currently traveling on the N American side of the world. been to TX, NY, Canada, back to TX, then to AZ. all on family matters, some sad. coming back around now. hope y'all are doing fine. some readings coming up tonight or tomorrow.
CLARK COOLIDGE ● NORMA COLE ● GRAHAM FOUST ● TENNESSEE REED ● ERICA LEWIS ● ALEX ESPINOSA ● ANDREA LOPEZ
Sunday, April 5, 2009, 12-4PM Small Press Distribution 1341 7TH Street (at Gilman) Berkeley
► 20-50% OFF ALL BOOKS ► READINGS AT 2PM
Brand new books by Clark Coolidge, Norma Cole, and Tennessee Reed! Cheap Books, Free Readings, Free Snacks, and a Poetry Trading Post—It's the SPD Spring Open House!
I will say on 2: A little note of explanation/context:
While in the US over the December/January holidays, I was happy to find that 2 books had found their way to my tiny, mall-based, out-of-the way mailbox (out-of-the-way only because I cannot check it but a few times per year since I am living/working overseas), one of those generic places that gives you an address when you really have none. . . . I want to acknowledge and say thanks to those who sent them--many thank-yous, y'all!--since both books are true gems, to my mind (literally, then), and have received excellent variable sources of critical attention (shouldn't a work that is an outstanding work be able to withstand the perspectives of many rather than a narrow few????--or is that too democratic for our specialized crew de arts?).
Because these 2 are both provocative, lovely bits of unique and timely western sensibility, I packed them in my suitcases and brought them overseas with me to continue reading. So, by way of thanks, I list here the 2 books, as well as having found a couple of poems from them to highlight here in my occasional, in-the-moment reading from series * :
1. There is nothing like the experience of reading Katy Lederer's The Heaven-Sent Leaf (Peter Connors' BOA Editions, 2008) while living in what some might term a certain heartbeat of the global economy, the independent Persian Gulf state, Bahrain, a place of quixotic simultaneity, hard working folk and abundant kindnesses. In this book, each page of Lederer's poetry--every line, every word in its poetic context--is more vibrant for this particular readerly, situational context. At some point soon I will gladly say more about that--for now, though, suffice it to say how much this book hums along with startling epistemological awareness and depth--a totally admirable work of, literally and brutally: lyric economy/economical lyricism, the effects of monetary economy scouring, as reflected in lyric (as I recall the connection being a focus in one review--I think in The New Yorker). To be a "brainworker" in an economy that does not treasure intellectual work, but loves spectacular instances of the amassing of wealth by almost any means and at any cost--this dilemma affects us all, all the time, yet we have been dumbfounded by it, numbed, shelved into silence, until now--what these poems are equals a bright and shivery awakening: I am thinking akin of Dickinson's sense of truth as slanted, as integrating slowly but purposefully into light--that effect of immediacy in knowing/understanding not something new so much as something that was always already there, that effect of immediacy in knowing which we do not often find in life or in the experience of reading.
2. I am walking along the sea on a brazenly sunny winter day (temp is something like 75%F, reminds me of a summer day on Hart Prairie, San Francisco Peaks, near Flagstaff AZ but for the sea, which is so quiescent(acquiescient?) here it is like a cliche of consciousness, a bit of everything and nothing at once) . . . I am walking while reading Jared Schickling's submissions (Geoffrey Gatza's BlazeVOX Books, 2008), and as such, am entranced by the clash of similarities between walking-reality and the reading's musicality, its life-presence. One thing (of many) not found here (here, as in locale: Bahrain sea coast) is the humble yet prolific and oh-so-musical cicada (humbly having grid-points--vectors of use to the ear--of both rhythm and tone & scale and melody)--oh so Socratic cicada for y'all: recall the role the insect plays in Plato's Phaedrus (another thing of use to the lyric memes, Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash, and everyone, ever: long wailing whistles of trains coming towards and then receding point by point: leaving, going. away.). The act of reading this book while here in this place is a completely new experience in life, curiosity about life, finding what is comparatively here and not here, there and not there (many thank-yous, Gertrude [Stein]). What a blast of contrast!! This lush description, and energy dancing linguistically, mindfully, again, against the quiescent backdrop of sea and this gulf region's urbanity.
my true xo's to the senders of such life's work books!
