Happy BDay Adam

I'll miss you at the reading tonight, my friend.

Don't Forget

Steal This Reading:
a Brooklyn Book Burning

Thursday, January 31st 7-11 PM
East Coast Aliens
216 Franklin Street

Doors 7 PM, $6 =Admission + Two Drinks

CD Wright, Eleni Sikelianos, Graham Foust, Joyelle McSweeney, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Julie Doxsee, Max Winter, Adam Clay, Zachary Schomburg, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Lily Brown, Rauan Klassnik, Cindy Savett, Jon Thompson, Melanie Hubbard

Hosted by Black Ocean, Cannibal Books, Free Verse Editions, Kitchen Press, Octopus, Tarpaulin Sky Press & Typo.

Charles Wright in Conversation: Fifteen Interviews

After years of waiting, Charles Wright in Conversation will debut this year. Thanks to Robert Denham for including my interview from the Sonora Review. Here's a peek at the table of contents:

A Charles Wright Chronology 7
Preface 14
Abbreviations and Shortened Forms 16
1. An Interview with David St. John (1979) 17
2. An Interview with David Remnick (1983) 34
3. Charles Wright on Eugenio Montale and Dino Campana: An Interview with Mary Zeppa (1985) 46
4. “Metaphysics of the Quotidian”: A Conversation with Stan Sanvel Rubin & William Heyen (1986) 59
5. A Conversation with Miriam Marty Clark and Michael McFee (1989) 80
6. An Interview with J.D. McClatchy (1991) 97
7. An Interview with Ernest Suarez and Amy Verner (1998) 107
8. An Interview with Andrew Zawacki (1998) 136
9. An Interview with Troy Teegarden (1998) 152
10. Through Purgatory to Appalachia: An Interview with Martin Caseley (2000) 157
11. An Interview with Willard Spiegelman (2000) 168
12. An Interview with Ted Genoways (2000) 190
13. An Interview with Morgan Schuldt (2002) 202
14. Oblivion’s Glow: The (Post)Southern Sides of Charles Wright: An Interview with Daniel Cross Turner (2005) 209
15. An Interview with Louis Bourgeois (2006) 224
Charles Wright: A Selected Bibliography 234
Notes 276
Index 287

Here's one of my favorite statements on poetry:

"Poetry comes, for lack of better words, from the heart (the "foul rag-and-bone-shop of the heart," as Yeats had it), and from the soul—neither a place you can put your finger on, but a place you can surely put your foot in, if you don't watch out. It is a matter of "soul making," as John Keats said. It truly is not a matter of arrangement, of performance, of presentation, or rhetorical dazzle or surprise, though all of those matters may be part of it. It is not the distractions, but the focus. It is not the undercard, but the main event. There is always an emotional half to the equation, but the other half is always craft—you have to be able to say it your way. It's the only time that two plus one makes two—language is half, technique is half, and emotion is half. An emotional value is always involved. Distortions and side events are often interesting and entertaining, but they are not the stillness and fathered attention at road's end. It's not a question of paper, or type-writers, of white space or of dark space—it's a question of what's in your life, and where you want that life to lead you. You've only got one, and you can fill it with whatever you want. You're free and American. But if it is poetry that you want, then don't look for language games, intellectual rip-offs, or rhetorical sing-alongs. It's too often been a matter of life and death to those who really cared. You've got to know, in your heart of hearts, that Keats is right, that it is about soul-making, that it does matter, and that it can make you or break you as a person. It is the main event, as I say, and ancillary to nothing. It's either Atonement or At Onement, but it is one of them."

-Charles Wright

Because we is not gently

James Longenbach reviews George Oppen's Selected Prose.

Matt Henricksen on Gram Parsons and Frank Stanford.

A giant list of off-site AWP goings-on.

Review of Robert Pollard's new record, Superman Was a Rocker.

Skin Alphabet.

Congrats Arianne

If you haven't heard the name Arianne Zwartjes spoken in poetry circles yet, you will. Add to your allknowingness by picking up a copy of her first chapbook, Stitched (A Surface Opens), now available over at the New Michigan Press website.

