Rachel Zolf PRESS Report Now on PRESS BLOG, Tangent Reading

This is really an IOU for a fuller report on 2 back-to-back events: Rachel Zolf reading at Evergreen for PRESS on October 15, and my reading with Rachel and Portland poet B.T. Shaw for Tangent in Portland the following evening. 

An IOU, as, due to the sudden death of my mother, I was unable to attend the reading we'd set up for Rachel in Olympia. Elizabeth and I were in Detroit. So THAT particular reading's report will be written out in full on our PRESS blog, along with the audio file of the reading and discussion. I know several were interested in our books that evening, so due to our not having them as promised, feel free to go to SPD and support our small presses by getting your hands on either Occultations, Neighbour Procedure, or both. For now, there's a brief summary of the feedback we got so far up at the PRESS blog.

--------------------TANGENT REPORT-----------------

One day after Zolf's PRESS reading/discussion, we headed down to Portland to give a reading for the Tangent Reading Series, co-curated by Kaia Sand, Jules Boykoff, and Rodney Koeneke. Joining us was Portland poet and The Oregonian editor B.T Shaw. I debated whether to participate in the reading given how terribly out of it I am, but we decided it'd be good for me, a respite of sorts, to go ahead with it, spend some time with some of the most beautiful souls we know. Kaia, Jules, Rodney, and all who came out, including David Abel, Maryrose Larkin, and other Spare Room Collective folks, Allison Cobb, Jen Coleman, Lionel Lints--the close-knit Portland poetry scene, basically--were so kind and generous. 

Having difficulty knowing whether my reading went well or not, things a strange blur at moment, but I did manage to wrangle fantastic poet James Yeary into doing an interactive piece of it, a distraction zone staging in which he's given earphones and a recording of me reading a re-mix of the Bybee torture memorandum, listens and writes what comes to him, while Elizabeth and I are reading the polyvocal section of Occultations that makes use of this document. James is asked to stop writing when the recording ends, stand, and interrupt our reading with his own. He was an excellent sport about it and did some excellent spot writing. When I ask participants to write in similar fashion, i.e., via distraction and in concert with live reading, the work that results then, by author's choice, either becomes part of the ongoing series / cycle "Your Nerve Center Taxonomy" - or it doesn't. James graciously said that I could do whatever I wanted with his writing, which means I get to share it with you here, and later in print form. Note that he was writing this in real-time while having to listen to not two, but three audio inputs. Not that I think the results are bad writing, not at all. But figured I should let you know that James' work is often quite different, often quite precise and sparser. Anyway, here's what he came up with and read aloud last night:

give as an inattention  Scotland
the inatten wash sweet dash
harom figures individual why keekee
inatten service to shock stereo
complicit stereo varies flame the
subject as a form of down the muscle
is indecent our form as a down
inatten using four distortions
two stresses on the plinth debt
debt throu excerpted inactivity
pharmacalogical debt cooperative
repeat space as a pronounced form
an distress an you would like to
less cooperate predisposed to debt plinth
which is a proximate of sewn [seven]

[-dance] 

So, many thanks to James for this. I felt good and cared for all night, got to laugh a bit and, of course, to hear Rachel and Shaw's amazing readings. Rachel's work I know well of course, having heard her read in New York years ago, that reading in fact one of those that helped decide for me to seriously write (by "seriously" I mean semi-consistently).  So, I got what I wanted: to hear her read again, as though Neighbour Procedure is perhaps my favorite book out this year (one of a handful anyhow), it's a different experience hearing her perform the work. Zolf read "Acknowledgment," which I would have requested had she closed out without it. Was just a real kick in the ass hearing the work. And B.T. Shaw's work, which I didn't know very well, having only read individual poems in journals, really drew itself into a complicated conversation with Zolf's work, with Occultations too--each new work responding in some way to the paradoxes and contradictions of art and the "docile body" taken up, used, spent, and otherwise weaponized by neo-liberalism/militarism. Shaw's manuscript in progress, investigating a military officer's murder of his wife, base life, military culture, all of it woven both lyrically and via the found, appropriated, and remixed, the performativity hence situating itself as related to the performativity of Occultations and Neighbour Procedure. For me a really happy discovery of a work! (Not to mention a lovely human being.)

