A P e e k o f R e a c h

2011-07-24T09:32:00.001-07:00

Watch live streaming video from democracynow at livestream.com

2011-07-22T08:39:00.003-07:00

Send here and here. Watch these. Listen to these. R e a d.

2011-07-12T17:41:00.003-07:00

~ R E A D ~

2011-07-05T16:35:00.002-07:00

Goodbye Cy Twombly

2011-07-04T14:06:00.003-07:00

Other than some tinkering around the edges and the addition of one or two poems I may finish in the interim, the erros manuscript is done and making the rounds. In the meantime, Tony and Sommer over at Flying Guillotine Press have graciously offered to add (as vanish, unespecially)—the chapbook that was supposed to come out on Spork Press—to their upcoming line-up of chaps. Tony thinks sometime in September. More as things develop.

Splitscreen: A Love Story from JW Griffiths on Vimeo. This was made with cell phones.

2011-07-04T12:53:00.003-07:00

Some reading—this & this & this & this & this & this & this & this

2011-04-04T07:07:00.001-07:00

Boyer Rickel all this week at No Tell Motel.

Spork Chapbook Update

2011-03-01T19:57:00.003-07:00

Due to creative differences that still aren't entirely clear to me, Spork Press will not be publishing my chapbook (as vanish, unespecially).

2011-03-01T19:56:00.001-07:00

Hot Damn

2011-02-02T15:04:00.003-07:00

Good news...

Greying Ghost Press has just put out a new pamphlet of poems, one which includes my poem "Becoming Regardless." Everything GGP does is gorgeous, so buy a chapbook and get the pamphlet free.

Also, I'm thrilled to announce my third chapbook, (As Vanish, Unespecially), has been accepted for publication by Jamison Crabtree and Jake Levine, the good people over at Spork Press. Sounds like a May / June release.

2010-12-07T13:20:00.004-07:00

A new Harp & Altar

A review of the reissue of Lisa Jarnot's Some Other Kind of Mission

On Ted Berrigan's Sonnets

Timothy Donnelly's The Cloud Corporation

Forthcoming In March 2011

2010-11-30T13:19:00.001-07:00

Katherine Larson is the winner of the 2010 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. With Radial Symmetry, she has created a transcendent body of poems that flourish in the liminal spaces that separate scientific inquiry from empathic knowledge, astute observation from sublime witness. Larson's inventive lyrics lead the reader through vertiginous landscapes—geographical, phenomenological, psychological—while always remaining attendant to the speaker's own fragile, creaturely self. An experienced research scientist and field ecologist, Larson dazzles with these sensuous and sophisticated poems, grappling with the powers of poetic imagination as well as the frightful realization of the human capacity for ecological destruction. The result is a profoundly moving collection: eloquent in its lament and celebration.

This is going to be a gorgeous book.

2010-11-27T18:48:00.002-07:00

A review of Dean Young's artful Recklessness

Kiki Petrosino's "Ragweed"

Interesting reviews and essays at HTMLGiant

Seinquote

Jacket 40 is coming together and features a section on Celan.

A review of Heather McHugh's Upgraded to Serious

Anagramming America in Kevin McFadden's Hardscrabble

2010-10-31T17:08:00.008-07:00

Kevin McFadden’s debut collection, the diligent, turvey, hyper-lexic Hardscrabble (University of Georgia Press 2008), opens unassumingly, with a short proem—an ars typographica of sorts—on that most emphatic of conjugates, “Is”:

written this way

to almost resemble

us:

half-straight,

half sinuous.

It’s a clever start, if a reflexive one, suggesting, as it does, a playfulness always already latent in physical typography, while also anticipating the 100 pages of poetry and prose that follow. Often rollicking and always witty, McFadden’s poems take Heather McHugh’s pathology of the punster—someone not “merely resigned to accident” but “committed to it”—and makes of it a poetic imperative. In anagrams, puns, and all manner of homophonic and homonymic wordplay, McFadden (like Harryette Mullen, Liz Waldner, Kristi Maxwell, and McHugh herself) thralls in what other writers merely lament, or too often ignore altogether: the inadequacy of language to mean in any stable, transparent way. Indeed, in Hardscrabble, language’s unpredictability and, by extension, its dynamism are not unlike the public, private, mythological America,—that "great wordplay of democracy," that embarrassment of linguistic richness—on which so many of McFadden’s poems fixate.

Nowhere is this exuberance for the American idiom more on display than in what McFadden has published elsewhere as his “variations,” poems that, in the book at least, typically borrow a line of literary Americana—the plaintive vision of a Ginsberg (“America when will you be angelic?”); or the stoic monumentalism of a Lowell (“History has to live with what was here”); or the carnal voracity of a Plath (“And I eat men like air.”); or the folksy nativism of a Frost (“The land was ours before we were the land’s”)—and riff on it, sometimes exhaustively, always audaciously, each subsequent line a perfect anagrammatical re-arrangement of the line preceding it. Sometimes the poem builds toward its borrowed line; sometimes the lifted portion appears mid-way through the poem; sometimes the poem departs from the appropriated line. In the eight variations that appear sporadically throughout Hardscrabble, such arrangements and re-arrangements challenge, ironize, or otherwise re-contextualize the original line's aura of meaning.