"These intricate essays use mathematics and poetry, the intersection of language and thought, to interrogate and describe the world. The cast list includes Gauss, Euclid, Weil, Rumi, Heidegger, Eliot, Carson, and Calvino. Thinky and beautiful, Zwartjes's essays are open, electrical explorations in space."

CF

Typo is now accepting submissions for issue 11.

"All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle . . ."

from The Center for Public Integrity

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

Read the entire overview here.

Or wow your friends with this interactive search database.

"Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or the public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale--who writes always to the unknown friend."
*--Emerson

New Coconut

"Coconut Eleven—featuring spicy new poems by Liz Waldner, 
Carla Harryman, Dorothea Lasky, Chris Pusateri, Peter Davis, 
Melissa Benham, Amber Nelson, Kismet Al-Hussaini, Kathleen Rooney 
& Elisa Gabbert, Anna Fulford, Marco Giovenale, Michael Sikkema, 
Sun Yung Shin, Maureen Thorson, Jordan Davis, Mara Vahratian, 
Philip Metres, Janet Holmes, Fritz Ward, Susan Scarlata, Jeni Olin, 
Jon Link, and Rebecca Hazelton—is now live on the web.  

Directions for a drawer found in a drawer at Target

"We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?"

--Geoffrey Hill

Welcome, Lucas, to your last month of your first year.

Congrats Sommer!

Get your copy of Sommer Browning's Vale Tudo from Horse Less Press. Do it now.

c 2008, 32 pages.
"Some of you will never go to Long Island."
8.5x5.5, staple-bound.
cover art by Conan Kelly.
And a special gift! Included with each book is a hand-drawn Ultimate Fighter Playing Card by Sommer Browning.

from Vale Tudo

Some of you will never go to Long Island. Some of you will but will never go to Walt Whitman Mall. Some of you will enter Walt Whitman Mall and head straight for Foot Locker. So let me tell you about the facade of Walt Whitman Mall, how it’s carved with passages from Leaves of Grass, how the blocky Emigrant Savings Bank sign is bolted to the poem.

A child said what is the grass? Fetching Emigrant Savings
Bank it to me with full hands How could I answer Get more
money for your money the child? ...I do not know what it is
any more than he.

More Mad Song

More of Michael Schiavo's Mad Song is now up at Guernica.

from BBC News

Online bidding for a wall painted on by graffiti artist Banksy has closed with a final bid of £208,100.

However, neither auction site eBay nor seller Luti Fagbenle has confirmed if the bid has been accepted.

The painting is on a wall on the side of a media production firm's base in Portobello Road in west London. Mr Fagbenle owns the company.

The final bid does not include the cost of removal and repair of the wall, estimated to be about £5,000.

The artwork is now covered in plastic and shows a painter finishing off the word "Banksy".

'Maverick'

Bobby Read, art expert at specialist insurer Hiscox, said: "Banksy is a maverick as well as a hugely talented artist. It's an intoxicating combination for buyers as this price shows.

"The Portobello Road wall is a special piece and probably the largest piece of Banksy art work to have been sold at a public auction.

"This sale poses many interesting questions for the art world. How do you move a piece of work like this, how do you display it and how do you insure it?"

Included on the auction page was a description of how Banksy managed to paint the picture without being discovered.

Broad-daylight graffiti

The posting explained: "One might guess that he would come in the middle of the night but instead he got some people to put a massive scaffolding in on a Sunday morning with Portobello Market at full swing.

"Even someone from my office saw it and thought nothing of it."

The vendor estimates that the cost of removing the painting will be about £5,000, which would have to be paid by the buyer.

There were a total of 69 bids for the painting.

2007 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists
Nonfiction
Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism, Hill & Wang
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848, Oxford University Press
Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Doubleday
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, Doubleday
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne BKs/St. Martin’s

Fiction
Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games, HarperCollins
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Riverhead
Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men. Dial Press
Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravediggers Daughter. Ecco
Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher, S. & S.

Biography
Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, Yale University Press
Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, Knopf
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison. Knopf
John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, Knopf
Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy, Penguin Press

Poetry
Mary Jo Bang, Elegy, Graywolf
Matthea Harvey, Modern Life, Graywolf
Michael O'Brien, Sleeping and Waking, Flood
Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan, Flood
Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems, Archipelago

Black Mountain (no, not THAT Black Mountain)

Listen to the new Black Mountain album, In the Future, here.