Most importantly for me it was a night that allowed me to feel "in my body" for a moment, and so I thank Jules, Kaia, Rodney, B.T., Rachel,  those who came out, and the Open Space Cafe, for a truly necessary (for me) evening. As does Elizabeth who'd been nearly single-handedly taking care of me for the past few days.

Rob Halpern's Review of Occultations / PhillySound Feature

I'm really so touched by CA Conrad's attention to Occultations, by how hard he worked in concert with Rob Halpern, Brenda Iijima, J. Townsend, Thom Donovan, and Jules Boykoff, to put together the interview, the featured poetry, and, of course, the community commentary. All the mini-reviews were touching, deeply so, each so insightful if a little too kind. I do want to draw your attention to Rob's review for a very specific reason: in the midst of a move (tenure track job!) to Michigan, Rob wrote a really in-depth piece, one that were he interested in credit, could have been published in a journal someplace, so thorough and investigatory it is. I want to thank him for this. He emailed me a pdf of it a couple days before it came out, and of course I didn't get back to him in any timely way whatsoever (my M.O for emailing). So I don't think Rob's piece gets the props it deserves for sheer amount of time he took to ponder the work, write it. Rob doesn't do things half-assed, which I admire. His compulsions end up making others happy.  I hope Conrad doesn't mind, but here's Rob's review, which were it a review in the sense of "hey read this great book," I wouldn't post here. But as per Rob's work overall, the review is rather an essay thinking through issues both of us, and I take many of you, are interested in. Many thanks to all for the feature! That I post Rob's writeup here is no reflection on how good/touching each of the pieces are. 


Link to the entire feature is on the right side of the blog here, under Book Info & Reviews. 

Re-Printed from PhillySound , Feature by CA Conrad

ROB HALPERN
Militant Bodies, Common Bodies : Some Notes on David Wolach's Poetry

It was David’s affect that attracted me first — open, vulnerable, patient, disarming — all the qualities a queer boy like myself longs for in other guys, whether there’s some amorous prospect to be realized or not. This was several years ago, but the impression remains fresh. David and I introduced ourselves to one another in a dining commons at Bard College. We both had summer gigs teaching in the Language and Thinking program, a scene of deep collaboration around poetry and pedagogy, which would become the setting for our new friendship.

There is a critical militancy that complements David’s affect — permeates it — augmenting, rather than contradicting, all his qualities that move me. Within a few minutes of our meeting, we got to talking about student activism at the Evergreen State College, where I had spent some time as an undergraduate, and where David currently teaches. We found common ground discussing campus politics — always a distorted mirror of larger social forces — and how our various political engagements, both there and elsewhere, changed our lives.

David’s militancy moves from the union to the classroom, from the clinic to the street, through institutional zones and practices where our collective well-being — the commons — is always being stimulated and suppressed, aroused and seized.

I don’t use the term “militant” casually or commonly, but I like the idea of linking it to the commons. Against the grain of dominant “common sense” — grotesque ideology — militating and communing are not at odds. The militant body may even be consonant with the common body, at home in it — the body as commons? Habeas corpus — to have the body — becomes our common ground, if only because of the hostile social processes that disable, subject, constrain, and debase all our bodies commonly. And yet the body also potentiates a resource in excess of anything we can currently name.

In his introduction to the recently translated Genocide in the Neighborhood, a work that emerged from Argentine activist groups responding to the situation of the disappeared, Brian Whitener notes “ ‘militant’ doesn’t mean military […] militant signifies a stronger commitment to politicized collectivity”, and this may get at the sum of David’s practices, pedagogically and poetically. Whether in a classroom or a waiting room, a poem or a chant, a community of friends or a union of laborers, David’s writing and person activate this commitment to collective engagement, while militating for an enlarged politics.

At a recent Nonsite Collective event where David facilitated a discussion on “The Commons and the Body”, I quickly cribbed a few notes to help me introduce his poetry to the group. I wrote: “In David’s writing, the body becomes an occlusion in common sense.” The phrase came unexpectedly. What was I getting at?: the body as resistant to any regime of knowledge — be it medical or military — that would make of it a ward.

The body manifests in David’s poems not as an object, but as a situation where too many social processes, institutions, and apparatuses converge — medical, military, labor, financial, environmental — in often hostile ways, despite whatever benign appearance. David’s body is a body in revolt from the object status to which these apparatuses subject it, and his poetry is nothing if not an agitator in the interest of this revolt.