Take, as just one example, McFadden's poem “Meditate Sea to Sea,” which borrows its first line from the title of the Langston Hughes poem, “Let America Be America Again”:

Let America be America again.

Ice-age ambiance. Later a mira-

cle air: a meat mania, ice-barge,

ice-amble. A tie. Agrarian came

later, Inca came, a bare image I

bear. An Eric came, agile at aim

(let America be a maniac, I rage).

Italian came----macabre, I agree.

Came Iberia, came Angle, a rat I

Rate, a marine bilge. Came a CIA

angelic era, a tame iambic ear.

Bacteria came in a mire, algae

era. Militia came, began a race,

a crime, eager aim, Cain at Abel.

At Abe L. Imagine a ceramic era,

ceramic ear: I am it. A lab. A gene

I age. A meme trace. A bicranial

air age, a bicameral cinema, et

cetera, a manic beige malaria,

a carnage. American I let be. I am

a cameraman, I create a big lie

(let America be a camera I gain),

I am a cabaret emcee, a girl in a

Miami tribe, an eagle, a car, ace

Airman. Elegaic America, a bet:

let America be a magic arena I

anagram. I bet I care (came a lie,

a clear image), I bet America an

animal acreage, I bet America

beer I can amalgamate air, ice-

berg. An ale. Ace-at-ear, I mimic a

man (bare me) I glaciate Americana----

I’m a rain. Let America be a cage;

I remain a gate, a Mecca. I blare

Niagra, I accelerate, maim, be

a beam, I emanate a grail, Circe

mirage. America, a neat cable I

tie in. America, a gala embrace.

Let America be America: a gain.

The technical virtuosity required to keep a poem like this one moving—without ceding tonal variety, without sacrificing comprehensibility to constraint—goes without saying. Indeed, the poem must—and, I think, does—strike a balance between the strictures of McFadden’s self-imposed process and the freedoms such limitations can afford. The poem churns. It obsesses. It chews over Hughes' original, transposing the same twenty-four constituent letters and repurposing them into a poem that evokes seemingly incompatible formal literary antecedents (insistent Whitmanesque cataloging; Dickinson's compacted, epigrammatic phrasing; the procedural strictures of OULIPO), while simultaneously re-engaging and recalibrating Hughes' spirit of indignation and defiance.

Indeed, if Hughes' original is a direct address to—and indictment of—the hypocrisies and paradoxes at the heart of America's founding idealisms ("the dream that's almost dead today"); if Hughes' original has been a rallying cry to the dispossessed and disenfranchised ("Who made America / Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, / Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, / Must bring back our mighty dream again . . ."); then McFadden's poem, born as it is from the nearly 75 intervening years of political and poetical advancements (or lack thereof), is both a reaffirmation of America's ostensible egalitarian vision ("American never was America to me, / And yet I swear this oath— / America will be.") and a kind of 21st century coda. It's the aspirational spirit of Hughes' final word ("again") around which McFadden's poem pivots the most, punning on the potential white space separating the "a" (now an indefinite article seeking definite progress) from "gain" ("Let America be America: a gain."), such that each of McFadden's lines becomes a "gain," but a gain that is first among equals, and therefore "again," a literalization of e pluribus unum, many-in-one.

And yet it's the destabilizing nature of the anagram and not the rhetoric for which it's used that draws attention to one of the great paradoxes of McFadden's process—progress. With each recombinant line, each coalescence and re-coalescence of letters on the poem's surface, the idea of America deepens, becoming (and just as soon un-becoming) a “maniac,” an “angelic era,” a “cage,” a “grail,” a “mirage." The poem collapses the American mythos into a brisk, schizophrenic progression through the ages, from "Ice-age ambiance" to our current hyper-mediated, hyper-surveilled, po-mo culture (“I am a cameraman, I create a big lie”). And there's depth to the critique of America's contradictory—and often sordid—histories. By turns hostile ("let America be a maniac, I rage.”), violent (“Militia came, began a race, a crime, eager aim"), wistful ("I remain a gate, a Mecca"), America, sometimes scaled-down to a single line or phrase—another paradox!—becomes not some grand narrative but a plurality of contradicting, contravening narratives (“I accelerate, maim, be a beam”), the collective concatenations of language itself (“let America be a magic arena I / anagram"), without which the America ideal—whatever it is, whenever it is—would be inarticulate.

2010-10-27T08:05:00.000-07:00

A Hart Crane movie?

