Ugly Duckling News From Ugly Duckling

Check out all this wonderful X... have myself looked at the Dorothea Lasky reading/interview & the rich review of the amazing Neighbor by Rachel Levitsky.  Link, link, link--go:

PRESS AND OTHER NEWS The Russian Version by Elena Fanailova wins Three Percent's 2010 Best Translated Book Award for Poetry.  Ten Walks/Two Talks by Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch is reviewed by Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Boston Phoenix, A Daily Dose of Architecture and HTMLGIANT. Interview and a reading by Dorothea Lasky, author of Poetry Is Not a Project, on BOMBlog. Made-up Interviews with Imaginary Artists by Alex Stein featured by the Boulder Daily Camera.  Two new poems by Filip Marinovich are published in the Brooklyn Rail. City: Bolshevik Super-Poem in 5 Cantos by Manuel Maples Arce featured on InDigest Picks.  Interviews with Matvei Yankelevich on Largehearted Boy and the Brooklyn Rail. Review of Look Back, Look Ahead: The Selected Poems of Srecko Kosovel on theBOMBlog. The Theory of Everything, Abridged, by Ben Luzzatto reviewed on The The Poetry Blog. Neighbor by Rachel Levitsky is reviewed on the Poetry Foundation blog.  : : : : : Yours, and truly,  Ugly Duckling Presse.

95 Cent School: Social Poetics/Aesthetic-Politico Practices & Poetry

From Susana Gardner of all things Dusie Press, many things Black Radish Books Collective, & uncountable other things, sends me this (wishing I could go, but due to teaching schedule, unlikely).

Students in my class, and those in the Olympia area who have been to PRESS events, etc: do read this post, & if interested, please feel free to contact me--obvious affinities here, etc.

This is a one time email. If you are interested in future updates, please reply to address above or or join the 95 Cent Skool facebook group:http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=300963159304&ref=mf


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The 95 Cent Skool is a 6 day long experimental seminar that will be offered in Oakland, California, July 26-31, 2010. It is convened by Joshua Clover andJuliana Spahr. It will explore the possibilities of poetry writing as part of a larger social practice, at a distance from the economic and professional expectations of institutions. We believe a dozen people sitting around a table can’t ruin poetry, but that costs, professional context, mythologies of individual genius, and client/service-based models can — and in our own experiences teaching in pay-to-play writing programs, often do.

Our concerns in these six days begin with the assumption that poetry has a role to play in the larger political and intellectual sphere of contemporary culture, and that any poetry which subtracts itself from such engagements is no longer of interest. “Social poetics” is not a settled category, and does not necessarily refer to poetry espousing a social vision. It simply assumes that the basis of poetry is not personal expression or the truth of any given individual, but shared social struggle.

The 6 days will feature:
•    Morning discussion groups lead by Juliana and Joshua
•    Two guest speakers: one on the political economy and one on ecology
•    Afternoon group and/or collaborative writing sessions
•    Dinners and drinks at a nearby bar

The 6 days will not feature:
•    Workshops led by a “master poet”
•    Agents or editors who will advise your work into publication
•    A Richard Wilbur Celebration Night
•    Instruction in reciting poetry to bring out the emotional content of the poem

The final program will be available later in the Spring.

Each participant will be asked to contribute up to 1% of annual gross income as their 95 cents exclusively towards operating expenses. The workshop leaders and as many other organizers as possible will donate their time. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Email us if you’ve got questions about how much you can pay. We will also help in finding free housing for any participants in need.

The program is open to any interested participant with any level of prior engagement with poetry. This program is not affiliated with any institution of higher education and no transferrable institutional credit will be offered. There is no application fee, but space is limited. Please send a note indicating interest and experience to 95centskool@gmail.com

Please feel encouraged to re/post this listing to your blog or otherwise redistribute. If you would like to receive further information about the 95 Cent Skool, please email the address above, or join the 95 Cent Skool facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=300963159304&ref=mf The 95 Cent Skool will happen with the support of Small Press Traffic and 'A 'A Arts.