Black Mountain will make their national television debut on the Conan O'Brien program February 21. They're playing at Hotel Congress in Tucson Feb. 8 .

The Best Off-Site Reading at AWP

A huge debt of thanks to Matt Henricksen for organizing this event--

Steal This Reading:
a Brooklyn Book Burning

Thursday, January 31st 7-11 PM
East Coast Aliens
216 Franklin Street

Doors 7 PM, $6 =Admission + Two Drinks

CD Wright
Eleni Sikelianos
Graham Foust
Joyelle McSweeney
Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Julie Doxsee
Max Winter
Adam Clay
Zachary Schomburg
Morgan Lucas Schuldt
Lily Brown
Rauan Klassnik
Cindy Savett
Jon Thompson
Melanie Hubbard

Hosted by Black Ocean, Cannibal Books, Free Verse Editions, Kitchen Press, Octopus, Tarpaulin Sky Press & Typo.


Host Websites

Black Ocean: blackocean.org
Cannibal Books: flesheatingpoems.blogspot.com
Free Verse Editions: parlorpress.com/freeverse
Kitchen Press: kitchen-press-book-store.blogspot.com
Octopus: octopusmagazine.com
Tarpaulin Sky Press: tarpaulinsky.com/Press/index.html
Typo: typomag.com


Author Bios

Lily Brown is from the east coast but currently lives on the west coast. She is the author of the chapbook, The Renaissance Sheet, published by Octopus Books in 2007. Her second chapbook, Old with You, is forthcoming from Kitchen Press. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Typo, Octopus, Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, Cannibal, Handsome and 26.

Julie Doxsee was born in London, Ontario. Her poems have appeared in over thirty-five national and international journals, including Aufgabe, Fourteen Hills, and Tarpaulin Sky. Forthcoming publications include two books: Objects for a Fog Death (Black Ocean, 2008/2009) and Undersleep (Octopus Books 2008), and two chapbooks: You Will Build a City Out of Rags (Whole Coconut 2007) and New Body a Seafloor Body (Seeing Eye Books 2008). The Knife-Grasses (Octopus Books), and Fog Quartets (horse less press) are now available. She is full-time faculty at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey.

Graham Foust lives in Oakland, California with his wife Amy and his son Merle. He teaches writing and literature at Saint Mary's College of California, and his most recent book is Necessary Stranger (Flood Editions, 2007).

Rauan Klassnik was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. In his early teens he moved to Dallas Texas with his family. Much of his time is now spent in Mexico. His poems have appeared in Caesura, Hunger Mountain, Pilot Poetry, No Tell Motel, The Kennesaw Review, Front Porch, The Mississippi Review, The North American Review, MiPoesias, Handsome , and many other journals. His chapbook, "Stitches" was published by Firewheel Editions in 2002 and his first full-length collection, Holy Land, will be released by Black Ocean in the Spring of 2008.

Melanie Hubbard lives in Ruskin, FL, with her family. Recently the recipient of an NEH fellowship, she has spent the past year completing a scholarly book on Emily Dickinson's poems in relation to developments in philosophy and linguistic theory, the invention of photography and the discovery of electricity, and changes in rhetoric, editorial theory, and popular manuscript activity. She also writes personal essays, commentaries, book reviews, and features for the St. Petersburg Times. Poems can be found in TYPO, Swink, Fence, Cab/Net, horse less review, and Cannibal.

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of Nylund, The Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007). She is also the author of three titles from Fence Books: Flet, The Red Bird, and The Commandrine and Other Poems. She is a co-founder and co-editor of Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web quarterly for international writing and hybrid forms. She writes regular reviews for Rain Taxi, The Constant Critic, and other venues and teaches in the MFA Program at Notre Dame.

Cindy Savett teaches poetry workshops at psychiatric institutions in the Philadelphia area to both acute short-term and residential patients. Her first book, Child in the Road, has recently been released. In addition, she is published in numerous print and on-line journals, including Margie, Heliotrope, LIT, The Marlboro Review, 26 Magazine, Cutbank, and Free Verse. She is also at work on a memoir on the death of her daughter. Cindy has served on several school Boards and other non-profit agencies, and spent fifteen years in the retail business, traveling extensively overseas. Born and raised in the Philadelphia area, she currently lives in Merion, Pennsylvania with her husband and children.