2010-10-25T06:34:00.000-07:00

H_NGM_N 11

Words

2010-10-24T23:19:00.001-07:00

Michael Schiavo's The Equalizer

2010-10-15T07:50:00.003-07:00

The Equalizer 1.1 Summer Block, Jim Behrle, Macgregor Card, Mark Bibbins, Emily Anderson, Aaron Belz, Don Share, Cody Walker, Christopher Salerno, Amick Boone, Adam Clay, Buck Downs, Stephanie Anderson, Owen Barker, and CAConrad. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.2 Matt Hart's "Write This Today While You Were." (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.3 Joshua Corey, Stephanie Anderson, Buck Downs, Shanna Compton, Laura Carter, Peter Davis, Alana Dagen, Reb Livingston, Cody Walker, John Cotter, Craig Santos Perez, and Chris Martin. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.4 A selection from John Gallaher's Guidebooks. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.5 Cynthia Cruz, Reb Livingston, Allison Gauss, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Cody Walker, Buck Downs, Barbara Cully, Peter Davis, Lucas Farrell, Stephanie Anderson, Noah Falck, Carol Fink, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Matt Hart, Maureen Thorson, Amy King, and Chris Martin. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.6 Lucas Farrell's "The Dual-Shade of Six-Prong." (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.7 Whit Griffin, Shafer Hall, Stephanie Anderson, Brian Henry, Amy King, Richard Deming, Chris Martin, Buck Downs, Christopher Salerno, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Matthew Henriksen, Evan Kennedy, James Meetze, Matt Hart, Cody Walker, and Douglas Kearney. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.8 Sonnets & sonnots from Nathan Austin, Jo Turner, Ernest Hilbert, Kevin Shea, Samantha Caan, Matt Hart, and Curtis Jensen. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.9 Mike Hauser's Samples. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.10 Mike Hauser, Buck Downs, Stephanie Anderson, Katherine Factor, Maureen Thorson, James Meetze, Mark Lamoureux, Katy Lederer, Alexis Orgera, Ada Limón, Kristi Maxwell, Cate Peebles, Richard Deming, Carmen Giménez Smith, Matt Hart, and Cody Walker. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.11 Evie Shockley's "the cold" (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.12 Andrew Hughes, Chris Martin, Stephanie Anderson, Buck Downs, Jason Myers, Richard Deming, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Carmen Giménez Smith, Cody Walker, Christopher Rizzo, Travis Macdonald, Matt Hart, Ravi Shankar, and James Meetze. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

Mullen Part I

2010-10-05T18:26:00.004-07:00

This piece once had a home over at Fascicle, Tony Tost's now-defunct on-line journal of poetry and poetics. I think it's worth having out in the world, so I'm considering this an archival posting.

Scatting the Visionary: Jazz, Jouissance and Identity

in Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge

...on her own jive

player and instrument

all the way live...

Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge is an eighty-page book-length poem composed in un-punctuated quatrains, four to a page. Borrowing from the jazz tradition which often encourages spontaneity on the part of the performer, Mullen conceives each page of her poem as a unit unto itself, with a seemingly infinite number of variations among them: “I think I just tried to feel, intuit, how the quatrains might be ordered. In some cases, there’s a local order that may continue for a page, usually not longer than a page.” Because the relations among the parts of the text are manifold, because narrative structure itself has been intentionally destabilized and delimited, the reader is expected to undertake both diachronic and synchronic readings–a strategy Mullen herself undertakes at readings, shuffling the order of pages entirely, sometimes commencing with those that appear at the back of the book, then perhaps reading pages which appear towards the middle, or elsewhere. On any given night, some passages may play together in loosely connected narrative sprints, others might associate as historical or thematic bundles, while still for others nothing at all coheres. And no doubt the arrangement will change on each subsequent reading because in Muse & Drudge, beyond the typographical linearity that the book and page format dictate, there are multiple beginnings and multiple endings; there is no reading of the poem which cannot be reversed, no fixed hierarchy of meaning which cannot be made more or less significant.

Mullen also destabilizes linguistic structures at the level of the stanza, doing so not only through disjunctive syntactical formations and vague operative relationships among parts of speech (nouns substituting for verbs and vice-versa), but also through the sheer preponderance of her word-play, which continuously permutates familiar words and phrases. Homophonic puns, anagrams, oronyms, palindromes, double (and sometimes triple) entendres–each enacts a polysemic playfulness which demands from the reader a comprehension of language on two, three, four levels at once. This is particularly true when we consider how such gaming is funneled through any number of vocal registers, including black vernacular, contemporary slang, diasporic idiom, colloquialism, Spanish, and pidgin. Moreover there is the ever-present bric-a-brac of cultural, literary and historic allusion with which to contend. The poem is, as Mullen herself admits, “a book of echoes," a hyper-literate, hyper-lexic “recyclopedia” of languages.

Most overlooked among critics, however, is the non-sensical strain running through Muse & Drudge, those passages “hooked on phonemes imbued with exuberance” in which mimetic representation of the world breaks down entirely, and in which Mullen’s radically destabilized language functions on the level of phonemes as an improvised form of textual scatting that Mullen disseminates over themes of kinship and identity. Mullen’s sprints of sound, which blur the spoken word with the written one, improvise a joyful nonsense–or jouissance in Barthes’ sense in The Pleasure of the Text–that offers an abrupt form of free play set loose above Mullen’s open-ended, allusive word-play. As in jazz, where the excitement comes from being present at the moment of creation, so too does Mullen’s “mix of wiggle” create a slippery, unpredictable, spontaneous composition that attempts to outrun, however fleetingly, those normative linguistic processes determined to contain it. Such scatting, I would suggest, is a gesture towards the visionary: an ideal semiotic state, a “writing aloud” wherein “the grain of the throat” revels in being an instrument unto itself (and without practical purpose); wherein even pluralized categories of gender, race, and identity are momentarily transcended; and wherein a heretofore undiscussed visionary aim emerges–one that not only signals a departure from the symbolic function of language, but also a concurrent sliding of the poem into a more archaic relation between vocal production and the body.