* I will continue the reading from series. And without much explanation, since for now I find poor exposition a lacking form/response. Tiresome, quarrelsome (some-some!). Loaded with overly-assumptive waywardness, alas--Montaigne: find us!!. What I want is the immediacy of descriptive presence. I'm not finding much of that in poetry lately or in the traditional ways and sources of interpretation, however (admittedly) trained I might be in and for that. Interpretive modes feel terribly flawed to me right now, as if an over-kill of the flux and facts of presence, even though we can never totally escape interpretive modes.
reading from Jared Schickling's (BlazeVOX [books]) edition of Submissions (2008) :
( )
"when the cat's away"
meeting in winter of some other's den, perhaps hoops remaining all equal on a grant drawn from the corners of the rock to notice that be me privilege students like this means this so like this time me old grand dad spun us into entropy's collapsing disorder the cat's away before at the corner lonesome talk with the original fan of that old folk singer
reading from The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (Trans. F. Max-Muller, rev. by Suren Navlakha. London: Bibliophile Books, 2000)
1. The pupil asked: "Sent forth by whom, impelled by whom does the mind proceed on its errand? At whose command does the first breath go forth? At whose wish do we utter this speech? What power directs the the eye, the ear?"
2. The teacher replied: "It is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of speech, the breath of the breath, and the eye of the eye. Detached [from the senses] the wise, on departing from this world, become immortal.
3. "The eye does not go thither, nor speech, nor mind. We do not know it, we do not understand it, how anyone can teach it.
4. "It is other than the known; it is also above the unknown. Thus we have heard from those of old who have taught us this.
5. "That which is not expressed by speech, but that by which speech is expressed, that alone know as brahman, not that which people here adore.
6. "That which does not think by mind, but that by which, they say, the mind thinks, that alone know as brahman, not that which people here adore.
7. "That which does not see by the eye, but that by which the eyes see, that alone know as brahman, not that which people here adore.
8. "That which does not hear by the ear, but that by which the ear hears, that alone know as brahman, not that which people here adore.
9. "That which does not breathe by life, but that by which life breathes, that alone know as brahman, not that which people here adore."
(19)
*
1. Two birds of the same kind and inseparable as friends, cling to the same tree. One of them eats the sweet fruit, the other looks on without eating.
2. On the same tree sits a man, immersed in sorrows, and grieving for his own impotence. But when he sees another lord contented and realizes his glory, then his grief melts away.
3. When the seer sees the brilliant maker and master [of the world] as the person who has his source in brahman, then he is wise, and shaking off good and bad, he reaches the highest oneness, free from passions;
4. For he is the breath shining forth in all beings; he who understands this becomes truly wise, not a babbler any more. He revels in the self, he delights in the self, and having performed his works [truthfulness, austerity, meditation, etc.] he rests, firmly established in brahman, the best of those who know brahman.
5. By truthfulness, indeed, by austerity, right knowledge and abstinence must that self in the body be gained; the self which spotless anchorites gain is pure, and like a light within the body.
6. The true prevails, not the untrue; by the true that path is laid out, the way of the divines, on which the old sages, satisfied in their desires, proceed to where there is that highest place of the true one.
7. That [true brahman] shines forth grand, divine, inconceivable, smaller than small; it is far beyond what is far and yet so near here, it is hidden in the cave [of the heart] in those who can see it even here.
8. He is not apprehended by the eye, or by speech, nor by the other senses, not by penance or good works. When a man's nature has become purified by the serene light of knowledge, then he sees him, meditating on him as without parts.
*****9. That subtle self is to be known by thought in bodies where breath has entered fivefold, for every thought of men is interwoven with the senses, and when thought is purified, then the self arises. ******
10. Whatever world a man purified of nature envisages in his mind, and whatever desires he cherishes [for himself or for others], that world he conquers and those desires he obtains. Therefore let everyone who desires happiness revere the man who knows the self.
reading from Farid Martuk's Is It The King? (effing press, 2006) * :
Of Mule and Deer
Out of a tin-cold, murmuring black wood Lightly you lope, pale deer, lifting A story from pages of snow
Nothing turns in your eye they say
Toward the tin-cold and murmuring black wood I bear a display case of blue light Say it was the sky
Say all you want it was the sky
(7)
* What a wonderful book, Farid! I was out of the US when it came out (am still out of the US), so unfortunately missed the moment, but then fortunately happened on a copy at the Dallas Museum of Art while visiting with dottir Heather last August. So very pleased to have this book, these kalaidescopic poems! I miss y'all--hello and happy wishes to all my friends in Dallas and Austin!