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books, including The California Poem and The Book of Jon. Du Soleil, de l’histoire, de la vision, a selected poems translated into French appeared this fall. Forthcoming are Body Clock and her translation of Jacques Roubaud’s Exchanges de la lumière.

Zachary Schomburg was born in Omaha, Nebraska, spent his childhood in Iowa, and received his BA from College of the Ozarks. Currently, he's pursuing a doctorate in creative writing from the University of Nebraska. Schomburg edits Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books, and co-curates the Clean Part Reading Series in Lincoln, NE. His poems have appeared in the Canary, CutBank, Diagram, Ducky, Fence, Forklift, Ohio, Good Foot, the Hat, La Petite Zine, Lamination Colony, LIT, Mid-American Review, Mipoesias, No Tell Motel, Northwest Review, Parakeet, Pettycoat Relaxer, Spork, Swink, Tarpaulin Sky, Unpleasant Event Schedule, and Washington Square Review. His debut collection, The Man Suit, was published Black Ocean in 2007.

Morgan Lucas Schuldt is the author of Verge (Free Verse Editions, 2007) and Otherhow (Kitchen Press, 2007), a chapbook. He lives in Tucson where he edits the literary journal CUE and the chapbook series CUE Editions.

Jon Thompson teaches at North Carolina State University where he edits Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics and the new poetry series, Free Verse Editions. His first collection was The Book of the Floating World, which was reissued in an new expanded edition in 2007. His current poetry manuscript is titled Strange Country.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the co-author, with Noah Eli Gordon, of Figures for a Darkroom Voice (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007). He is also the author of Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Pinball, 2005), Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (U of Iowa, 2006), and The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (forthcoming from Tupelo Press). He holds a PhD from University of Denver and lives in Chicago where he teaches at Loyola University. His first film, Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape, is due out in 2008.

Max Winter is the author of The Pictures (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007). He is also the winner of the Fifth Annual Boston Review Poetry Contest, and has published poems in Free Verse, New American Writing, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, The Canary, Denver Quarterly, and Typo. He has published reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, and BOMB, and is a Poetry Editor of Fence.

C.D. Wright was born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She is the author of a dozen books. Her most recent titles are One Big Self: An Investigation (Copper Canyon, 2007), Like Something Flying Backwards, New and Selected (Bloodaxe Editions, 2007), Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (Copper Canyon, 2005). Rising, Falling, Hovering will be out in 2008, also from Copper Canyon Press. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Lannan Foundation. Steal Away: Selected and New Poems was a finalist for the 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2004 she was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 2005 she was given the Robert Creeley Award and elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Wright is the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University. She lives outside of Providence with her husband, poet Forrest Gander.


Directions to East Coast Aliens
216 Franklin Street
between Green & Huron
Greenpoint, Brooklyn

by taxi (recommended)

from Midtown Manhattan
Take the upper level of the Queensborough Bridge into Queens & turn left on 21st Street. Cross the Pulaski Bridge, which turns into McGuiness Boulevard on the Brooklyn side. Take the third right after the bridge at Huron St. After two blocks turn right on Franklin St. East Coast Aliens is on the right side. The ride from Midtown (w/ gratuity) should cost between $20-25.

from Lower Manhattan
Take the Williamsburg Bridge to the BQE (Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) north to McGuiness Boulevard (Exit 33). Turn left onto McGuiness Boulevard. After approximately eight blocks turn left on Greenpoint Avenue. After three blocks turn right on Franklin Street. East Coast Aliens is four blocks up on the right side. The ride from Lower Manhattan (w/ gratuity) should range between $20-25.

by train (for the adventuresome & frugal)

from Midtown Manhattan
Take the Queens-bound 7 train from Times Square, Bryant Park or Grand Central to Vernon/Jackson (the first stop after Grand Central). Exit at Jackson Ave. & walk one block east to the B61 bus stop at 11th St and Jackson Ave. Take the B61 two stops to Manhattan Ave. between Freeman and Green. Walk right on Green St. one block to Franklin St. & turn left. East Coast Aliens is on your left.

