Stain Reading featuring Yours Truly - See You There

What a lineup.  I'm a little demured.  As a long time fan of Adam, Nada, Scott, Chris, and Julian, I can say with confidence that this will be another wonderful Stain of Poetry reading--even with me in the lineup.

Please support your fellow poets and drop by.  A huge thanks to Amy King and Ana Bozicevic for the invite.

Please, if you come, be prepared to participate.  I'll need at least 2 volunteers who can project.   

Saturday, August 1st @ 7 p.m. 

~ Julian Brolaski, Adam Fieled, Nada Gordon, Scott Hightower, Chris Stackhouse & David Wolach ~

Goodbye Blue Monday
(go through cafe room
to back garden stage)
1087 Broadway
(corner of Dodworth St)
Brooklyn, NY 11221-3013
(718) 453-6343

J M Z trains to Myrtle Ave
or J train to Kosciusko St.

~

Julian T. Brolaski is the author of the chapbooks Hellish Death Monsters (Spooky Press,  2001), Letters to Hank Williams (True West Press, 2003), The Daily Usonian(Atticus/Finch, 2004) and Madame Bovary’s Diary (Cy Press, 2005) (under the name Tanya Brolaski), Buck in a Corridor (flynpyntar, 2008) and the blog herm of warsaw.  Xir first book gowanus atropolis is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. Brolaski lives in Brooklyn where xe writes poetry, serves as a Litmus Press editor, plays country music inThe Low & the Lonesome, and curates th’every-other-monthly freakshow Mongrel Vaudeville.

~

Adam Fieled is a poet, musician, and critic based in Philadelphia. He has released several books and chapbooks, maintains two blogs,and is finishing his PhD at Temple University, where he teaches.

~

Nada Gordon is the author of four poetry books: Folly, V. Imp, Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?, and foriegnn bodie – and, with Gary Sullivan, an e-pistolary techno-romantic non-fiction novel, Swoon. She practices poetry as deep entertainment and is a proud member of the Flarf Collective. Visit her blog athttp://ululate.blogspot.com.

~

Scott Hightower’s third collection, “Part of the Bargain,” received the 2004 Hayden Carruth Award. His translations from Spanish have garnered him a Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. He is a contributing editor to “The Journal.”  His reviews frequently appear in “Coldfront Magazine” and “Boxcar Poetry Review.”   A native of central Texas, he lives with one foot in New York City, one in Texas, and one in Madrid, Spain. He teaches at NYU, and has taught poetry, non-fiction writing, and translation at Drew, F.I.T., Fordham, and Poets House.

~

Christopher Stackhouse is the author of poetry collected in the chapbook Slip (Corollary Press, 2005); co-author of Seismosis (1913 Press, 2006), a dialogic collaboration featuring Stackhouse’s drawings and text by writer/professor John Keene (Northwestern University), with essays from poet Ed Roberson and poet/critic Geoffrey Jacques. He holds has MFA in Writing/Interdisciplinary Studies from Bard College; is a Cave Canem Writers Fellow; and is a 2005 Fellow in Poetry, New York Foundation for the Arts. His recent essays have been published in the literary journal American Poet, and the anthology A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years. He will be a guest faculty member in the Naropa University Summer Writing Program 2009, at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado. He organizes Readings at Max Protetch Gallery in New York City with poet/assistant gallery director Stuart Krimko. Currently completing a manuscript of poetry, while also doing research for the development of a non-fiction book on poetics, Stackhouse lives and works in Brooklyn New York.

~

David Wolach is professor of writing, poetics, & philosophy at The Evergreen State in Olympia, Washington, and visiting poet in Bard College’s Workshop in Language & Thinking.  Author of Fractions of M, The Transcendental Insect Reader, Acts of Art/Works of Violence, and the forthcoming Scripto Erratum (sound/text compositions, scored with composer Arun Chandra & video artist Tasha Glen), David’s work has appeared this year or is forthcoming from Bird Dog, CRIT, Night Train, Diode, The Concelebratory Shoehorn Review, Venereal Kittens, [...]: An Anthology of New American Writing, AB OVO, and Ignavia Press: Journal of Transgressive Queer Writing.  Much of his work is multi-media and performative, and has been featured at venues such as Buffalo Poetics Series 2009, The American Cybernetics Conference 2009, and Bard’s Visiting Poets Series.  David is also editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press and curator of PRESS: A Cross-Cultural Literary Conference.

