’s what I do. And now I am able to write three, or perhaps four, kinds of sentences.

Now, Rosmarie Waldrop likewise points and meta-points, and her writing is overwhelmingly conceptually and aesthetically rich and vibrant. It’s an energy transfer. I sit down at the desk to read from The Reproduction of Profiles, and before I know it I’m outside the house, walking, with the book open in my hand, looking for trees to climb or something. How does she do it?

In her writing, the inextricable artifices of language and poetry are not assumed to be transparent. She is complicating the language at all turns, and in a way that not only reveals the language as a code, but reveals code itself as an artificial system. These prose poems in her trilogy The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, and Reluctant Gravities continuously open as you read them, and they meta-open as well.

Two sailors throwing dice on the quay will not make a monument, but there you sat reading a paper in its shadow. You said once we had a language in which everything was alright, everything would be alright, and your body looked beautiful while a fisherman tied his boat to a post, looping his rope through the rings without getting tangled in problems of representation or reflection. Nobody looked at you except for the water which, though it has no shape, is heavy with mirroring that of others. These images, however, are hard to get hold of, sunk as they are at the bottom of the alphabet.

You can read this as narrative prose, enjoying the interpersonal and romantic twists of the I and the you. You can also read it as an essay on, and an example of, problems of representation and reflection. Or you can admire the aesthetic and conceptual craft of the ornate shifts and transfers from one philosophical issue to another – several in every sentence. These poems are not so much accessible as imminently available, receivers rather than transmitters of ideology.

Hers are the kinds of books in which the word count of your marginalia would exceed her primary text. When you read Waldrop’s work, you de-condense her condensation, and this is how the energy transfer happens. And you can unpack these poems in many different ways, setting up very different residences in the poems in the process.

Only a person who contains multitudes can make these kinds of artifacts, and Waldrop indeed contains multitudes. I don’t know how many books she has written (I have more than 10 in my library) or how many she has translated (again, more than 10 such books in my house) or how many she has published (easily I have 30 Burning Deck books), but these numbers do not matter. Rosmarie Waldrop is someone who gives. She has devoted a life to readers, to those who read.

And tonight, she will read for us. Please welcome Rosmarie Waldrop.

In the opening of his 1947 essay “My Creative Method,” Francis Ponge writes about his disappointment in ideas:

Ideas as such seem to me what I am least fit for, and they interest me little. You may well reply that right now we are dealing with an idea (an opinion)… However, ideas, opinions, strike me as determined in each of us by something quite different from free will or judgment. I don’t know anything more subjective, more epiphenomenal…

On the other hand, objects, landscapes, events, individuals of the external world give me much pleasure. They win my trust. For the simple reason that they don’t need it. Their concrete presence and evidence, their density, their three dimensions, their palpable undeniable aspect, their existence – all this is my sole justification for existence, or more precisely, my pretext; and the variety of things is what constructs me.

At first this seems very similar to the William Carlos Williams “No ideas but in things” concept, but Ponge extends it. He establishes a category in the interstice between ideas and things that he calls “observations, or… experimental ideas” – he’s using the word experimental in a scientific rather than aesthetic sense here. It seems to Ponge that he can agree on certain established facts and definitions because these are both abstract and phenomenal, though he acknowledges that language gets in the way here:

Why is there this difference, this unthinkable margin between the definition of a word and the description of the thing designated by the word? Why is it that dictionary definitions seem to be so woefully lacking in concreteness, and descriptions (in novels or poems, for example) so incomplete (or else too specific and detailed), so arbitrary, so capricious? Couldn’t one imagine some kind of writing (brand new) which, placing itself more or less between the two (definition and description), would borrow from the former its infallibility, its indubitability, and its brevity; and from the latter, its respect for the sensory aspect of things…

Quite simply, Emmanuel Hocquard produces this “brand new” kind of writing, not by locating it between the poles of definition and description, but by commuting or vacillating between them at an ultrasyntactic speed that makes a connection. This is the eighth sonnet in A Test of Solitude:

Viviane, there has been the canale, and there is
the burnt stump.
Between the two, thirty paces, seventeen iron-
woods and eight seasons gone by.
What operation in mathematics or logic can
count at the same time in meters, trees and
years?
Should one even try?
Would somebody with sense go and add up
bread and feeling?
It’s like saying: I remember the islands.
Here, however, is an intention, tied to a film
project – the sequel of the voyage – a matter
of going from the canale to the burnt stump.

By writing in this brand new way, Hocquard extends Ponge’s extension of Williams, into an ethics.

This is a little reductive, but instead of taking Williams’ objectivist opposition of ideas and things, or Ponge’s phenomenologically framed poles of definition and description, Hocquard nests these oppositions into the operational area of interrogation, and posits the impossible area of negation all around it. Hocquard is not presenting a way to think, or even a way to write – he’s presenting a way to exist, even while acknowledging the fundamental lack of an explanation of, or purpose for, existence. Let’s face it, being alive is difficult (interrogation), but what’s the alternative (negation)?

Hocquard’s book Theory of Tables is his equivalent to Ponge’s essay “My Creative Method.” In its afterword, Hocquard describes his method for writing the book. In his travels he collected pebbles, beach glass, fallen bits of facades -- fragments of the external world – placing them in white envelopes upon which he noted the time and place of their collection. Later, he emptied the envelopes out, separately, onto tables, and contemplated them, writing his observations and interrogations. As he says, “I had become, in sum, the translator of pebbles.”