This is “the body-as-a-hole” (Occultations 77). This is the body struggling to affect a radical displacement in orders of common sense that determine what can and can’t be seen and said. This is the body as supplement and void — in excess of what counts and thus not legitimately here — challenging everything that serves to enforce orders of state. This is the body as nonsite of the commons, the commons being what is not here, the only thing we can share in truth, a set of social relations we’ve failed to actualize, a blank of pure potential, where we’re always dying, and always becoming. This is the body as an assemblage of intensities linked to multiple scenes of power that contain all our utopian and dystopian possibilities: all the vicissitudes of care and harm. This is the body as the critical situation of our undoing: the body as a commons in the way failure is a possibility we don’t know what to do with.

Tortured body. War torn body. Environmentally ill body. Ecstatic body. Immolated body. “What work this dying is,” he writes. David’s poems consistently make the occulted links between various scenes of the body’s expropriation perceptible. And while the poems affirm not knowing what a body can do, they nonetheless register what the body can’t do insofar as its flows have been obstructed, expropriated, owned, and forced to persist in irresolvable conflict with militarized production, environmental degradation, and geopolitical debasement.

David’s writing portends the body as a kind of “dissipative structure” — (according to chaos theory, a form of organization that resists its own conditions of dissipating energy and eroding resource) — a body at once vulnerable and resistant to every form of social erosion, a vulnerability and a resistance commensurate with the struggle to organize under conditions where the commons and the body alike go on sliding entropically toward exhausted resource.

Organize what?: a community, a union, a classroom, a collective, a poem: “organization” being a dynamic movement between all these organs. Prosody as organized pulse.

In David’s poems, the body-in-pain — chronic pain, constant reminder of mortality — is lived like a third world niche market — frontier of development — where the only lexicons available for speaking or singing of first world illness collide with the perverse semantics of the so-called “developing world”: the body as casualty — what can’t develop any more — sung in “the language of paper / cheap and easy,” when all you can do from here is “hold yr breath & pray / for the lynched.”

Under these conditions of ongoing war and environmental disaster, what has been occulted — nonsite: withdrawn from view — is as much the war-torn body, or the flood victim body, or the fallen militant body, as the memoranda that make these bodies possible, all of which are inseparable from the sick body here,wherever we might call home. 

David’s writing proposes to resurrect the failed body as potential and resource. And in this sense, too, his work proposes a perverse model of our occluded commons — body-as-a-hole — the body that fails to count within dominant regimes of visibility. This is the body as “collateral damage”, and it shares what can’t be shared with the militant body fallen in the streets of Gaza, and with the transgendered body violated here on Mission Street.

Just as the commons may be thought of as a nonsite whose history is the story of its own expropriation, this body is a disappearing act: negative ontology of our only common resource. This is the commons as the blank in history — history of the future that haunts us now — and David’s poems propose “degraded lyric as convergence of [these] aporias / The strange tremor of unusual poverties / Of not knowing what will come of this” (Occultations 117). The militant body — the body as secret agent of our commons — hangs on that not, the withdrawn secret of a counter-capacity waiting to be activated, waiting to surge.

This may be our occultation: the militant body as site of common refusal, zone of uncharted futures. This is also the body whose patiency suspends all property relations, to one another and to our life processes — “giving oneself over as shared resource” “given over to community” (David’s notes) — rendering the corpus open, disarming, and vulnerable to forms of unanticipated care, while resisting any form of knowledge that would further subject it.

Here is the abundance of the patient body — “a capacity without limit” — whose unruly excess persists in revolt against a grammar of proper agents and objects, a system that disables, limits, constrains.

David’s writing is the militant affirmation of this patiency.

Prefab Eulogies Available Now

My book of improvisational poems/inter-poetic conversations, Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses, is now available for purchase. These are some of my earliest poems, some written as early as between 2003-4, with yet several others written as late as this winter. 

You can go here, to the BlazeVox website and order directly, or you can order the book thru Amazon or SPD, both of which are linked on the BlazeVox Prefab Eulogies web page.  

Also on that page you can listen to a live recording of some of "Nothings Houses," a polyvocal work for multiple media (live voice, tape, typewriter, yellow stickies, and large film screen). A short excerpt of this multimedia work is in the new book as transliterated material.  Check out the recording here. 

Other more dubious poems, telephone calls, ritualistic behaviors transcribed, songs sent to senators/congress-people, drawings of the inside of various body parts, and some essay, follows.