from Lower Manhattan (simpler than from Midtown)
Take the Brooklyn-bound L train to Lorimer. Transfer at the station to the Metropolitan stop of the G train. Take the Queens-bound G train two stops to Greenpoint Ave. Exit at India St. & walk one block north to Huron St. Turn left on Huron, walk one block to Franklin St. & turn right. East Coast Aliens is on your right.

from Brooklyn and Queens (or ride your bike!)
Take the G train to Greenpoint Ave. Exit at India St. & head north one block to Huron St. Turn left on Huron, walk one block to Franklin St. & turn right. East Coast Aliens is on your right.

This is a great idea.

Untitled Stuff No. 1

My favorite opening scenes from any movie ever:



THE TOP 10 TRADE BOOKS OF 2007, arbitrarily selected by Unnameable Books and alphabetically by authors:

1.
NOTES FROM THE AIR: Selected Later Poems
John Ashbery
Who doesn't love John Ashbery? I don't care if this book was published by Rupert Murdoch, nor would I care if the selections were made by a random number generator (They weren't -- Ashbery made the selections himself, and they are extraordinarily smart in their paratactical logic -- in fact, this book seems more "of a piece", and more ambitious, than any of the smaller books from which it is compiled): give me a couple hundred poems by Ashbery, printed beautifully on large pages (wide enough to hold most of his long lines) in a handsome clothbound book with a well-designed matte dustjacket, and I will love you forever.

2.
BLACK FIRE: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing
edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, first published in 1968.
I thought I was special because I owned a first edition of this book, which has long been out of print. But now it's back, from Black Classic Press, and readily available at the bookstore, and the Black Arts movement of the 1960s is now again here and now. The huge diversity of its aesthetics, and its importance to a wide diaspora of artistic lineages, is greater by far than you would expect if you have learned of the movement only from reductive textbooks and secondary anthologies compiled after the fact.

3.
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF ROBERT CREELEY, 1975-2005
Robert Creeley
Ok, so technically this book was published in 2006, but it takes more than a year to read it, and Creeley's ghost continues to haunt the contemporary world. He inhabits just about every poet writing today, and these last 30 years of his actual breathing, though not as widely loved as the first volume of his collected (now available in paperback) are carried everywhere by everybody, whether you buy this book or not. But if you do buy this book (and do buy it from me!), you'll probably be happier in the long haul. Onward!

4.
TODAY I WROTE NOTHING: The Selected Writings Of Daniil Kharms
Daniil Kharms
Edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich, who himself comprises one of the boundless energies of Ugly Duckling Presse, and who incidentally is reading here in January, TODAY I WROTE NOTHING includes many of the most astonishing condensed fictions (not, to be sure, "short stories") ever written.

5.
THE ALPHABET GAME: a bpNichol reader,
bpNichol, edited by Darren Wershler-Henry and Lori Emerson
bp Nichol (1944-1988) was a concrete poet, a sound artist, a 'pataphysical speculator, a linguistic mystic, a theoretician/practitioner whose output spanned genres, mediums both small and large, and decades. He wrote for the page, for the stage, for cassette tape and for television (yes, he worked on FRAGGLE ROCK), as well as for the potential of future works and forms. Finally, somebody has made a compendium of reasonably representative works, fit it all into 334 pages, and priced it at a very reasonable $21.95. I can't understand how the NY Times missed this one.

6.
I AM A BEAUTIFUL MONSTER: Poetry, Prose and Provocation
Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia (1879-1953) was a funny guy. His dada doings have long been overshadowed by other writers who are perhaps more easily incorporated into the official narrative of modernism, but NOW IN ENGLISH FOR THE FIRST TIME, thanks to the efforts of translator Marc Lowenthal and MIT Press, his writings remain "avant-garde" still for the post-avant century.

7.
AGAINST THE DAY
Thomas Pynchon
This is the only novel on my list. The rest of the top-10 books tend to get shelved in the Poetry section. Here in the book business, some years are like that. Perhaps the novel is a dying art form. In any case, this is the only new novel I have read all the way through to the end in the past year. And Michiko Kakutani hated it, which is probably a good sign: He’s doing something new! It’s not a good novel, it’s not a good Pynchon-novel, it’s something else and better.

