Trip Down Memory Lain

Here's Mr. Wolach again, this time presenting his multi-media piece. I love this. If you can't read it, he's listed various forms of poetry for sale.  Okay, so that's Round 1 of photos and commentary and it only covers Day 1. So, chew on that and I'll get some more ready for you.  --Snapshot of Prefab Eulogies, from Lidsey Boldt's blog slideshow

So, with Kaia Sand & Jules Boykoff about to kick off winter's PRESS events (David Buuck did so in fall, on the heels of the amazing EconVergence Conference in Portland), I decided it was time to take a trip down memory lane, revisiting our every-two-years large PRESS Conference, as well as listing some of the PRESS artists/activists who have helped make the series hum over the past 3 years.  Here's a thank you to the organizers and guests.  First, the conference: in late 2008 300 of us crammed into various buildings on Evergreen's campus, and in a semi-abandoned 4-story structure downtown for the reclamation of public space public readings.  It was the first of what we hope to be several such conferences that explore various intersections between aesthetic and political practices.  This year we are planning for the next conference (next year), with Rachel Zolf so far trying to come out here on her own dime because the U.S. won't allow her, as student visa holder, to get paid.  The 2008 conference was generative, and so hats off to the student organizers, who really made the whole thing go, spending their summer planning the conference instead of doing more sexy things.

Here's Lindsey Boldt's blog slideshow of the conference.  Nice write-up, giving one the sense of what we did.

There are several other slideshows online, including a very comprehensive one by Tom Orange on Flickr.  You need to log in to see that slideshow.

And here's one of two websites for PRESS, this one for guest info, list of panels, readings, etc. Photos by Shaun Johnson, website by Chris Hoard, now both graduated.

A year later the PRESS: Activism & The Avant-Garde Anthology was published thru Wheelhouse Press (one of the main sponsors of the event).  All guest poets/writers contributed work to the anthology, as did many--but not all--of the activists and/or students.  

Several nice reviews of both the conference and the anthology appear online and in print, but here is one that was published just recently in the journal Prick of the Spindle (interview and review).

After the conference, we got down to work on continuing the series.  And now we're back in the conference planning stages, rethinking it, both in terms of thematics and finances.  How will this recession both negatively impact the conference and be a major site of resistance/excavation?  Since this is your conference too, feel free to send ideas for workshops, performances, and panels, here as blog comments.

PRESS Guest Participants (by year):

2007-8

Sarah Mangold (poetry, talk on Bird Dog Magazine)

Jessica Balsam (TACO founder, installation art)

Bill Porter (translator, Chinese poetry)

Erica Lord (installation art)

Zhang Er (poetry, translation)

Julia Zay (film, experimental critical writing)

Jeffrey Silverthorne (photography)

2008-9

Rodgrio Toscano (poetry/poetics theater/panel discussion)

Kristin Prevallet (poetry)

Lindsey Boldt (poetry/panel discussion)

Mark Wallace (poetry/panel discussion)

Jessica Baron (poetry/panel discussion)

K. Lorraine Graham (poetry/panel discussion)

Holly Melgard (poetry/sound art)

Jules Boykoff (poetry/panel discussion)

Tom Orange (poetry/panel discussion/poetics theater)

Jennifer Bartlett (poetry/panel discussion)

Alice Templeton (poetry/talk)

Jais Brohinsky (Agit-Prop Theater)

Nicholas Hayes (poetry/panel discussion)

Steven Hendricks (prose/book arts workshop)

Zhang Er (poetry)

Leonard Schwartz (poetry)

Kaia Sand (poetry/panel discussion)

Tung Hui-Hu (poetry/panel discussion)

Laura Elrick (poetry/panel discussion)

2009-10

Rob Halpern (poetry, workshop)

David Buuck (poetry/performance)

Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand 

Chris Mann 

CA Conrad (forthcoming Soma(tic) workshop/PACE Action/Reading--March 4 & March 7)

David Abel (forthcoming reading/workshop--last Thursday of May)

Sarah Mangold (forthcoming)

Eleni Stecopolous (forthcoming)

2010-11

Rachel Zolf (forthcoming)

Received, Eviscerated

Got some goodies in the mail today.  