Making a note of it here to say it is explaining a significant point about what turns out lately to be an influential bunch of ideas from an author-centered critic: that Woods' criticism, while attractive because creatively generous (poetic, even playful?)--remarkably creative/aesthetic in its own right--is, at the end of the day, extremely narrow in ways that offer an authoritative disservice culturally, literarily, to the texts, the authors, the audience, and especially, as I read it, the trans-literary-cultural-historical milieu. Seems we might have done better than this by now?--alas. Give me Eagleton's keenness and modifying displacements any day, y'all.
Disturbed earth: some plants sprout quickly in it. Sow thistles come to mind. After you've wrenched them out they'll snake back underground and thrust their fleshy prickled snouts in where you intended hostas.
Hawkweed will do that. Purslane. Purple vetch. Marginals, hugging ditches, flagrant with seed, strewing their paupers' bouquets.
Why is it you reject them, them and their tangled harmonies and raffish madrigals? Because they thwart your will.
I feel the same about them: I hack and dig, I stomp their pods and stems, I slash and crush them. Still, suppose I make a comeback -- a transmutation, say -- once I've been spaded under? Some quirky growth or ambush?
Don't search the perennial border: look for me in disturbed earth.
(120)
* Margaret Atwood, The Door (Virago Press: London, 2007)
. . . How do conflicting views on the value of different kinds of artworks jell into a rough and shifting consensus about the boundaries of what will be considered art in the first place? . . .
Anyway, re: the post below on "Issue 1"--and btw, have I said I'm a detail person?? (*smiles*) reminds me of something from a few years ago.
I think it was March of 2005, a moment of reading/watching a BBC production of Waiting for Godot on DVD while blogging from Dottir Heather's hang-out in downtown Dallas TX. My favorite part of Waiting for Godot is Lucky's hat-tipping oration (see hat list on sidebar & call it also a rant, perhaps, but Beckett calls it a "tirade" in the stage notes) on what's wrong with 'mankind' in pursuit of existential ultimate understandings:
reading from Samuel Beckett * :
LUCKY:
Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labors left unfinished crowned by the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry of Essy-in-Possy of Testew and Cunard it is established beyond all doubt all other doubt than that which clings to the labors of men that as a result of the labors unfinished of Testew and Cunnard it is established as hereinafter but not so fast for reasons unknown that as a result of the public works of Puncher and Wattmann it is established beyond all doubt that in view of the labors of Fartov and Belcher left unfinished for reasons unknown of Testew and Cunard left unfinished it is established what many deny that man in Possy of Testew and Cunard that man in Essy that man in short that man in brief in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation wastes and pines wastes and pines and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the strides of physical culture the practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating riding gliding conating camogie skating tennis of all kinds dying flying sports of all sorts autumn summer winter winter tennis of all kinds hockey of all sorts penicillin and succedanea in a word I resume flying gliding golf over nine and eighteen holes tennis of all sorts in a word for reasons unknown in Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham namely concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown but time will tell fades away I resume Fulham Clapham in a word the dead loss per head since the death of Bishop Berkeley being to the tune of one inch four ounce per head approximately by and large more or less to the nearest decimal good measure round figures stark naked in the stockinged feet in Connemara in a word for reasons unknown no matter what matter the facts are there and considering what is more much more grave that in the light of the labors lost of Steinweg and Peterman it appears what is more much more grave that in the light the light the light of the labors lost of Steinweg and Peterman that in the plains in the mountains by the seas by the rivers running water running fire the air is the same and then the earth namely the air and then the earth in the great cold the great dark the air and the earth abode of stones in the great cold alas alas in the year of their Lord six hundred and something the air the earth the sea the earth abode of stones in the great deeps the great cold on sea on land and in the air I resume for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis the facts are there but time will tell I resume alas alas on on in short in fine on on abode of stones who can doubt it I resume but not so fast I resume the skull fading fading fading and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis on on the beard the flames the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the skull alas the stones Cunard (mêlée, final vociferations) . . . tennis . . . the stones . . . so calm . . . Cunard . . . unfinished . . .
* Beckett, Waiting for Godot, as translated from the French original by the author.
Wow. I've not been online lately, and so regrettably missed a lot of good stuff on the bloggysphere. Tonight I spent a while moseying around to favorite sites, and checking my links (many are out of date, sad to say, but I will soon update them when I return to the US). It sort of felt like the first time I found the online community of poetry blogs and made one of my own (this one!) in early 2003! What a fascination all this makes!
Adding to the good stuff found (invariably good stuff abounds), I happened on one controversy, specifically, the ForGodot's "Issue 1" of poetry, a parodic instigation (which now, 6 weeks after the fact is news only to me at this point, since it happened in early October ! and everyone is surely tired of mulling it over by now).
