Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Tentative Guest Lineup for PRESS 2009-10

As Wheelhouse Magazine & Press puts its final touches on the PRESS 2008-9 Anthology, The Evergreen State College and Wheelhouse Magazine & Press, along with other generous donors, are gearing up for PRESS 2009-10 - details on events and schedule as they come. Here is the (very) preliminary list of guest poets who will read from & perform their work and contribute to program workshops next year (subject to change):

Eleni Stecopoulos, author of, most recently, Autoimmunology and Armies of Compassion

David Buuk, author of, most recently, The Shunt (see initial thoughts post below)

CA Conrad, author of, most recently, The Book of Frank and Deviant Propulsion

Erica Kaufman, author of, most recently, Censory Impulse, curator/publisher of Belladonna Books / The Belladonna Reading Series

Kythe Heller, author of, most recently, Immolation

New Titles from Ungovernable Press

Lars Palm of Ungovernable Press has been busy, as have been the poets whose new work Lars and Ungovernable recently published. Check out new work from Adam Fieled, Mark Young, Alana Madison, as well as a Diana Magallon / Jeff Crouch collaboration. Forthcoming from Ungovernable Press is fascinating poet Ed Baker, whose work spans forty years and myriad media. Another Baker chapbook, Points/Counterpoints has just been released by Fact-Simile Editions (available now), and yet another chapbook of his, Asherah, will be published by yours truly and Wheelhouse Magazine & Press - slated release late spring / early summer. Head over to Ungovernable Press and do check out the free e-versions - all downloadable booklets, and print friendly.

http://ungovernablepress.weebly.com/

Monday, June 8, 2009

David Buuck's The Shunt (Palm Press, 2009) - Initial Thoughts Post-Participle(ation)

Just read David Buuck's new The Shunt, another amazing title from Jane Sprague's Palm Press.

Briefly: The Shunt is, as Juliann Spahr notes, "...your brain on war." Imagine n a person in a town in a place with a computer and a television, each tuned to the what if scenario of some imaginary world's (why so familiar?...) distillation of mutilation into pixilated xanax facsimiles, a newsocracy of sound bite without bite, rehearsals of waste and excess and the shakes without waste and excess and the shakes but crash test dummy versions of waste and excess and the shakes. And then imagine that suis generis Spahr speaks of in relation to this work, and give it a name for now: between the cracks and the fissures and the muscle tares at a hundred frames per second there is a particular exhaustion born of sensitivity to all this artifice and mask covering up and recovering from the undertow, the real shit, the onslaught of constant slaughter of which we are, all, culpable. Call it a poetry of counterirony in the face of countercounterinsurgency. Though its tropes play off the image of the failing stand up comedian, as Sianne Ngai rightly notes, it is the aftermath of that comedian's waste, his/her post-stage embarrassments - the failiure of one's affective labor - that is our discomfort. With this imaginary world we are thankful is not real. Of an extraordinary book of post-traumatic recipes we are thankful for having not had to encounter. The Shunt, for instance.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Political Theater: Article on Conservatism, Neo-Liberalism, & the Corporatization of Academic Institutions

Article: Recent controversies over political theater at Evergreen, a comparatively "progressive" college campus, exemplify just how conservative academic institutions are.

http://cxpj.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/counter-point-journal-03.pdf