Here is the 34th sequence of the book:

A name becomes clear
A name is extinguished

You had a name for this

You don’t remember which anymore
you have lost this name
can this take its place?

This is not an image of this

If the reply is this
what is this? is a question with no object

A question has no object

Does this clarify this?

Please welcome Emmanuel Hocquard.

Rosmarie Waldrop, Emmanuel Hocquard, & Juliette Valéry, This Saturday, April 22nd, 8pm, Internationalist Books

2006-04-19T12:19:00.000-04:00

Who: Rosmarie Waldrop; author of Blindsight, The Lawn of the Excluded Middle, Reproduction of Profiles, Love Like Pronouns, and many others; translator of the work of Edmond Jabes, Paul Celan, and Emmanuel Hocquard; editor of Burning Deck Press; left a German circus at eleven to become one of the US's finest living poets.

Who: Emmanuel Hocquard; author of Theory of Tables (translated by Michael Palmer), Aereas in the Forests of Manhattan (translated by Lydia Davis), A Test of Solitude (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop), among others; director of Un Bureau sur l'Atlantique; invites US poets to weeks long retreats in French chateaus to translate poetry, eat, drink wine, and sleep.

Who: Juliette Valéry; author of Le bolide immobile an centre de l’écran and, with Emmanuel Hocquard, L’année du goujon and Les oranges de Saint-Michel; translator into French of American poets such as Cole Swensen, Norma Cole, Rosemarie Waldrop, Keith Waldrop, Jackson Mac Low, Robert Creeley, Juliana Spahr, Charles Bernstein, Michael Davidson, and Michael Palmer; teaches at the École Supérieure d’Art et Céramique.

What: Desert City Poetry Series, French and English, Bi-lingual, by George.

When: This Saturday, April 22nd, 8:00pm, 2006, the only one this year.

Where: Internationalist Books, 405 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC, Thrill on the Hill.

How much: $2 dollar donation is requested to support the readers and series.

Why: "From no point of the canale is it possible to see / the burnt stump. Not because of the hedge-row. / Because a word is missing." "Still, depth of field allows the mind to drift beyond its negative pole to sun catching on a maple leaf already red in August, already thinner, more translucent, preparing to strip off all that separates it from its smooth skeleton. Beautiful, flamboyant phrase that trails off without predicate, intending disappearance by approaching it, a toss in the air."

See you there.....

Thanks for a great 05/06 season!!!

Stay tuned for news of next seasons readings!

*Internationalist Books

*Rosmarie Waldrop

*Emmanuel Hocquard

*Juliette Valéry

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 and generous donations from anonymous individuals.

from Lawn of the Excluded Middle
by Rosmarie Waldrop

I put a ruler in my handbag, having heard men talk about their sex. Now we have correct measurements and a stickiness between collar and neck. It is one thing to insert yourself into a mirror, but quite another to get your image out again and have your errors pass for objectivity. Vitreous. As in humor. A change in perspective is caused by the clarity by the ciliary muscle, but need not be conciliatory. Still, the eye is a camera, room for everything that is to enter, like the cylinder called the satisfaction of hollow space. Only language grows such grass-green grass.

from A Test of Solitude
by Emmanuel Hocquard (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop)

XIV

This chronicle contains all the words that
stake out the route from the hut to the burnt
stump except one.
The one that is missing. What properties do
the stump and the canale have in common?
Memories: of the chalk pond traced in the
grass and of the ancient cedar uprooted by the
storm.
Italy: canale is an Italian word designating a
long rectangular pond, and the burning of the
stump is a technique brought from Rome.
Two properties in common is not enough.
At least one more is missing.
The missing word.

Ron's Review of Selah's Book

2006-03-29T18:07:00.000-05:00

A nice write up of Selah's book over at Ron's place here today. As I Lay Dying and Dodie Bellamy -- yup, sounds right.

Thanks, Ron!

Umm, let's see....some other good things:

Just saw that Jordan put one (? maybe it was the whole section?) of my poems (I think from the 2nd issue of Wherever We Put Our Hats (thanks, Jon, and congrats)) on his best of 2005 list, some of the Key Bridge stuff -- thanks, Jordan. The next issue of Typo is going to have some of it too and the next issue of Coconut -- thanks, Adam & Bruce. And some stuff from another manuscript is in the second issue of the tiny recently out (and it's a real hot issue) -- thanks, Gina & Gabrielle. And Zach put some in the most recent issue of Octopus -- kick ass in the Koos class, Zach! And there's some stuff from St. Apples, A Monologue for Voices & President Letters, and another manuscript over at the new (ish) Fascicle -- thanks Tony.

And and and hmmmm, well I'm happy.

Happy trails, cowpokes.

ps: part of the reason I haven't posted anything about the Rankine & Davis reading (which was great) is that my computer exploded the day before the reading. Threw me off a bit, but all's well, so I'll post a wrap-up pretty soon. Late....sorry.....

pps: speaking of Jon Leon, the former Wherever We Put Our Hats blog (and speaking of WWPOH) that blog has been one of the best blogs I've seen for going on a month or two now. I hope he keeps going -- it isn't archived, so you just have to check and maybe you'll get a nice little something and maybe you won't....