8.
CALLER AND OTHER PIECES
Tom Raworth
Raworth's Collected was published a couple years back, but he keeps writing anyhow. These pieces include a mix of angry satires and the complex everyday language compositions that have kept him so intimately unfamiliar to us for the last 40 years or so. "examined every one real".

9.
DAY OCEAN STATE OF STAR’S NIGHT: Poems & Writings 1989 & 1999-2006
Leslie Scalapino
Scalapino is the edgiest thinker/writer/perceiver around right now on the edge where things happen, not cutting but expanding and exciting, this “rim of occurrence”. Her books are always challenging to read (and even more challenging to sell), and entirely preoccupying. This collection, published in El-E-Phant format, allows her long poems to reflect on each other, her project become more self-apparent. “Only what one doesn’t know happens.”

10.
HUMAN RESOURCES
Rachel Zolf
From the notes at the end of the book: "Poems on pages 15, 23, 39, 51, 59, 69 and 77 were made using Lewis LaCook's Markov-chain based Flash poetry generators. All other poems were made by the author’s proprietary machine-mind™, with some assistance from WordCount™ and QueryCount™ at www.wordcount.org. The former is a searchable list of the 86,800 most frequently used words in English, while the latter is a searchable list of words most frequently queried in WordCount. / The author also used the Gematria of Nothing (GON) engine at www.mysticalinternet.com. Gematria is a method of Biblical exegesis based on assigned positive or negative numerical values of Hebrew letters and semantic links between words based on their values. The GON is a bizarre Christ-, crow- and empress-laden attempt to co-opt the serious practice of Hebrew numerology and apply it to select English words and phrases. The author co-opts GON for HR purposes. / WordCount values are represented in the text by the letter w; QueryCount by Q; and GON by G. As QueryCount rankings shuffle every few hours to reflect recent word queries, Q values in this text will not match present QueryCount rankings. Nor does GON‘s numerology always add up. Orthography and punctuation are also used as found.”

~

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.


WordCount tracks the way we use language. QueryCount tracks the way we use WordCount.

Hawkey & Hicks

One ear to your stomach, another to the sky.
Oh to be an angel (if there were any!) & go
straight into your body & look around
& maybe kiss the back of your lips with my lips
or whisper something, softly, “You are not alone
in the galaxy, my child, belly buttons are sphinxes,
a body riddled with answers, Tibetan monks
smell like sperm, tenderness is a touch monitored
by snails & sadness: an airspace, owned by Disney”
—O if we could lean back, &, leaning, widen
our eyes like Montgomery Clift! (His eyebrows
were doubled by those of an angel, standing in him.)
The coroner, after inspecting the body, only noted
he had an innie, an innie so far in it was missing—gone.

from Christian Hawkey's SONNETS IN THE MOUTH OF AN ELIZABETHAN WOLF

Oh, To Write a Poem in the Manner of Iggy Pop . . .

Adios

The Tucson literary scene just got a lot smaller. Goodbye, Spork. We'll miss you.

Putting the -ensian on Dick

Don't forget to watch The Wire's first episode of its fifth and final season tonight. Here's an article in the Sunday Times today, and a New Yorker profile of the show's creator, David Simon.

AWP in NYC

The 2008 Conference & Bookfair in NYC is sold out.
No more passes will be sold. No onsite registration will be available. 7,000 people will be attending the NYC conference. Only pre-registered individuals possessing a registration badge will be admitted into the conference events & bookfair. Thank you for your support.


Oops. Anyone else out there not registered yet?

One Filmmaker's Vivid Tales of Fathers and Other Strangers

by Matt Zoller Seitz, The New York Times

The films of the writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson are obsessed with the destruction and reinvention of families, particularly the anxiety of influence felt so keenly in the relationship between distant, absent or controlling fathers and their grievously wounded sons. This in itself is not remarkable. What is remarkable, or at least striking, is how vividly the theme manifests itself in the stories that Mr. Anderson tells, and the evolving style with which he tells them.