~

Hosted by Amy King and Ana Božičević

http://stainofpoetry.wordpress.com/

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=103132898882

Wheelhouse Publishes 3 New Chapbooks

On behalf of Wheelhouse, especially co-designer of our chapbook series Gianna D'Emilio, I'm happy to announce the release of 3 new Wheelhouse Press titles:

Matina Stamatakis & John Moore Williams,  Xenomorphia

Juliet Cook,  Tongue Like a Stinger

Lars Palm,  Over This Here Rainbow

All are available, along with other titles we've published this year, through the Wheelhouse website, here

These publications are the first in a parade, it feels, of amazing work that dedicated, interesting, people have sent us.  These works, the Wheelhouse PRESS Anthology, and the upcoming regular issue of Wheelhouse, speak to the fractured, but very much alive and urgent contemporary poetry "scene."  As all presses, Wheelhouse has its particular wants and missions.  We're interested in work that not only pushes normative definitions of what text arts is or can be, but we're also interested in work that exposes itself to, and implicates itself in what's going on, where "what's going on" becomes one among many possible sub-cultural narratives.  Which is to ask of the work that it acknowledge its potential as well as its inertness as part of while resisting capital, new colonialism, and militarism.   What strikes me again and again, however, is the sheer diversity of poetries, experimental prose--of text arts--that these demands, needs, and wants, in some way meet.  That is, the diversity of counter-narratives that explode, if even for a moment, dominant forms, that do so by working inside-outwards.  

The three works above are good examples, I think, of such diversity in contemporary poetry and poetics.  Each work is unrelenting, each developing its own poetics, at times probably imploding its own poetics as well.  

Next up, as we furiously try to meet our deadlines, is the double issue of Wheelhouse, which includes the PRESS Anthology.  Proofs have been sent to authors now, and feedback is nearing completion.  So do look out for the next double issue (see posts below) by the end of this month.  

And keep an eye out for future chapbooks, usually released 2 or 3 at a time.  Next up:

Thom Donovan

Elizabeth Kate Switaj

Felino Soriano

Laura Carter

EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT KILLED BY CONGRESS

According to insiders with whom I've just spoken (as of last night, 7pm EST), the labor / commerce Congressional sub-committee, charged with getting the Employee Free Choice Act through the House, have just gutted the legislation by stripping it of card-check neutrality. "Card-check," as it's referred to, would have erased (or at least numbed) several decades of right-to-work anti-union legislation, making it once again (as it is in many industrialized countries) a right for workers to have a legally recognized union by showing simple membership-majority--"checked" via a neutral third party (an arbitration judge, for instance). This provision was the Employee Free Choice Act. It was what those of us within the labor movement, including friend, colleague (and despite what I'm about to say) deeply committed unionist, Stuart Acuff (vice president of the AFL-CIO), have been fighting for, shaping, designing, for nearly a decade.

This is news that means several things, not least of which: the labor movement under Obama will have no resurgence. We, as workers, will continue to have fewer rights, and we as a labor movement will continue to shrink. That this legislation has been gutted is one sign of how weak, in fact politically irrelevant, the labor movement has become. And this point is what I'd like to focus on here. In two parts, brief, so we can all ponder them in their starkness:

1) the majority of those who gutted the Employee Free Choice Act are those whose elections to office were (in part or in whole) made possible by labor organizing and endorsement. I'm told that Obama officials had a hand in pressuring the committee to kill the legislation, despite Obama's promises to support it. So, there you go. Says a great deal about Obama. Says even more about why we need not, nor should not, as a labor movement, put money and energy into elected officials.

2) Due to (1), and, due, I think, to incredible unwillingness to take the risks necessary - e.g., to be militant and organize more wild cat strikes, to organize more in the south, to be more intelligently "on the offense" when it comes to workplace organzing (in terms of $$ as well as tactically) - THE AFL-CIO is EFFECTIVELY COVERING THIS UP. I am not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch, but there is a scramble within the AFL (and within Andy-the-manager-Stern's camp too) to figure out how to spin this such that the AFL and New Directions come out looking good, that the labor movement comes out looking a winner on this as a piece of nothing legislation finally winds its way around the House and Senate until Obama signs it and everyone smiles and shakes hands for the cameras.

To reiterate--the AFL-CIO is saying nothing, is doing very little other than figuring out how to take a shower and smell nice. As evidence, here's the latest set of AFL blog posts. They went out over the wires this morning, well after the Act was officially gutted, and not a word about it (as of July 17, 10:51pm ET).

What to do? Eventually we'll need to organize from the bottom up, strategically, intelligently, but militantly - where the term "strike," we remember does noes not have four letters. Meantime, call members of the sub-committee and tell them you want card-check. Also call Obama's office and say the same thing. But just as importantly, contact the AFL-CIO and (as a suggestion) say that you only support a labor movement that supports laborers, i.e., card check.

New Chapbook Forthcoming / New Work Online

I just found out my new chapbook, Hospitalogy, is due out from Andrew Lundwall's Scantily Clad Press in August. As is often the case, I forgot to adjust for color in uploading the cover image, and so what you see to the right is a very ugly (inverted) version of what I think you'll see upon publication.