If accessibility to word-play and allusion (still operating at both the denotative and connotative levels) represents the pheno-text of Muse & Drudge, that level of the poem which, according to Julia Kristeva, “serves to communicate . . . ‘competence’”, then such breathless (and punctuation-less) flows of words (“mutter patter simper blubber / murmur prattle smatter blather / mumble chatter whisper bubble / mumbo-jumbo palaver gibber blunder”), places locution in the realm of what Kristeva associates with “the transfers of drive energy that can be detected in phonematic devices”; devices such as “the accumulation of rhythm,” “intonation or rhythm” as well as the sonic textures produced by sonic textures like consonance, assonance and alliteration. It follows then that Mullen’s drift into phonemic improvisations, her “runs’‘ in language (“Nary hep male rose sullen / let alley roam, yell melon / dull normal fellow hammers omelette” constitute a disruptive, pre-verbalized, pre-lingual state. Mullen’s scatting, then, is a kind of somatic impulse “below the surface” of her speaking being.

What should interest us most here is the motility of this energy; that is its spontaneity. The chora as a “rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position” is “rhythm, a sequence of linked instants . . . prior to any signified spaciousness” where “rhythm, space and time coexist." Kristeva’s notion of a mobile rhythm preceding “signified spaciousness,” as well as the collapsing together of time and space get at the improvisational aspect of Muse & Drudge. Scatting emphasizes the spontaneous over the formulaic, happy coincidence over premeditation. Gerald L. Bruns posits the generative nature of extemporaneous linguistic performance this way:

From a mildly etymological point of view an improvisation is a species of unforseen discourse. One cannot predict anything about it. It is discourse that makes no provision for a future, not in a readers mind nor, certainly, in the writer’s; its teleology is entirely in the present. It is discourse whose beginning is what matters, because to improvise is to begin without a second thought, and under the rules there is no turning back. It is discourse that is governed by no provisos, and so differs from nearly every other discourse one can imagine: it is ungeneric almost by definition; it is a close semblance of free speech.

That improvisation situates itself “entirely in the present” suggests the temporal provisionality to utterance. Take, for example, this stanza from Mullen’s poem: “rough, dirty, a little bit hard / broken blossom poke a possum / park your quark in a hard aardvark." Disjunctive syntax, illogical verbal constructions, unannounced operative relationships among parts of speech (how nouns, adjectives and verbs as qualities and abstractions are freely substitutable)—such impulsive derangements of the verbal practice are always beginning. And yet for readers acquainted with her interview with Calvin Bedient, Mullen (in the line “park your quark in a hard aardvark”) admits to having played with her mother’s Boston accent, punning on the phrase “park the car in Harvard yard." Where allusion and oronymical play depend on the reader’s coincidental recognition of cultural signs and speech patterns, Mullen’s “scattings” also depend on a complete and coincidental mis-comprehension of language. That is to say, because interpretation is provisional to a particular reader in a particular moment in time (and thus mobile across any number of audiences), and because complete mis-comprehension of lines and stanzas is always a potentiality for the poem (thus abjuring any sense of finality to the process), scatting in Muse & Drudge could–at least potentially–occur everywhere and nowhere. Indeed, Mullen’s scattings end not when they have attained a necessary formal or thematic completeness, but rather when they re-emerge again into the symbolic order of an individual reader or audience member.

Mullen’s extemporaneous sprints of nonsensical sound suggest a verbal state that precedes emergence into the social order. Her runs of language (“spaginzy spagades / splibby splabibs”, “jig-rig nitty-gritty”) slide straight out of bodily desires, aligning them with both an asocial linguistic state and with a highly individualized bodily presence. Indeed, the semiotic would appear to fulfill Mullen’s own vision of “the body as instrument." With its intertwining of symbolic and somatic energies, scatting suggests a reverse anthropomorphizing and conjures the fierce independence of the female jazz vocalist whose voice, Mullen suggests, “she can enjoy because so many people have tried to define and limit and imprison her body and her sexuality. The idea is that she can be in charge: she can play her own instrument, and she can play the tune that she wants on the instrument."

To extend the implications of Mullen’s poetry, I would here suggest that her improvisations (“chenille feely zeroes / fuzzy nooky fumble”) represent Barthes’ utopian notion of “writing aloud,” that is “the art of guiding one’s body” in a “language lined with flesh” where we can hear “the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the volumptuousness of voweles, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning." Indeed, Mullen’s linguistic improvisations–played over and around the rule-bound domain of allusive word-play–place her back in the corporeal body; they individualize her (and the reader) in a body, yet place that body beyond articulated strictures of race, ideology, and socio-economical status. Indeed, scatting posits a heretofore undiscussed visionary strain within Muse & Drudge, a strain wherein verbal production and material being conjoin, wherein materiality, sensuality, “the breath, the gutterals, the fleshiness of the lips, the whole presence of the human muzzle” are realized in the transitory surfaces of the text. In short, scatting is a realization–by more extemporaneous means–of the body of bliss, the pleasure of jouissance that is “individual–not personal” (62). Mullen the African-American, Mullen the woman, Mullen the professor and childhood product of a segregated Texas border town has dispersed into the rise and fall and push and pull of vowel sounds, into the nonsensical whelter of phonemes, and the bursts and sprints and timbres of accents and inflections. As Barthes would say, text, however fleetingly, has generated into tissue. Having succeeded in shifting the signifieds of identity a great distance, Mullen (and by extension, the reader) has everywhere and nowhere become an “anonymous body." She has gone into our ear.