The career of Mr. Anderson, whose first four features will be screened on Saturday and Sunday at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, is on the minds of cinephiles with the arrival of his fifth movie, “There Will Be Blood,” a kinetic period piece about a driven oil prospector, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, who builds a financial empire atop the self-destroyed ruins of his personal life.

Whether “Blood” succeeds in all of its varied, wildly ambitious aims is a matter of debate among critics. But there seems to be a consensus that Mr. Anderson — a largely self-taught filmmaker, criticized in some quarters for a hyperkinetic style thick with instances of cinematic genuflection — has forged a distinct voice after a decade of sensuous wide-screen searching.

That evolution is inscribed in his first four movies: “Hard Eight,” “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia” and “Punch-Drunk Love.” Viewed consecutively they chart the evolution of a style that blooms like the titular flower in the opening credits of “Magnolia.”

‘Hard Eight’

Mr. Anderson’s debut, “Hard Eight” (1996), was a potboiler in the mode that the film historian David Bordwell calls “indie guignol.” John C. Reilly plays John, a sad sack who is instructed by a dapper old gangster named Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) and falls in love with a waitress and self-abasing prostitute (Gwyneth Paltrow). Mr. Anderson directed “Hard Eight” with a poise that mimics Sydney’s rock-of-ages cool. But in its restless trying on of visual and verbal modes, the movie’s heart seems more aligned with the malleable seeker John.

The poetic, profane dialogue in “Hard Eight” owes much to David Mamet, an admirer of Anderson’s movies whose longtime collaborator, the actor and cardsharp Ricky Jay, acted in Mr. Anderson’s “Boogie Nights” and narrated and acted in “Magnolia.” The visuals borrow from giants of ’70s American filmmaking, notably the unhinged innocent Hal Ashby (“Shampoo”) and John Cassavetes, whose improvisation-heavy approach toward performance is evoked throughout Mr. Anderson’s films, down to the convention of having actors play characters who share their first names.

Looming over Mr. Anderson’s shoulder is Martin Scorsese, whose adrenaline-jacked post-“Raging Bull” movies obviously helped forge Mr. Anderson’s compositions and camera movements and his sense of how to cut action to music.

‘Boogie Nights’

Mr. Anderson’s comedy-drama about the pornographic film industry, “Boogie Nights” (1997), was so brazen in its appropriation of techniques, situations and set pieces from great older films that at times it suggested a 35-millimeter version of one of those Top 40 record collections sold on local TV: Scorsese-style high-speed dolly-zooms that lunge into actors’ faces! The walking-into-the-pool shot from “I Am Cuba”! Quentin Tarantino-style freaky monologues that build toward acts of violence! And much, much more!

Some of these elements were undeniably spectacular, notably the film’s opening tracking shot, which Mr. Anderson modeled on similarly acrobatic long takes in “Touch of Evil” and “Goodfellas.” Others were the auteur equivalent of chewing with one’s mouth open.

But lurking beyond (or beneath) the homage was Mr. Anderson’s own sensibility, marked by a dry, goofy wit (picture Mark Wahlberg and Mr. Reilly in “Boogie Nights” bragging about how much they can bench-press) and a bracingly unironic emotional directness. The cocaine-fueled moment when the young porn star Rollergirl (Heather Graham) tearfully asks her mentor, Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), to be her mommy is trite and on the nose; it’s also exactly the sort of thing Rollergirl would say.

‘Magnolia’

“Magnolia” (1999), an ensemble drama about family, fate and coincidence, is longer, louder and more populous than “Boogie Nights” — no mean feat. Its fusion of mundane domestic tragedy, dark-night-of-the-soul emoting and hypermuscular camerawork suggests Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” on jet-propelled roller skates. (Mr. Altman embraced Mr. Anderson, even asking him to be his directorial understudy should he expire before completing what would become his final feature, “A Prairie Home Companion.” “There Will Be Blood” is dedicated to Mr. Altman.)

But if the film’s miscalculations were magnified by its grandiosity, its sincerity was too. The wilder conceits in “Magnolia” — a biblical rain of frogs; a musical montage in which principal characters sing verses from Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up” — were more startling for being heartfelt.