This is a transitional book in many ways--though coming out now, much of it is earlier than the poetry I've published in more recent chapbooks.  Hence, the book reflects (if anything) a transition from installation and performing arts into the questions of contemporary poetry, with which I'd been engaged for those years, but which I'd only written about--until falling ill, which really meant, for me, being unable to move in ways that I'd been used to in performance and in daily life.  Of course I'm still undergoing that transformation, so this is no huge proclamation on my part, but something I've been reflecting on since last week when I got the proof in the mail.

Anyway, enjoy.

A huge thank you to poet & editor of BlazeVox [books] Goeffrey Gatza, as well as to Linh Dinh, Amy King, Jules Boykoff, Catherine Taylor, and everyone else who either edited, commented on, or otherwise helped get Prefab Eulogies out the door.  

And please help spread the word that Prefab Eulogies is now out!

Thanks,

Solidaridad,

David

New Titles/Works

Simone White, House Envy of All the World (Factory School)

ON: A Journal of Contemporary Practice, a truly outstanding collaboration between Michael Cross, Thom Donovan, and Kyle Schlesinger, has just released ON 2.  I'm just tonight ordering a couple copies, so I have yet to see the whole thing.  But ON, for me, is one of the most exciting critical journals.  It features contemporary artists writing on/with/for their contemporaries, involves what Thom Donovan has referred to elsewhere as "loving" criticism, and I can say this at least: what I've read is indeed loving--not lathering--and very, very good.  I'm especially taken by C.J. Martin's critical look at the work of Rob Halpern, an essay that pivots around Rob's new Disaster Suites (Palm Press).  So, from just the small sample I've read, I'm extremely glad to have an opportunity to purchase--for such small dough--a handmade/letterpress journal (beautifully designed by two world class book artists) that's so thick with ideas, playfulness, and studied tho loving critique.  Get it here.

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Wonderful poet and damn important left political economist Jules Boykoff has an article in The Guardian.  Why Protest the Olympics?  Read here.

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Allison Cobb and Simone White have respectively released books this week, both from the (overall) awesome Factory School Heretical Text series (Boykoff, e.g., is in this year's catalogue).  Order both from SPD here.  White's book, House Envy of All the World, is her first. For those of you not in New York or on the East Coast, get to know White's work.  It's some of my new favorite poetry, and so I'm off to get this work asap.  Plus White makes a mean espresso.  Very happy for White, but more for us, as rarely have we had the chance to read White's work unless hearing it live, and yet despite the purposeful go-at-my-own paceness, there's been a great deal of buzz around White's work for some time.  

Here's a blurb on Cobb's new book, Green-Wood:

In Green-Wood, Allison Cobb wanders Brooklyn’s famous nineteenth century Green-Wood Cemetery and discovers that its 500 acres--hills and ponds, trees and graves--mirror the American landscape: a place marked by death but still pulsing with life. Through the lens of Green-Wood, the book explores the history of the American landscape, changing attitudes toward the land, and the impacts of private property, industrial poisons, and war. This is history and poetry, a testament to what survives and an elegy for what is lost--the long dead, the landscape itself, but especially those who died in the twin towers and in the United States’ ongoing wars.

Cobb is a transplant like me, having moved out here from NYC before I did, now in Portland. Been great learning the land from her, figuring out what's where. Quickly she's become a central figure in organizing and curating out here.  Congrats to both lovely human beings.  

PRESS 2009-10: Chris Mann this Evening/ Kaia Sand & Jules Boykoff last Thursday

As I get ready to meet up with Chris Mann, then hear him perform for our second PRESS event of the winter, I'm thinking about how amazing Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff were last week, and how grateful I am that they're in the region and doing what they are doing: finding new, rather exhilarating ways to intersect and collide oft-thought-of "political" and "aesthetic" spheres. 

Jules read first, all work from his new Hegemonic Love Potion (Factory School), which included lines from his cycle "Das Greenspan," such as:

"The kind of guy who's not afraid to bring an inflatable candy cane to 

to a trans-national stag party"

and other gems, including one of my favorite poems in this hyper-sonic collection, this auctioneering of warped eternal present faux recollections born of the latest capitalism money can't buy, "Notes from the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment."  The poem begins: "I was all jacked up on freedom juice again."  And moves on from there, multidirectionally, trying to capture but necessarily failing to capture, one's own--our own--market driven madness.