Nelson Interview

2010-09-28T14:34:00.003-07:00

Christopher Nelson interviews Stephanie Balzer on the prose poem, satire, and her new chapbook, faster, faster (CUE Editions 2010).

2010-09-27T17:00:00.002-07:00

I'm currently renovating the blog and will be back at it full-time soon. Expect more sustained pieces, including reviews, essays, etc. on poetry and poetics.

Mark Horosky's More Frisk Than Risk

2010-09-26T07:50:00.003-07:00

Mark Horosky reading from his latest chapbook, More Frisk Than Risk, which has now dropped over at Flying Guillotine Press.

There are still 15 copies of Mark's first chapbook, Let It Be Nearby, available from CUE Editions.

Sommer Browning, Adam Chiles, Tony Mancus

2010-09-20T07:50:00.000-07:00

Chiles, Browning, & Mancus Read @ Chop Suey Books - Sept. 17, 2010 - Richmond, Virginia from Silver Persinger on Vimeo.

2010-08-28T22:05:00.001-07:00

Arizona Spotlight

2010-08-06T08:00:00.003-07:00

Thank you to the U of A Poetry Center and Mark McLemore for asking me to read on Arizona Spotlight. Listen to my interview and a reading of a few poems here.

A Call From the Equalizer

2010-07-17T07:59:00.001-07:00

from Michael Schiavo

"Any poet who had work accepted by The Paris Review and has received notice that their poems will no longer be published due to the editorial changes at the magazine are encouraged to submit those poems for consideration to The Equalizer, a new PDF-based journal which I’m assembling right now for a September/October 2010 launch. Please forward the email from the new PR editors informing you of their decision and a single Word document with your poems to theunrulyservant (at) gmail (dot) com. Space is limited, so while I cannot guarantee acceptance, I would appreciate the opportunity to consider your work."

Now Available From CUE Editions

2010-06-21T23:19:00.002-07:00

F a s t e r, F a s t e r
by Stephanie Balzer

I read that time passes through people though people believe they are passing through time. Those who are melancholy write from memory but those who are happy, imagination. All surrealists are happy. An MRI can detect if you are madly in love and freshly rejected, the blood nourishing the obsessive-compulsive brain. An MRI can detect if you’re a surrealist. The door handle of your truck, locked: the penny taped to your window, still: the light in your bedroom window, late. Television is a writer’s medium, film a director’s. David Chase thinks The Sopranos is a failure and Norman Mailer the closest thing to the great American novel of today. Beloveds, we live in an age of diminished returns and empathize with Tony’s malaise. “I watch all this fighting, you know,” Sommer emailed, “and these fighters work their asses off. they say things like ‘if you want it you can get it’ as if that is utter truth.” Mike said he’s not going for happiness anymore, only contentment. I heard that attorneys tell illegal immigrants not to drive or even get in cars in case they’re stopped for traffic violations and deported. Barbara said it’s like we’re all ex-patriots now living in our own country. Those with the least power hold access to the purest truth—sounds like Jesus but I’m paraphrasing Bill Moyers. I confess: my state of mind is America. “something to do w entropy, i think. the force of nothingness so much stronger than its opposite.”

CUE Editions
Chapbook #2

5.5 x 7 hand-sewn chapbook printed on high quality paper with vellum insert and stamped cover. Printed in a limited edition of 100.

$8

Order your copy here.

from Heather Green

2010-04-27T17:24:00.001-07:00

Dear All,

I'll be teaching two sessions of Letterpress this summer (ART 462E and 562E) and would love your help referring anyone who might be interested. There are still spaces available. This year, we'll be having an exhibit of the completed student work at the Lional Rombach Gallery at the end of the summer.

Letterpress + the Multiple
ART 462E/562E
Summer Session I — 6/7/10-7/8/10
Summer Session II — 7/12/10-8/11/10
M-F 5:00 pm-8:50 pm
Room: ART 201
No prerequisites

Learn how to hand-set type and use early twentieth
century printing presses to create printed ephemera.
Traditional hand-set type, photoengraved zinc plates
as well as photopolymer plates will be used. Integrate
the tactile quality of letterpressed type and image with
other media. Conceptual and material aspects of
letterpress will be discussed.

Please see class blog for examples of past student work, etc. http://art404-504.blogspot.com/

Many thanks!
Heather

Buy This Today

2010-03-30T16:54:00.003-07:00

Revenant
by Stephanie Balzer
Kore Press
Chapbook 30 x 36" when unfolded.
$9.00

Stephanie's next chapbook, faster faster, is currently in production and will be forthcoming this April with CUE Editions.

2010-03-25T12:36:00.004-07:00

The new Shampoo (with work by Shelly Taylor, Matt Rotando, Joseph Mains, among the U of A alum.)

Shelly Taylor's new book, Black-Eyed Heifer, drops soon.

A new Selected Poems of Beckett.

The new Diagram.

A short piece on Matt Hart and Nate Pritts.

A Rain Taxi review of Kiki Petrosino's Fort Red Border.

The new Octopus.

2010-03-11T08:46:00.003-07:00

Shelly Taylor on her forthcoming first book, Black-Eyed Heifer.

An interview with Michael Schiavo.

What's in the DFW archive?