Thank you very much,

the 95¢ Skoolers —

On Silliman's Blog Today

Ron Silliman kindly put my essay on the poetry of Lourdes Vazuquez up on his blog today.  On that same poetry news list of links is a link to a a review (over at Damn the Caesars) of Brenda Iijima's  Revv. You'll--Ution, an awesome book I need to get, having seen some of the work that's in it already, some going in Wheelhouse quite soon.  Much of the review seems spot-on with regard to Brenda's work, and for supplement, Thom Donovan has a rich essay thereon over at Wild Horses of Fire.  

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.  

New News: Delete Press

In writing a review of CJ Martin's latest book, out from the new Delete Press, I asked Crane Giamo, one of the editors, for background information on Delete.  Martin's chapbook, WIW?3, part of a series, is startlingly good, really one of the best books of poetry I've read this year (which is why I'm SLOWLY writing a review of it), yet as amateur book artist, I couldn't help but delve into the object itself.  The book is beautifully constructed, coptic bound, the cardstock thick and letterpressed typesetting gorgeous.  Each comes with its own handmade sleeve (again, beautiful). All materials (I think) are recycled.  So, I emailed Delete and asked them what gave rise to this new press, as well as how they worked with CJ.  The latter will be another post--here I'll just say that Crane said they worked quite closely with CJ throughout on the design of the book. For now, I want to pass along what Crane forwarded me--fellow editor Jared Schickling's mission statement, or mini-essay-as-response to my question. 

Why Delete Press?

JARED SCHICKLING 

We start interning at a university-affiliated journal and notice a number of things right off the bat.  Despite advertising itself as a journal seeking “new” and “upcoming” writers, suggesting that unsolicited submissions have a fighting chance of getting through the selection process, the journal’spermanent editorial board solicits the vast majority of its published material.  These editors, English department faculty and staff, solicit work from writers they admire and from their friends, and it’s common for an issue to contain not one unsolicited poem.  Someone working in the field tells us one builds a successful journal through solicitations, which we believe is true.  Our problems are with the posturing of the journal and the quality of the work finally printed.  Most of the work that we see reach publication is mired in popular and established models of writing and thinking being pushed and explored in mostly prominent English departments.  We notice how many poems, often in obtuse ways, use all the coveted buzzwords of the day—“location,” “Other,” “cartography,” etc. 

 

But perhaps our biggest problem is the manner in which unsolicited manuscripts are treated.  They go through an evaluation process resembling an assembly line.  A row of graduate students read the same manuscripts successively—if at any point a reader doesn’t like one, that manuscript is rejected.  There is little conversation—one likes it or one doesn’t.  We notice that the most mild, broadly appealing poetry can get through all those different readers, many of whom seem new to the manifold worlds of innovative, contemporary, at times underground poetry of the past century. Furthermore, if at any time a manuscript manages to satisfy all of these readers, hungry and curious and perhaps easily excitable at “discovering” titillating poets and poetry, the work still has to pass that issue’s lead editor.  (Return to first point; and note that student readers are students of thepermanent editorial board.)     

 

The press that publishes the journal also runs an annual book contest.  We literally despise every book that wins, aware of the innovative, important, and more interesting work happening elsewhere at presses that aren’t asking reading fees, submitting artistic endeavors to a “contest,” nor offering cash prizes.  The contest model amounts to extortion.  Artists, such as many writers are, will produce and distribute their work in the absence of support from markets, academies and presses.  History shows this.  Writers don’t need presses.  Presses, however, need writers.  As we work with five different presses currently, we’ll add that we value the work many editors and publishers are doing.  They give us our books and digital media in aesthetically pleasing formats, and in this can do a great honor and service to a writer’s work.  They create space in which a work may live.  But how is it that we’ve arrived at a moment where publication with wide distribution, cash prizes, and the institutional praise attending that are the barometers by which the work of a press is valued and comes to be desired?  To suggest that this isn’t the case is to simply deny the actual situation.  We have a publisher friend who can’t tell us one title published by such-and-such press, but yet he wants his press to affiliate with theirs and be welcomed into its larger community of writers and presses—why?   And he requires, by requiring contest fees, that writers support him financially in his endeavor, as his press’s books aren’t selling as well as he’d like.  What values are exposed in this situation?  Presses requiring reading fees will argue it’s the only way to sustain their projects—but do we need presses that can’t sustain themselves by virtue of the work they’re producing?  Why do we go to presses?  What exactly are we looking for?