In contrast to Jules' work, which--besides being often devastating in its critique of itself as necessarily a product of the culture industry (its critique of us)--often feels to me like being jabbed in the ribs by a friend acting out the persona of the joke-teller, Kaia's work is quieter, raging from the inside out, its lyricism being one central point on a literal map that is her new work, Remember to Wave, around which these life-structures in Portland turn.  So many habitations are mapped out, their sociopolitical, their social grid lines mapped out not just by Kaia, but by what Kaia's research unearthed as document, as letter form, as well as her tour group's often startling observations.  These habitations are often the most occulted in this one area's history, where, for example, Kaia concentrated her reading last week very much on the section of Remember to Wave that charts out the internment of Japanese people at the Portland convention center's storage lockers, the lockers turned into "living quarters," i.e., "prisons."  One work from which Kaia read involved giving "voice" to silent archive home movie footage from (I think?) the 1960s, again charting this area of the Portland Convention Center in a different way, this long lyrical poem incredibly captivating, the large screen footage dividing our attention between the seen and the heard in ways not unlike Laura Elrick's work, on which Sand has written recently (see posts below on both Remember to Wave and Laura Elrick's Stalk, which has been fleshed out and lengthened as an essay forthcoming).

The two combined for a deeply engaging contrast, and as the gracious, committed activists they are, offered several plugs for CA Conrad's arrival in March.  As, for those of you familiar with Boykoff, Conrad, and Sand, the three are engaged in similar political enactments thru language, and are, as Boykoff spoke about during the discussion after the reading, part of a larger phenomenon of site-specific and sociopolitical spatial practices / concerns at work in contemporary poetry, "witness" post-Oppen, not dissimilar to the site-specific arguments and engagements in visual arts last decade, continuing to evolve currently (and inform poetry & poetics).  

I'll try to dig up photos of the event as well as quotes/images from Kaia's Remember to Wave (both, at the moment of this writing, are being circulated among Evergreen students who could not make the reading itself).  In the meantime, take a look at some posts below, and go here for a snapshot of Kaia's map-making (from Wheelhouse PRESS Anthology 2009), and head over to Factory School and Tinfish Press website for further ordering information.

HOT PRESS ACTION COMING SOON: Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand

Yesterday's PRESS event, Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand reading (after a marathon day of workshopping with Arun Chandra & Elizabeth Williamson's class) was AWESOME.  Both read from their new work: Jules' Hegemonic Love Potion (Factory School) & Kaia's Remember to Wave (Tinfish)

I'll be blogging about this tomorrow, as at moment I'm gathering some images & quotes for the write-up, which will include some discussion on both of these new books.  But for now: a shout-out to Jules & Kaia, for their gracious participation and really amazing reading, & to the students & faculty who packed the house.   If you weren't there, too bad. 

Some Mediations for Untangling,

--Belladonna has a new web page on facebook (the blog is down now, but probably--guessing here--just for remodelling).  Anyhow, go here for news & notes (you need to log in to facebook), such as: 

--New from Belladonna is Carla Harryman's Open Box (Improvisations).  Laura Elrick's write-up:

From one of our most mind- and genre-bending of writers comes a poem. Don’t expect the poem however: “The page will not inflate / lungs do.” Carla Harryman’s startling new improvisations sound the edges between life and word, text and body, presence and a future (“in the hands of a shovel”). Notes that do not sing open the transfiguring “clink between / Thud and shine”… “Between us and a thing / Not yours, not mine / That owns us.” Thus an intense sort of music arises from the “wasting” gratitude of this Open Box. Syntactically figured through doubles and negatives, its “window window” beckons while it cloaks, reveals as it extends, as intimately as that rack of garments (the plush and the frayed) hanging from our mirrored backs.

--Laura Elrick

--From friend & political economy professor (one of the planners of EconVergence) Pete Bohmer regarding the sort of death that seems like a nail in the collective coffin, Howard Zinn (he was due to speak here later this week, for my class as well as others):

Howard Zinn contributed in so many important ways to creating an understanding of  U.S. history that put at the center the struggles of oppressed people for dignity, and for economic and social justice. His classic, A People’s History of the United States, has had a profound effect in this regard. It is my favorite book.   I have probably given away  30 copies as gifts over the last 25 years and used it in countless classes. Howard was a very wise and humane person who relentlessly criticized our unjust capitalist system while believing in and giving us historical examples of individuals and movements who in ways big and small worked and struggled against all injustice and for a just society.   In language and analysis that was simple but not simplistic, radical but accessible, Howard Zinn’s  anti-racism and anti-imperialism and his strong identification with working people stood out. So did his strong anti-war commitment and perspective.  He listened to and respected the non-elites, those usually omitted in the official histories.