So too were the film’s confrontations and reconciliations, the most painful of which forced resentful parents and children to move beyond misery and lineage and into enlightenment. Jimmy Gator (Mr. Hall), a philandering, child-abusing quiz-show host says, “We might be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” But it is. The final meeting of the cancer-ravaged tycoon Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) and his long-estranged son, the chauvinist self-help guru Frank T. J. Mackey (Tom Cruise), is an open sore that miraculously heals itself. And the whole movie is filled with intimidating parents who die off, self-destruct or fade in prominence, leaving the next generation to move ahead.

‘Punch-Drunk Love’

Mr. Anderson himself did move ahead, conspicuously, with the romantic comedy “Punch-Drunk Love” (2002). A truly strange movie told mostly in long, slow, unbroken camera moves, interspersed with abstract color patterns and partly scored with a harmonium, it was also the first of Mr. Anderson’s features that concentrated on one character: an emotionally constipated, lovestruck man-child (Adam Sandler) who had no on-screen father, and who struggled to assert his own identity in the presence of his domineering sisters.

Like the filmmaker’s previous efforts, “Punch-Drunk Love” paid homage to past masters, including Mr. Altman, whom Mr. Anderson honored by scoring a daft travel montage with “He Needs Me,” Olive Oyl’s love song from the 1980 Altman film “Popeye.” But the quotations were submerged so deeply within the film’s visual text that the result seemed not merely unique but beguilingly alien, like an artifact from a lost civilization.

“Punch-Drunk Love” is Mr. Anderson’s most tender and self-revealing work, arguably one of American cinema’s most un-self-conscious love letters to romantic eccentricity since Mr. Ashby’s “Harold and Maude” in 1971. In its meticulously composed wide-screen frames, periodically disrupted by eruptions of fury and heartache, you can see the rock-solid artistic confidence that would lead to “There Will Be Blood,” a grimy capitalist opera that pulverizes sweetness and spews black humor like crude oil.

Like “Punch-Drunk Love,” “There Will Be Blood,” based on a novel by Upton Sinclair, concentrates on a protagonist, who is defined more as a father than a son. And with his most recent film an upstart filmmaker elbows his way into the pantheon. The child is father to the man.

Five films by Paul Thomas Anderson can be seen this weekend at the Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria, Queens; (718) 784-0077, movingimage.us. On Saturday “Hard Eight” will be shown at 2 p.m. and “Boogie Nights” at 4 p.m. On Sunday “Punch-Drunk Love” and the 2003 short “Blossoms & Blood” will be shown at 3 p.m. and “Magnolia” at 6 p.m.

Takedown

William Logan takes down Charles Wright. Sadly, I think his assessment is right on:

Wright isn't writing poems any longer—he's laying down a coat of sensibility, as if sensibility were somehow enough; but sensibility isn't like house paint. You have to have a house to paint. America is a forgiving country, and old geezers can write old-geezer poetry for decades without suffering any punishment worse than having a sack of awards dumped on their heads. Wright's late poetry has fallen into a kind of dumb rumination—like the beasts of the field, he has to be prodded not to chew the same damn thing over and over. It might be amusing to see an index to this long, lazy, undemanding book, with entries like:

memory, a lonely observer, 25
memory, deep blank of, 55
memory, immeasurable, like the heart, 25
memory of fur coats, erotic and pungent, 32
memory, slide show of, 3
memory, thick staircase of, 17

Wright was more ambitious once; and I wish he'd drop the immanences and immensities, the references to angels and the moony vacancies ("We're not here a lot longer than we are here, for sure./ Unlike coal, for instance, or star clots"). He's gone over this ground so often, it has begun to look like an open-pit mine.

~

Still, as Logan mentions earlier in his review, Wright's earlier work--China Trace, The Southern Cross, Zone Journals, Black Zodiac--is as brilliant as anything written in the last 50 years.

Twilight Home

I've decided to stay in NJ another month until AWP. I'll be reading for Kitchen Press at the off-site Black Ocean Books, Free Verse Editions, Kitchen Press, Octopus, Tarpaulin Sky Books, & Typo Thursday, January 31st, 7:30-11 PM East Coast Aliens Studios 216 Franklin Street, Brooklyn.

"Words which sound alike belong together." --Oyvind Fahlstrom

Perloff reviews Ashbery's Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems.

Happy New Year, everyone . . .