 

The problems with the contest model also include the nature of judging.  The ideal judge for a contest is one that meets with the press’s aesthetic, and one who is famous, making the contest look attractive to aspiring writers, thereby attracting more submissions and the accompanying fees.  The writer thinks, “If Eileen Myles or Billy Collins or…would only choose…endorse my work,” and thus, the winning manuscript will be one that conforms to pre-existing notions of what constitutes “winning” poetry.  It is not possible to run an “ethical” contest despite the lip service couched in the CLMPCode of Ethics.  The contest model of publishing is antithetical to the health and evolution of poetry and its forms.

 

We quit to work with a smaller press doing chapbook contests with the occasional full length.  The contests continue to prove disappointing—in six or seven contests we are excited for one manuscript, but the judge doesn’t choose it.  The founders of the press admit to publishing work in which they have no interest.  They hand their most important decisions over to someone whose interests are not necessarily in line with the publishers’ needs and desires.  So again the question, whom and what is the press serving?  All the while various ideas on how to publish work that excites us are mired in what ifs that are irrelevant, centering on how to create a popular and commercially viable press.  Instead of engaging in more satisfactory work, all we do is talk about it, a discussion accounting matters perpetually sidetrack.  A few of us talk it over and decide the nature of the aspiration—success, fame—is the problem, a dumb dream masking the fact that evolutionary poetry begins as an unknown, and often remains so throughout its author’s life.

 

We decide it will be possible to run a self-sustaining press by soliciting and publishing work we deem important.  Period.  The trick will be to choose truly (according to our lights) outstanding work, to put much care into the construction of the book, and to do this in small, limited edition print runs that don’t cost too much.  The measure of “too much” will be something we can’t afford funding out-of-pocket.  It may seem idealistic to suggest that a press doesn’t need to rely on reading fees in order to happen, that it can sustain itself on the quality of the work it produces, in light of how few consumers of poetry there are and the many presses they already know and can choose from.  But here we are with our first print run almost sold out and our money investment returned.  We put this next to our remembrances of boxes stuffed with contest winners and journals from ten years ago awaiting their readers.  We don’t try to account for the possible truth involved with our own dream, other than to say that we have faith that other readers and writers share our vision—where the quality of the work is all that matters—we have faith that there will be buyers for work that hasn’t thought once in terms of posterity, popularity or commerce. 

 

We won’t suggest that vanity and conflicting interests do not attend this experiment called Delete Press.  We benefit in ways that have little to do directly with its work, and we appreciate those benefits.  But we run the press with the interests of the press in mind, because we’re whores topoetry. 

 

Another Fuck the Holidays Special

How could we not include the always wonderful Tinfish in our list of small presses?  Especially when, available for pre-order, are new titles from Kaia Sand and Elizabeth Soto.  Soto's work is always good, so I imagine this book is a must.  And I'd read some of Sand's Remember to Wave, with Wheelhouse publishing a selection of the work for our PRESS Anthology--the work is awesome, daring, politically radicalizing and beautiful.

SCROLL DOWN for ordering details.

FROM TINFISH PRESS:

Tinfish Pre-Publication Sale (Please help us to cover print costs!)

We have two exciting books going to the printer this week:

Kaia Sand, REMEMBER TO WAVE, $16




Elizabeth Soto, EULOGIES, $14





Details here:

Pre-publication prices are $14 for Sand's book, $10 for Soto's, or $22 for both.

Please support our efforts to publish experimental poetry from the Pacific by pre-ordering these titles.

47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9
Kane`ohe, HI 96744

or via the "purchase" button on our website: http://tinfishpress.com

aloha, Susan M. Schultz
Editor & money-bags

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.  

Wheelhouse Contributor Notes: New PennSound Audio from Emergency Poetry Series: Thom Donovan/Julian Brolaski, etc etc!

Look out for an interview about Wheelhouse Magazine & Press in the next issue of Prick of the Spindle.  Poetry Editor Eric Weinstein and the editorial team were very kind in reviewing Wheelhouse's PRESS Anthology, which, as part of that, entailed interviewing me about the history of the journal and press.  