One of the poems, along with other poetry of mine from another book project (Prefab Eulogies) can be found in the amazing new issue of Eklesographia (Ahadada Books), guest edited by Amy King. The issue features wonderful poetry all around, a diverse cadre--startling work from Linh Dinh, Annie Finch, Adam Fieled, Tomaz Salamun, and many others (hell, just read it...).

The book, Hospitalogy, as may be evident somewhat from the poem in Eklesographia (having another poem in the issue doing similar, but more overt work), is in part a meditation on, and in some ways is in conversation with, Rob Halpern's poetics as I read them in Disaster Suites. Not to suggest that my end of the conversation is as generative as Rob's has been, and will be. But Hospitalogy began three or four years ago, shortly after falling ill, as a way for me to think about, really to try to rethink, a poetics of disablement viz. the problematic of the confessional poem. I have almost no energy at the moment, so I'll hold off writing here on the confessional poem as I see its western historical valences, its extraordinarily well-tread (and well-taken) negative critique from (at least) Stein onward. I'll only say here that as the poems came in the wake of my first adulthood sustained interactions with the American healthcare-less system, tropes of confession, the confessional poem, kept coming to mind when thinking about the doctor-patient discourse; the question-answer-question conversation between doctor and patient is not dialogic, nor is it particularly diagnostic - it's confessional. The ways in which language is internalized, and the patient's mythos of personhood inflated through a cycle of confession, expectation of (expert) epiphany through logos, back into confession again, I found both sensorially miserable and perceptibly interesting. A year or two later I encountered Rob Halpern's work, then Rob himself and The Nonsite Collective, then Disaster Suites, and Rob's interest in a poetics of patiency, which, for Rob, I believe, hooks up intimately with rethinking the use (value) of the lyric, a new lyricism, which is as much a critique of lyrical poetry generally understood as it is an exploration and expansion of "it." So, Hospitalogy quickly became a conversation with both Halpern/lyricism and patiency/disaster, how this complex poetics informs, unhouses, sometimes backspaces the logos of rethinking confession/medical discourses. The books coming out so closely together should make for more interesting conversations between us when we meet up again at Bard College this summer for a semester of teaching.

Thanks very much to Scantily Clad for publishing the work--do visit them, as many of their titles are online in pdf form to read now for free, and since opening their press a couple years ago (at most), they have published some wonderful books.

Meantime, new work of mine can be found in the lovely new issue of The BluePrint Review, care of kind and patient poet-editor, Dorothee Lang. Click here to check it out. And work of mine is soon forthcoming from:

No Tell Motel
Eklesographia: An Imprint of Ahadada Books
Dusie

So, do look out for these subtle works of genius. Seriously, thanks to the editors--Reb Livingston, Amy King, and Susana Gardner--for including my poetry in their pages.

Wheelhouse/PRESS & Other Simulacra

I'm beginning to get very excited about the next Wheelhouse, which features a double issue, or, rather, a regular issue of the journal plus online PRESS Literary Conference anthology (see PRESS post below for details). The design is really taking shape--thanks to Meghan McNealy, poet and book artist. Before all I could see were (very good) formations of marks on stacks and stacks of paper. Now I'm seeing shapes. We aim to get proofs into contributor hands by (very latest) June 24, and to get the issue and anthology out very soon afterward.

Above is the mock-up of the PRESS Anthology cover. Who knows, by the 24th we might scrap it for another cover, but at this point I hope not. Contributors to the anthology include:

Rodrigo Toscano
Kristin Prevallet
Jules Boykoff
Kaia Sand
Roger Farr
Laura Elrick
Leonard Schwartz
Meghan McNealy
Tung-Hui Hu
K. Lorraine Grahm
Tom Orange
Sarah Mangold
David Wolach
Jessica Baron
Steven Hendricks
Daniel Brohzutsky
Mark Wallace

And contributors to Wheelhouse 8 include:

Zach Schomberg & Emily Kendal Frey
Summer Block Kumar
Ryan Daley
Deborah Poe
Garth Graeper
Marja Hagborg
Joel Chace
Kristina Marie Darling

Elizabeth Bryant

and several others. See post below, as with all this lovely work coming out, we'll also be releasing, hopefully within the next few days, three new chapbooks by:

Thom Donovan
Juliet Cook
Matina Stamatakis/John Moore Williams

More chapbooks on the way after that, so Wheelhouse has been busy, due in large part to reup of the Wheelhouse Arts Collective. Since Wheelhouse's active members moved all over the place two years ago, we'd been working primarily as a journal of two editors--Eden Schultz, our arts director, and myself, the editor of the journal and press. In the past few months we've expanded, and now editors Meghan McNealy, Lionel Lints, Andrew Csank, Kate Robinson, and Gianna D'Emilio have come on board. All recent graduates of Evergreen's writing and book arts program, they're younger and more energetic than I am. So, Eden finally has some company that can keep up. Stand by for the work that is due out; I hope we, as a press, can continue to do such fine poetry, essay, prose, etc, the justice it deserves.