Barthes on Tenderness

"There is not only need for tenderness, there is also need to be tender for the other: we shut ourselves up in a mutual kindness, we mother each other reciprocally; we return to the root of all relations, where need and desire join. The tender gesture says: ask me anything that can put your body to sleep, but also do not forget that I desire you--a little, lightly, without trying to seize anything right away."

from the Letters of Hart Crane

"For many days, now, I have gone about quite dumb with something for which "happiness" must be too mild a term. At any rate, my aptitude for communication, such as it is!, has been limited to one person alone, and perhaps for the first time in my life (and, I can only think that it is for the last, so far is my imagination from the conception of anything more profound and lovely than this love). I have wanted to write you more than once, but it will take many letters to let you know what I mean (for myself, at least) when I say that I have seen the Word made Flesh. I mean nothing less, and I know now that there is such a thing as indestructibility. In the deepest sense, where flesh became transformed through intensity of response to counter-response, where sex was beaten out, where a purity of joy was reached that included tears. It’s true, Waldo, that so much more than my frustrations and multitude of humiliations has been answered in this reality and promise that I feel that whatever event the future holds in justified beforehand. And I have been able to give freedom and life which was acknowledged in the ecstasy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful bridge of the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with another."

Hart Crane to Waldo Frank
April 21, 1924

If the Glover Fits

How cool is it that Crispin Glover is going to play Grendel in a film version of Beowulf? Check it out:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0442933/

The only thing cooler is that Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson are teaming up to bring an Upton Sinclair novel to the screen:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0469494/

Then again, David Fincher is directing again, so...:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000399/

And then there's the Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman movie...

A Humble Observation

Why is the creative writing MFA the only "MFA" that ever gets shit on? Why do we never hear someone say: "That goddamn NYU film school--all it churns out are clones?" Or, of graduates from Juliard,--"those pricks play a piano too much like those other pricks." This exasperation with poetry MFA's, in particular, seems to me a lame, unimaginative holdover from the Donald Hall school of exclusionism, which is now close to 30 years old. Sure, there are an inordinate number of MFA (and, now, PhD) creative writing programs willing to confer degrees on far too many uninspired (and uninspiring) writers. And sure, it's easy to slam many of these students and their teachers as purveyors of a kind of blandness. But this argument is too easy. It's all well and (more than) good to be suspicious of group-think, mediocrity, and Po-biz industrialism. But since most, if not all, of us are graduates from such programs, maybe we should all just shut up and write our poems. Maybe we should be content with that.

Sounding Off

"So as history dictates, perhaps the pendulum should swing wildly the other way and we should plunge back into the aural. Inject a kind of layered dynamism into poetry, a highly concentrated polyglot song where the voice is not a mimesis of the natural plain spoken but instead “speaks” in a stylized invented language that reflects and ultimately synthesizes the careening sounds of a shrinking late capitalist world."

It's something to think about. Here's the rest of Cathy Park Hong's essay:

http://slapkoppel.blogspot.com/2006/03/essay-by-cathy-park-hong.html

Some Upcoming Readings and Such

ARIZONA QUARTERLY SYMPOSIUM
Friday, March 31 (Foundation/Alumni Bldg. Dining Rm, 1111 N. Cherry)
10 am: "The Pleasures of Deja Dit: Citation, Intertext & Ekphrasis in Recent Experimental Poetry," Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University
Saturday, April 1 (Foundation/Alumni Bldg. Dining Rm, 1111 N. Cherry)
10 am: "The Authority of Lyric," Robert Von Hallberg, University of Chicago

POG PRESENTS
Saturday, April 1, (5 pm Tucson Museum of Art Education Auditorium, 140 N. Main Avenue)
A conversation with and between Marjorie Perloff and Robert von Hallberg

SONORA REVIEW 25TH ANNIVERSARY READING
Monday, April 3rd (3:00 PM, lower level of the University of Arizona Bookstore)
G.C. Waldrep, Antonya Nelson, Ken Lamberton

Coming in April, CUE4. Featuring new work by Michael Palmer, David Lehman, G.C. Waldrep, Lisa Jarnot, Brian Clements, Dan Hoy, Andrew Zawacki, Jason Zuzga, Stephanie Balzer, Brandon A. Wyant...

Celan

"Poetry, isn't it confidence? Isn't poetry a progression toward the Real, working amid what surrounds and seizes us? To engage oneself--isn't that, above all, to answer back?"

Eat Me

Cannibal: Volume One, Issue One

The premier issue will be ready to ship April 1st.

Cannibal is 88 pages, hand-bound, with a screenprinted cover. The first issue features poems from Geoffrey Babbit, Andrea Baker, Zach Barocas, Jim Behrle, FJ Bergmann, Edmund Berrigan, Anne Boyer, Jenna Cardinale, Laura Carter, Adam Clay, Clayton Couch, Bruce Covey, AnnMarie Eldon, Jane Gregory, Anthony Hawley, Brian Howe, Brenda Iijima, Lisa Jarnot, Shannon Jonas, Erica Kaufman, Alex Lemon, Tao Lin, Rebecca Loudon, Joseph Massey, Andrew Mister, K. Silem Mohammad, Valzhyna Mort, Gina Myers, The Pines, Emma Ramey, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Sandra Simonds, Laura Solomon, Gabriella Torres, Jen Tynes, and Dustin Williamson

Please help spread the word.

Send your check to Matthew Henriksen/95 Clay Street, 3L/Brooklyn, NY 11222. Don't send or write the checks to Cannibal because he doesn't live here. Or use Paypal.