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Just got an amazing short agit-prop from Tina Darragh, which will be featured in our upcoming issue of Wheelhouse. We're happy with how this issue is coming into relief, with contributions from Darragh, Rachel Zolf, Julian Brolaski, Barbara Jane Reyes, Ben Friedlander, Brenda Iijima, and several others--including some wonderful work from poets new to publishing their work.  The agit-prop by Darragh is close to my (enlarged) heart--it's a complex, nuanced but hard-hitting critique of our failing health(care) system, the work taking place and to take place (so to speak) in an E.R. ward.  The work has that sideways, dark humor that I love, and that I think is under-appreciated in Darragh's incredibly varied but always pretty awesome work.

-----------------------

We've received more submissions--several hundred--in this last round than we ever have, so this is slowing us down a bit, tho we plan on releasing this issue basically on time.  Again, if you haven't heard from us, and you submitted work in the last 3 months, give or take a week or so, we're still trying to decide on it and will get back to you soon.

As we do a last round of readings of work, keep in mind that if you're sending us anything now, it'll be considered for issues 10 and 11.  Submissions are, however, open as always.

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Phillip Metres has a nice review of the important and inspiring Landscapes of Dissent: Guerilla Poetry & Public Space by Kaia Sand & Jules Boykoff in Jacket.  Along with Laura Elrick's Stalk (see short review below), the book and this fairly comprehensive review, offer us here a good starting place for wider investigations of guerilla poetry and the new (plural) poetics of dissensus.  

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Wheelhouse friend Dorothea Lasky has a really good article on spatial/physical practices and museums as proproceptive learning in the latest issue of Urban Ed.  Check it out here.  

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From Thom Donovan's Blog (Wild Horses of Fire):

Here is audio from a reading I gave a couple weeks back with Julian Brolaski at Penn's Kelly Writers House. The reading is followed by aconversation in which Julian and I discuss our work in relation to community discourse, "New Brutalism," "composition by breath," biopolitics, and intertextuality.

The conversation is really worth checking out in addition to the awfully f-ing good poetry of Brolaski & Donovan.  

Last post I forgot to add links, both of the upcoming reading from my books Occultations and (the multi-media) Prefab Eulogies at If Not for Kidnap Poetry, as well as the No Tell Motel Best Poetry of 2009 Holiday List (to promote the small presses & poets who have published work this year).  Jen Coleman, who I met for the first time at EconVergence Conference, will be reading at If Not for Kidnap Poetry (when/where/what info in the post below).  Have been a fan of Jen's work since I first ran into it on the web circa 2005, so it'll be a treat for me to hear more from a manuscript she's working on (really cool, how to call them, miniature radicalized allegories?), to talk some more while, or perhaps after, hearing what sounds like what will be some good live music.  The visual artist's pieces are also very interesting, but one only gets so much of the experience of an installation from looking at small photos online.  So, looking forward to it.  

As for the No Tell list, my picks are up now.  I tried to pick works that hadn't yet been picked by others, and, of course, books that are in print (not online).  This was difficult, as the list could have gone on for at least 50 titles, longer if I actually read a lot, or fast, which I don't.  Or if I'd taken the time to get input from other Wheelhouse editors or contributors, which I didn't.  

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In the coming weeks I'll put a schedule of readings (city/venue/date) up here; just getting that stuff together now, so right now the calender reads like a 4am television program listing.

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After being slowed by health issues--not just me this time!--Wheelhouse is getting back on track, working on finishing books by Felino Soriano, Elizabeth Kate Switaj, Uche Nduka, Laura Carter, Stan Apps, as well as Wheelhouse #9, which is beginning to take shape as we begin the process of deciding which pieces sent to us we'll be using.  We plan to release both the new issue and the first two chapbooks--by Soriano & Switaj--in the coming weeks.  That is, in time for an early winter release.  Shortly after that we'll be rolling out chapbooks 1-2 at a time, and prepping for some more PRESS events, including regional performances, and later, a reading/talk by SF poet Eleni Stecopolous and Seattle poet/editor (of Bird Dog Magazine) Sarah Mangold.  Meantime, if you haven't already, head on over to Wheelhouse & read the PRESS Anthology, which comes out of the PRESS Literary Conference, which as part of PRESS, occurs every other year (as long as we can get the funds for it, and given the state of the economy, grants are going to be hard to come by for next year).