It's a parody (as distinguished from a hoax, according to one of its makers, Jim Carpenter), meant to do or instigate thought/writing of who-knows-what--I'd speculate more on that (the outcome might have been easily predictable given the delightful contentiousness of the social group) but it's hardly worth it at this point since as it concerns me it's done)-- but the overall effect is certainly strong so I thought that bears a few more questionings, even if in retrospect, given that almost every poet involved is/was passionately critical, even angry over it (hmm, the parody seems to have missed its mark, thus it cannot be parody).
Or everyone seems to have a strong response, and rightly so. I'm allowing some reserve of judgement, however, for the apparent, essential, contradiction it demonstrates, which is between authorship and language-problematics of same: the parodic examples of writings are tagged to a list of writers mostly from the so-called experimentalist (innovational) movement in poetics. This movement, a lively surge in contemporary poetics, in general seems to embrace aesthetically a decentering, a distancing from, the uniquely identified, expressionism of the author, in favor of innovations of media, collaboration, and technologically enhanced language-experiments (or that's one way of understanding one part of its complexity). It's far more complicated than that, but just for the sake of trying to see what is happening with the phenomenon of this parody, I'm letting that assumption be the groundwork of my thinking at moment.
A poem, that is, is no longer and not only the poem the singly identified author thought it was or wanted to make. In fact, this group is toying continually with that dynamic, letting the poem be "other" as distinct from the highly controlled and curatorial work full of conscious intention. That toying is a good thing, I think, since it recognizes that language meaning and use are flexible matters worthy of innovation. The poem is the thing (not the author) that a de-ossified understanding of *language* wanted to make, to do, to be. But that toying is also a radical displacement of the ideology of the writer/poet per the ideas of ownership and poetic constructs. And today, who can afford not to buy into the idea of authorial ownership? That is a large leap for authors to make.
Nonetheless, poems and processes of writing can be much more fun without the baggage of uniquely identified ownership by an authorial name; poems are thus less a version of extended ego, more a shared banquet of variables, as it were (imho). Mind you, this, too, is a controversial interpretation (all interpretations are matters of contention, dialogue, ongoing: an always-as-yet-to-be-determined matter--in effect, to be questioned.
And this surge of innovative poetics is underscored by decades, even more than a century, of combined theoretical philosophizing and opinionated interpretation about the uses and artful potential of language-based, artful, rhetorical dynamics. That is, the change from author-reliant epistemology to innovations on language-based epistemology has happened over time and affects many media--for example, even visual representations fall more than ever (yet always questionably), interpretively, under this paradigm of historic precedent and more open textuality: multi-formed linguistic interactions. But what to do with individually marked uniqueness?--what to do with talented propensity in the individual?
The event of so-called "Issue 1" seems to me, although easily explained as fitting a current episteme (see above), a mostly not-well-thought-out parodic prank because the poems, thus, are simply "bullshit," (as one clear-eyed critic) put it, rather than having a connection to any admirable (talented) human relation or series of relations (semiotics with a worthwhile human-community factor, if you will).
Then, come to find out (if you explore the website/blog of Forgodot), "Issue 1" was generated by a playful language bot named Erika, housed at UPenn. So, okay, that all sounded like the end of explanations, at least to me (not having had time or energy for discourse with the principle parties involved, although I did take time to note the poem set to my name: it was certainly an intriguing bit of bullshit I could toyed with more fully, and better :-)
But I go on at length here to point out something else I had not heard in the rest of the talk about this. In letting my curiosity go randomly wandering on this, I found a nettling little contradiction. It sort of unnerved me even more than the event itself.
Something usually considered a distinctly human mistake, even a trademark of being human: in the text of "Issue 1" there is at least one spelling error (if the Poetics listserv has aleady discussed this nettling error, then forgive me this little essai, as it were)
Finding that, and thinking about the phenomenon of text being machine generated--well it cracked me up! because machines dealing with language variations do not misspell--or if they do, it's because the human doing the programming of the machine had a lapse of idiot-function: someone forgot to proofread, someone forgot to consult the spellchecker, someone *Forgodoted* the effing dictionary! Forgodot forgot the dictionary?--that is too awesome for me. The tiny fact of this misspelling seems irresistible in terms of essential questioning of this phenomenon:
It raises the question of language as autonomous (language is its own toy) yet only in relation to the human (for the uniqueness of an author to toy with) and the human community (since dictionary definitions are only as good as the community agreed they have authority). Then there is also the fun question of the wizard behind the machine, the question of human intervention. Who is that power behind the curtain of OZ?? The spelling anomaly (the misspelling) raises the tiny question necessary to break out of the gridlock of opposition between author as authority or language as authority. It means that meaning can inhere regardless of writer, reader, or situational context, that I can understand what the misspelled word meant whether or not it is spelled correctly is beside the point: The point it that there is a system of correct spelling and any anomaly in this context suggests human error, not machine error. So, what is this text, then?--human or machine parody???? And in the context, who gets to decide?