An interview with Harryette Mullen.

Jim Behrle on careerism.

James Murphy on the third LCD Soundsystem album and Greenberg soundtrack.

LCD Soundsystem / Yves Saint Laurent Song:

2010-01-26T08:57:00.003-07:00

A conversation with Harryette Mullen

A review of Graham Foust's A Mouth in California

A piece by Bill Moyers and Thomas Frank on American's demented politics

Revisiting Roland Barthes

A new episode of Rabbit Light Movies

2010-01-13T21:08:00.001-07:00

2010-01-10T16:48:00.003-07:00

The new Spoon.

Making the case for good bad poetry.

The climate killers.

Celan's letters.

No Sex Please, We're Postmodern.

2010-01-06T18:58:00.002-07:00

An interview with Anselm Berrigan

Big Lebowski studies

Portraits of Poets 1910-2010

An interview with Stephen Burt

The Guardian's 100 Best Films of the previous decade

Allison Titus now has a webpage

Free audio books in the public domain (this link to Moby Dick)

2009-12-03T06:57:00.002-07:00

An interview with Cormac McCarthy.

An interview with Wes Anderson.

Free audiobooks.

PogSound is up and running.

An interview with Graham Foust.

2009-11-16T16:27:00.001-07:00

Contratulations to Mark Horosky on having his second chapbook, More Frisk Than Risk, accepted for publication. Grab one of the only 18 copies of Mark's debut chapbook Let It Be Nearby at http://cueeditions.blogspot.com

Also, this:

Dear Friends,

Please take a moment, if you can, to pass along this call for submissions to the second annual ReBound Series from Seven Kitchens Press. 7KP will publish a new edition of an out-of-print chapbook, complete with a new ISBN and an introduction by the nominating writer. Submissions are currently being accepted through December 15; complete guidelines are available at http://sevenkitchens.blogspot.com/2009/10/cfs-2010-rebound-series.html.

We think this is a wonderful opportunity to "bring back" deserving titles, and we'd truly appreciate your help in getting the word out or nominating a deserving title. Last year's winning chapbook, Notes from the Red Zone by Christina Pacosz, is available now.

All best,

Ron Mohring
Seven Kitchens Press

2009-11-08T19:08:00.000-07:00

"My complaint, if there is one, is not that New York Poets are rude. It is that New York Poets are too nice, that they don’t tell the truth to each other enough. In New York, you see, it also helps to have someone else say you are a poet. Beneath the surface politesse and modesty of the New York Poet runs an undercurrent of exclusion you only sense years later. To be coddled in New York City as a poet is to be killed slowly." --Daniel Nester from Goodbye to All of Them

2009-11-06T19:12:00.005-07:00

Pool is now online.

Which intergalactic attack is more harrowing: ABC's "V" or HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm"?

Lit journals associated with graduate programs.

The cult of Ashbery thrives.

An interview with Julian Casablancas. A review of the new solo album.

Jonathan Safran Foer on factory farms.

Thank you to Ashley d'Avignon Goodwin over at The Benefactor for taking my "Poem For Bob Flanagan."

2009-10-27T14:02:00.000-07:00

Two new poems in the latest installment of H_NGM_N.

2009-10-26T19:07:00.002-07:00

A new Diagram.

Boyer Rickel's beautiful, hand-bound new chapbook, reliquary, is now out with Seven Kitchens Press.

An interview with CA Conrad.

On Charles Wright's recent books.

Cystic Fibrosis and Medical Bankruptcy

2009-10-21T08:12:00.004-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The Full Testimony

Rachel Maddow Giving a Smackdown

2009-10-16T09:43:00.002-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

2009-10-09T08:02:00.002-07:00

The new Typo is up.

2009-10-04T13:56:00.002-07:00

Meet Ronnie Sharp.

2009-10-03T08:23:00.002-07:00

Dear President Bush,

Curb your enthusiasm
about the world's largest private poetry collection.
Meet this radical
then read these new poems now up at EOAGH 5.

2009-09-21T09:19:00.001-07:00

New poem up at Fou.

Two each forthcoming soon in Eoagh and H_NGM_N.

Out of the hospital—hopefully—this Wednesday.

2009-08-19T11:53:00.001-07:00

2009-08-11T12:38:00.004-07:00

My interview with Chris Nelson about the new CUE is up at the Poetry Center.

Dale Smith and Kenny G discuss fast and slow poetries.

A review of Charles Wright's Sestets.

The white noise of academic publishing.

Three poems by Carolyn Guinzio.

A review of Joseph Massey's Areas of Fog.

Graham Foust on Jack Spicer.

A review of Anselm Berrigan's To Hell With Sleep.

Thank you Tim Peterson for accepting two poems for Issue 5 of EOAGH.

A Worthy Cause

2009-08-07T08:54:00.001-07:00

University of Arizona Poetry Center

Beginning August 11th, the Ghost Net Project will be on display at the University of Arizona Poetry Center as part of their fall series, Oh Earth, Wait for Me: Conversations about Art and Ecology. Please join us on Thursday, September 10th for a small reception to kick off the first lecture of the series.

Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

Please join us August 8th for an exhibit that will be held in the Gallery at the Baldwin Education Building during the Sustainable Seafood Festival at The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

Sustainable Seafood Festival:
Saturday, August 8th from 5:00-10:00 pm
Tickets for museum admission & events are $5.00

Additional highlights of the festival include a Sustainable Seafood Cooking Demonstration featuring ASDM Execuctive Chef Nick Rumen, lectures and ﬁlms about the ecology of the Sea of Cortez and activities for children.

Exhibition Dates:
August 5th-8th, 2009
Baldwin Education Building Gallery
Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

Please Help

2009-07-21T16:58:00.002-07:00

I'm 31 and have Cystic Fibrosis. I’d like to keep writing poems past the age of 37. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation needs you to ask your Congressional Representatives to co-sponsor the Improving Access to Clinical Trials Bill so people with CF don’t have to choose between participating in clinical trials and keeping their health care coverage: http://tinyurl.com/mzyvrm.

It takes less than 2 minutes to fill out the information fields, and with only 50 more representatives needed to co-sponsor the bill, every delivered form letter helps. Please pass on this link to as many people as possible.

The Captain versus David Berman

2009-07-20T09:33:00.006-07:00

A review of Lisa Jarnot's Night Scenes.

Read CUE.

A piece by Aram Saroyan.

The new Octopus.

Banksy.

The new H_NGM_N.

And this from Publisher's Weekly:

Fort Red Border Kiki Petrosino. Sarabande (Consortium, dist.), $14.95 (104p) ISBN 978-1-932511-74-1

The sharp, witty sequences in Petrosino's debut reveal a poet who has more fun with language, and who shows more range, than most. The titular series, whose moniker uses the same letters as “Robert Redford,” describes an imaginary affair with him, highlighting their differences in taste, in status, in race: “ I gather my afro into a plain elastic hoop... Redford's face goes coltish & aware.” Petrosino has more to say about lust and romance and social class than Redford's celebrity. Other series put more pressure on the sounds of words, in the propulsive sentences of her prose poems or in irregularly rhymed short lines: “The field saint in my skin/ who rakes:// I balm. I slake.” Ten poems all called “Valentine” include kiss-offs, come-hithers and advice: “Ordering food/ is really ordering some of the food... But:/ You can't order some of the love.” Drawing on popular culture, invoking sex often and flirting, or trying to shock, Petrosino rings some of the same bells as Frederick Seidel. But she repeats herself a lot less often, and her jokes are her own generation's: “Who would win, Jack White or Jack Black?” Her poems should attract anybody who wants to find out. (Aug.)

Get her book here.

2009-07-11T19:22:00.001-07:00

Now Available from Cannibal Books:

Autumn it gestures.

by Thomas Hummel

32 pages, hand-sewn

flesheatingpoems.blogspot.com

Boot Cut

2009-07-05T09:37:00.003-07:00

The Vanity Fair piece on Sarah Palin.

Whitman's selling Levi's

A profile of Jeff Tweedy. A review of the new Wilco album.

Harold Bloom on Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

A new chapbook by Olena Kalytiak Davis.

Scantily Clad Press has released several new chaps.

If you have a chapbook for review, send it here:

The Chapbook Review
92-37 55^th Avenue
Elmhurst, NY 11373

Oh yea, and the new CUE is now online.

CUE CUE CUE CUE CUE CUE

2009-06-30T09:48:00.004-07:00

The debut issue of CUE online, guest-edited by Mark Horosky, is now available for your reading pleasure and includes new work by Elizabeth Willis, Richard Siken, Matt Hart, Sarah Manguso, Tony Mancus, Dorothea Lasky, Tim Peterson, Reb Livingston, Chaz McCallahan, Mathias Svalina & Julia Cohen, and Jason Labbe.

As we move forward, CUE will be open to all types of poetry (prose and otherwise) but will skew toward work that emphasizes sound, word play, and the more material aspects of language.

For those of you with blogs, I hope you'll help us spread the word. For those of you with journals of your own, I hope you'll consider linking us to your website. Favors we'll reciprocate in kind.

In the coming weeks and months I'll be tinkering with the site a bit, adding a links section of our own, posting reviews and interviews as they become available.

Expect new issues to go up every 3–4 months.

2009-06-19T19:03:00.001-07:00

2009-06-19T07:19:00.003-07:00

Tight 5 is now available for purchase from the Northshire Bookstore. Or call 1-800-437-3700 and talk to an actual person.

Featuring: Samuel Amadon, Stephanie Anderson, Nathan Austin, Charles Bernstein, Anne Boyer, John Coletti, Justin Courter, Barbara Cully, Katherine Factor, John Gallaher, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Shannon Jonas, Katy Lederer, Andrew Lundwall, Carl Martin, K. Silem Mohammad, Charles North, Boyer Rickel, Christopher Rizzo, Ravi Shankar, Prageeta Sharma, Lytton Smith, Paul Violi, Dana Ward, and Eve Zukor.

Also check out the Cannibal Book sale. Pick any three of the chapbooks below for $12.50:

Carolyn Guinzio Untitled Wave
Melanie Hubbard Gilbi Winco Swags
Ben Mazer The Foundations of Poetry Mathematics
Keith Newton Sent Forth to Die in a Happy City
Marvyn Petrucci Pardon Me, Madam
Bronwen Tate Like the Native Tongue the Vanquished

Dude, Duder, Duderino

2009-06-18T07:04:00.003-07:00

"A massive underground sensation, The Big Lebowski has been hailed as the first cult film of the internet age. In this book, 21 fans and scholars address the film's influences—westerns, noir, grail legends, the 1960s, and Fluxus—and its historical connections to the first Iraq war, boomers, slackerdom, surrealism, college culture, and of course bowling. The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies contains neither arid analyses nor lectures for the late-night crowd, but new ways of thinking and writing about film culture."