Which reminds me to thank David Buuck, on behalf of Wheelhouse AND The Evergreen State College, Slightly West Literary Journal, and other co-sponsors of PRESS, for his incredibly generative performance/reading/discussion/talk.  A great turnout & now several students interested more than ever in poets theater, work that has a real stake, both politically and aesthetically.  

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Also, if you are in the Bay Area, check out Nonsite Collective.  The upcoming talk/performance by Marcus Civin I wish I could go to; the work is right up my alley, it seems.  From the announcement:

...join the Nonsite Collective this Saturday, November 21, at 3:30 PM for work by Marcus Civin (performance and talk) in discussion with Chris Nagler and Real Time Ethics.

935 Natoma Street, San Francisco

between 10th and 11th Streets

and between Mission and Howard

close to the Civic Center BART Station

and the Van Ness MUNI station

From Chris Nagler:

Marcus Civin’s performance work asks questions about bodily politics, and puts together serial kinetic phrases about his own. He reframes that old contested territory, the ordinary, or ‘pedestrian’ body. His teacher, the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, wrote, in 1968, of her own work as “a control that seems geared to the actual time it takes the actual weight of the body to go through the prescribed motions, rather than an adherence to an imposed ordering of time. In other words, the demands made on the body’s (actual) energy resources appear to be commensurate with the task . . .” Does this equation balance in the ordinary body of today, when the ‘prescribed motions’ are often obscure, charged with impossible simultaneities, or shamed with distant, mechanized heroism. And what to do with all that ‘seeming’ ? 

In his words:

My everyday life reveals my cowardice, my normalcy, my difficulty.

Every time I do my ritual, it is slightly different. I think about what

I would do in an extreme situation. I assume, I would know what to do

in an extreme situation, but I need practice.

Some possible issues and questions that may arise:

What kind of athlete or non-athlete is the contemporary American citizen?

The slapstick histories of multitasking

Do the body’s economies (sexual, affective, energetic) reflect/counter/react to/empty into The Economy? How. specifically?

Is ‘survival’ a performance, a fetish, a nostalgia, an ordinary reality? Which for whom?

Is represented labor still labor and is labored representation still representation? Who says so?

___

From Marcus Civin:

"I had been so confident and now I had an awful feeling that the war had gotten out of my hands" 

                                    --Gertrude Stein as Alice B. Toklas (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas)

With the Nonsite Collective, Marcus Civin will project, re-build, perform gestures and utterances that riff on themes from his recent performance work — performance work that lands a poor, rough tramp behind enemy lines and forces the poor, rough tramp to decide: am I a killer, OR am I a clown?

Or: "In a series, objects become undefined simulacra one of the other. And so, along with the objects, do the people that produce them." -- Jean Baudrillard (Simulations)

I handle an ax, matches, a deck of cards, a spear, drips of water. I make a bathtub. Am I a bathtub. Or: I make a small black painting.

Or: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjarLbD9r30&feature=related

Or: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcx9BJRadfw

Participants might enjoy watching:

http://www.archive.org/details/busterkeatonfilm (SAMUEL BECKETT, FILM)

and/or

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8727552817849141561# (BUSTER KEATON, HARD TIMES)

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Ritual No. 6, from Occultations:

6. (muted domestic pornography)

 

We must insist upon the idea of culture-in-action, of culture growing within us like a new organ, a sort of second breath: and on civilization as an applied culture controlling even our subtlest actions, a presence of mind  --  Artaud

 

Never so held in held

Suspense  : the long

 

Disease is pornographic

Graphic despite I knowing

 

What will come of this

This narrative as usual

 

As so much desolate

Hunger there is some I

 

Tensing with a perverting here

Here the sheen of a slowly open

 

Curve a depth I’ve seen this before

Before I roamed corporate clinics

 

My holes are a constant testing 

Ground perpetual breaks of strata

 

In continuity becomes continuity : I 

I here cannot see is a here with yet no

 

Name his delivery system holds I up

Up by its penis a story halos above

 

It : degraded as a convergence of aporias 

The strange tremor the unusual poverties

 

Of not knowing what will come of this this