Order One Issue, $10

http://flesheatingpoems.blogspot.com/

Sprung Back

Back from Mexico with three new poems, though no "finished" full-length manuscript to speak of. Finally wrote my Homage to Celan. Been trying to write that one for a long time.

from the desk of Charles Alexander

"If you haven't made plans for next Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (March 14-16) yet, I ask you to consider attending the events featuring poets Simon Pettet, Annie Guthrie, and David Abel. In addition to these three, an ensemble of Tucson poets and others, including (but not necessarily limited to) Dawn Pendergast, Jimmy Lo, and myself, will perform works from the scores of Jackson Mac Low, one of America's great avant-garde poets and creators of performance works. Mac Low died in December 2004, but his work definitely lives on, including in the book DOINGS, a gathering of his performance scores and instructions published in 2005 by Granary Books.

I look forward to seeing many of you at these events.

Tuesday, Marcy 14, 8pm: Reading at Cushing Street Bar & RestaurantWednesday, March 15, 7pm: Performance Works at Dinnerware Contemporary Art
Thursday, March 16, 7pm: Conversation with the Poets at Casa Libre en la Solana

For more information email me back or call 520-620-1626 in Tucson."

Verge 2

Everything is more than it means.

A New Prose Poem Anthology

Now Available--PP/FF:  An Anthology

A virtual who's-who of innovative writing today, including Kim
Addonizio, Kazim Ali, Eula Biss, Stuart Dybek, Lydia Davis,
Sean Thomas Dougherty, Brian Evenson, Raymond Federman,
Noah Eli Gordon, Arielle Greenberg, Laird Hunt, Harold Jaffe,
Kent Johnson, Sally Keith, Gary Lutz, Cris Mazza, Daniel Nester,
Ethan Paquin, Martha Ronk, Morgan Lucas Schuldt,
Jessica Treat, Diane Williams, G.C. Waldrep and 40 others!

240 pages, $20.  ISBN 0-9703165-1-8. Order now:
available at http://www.starcherone.com/ppff.htm

Official release: July 1. Reading of contributors
to the PP/FF anthology, Night & Day, Park Slope, Brooklyn,
NY, July 26.

Verge 1

To be wholly without intention--as breath, sound, image. To write the death that comes a mouthful at a time.

A Wake-ning 2

". . . a rude breathing on the void of to be..."

-Joyce

A Wake-ning 1

"In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the units that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality."

-Joyce

Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean They're Not Out to Get You

Halliburton detention centers in the US? Ain't as far fetched as it sounds:

Alternet News Item about Bush/Cheney/Gonzales Labor Camp Dreams.

In the POOL with Dean

There's a short but provocative interview with Dean Young in the latest issue of POOL. Whatever you may think of his poetry, the excerpt below seems to be getting at something:

"I've said this before: we've had over a hundred years of experimentation and it's time for results. The "experiment" began with clear objectives of resistance, be it through Dada sabotage, surrealist blasphemy or irrational assertion. Jacques Roubaud, writing about OULIPO, pointed out that resistant art is dependent upon that which it resists; it functions primarily as critique. While that isn't always true (America especially will always have its rebels without causes), it does point towards why I find so much of what is flashing its experimental gang signs uncompellingly: the resistance has become rather old hat (to the coherent self, to the authority of the author, to the supposedly implicit and guilty biases of language itself as well as the whole capitalist/bourgeois ball of voting booths) and of blurred objectives. When all the fences have been knocked down, it doesn't seem to be very impressive to pretend you're jumping them. While matters in society remain to be resisted, matters in poetry definetly not so much. The critique to past formalities and aesthetics has done its work, and it seems time to enter a period of recuperation. The poetics of inclusion (thank you for happening) has led to a formlessness, because to a great extent form is created by exclusion, by the presence of a decision. What is inside (which creates / defines shape) is clarified by what has been made to be outside. A sort of post-modern sentimentalism also assumes an a priori ruin of culture, self, history and language that has become unexamined. Much experimental writing is called poetry by default; it can't be published or shelved as any other genre and that doesn't strike me as a very positive approach to the art. So frightened of being repetitive (when reinteration has always been one of art's tasks and opportunities), the experimental is also sentimental in its fetish for novelty (ooh, let's put all the consonants on one page and the vowels on the other, no one's done that before!) and makes a mockery of the Apoollonairian call for invention. This clamoring for the new leads to the scarification of amazement. It doesn't take much reasoning to see how experimental writing is responsible for the hole in the ozone and the fact that menus have so many occult adjectives on them. And while this is anecdotal, I feel it qualifies as important evidence: I have seen on more than one occassion, experimental writers leaving the restroom without washing their hands. They think epidemiology is a construct."

Charles on Gerard

"Hopkins has style, style to burn, onto-theological style . . . He has, in fact, great style. Great style is transcendence and flash. It is that moment of exscalation that moment when the light of recognition and understanding, the phosphorous-flare of perception renatures a thing. You find the burn and you feed it. There is, as Hopkins said, the dearest freshness deep down things. True style exfoliates this into the sudden glare of awareness. Great style is like that, linked moments of exscalation down the page--fluid, not static and insular, the after-aura of rediscovery flooding the thing in question. I'm talking about poems here--the after-aura spreading and interlocking, a retreating radiance highlighting language and its excavations of new combinations and new geographies . . . Perhaps [Hopkin's poems] were written for instruments that don't exist yet."

-Charles Wright