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.

New Philadelphia Poets in NYC

In working on my poems/poetic statement/list of contemporary affinities for his ongoing anthology of new American poetry, poet & editor of Elective Affinities Carlos Soto Roman sent me a heads-up about the New Philadelphia Poets' upcoming reading at The Bowery in NYC.  This is as good a time as any, then, especially if you are in the New York area (on the east coast) to get to know the New Philadelphia Poets.

Why is it, I ask myself often enough, that about the time I move from Philadelphia (several years ago), the poetry movement there becomes vibrant once again.  Philly has gone thru several waves of sudden poetic acceleration: Gil Ott & his crowd doing extraordinary things at the same time that other poets more directly connected to the Language Movement were doing their thing in the early 80s; then Conrad & PhillySound offering an awfully generative friendly/collaborative contrast to what Al F. and Charles Bernstein and others have managed to do at Penn; and now more poetry collectives and series' are forming, overlapping in experimental, collaborative, and socially conscious trajectories.  Seems like an exciting time there.  When I was in Philly the poetry "scene" was, of course, alive, as it always has been, but it was, like other recessionary periods, more a time where people were heading to New York to read, build poetic communities, etc.  

So, check out the New Philadelphia Poets, and if in the area, check many of them out live.  

Jan 16: NPP To NYC

REDEMPTIVE STRIKE:  RECKONING THE DECADE

At the beginning of the century, we found ourselves in a dark wood.  The past ten years saw the collapse of the Twin Towers, the marriage of religious fundamentalism and global politics, and the rise of digital communities.  With this in mind, The New Philadelphia Poets launch a redemptive strike on the past decade.  Join us for a reconsideration of this yet unnamed era.

Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery)

Saturday, Jan. 16, 2010

6:00 pm, $6.00

Featuring: Gregory Bem,  Sarah Heady, Debrah Morkun, Patrick Lucy, Angel Hogan, Matthew Landis, Carlos Soto Román, and Jamie Townsend.

Carla Harryman Interview

In talking with Charles Bernstein a couple nights ago (he gave a great reading here at Evergreen this week, & was good to see him, & Leonard Schwartz, who I hadn't talked to since taking the semester off), I found myself on the receiving end of a lot of insight regarding teaching / discussing the ideology of the classroom (and ideology generally) in the classroom.  Thanks much to Charles, who helped me add some needed texts to my syllabus.  It was a serendipitous discussion, as we're both teaching at moment, both classes circling around politics and pedagogy.  A couple current texts came up for discussions along these lines--both, we agreed, are some of the best new books of late.  One was, as I mentioned in another post, Disaster Suites by Rob Halpern.  The other, Carla Harryman's Adorno's Noise.  

I've long been struck by how little attention Harryman's work is given compared to her male counterparts.  Not that Harryman isn't a major influence for contemporary artists.  But yet again, Harryman and The Grand Piano are not usually mentioned in the same sentence.  Google these via Boolean search and you'll wind up with approximately 177 unique entries.  For Barrett Watten, you get nearly 400, same volume.  Not that lack of some vast popular/viral takeover is indicative of anything to any degree of interest beyond a passing one on this topic, but I've read Adorno's Noise, released last year by Essay Press, about a dozen times now, and still very much discovering things, getting a kind of static shock from it--even "Orgasm," an essay of all of about 50 words.  The work, like Harryman's other work, is extremely difficult to place, exacting, precise in its deliberations.  It's not just that my background is in philosophy of music; the book really is, beyond everything else it is, a study in the form of the essay (which makes Essay Press the best possible home for it, in my estimation). 

Well, I'm liking Bucharest at moment, at least the American Studies Program at the University there, specifically its undergraduate journal, Intersections.  There's a nice interview with Harryman in this latest issue.  Harryman's somewhat politic to linger on genre here as to why it is difficult to "place" her work.  Part of what I love--what's influenced my work a great deal--is this genre concern, where essay for Harryman deliberately meets poetry and prose, and where the written is embodied on the page and in the literal performance of much of her work (Neo-Benshi, and other poets theater conventions).  The difficulty of placement is an act of political resistance, and so one would, and should, and want to expect that work such as Harryman's is going to remain occulted by more commercialized texts (tho, think of how many options the bookseller has when trying to file the newly acquired Harryman book!).   Gender, quite simply, as has been discussed so often, is one culprit in Harryman's (at times) backgrounding.  Not just the gender divide within the Language Poetry culture of the 70s and 80s, but more generally, and now: we just love our male-identifying(ed) poets.  Can't seem to get enough of them.  

Well, glad to see this interview.  Glad it is so rich as well--thinking of using some of it along with Adorno's Noise in my classroom this year.  

Take Two

Woke this morning to two additions to our bi-weekly Wheelhouse contributor notes.  Very cool to see that, among some other juicy books I would like to have, Charles Bernstein has included Rob Halpern's Disaster Suites on his holiday wish list.  Looks like he was reading my No Tell Motel Best Of list (ha).  

Also, Thom Donovan's interview on "seeing" in his Wheelhouse chapbook Make Believe (and in his work generally) has just been published over at ReadWritePoem.  I recommend reading the interview, which really is an archeology of whether Donovan here posits a poetics of vision, as (not unusually) Thom with clarity posits a whole bunch of things that anyone interested in intertextual & visionary poetics should like to read.  If for the simple reason that it's a sort of mini-primer on a well developed poetics, developed enough to get an inside look on how one might, for example, relate seemingly disparate strands, texts, phenomena, weave them together in the poetry-making process.