While motivated in his writing by his values of the right to self-determination, of the centrality of ending poverty and all forms of oppression such as sexism and racism, and for peace and justice, Howard told the truth and did not exaggerate and omit facts that were uncomfortable to his beliefs. He also acted on them by participating in countless demonstrations and other forms of activism from the 1930’s until the present.

Based on Howard’s  profound  historical understanding of the U.S. history and his respect for people and his understanding of the obscene  inequality and militarism that marks the United States today, Howard Zinn continued to have hope and believed that we, the people, of the United States, could and would transform this society into some form of democratic socialism that lived in harmony with the rest of the world.    We can all learn from this truly outstanding thinker, historian and human being. Howard Zinn presente!

Sadly, Peter Bohmer

--And yet, there are those whose hope & tireless organizing / creative lather causes various little futures to open up here & there.  Such as Jules Boykoff.  And Kaia Sand.  They're reading tonight, discussing where to go from here tonight, so please do come if you are a STUDENT, FACULTY MEMBER, STAFF MEMBER, or OTHER PERSON LIVING IN OR AROUND OLYMPIA.  Both are always on.  

Born in large part out of Elizabeth Williamson's hard work: 

Winter's first  PRESS EVENT:

Join poet/activists Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand for a tour of their latest work

The Evergreen State College

        Where: Sem II C1105

    When: January 28,7:30pm 

Boykoff and Sand helped organize the recent Econvergence conference in Portland(http://www.econvergence.org/). They are the founders of the Tangent Press and reading series in Portland (http://www.thetangentpress.org/readings.html) and co-authored a new book on guerrilla poetry entitled Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space (Palm Press 2008). 

 

Boykoff is the author, most recently, of Hegemonic Love Potion (Factory School, 2009) and Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge (Edge Books, 2006). He has also published and lectured widely on the suppression of dissent in the United States. He is a contributor to scholarly journals like Antipode, Social Movement Studies, andNew Political Science as well as popular publications like the Guardian, Common Dreams, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. He was an  invited speaker at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Nairobi, Kenya (2006), where he presented research he carried out on U.S. media coverage of global warming.  

Sand is the author most recently of Remember to Wave, forthcoming this winter with Tinfish Press. This collection investigates political geography in Portland, Oregon, and contains a poetry walk she guides. Her  collection, interval (Edge Books 2004), was selected as a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year and she is also the author/designer of several chapbooks through the Dusie Kollektiv. She is a contributor to Jim Dine’s Hot Dreams series (Steidl Editions 2008) and recently performed poetry collaged entirely from the North American Free Trade Agreement at the Positions Colloquium of the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver, British Columbia. At present, she is at work on The Happy Valley Project, multi-media collaborations investigating housing foreclosures and finance.

Sponsored by: Performing Meaning, Translating Thought; Music and the Environment; The Writing Center; The Office of the Budget Dean 

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--Last, on Feb 3 poet Yan Li will be at our Tacoma Campus, hosted by amazing poet (and person) Zhang Er.  From an email invite she sent (more later on this blog regarding the event):

You are Invited to Chinese Poet Yan Li's reading at

The Evergreen State College – Tacoma

1210 – 6<sup>th</sup> Ave, Tacoma WA 98405, Room 218

February 3, 2010, 2:00-4:00 pm

Yan Li is a well-known poet and painter based in Shanghai. He belonged to the loose organized young poets group active in China in the late 1970s to mid-1980s, which was labeled as the "misty" school. He is the founding editor in chief of the unofficial, yet influential poetry journal First Line since 1987. He exhibited his art works in a 1979 show by a group of avant-garde artists later known as The Stars. His one man show in 1984 at People’s Park in Shanghai was the first one-man Avant-garde art exhibition after 1949 in mainland China . He has held many exhibitions and published numerous books since the 1980s. In his poetry and fiction work, Yan Li pushes the boundary between vernacular and written, capricious and philosophical, transient and historical, private and public, realistic and imaginary, humorous and solemn, contemporary and canonical. He has maintained his intellectual and artistic integrity under the not so subtle inducement of commercialization or propaganda for the party. He has also been an unfailing supporter and magnet for generations of younger poets and artists who seek his advice and help. His poetry has been translated into many languages including English.