But first, Wheelhouse's new favorite blog-poster (I feel like we should call attention to one each week, now that I'm writing this): fantastic poet Tonya Foster, who is currently blogging for Harriet.  The sheer musicality of the couple entries so far should make this blog sing to you.  But the pressing sociopolitical questions, much of them revolving around Foster's poetical, political, and other lives in New Orleans pre- and post- Katrina, these enrich and inform the headlong and wide-ranging poetic explorations Foster is making.  Foster's also interested in the possibility of real dialog on her Harriet blog.  Reflecting her interest in the commons, she's calling for this blog to be as much as an online place can be, a commons.  So, if you have time & interest, wrestle with some of the ideas, claims, images, etc., that are, and will be, occupying this space.

Books received: 

--Jules Boykoff, Hegemonic Love Potion (Factory School)

--K. Lorraine Graham, Terminal Humming (Edge Books)

--Mark Wallace, Felonies of Illusion (Edge Books)

--Jessica Baron, The Best Word for the Job of Mourning (BlazeVOX)

--Michael Leong, e.s.p (Silenced Press)

Just received Leong's book.  Looks very pretty, & I like his poetry quite a bit.  But will have to wait to write about it.  Or, I could write about it and then read it?  Just finished Boykoff's Hegemonic Love Potion and Graham's Terminal Humming, both of which I am in love with. These are EXTRAORDINARY books that, were I you, I'd buy instead of eating tonight.  Since I'm writing on them in conjunction with David Buuck's The Shunt RIGHT NOW (well, as of a few minutes ago, and for the next couple weeks), I'll wait to post anything but HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.  Looking forward to cracking open Wallace's latest, which this time promises to torque lyric.  As an expert "torquer" (this, despite how it sounds, is meant as compliment, as Wallace's Temporary Worker Rides a Subway is one the books that is forever stuck in my head like a diaper pin), quite literally looking forward--book's across the room, under smaller of 2 cats.  As for Baron's work, I wrote a blurb on it.  So, I guess I'll reproduce it here (from BlazeVOX's website):

Words, says Beckett, are underlined with silence. Baron urgently impels us to perform an archeology of "mourning," and in so doing, to mourn with, for, and against the word, to rehearse the absence of any singular vocabulary that will do the work needed. To mourn is to act, and with Mallarmean strophic bursts, subtle clefts of negative space followed by litanies and lists and dissolving gestures and anxious searchings, the act is the appearance of its opposite, stillness. And here, in Baron's work, we sense that no matter the gesture, all is potentially excess, or inertness, in the job of addressing the terrible-ineffable. Via such careful maneuvers, Baron's The Best Word for the Job of Mourning turns reader into worker. We are both witness to and actors in the rehearsal of mourning, wherein page by page, each itself a day or an hour or a lifetime, words, or, for Beckett, memories, "are killing."  

Baron's The Best Word for the Job of Mourning complicates any understanding the reader may have of new lyricism: "Hold on to...small seemingly...lines I cultivate disappearing" follows “There’s something I’m supposed to be saying,” calling into question the distinction between the said and the written, the tonality of the upper register and the drumbeat of the colloquial, within the context of eulogy. The Best Word is falling houses and waterlogged instruments, submerged sound and wet score, air filling lungs for a last time in a struggle to empty all but the word: "Here's a clue: Information has become too scarce." With the self-conscious music of lamentation as script-fragment, we are compelled to act out in its double sense, repeatedly, the search for the right word. Countless dead and what, Baron implies, could possibly be a vocabulary of such catastrophic and idiotic loss? Language has failed us, yet we must go on. If we are a "we," we will find the space between us to be vast enough to cause a graven silence. In so few words, Baron gives us the dialectic of inner and outer, personal and sociopolitical, a poetics of disavowal, disavowal of language via language, wrapped up in a faith in the ritual of rehearsal, where by beginning again and again, the lost thing just might return, transfigured, perhaps so much that it is unrecognizable, but returned to us nonetheless. This is a quietly eviscerating, astonishingly unsilenced debut from a poet who deserves our immediate, and careful attention.