So, curiouser and curiouser (a la Lewis Carroll's Alice with the cheshire cat), eh?
Stay tuned for more mysterious spelling errors found, heeded, and heaped with discussion by yours truly, your uniquely formed author in context!
reading from The Literature of Modern Arabia: An Anthology, work written by Muhammad Jabr al-Harbi and translated into English by Lena Jayyusi (first translator) and Diana Der Hovanessian * :
Drinking from Her Eyes
Before I was born, before the horse neighed, before the dove called, cooing, before the rainbow was painted, before the rainbow answered the colors of the essential poem, before the northward and southward migration of birds, before the birth of the alphabet, before I could stand on two feet, you came . . . With the sun you came to stand before me and I never doubted what it was that makes music for the dance, nor what answered my blood nor what said no to my tribe. Woman of wheat, color of wheat, your eyes touch me like fingers.
I crossed road after road where your name fell across my forehead like a shadow. I stopped, whispered, ran, cried I love you. Love's heat is warmer than the tremor from open windows. Love's heat is warmer than this epoch shaking the gate of the village.
As if just wakened I reach to touch your hands. And you are there standing at the portals of my eyes fixed into the alphabet. Your colour is my colour. Your hand, my hand, you are my journey and the movement of time. Why, how, who are those people who claim kin and surround you? They are immobile, but you come, forward, approaching like a poem.
I knew you. We were young. How did you discard your old shoes? How did you make women jealous? How did you make them angry, make them nurture resentment like children? Are you an adolescent? A nun? And will perfume from Paris define The passion that fills the air I inhabit when your voice reaches me? I talk to myself because talking to you never reaches, even though my voice stretches toward you and I escape toward you and I escape through you, from you, to you. You choose the steps, the distance, the size of the caravans, the dress; the colours of the rainbow which you wear remind me of disobedience. And I repent. I paint a palace without windows, a house, fenced in with double walls. I dream I am the flight of a wing, the light beam refracting light from the threshing floor.
Child, desired to the point of tears, embraced by the eyes of men and whispering girls, I crossed the roads and my heart fell in shards where again for the second time I found the image of my mother and the accents of my father's voice -- you for the second time, for you were with me before I was born. You stood with the sun and I never doubted which of you would be the essence of the poem.
(107-109)
* The anthology is edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, and first published by Kegan Paul International (of London and New York), later Routledge, Chapman & Hall, in association with King Saud University, Riyadh, S.A., 1988, copyright King Saud University.
reading from Slavoj Zizek * quoting Antonia Fraser's "Head of the [eighteenth century French] Revolution" (The Times 22 April 2006, Books section, p.9) :
Robespierre was personally honest and sincere, but "the bloodlettings brought about by this 'sincere' man surely warn us that belief in your own righteousness to the exclusion of all else can be as dangerous as the more cynical motivation of a deliberate tyrant."
* Slavoj Zizek, Robespierre or the "Divine Violence" . . . (lacan. com/zizrobes)
[Originally I had written "Mission Accomplished," here, but then yesterday I saw where the lame duck was saying it about the last eight years--whoa, doggies!!--definitely not my cuppa, if ya know what I mean :-]
So, Yeah!!! Hands down, all folks I've spoken with here are *ecstatic, jubilant, even cartwheeling* about the election outcome.
The Blind Chatelaine's Keys, by Eileen Tabios (BlazeVOX[books], 2008) 194 pp.
Intriguing 'conceptual art'--Many Thanks to you, Eileen!!
o~o/
cm
* About mailing printed material to me abroad, I feel I should convey some caution: mail is not usually reliable and materials are censored--several excellent projects sent to me at my address abroad *did not make it* and I received no local notice about it (only found out when the sender contacted me to ask if I'd gotten it). Fortunately, the book above made it through.
Please know I am most (happy!!) for and grateful to all who think to send me work. If you happen to be thinking of sending something, please do not send it to me abroad. Instead, send to my stateside address (email me for it, at: cmurray88 AT live DOT com), which is an address my family monitors until I return each December and June/July. Thanks, and Cheers, Y'all!!
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