 

The reading is supported in part by the Cycle Makers and Cycle Breakers Program.

 

Sacrificial Trees

                                             full book cover proof, Prefab Eulogies Vol 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox, forth. 2010)

Several projects are coming to a close, and as I now settle into teaching after a semester off, some trees are going to be sacrificed.  I'm not sorry given the tiny number of poetry / poetics books that are sold.  For instance, I expect to sell only about a million copies of Occultations, an artist book (designed by Jill Stengel & Mark Lamoureux) from Black Radish Books (Collective) that I've now got a release date for: April 1, & available thru SPD a couple weeks later, mid-April.  And given what Neo-Liberals have done to save the economy, I suspect I'll only manage to sell six hundred thousand copies of Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox).

I'm happy to find out from Geoffrey Gatza at BlazeVox that the final proof is now off to the printers, which should make the book available for purchase very soon; early Spring I'd imagine, at latest.  I'm really happy with what Geoffrey did in helping design the cover--taking my crap collages and making them legible.  So, my sincerest gratitude to Geoffrey.  

And my sincerest gratitude to Linh Dinh, Amy King, Jules Boykoff, and Catherine Taylor for writing too kind blurbs for the back of the book & website.

I just found out as well that Lourdes Vazquez found a home for an essay I wrote on her work a couple years ago, now part of a book I'm slowly working on--Necrophiliology: Aesthetic Practice During the Bush Regime.  She submitted it to and got it placed in the Brazilian journal of literature Sibila, edited by Charles Bernstein and poet Regis Bonvicino (English/Portuguese/Spanish).  That's cool: I've never had to do so little (nothing) to share my work with you.

Here is the English version.

Finally, a sincere thanks to Carlos Soto-Roman (post below), for formatting and re-formatting--basically spending too much time--my poems for Elective Affinities.  I've been working my way thru the pieces.  Really digging on Frank Sherlock's long poem at moment.

Finally finally, it's been a long haul, waiting on various pieces to arrive, making sure our chapbooks are able to come out with and soon after, but the new issue of Wheelhouse is nearly ready to be uploaded by designer-editor, Eden Schulz.  Excited for this issue and for the chapbooks, work from Uche Nduka, Stan Apps, & contributions to the journal from an amazing group of folks.  

Last, finally.  The new ON: A Journal of Contemporary Practice is coming out!  I'll post on this again when it is published.  Editors Michael Cross, Thom Donovan, and Kyle Schelsinger put out an amazing constellation of critical writings on contemporary poetries in the first issue. I've read some of the work from the new issue, and I'm certainly going to be ordering a couple copies asap.  Of course, they're beautiful art objects as well, with Cross (Atticus/Finch) and Schlesinger (Cuneiform) some of the finest book artist around.

PRESS 2009-2010: Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand

Join poet/activists Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand for a tour of their latest work

                 

The Evergreen State College

Where: Sem II Building, Room C1105

    When: January 28, 7:30pm 

Boykoff and Sand helped organize the recent Econvergence conference in Portland (http://www.econvergence.org/). They are the founders of the Tangent Press and reading series in Portland (http://www.thetangentpress.org/readings.html) and co-authored a new book on guerrilla poetry entitled Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space (Palm Press 2008). 

 

Boykoff is the author, most recently, of Hegemonic Love Potion (Factory School, 2009) and Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge (Edge Books, 2006). He has also published and lectured widely on the suppression of dissent in the United States. He is a contributor to scholarly journals like Antipode, Social Movement Studies, and New Political Science as well as popular publications like the Guardian, Common Dreams, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. He was an  invited speaker at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Nairobi, Kenya (2006), where he presented research he carried out on U.S. media coverage of global warming.  

Sand is the author most recently of Remember to Wave, forthcoming this winter with Tinfish Press. This collection investigates political geography in Portland, Oregon, and contains a poetry walk she guides. Her  collection, interval (Edge Books 2004), was selected as a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year and she is also the author/designer of several chapbooks through the Dusie Kollektiv. She is a contributor to Jim Dine’s Hot Dreams series (Steidl Editions 2008) and recently performed poetry collaged entirely from the North American Free Trade Agreement at the Positions Colloquium of the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver, British Columbia. At present, she is at work on The Happy Valley Project, multi-media collaborations investigating housing foreclosures and finance.