A smart piece on Synecdoche, New York, a film I wasn't a fan of when it was in theaters.

Gregory Betts on contemporary poetry classification.

Walks with Paul Celan.

Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse team up with David Lynch for Dark Night of the Soul.

Brakhage scrapbooking.

"Dylan's lyrics construct an author-reader relation posited on the model of an irresolvable enigma which is both the incitement to and the perpetual frustration of readerly desire." Bla, bla, bla...

Chapbooking

2009-06-08T12:44:00.001-07:00

This just in from Matt Henricksen:

Gang-

Maggie Ginestra is putting together a chapbook store, which she plans to run more like a low key reading room, and sent me the following note about it. We are tentatively planning a reading there, possibly for July. If any of you might want to get involved, as hosts or readers, let me know.
-Matt

Dear Cannibal:

I’m opening a teeny tiny place at 2122 Cherokee Street in St. Louis, hopefully in late July. It will mostly be a chapbook consignment shop. Also, it will be a gallery usually and a performance space occasionally. The chapbooks will not be shelved—they will constellate on little tables. Music will burble. I’m hoping to make a space that really invites people to spend time and read and be, and then I also hope they fall in love and want to take things home. There will be a reading room and snacks. I hope you’ll want to sell your work there, and that St. Louis will have access to what you do.
It will be chapbooks-only to help keep things small and intimate and perceivable and slightly unified. Also in the name of smallness, I’m asking each press to pick out just a few chapbooks from their catalogue, 3 or 4 or 7, ones that rattle and explode hearts. And just 2 copies of each title to start with. Before things get going, we’d email and be very clear and happy and arranged so that we stay that way.

I think what would happen is something simple like 1) You send me books and set the selling price 2) I sell them! 3) I send you periodic checks for 60% of everything (that is negotiable! I’ll want to help your press thrive! It just seems like what people do?) 4) I ask you for more books to sell. We refine the process.

I want to sell chapbooks because I want to hold them and read them myself and mostly because it feels like a stable way to foster a literary arts community here. Please email me with any questions or thoughts. I’d also be very grateful if you forwarded this invitation to other presses that you love.

With greatest respect,
Maggie Ginestra

Also, a new review site for chapbooks.

2009-06-05T14:00:00.002-07:00

2009-06-03T17:59:00.002-07:00

Peter Schjeldahl writes about the Francis Bacon retrospective at the Met.

Another piece over at Slate.

Shelly Taylor has a blog.

The Quiet Coup.

A piece on John Olson's prose poetry.

An interview w/ Mark Yakich.

Aram Saroyan on Creeley and Dorn.

2009-05-27T15:49:00.002-07:00

The New Thing: The Object Lessons of Recent American Poetry by Stephen Burt.

Perloff on Beckett's Letters.

An interview with Reb Livingston.

In Praise of Democratic Comforts by Stephen Burt.

A review of the new Sparklehorse / Dangermouse collaboration, Dark Night of the Soul.

A review of the new Grizzly Bear.

2009-05-20T14:03:00.001-07:00

Cannibal Pals!

We have a new book in a new format by one of our all-time favorite Cannibal poets, who happens to live here in the Ozarks.

Untitled Wave by Carolyn Guinzio
20 pages, hand-sewn, in a limited edition of 150
$7

flesheatingpoems.blogspot.com

Chicagoans, note her upcoming reading:

Kostas Anagnopoulos and Carolyn Guinzio
will read at Myopic Books 1564 North Milwaukee, Chicago
Sunday, May 24 at 7pm.

Kostas Anagnopoulos is the author of Various Sex Acts (Insurance Editions) and the forthcoming Moving Blanket (Ugly Ducking Presse).

Carolyn Guinzio is the author of West Pullman (Bordighera), Quarry (Parlor Press) and the chapbook Untitled Wave (Cannibal Books).

2009-05-16T08:08:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The Road

2009-05-15T07:06:00.001-07:00

2009-05-01T16:44:00.002-07:00

On Barbara Guest.

On Ian McEwan.

On Olena Kalytiak Davis.

On Bob Dylan.

2009-04-29T11:49:00.000-07:00

Po' Tree Salo(o)n

First Annual Fundraiser for Casa Libre and Sonora Review

This event is supported by Spork Press!

Wednesday, April 29th
7p.m. until 1 a.m.
at Hotel Congress
Cost: $5

Typically the Wednesday Night Salons at Casa Libre provide a forum for artistic discussion between various artist and writers. This month, we are partnering with Sonora Review, The University of Arizona's creative writing student-run literary journal and changing up our program.

Please join us as we take over Hotel Congress for an evening of Poetry and Music at our first Annual Po' Tree Salo(o)n

There will be t-shirts, stickers, and books for sale, and a 50/50 raffle where you can make some money in these po' times!

Schedule:
(your MCs for the evening will be Kristen Nelson and Jake Levine)

Patio Players (under the stars)
7 p.m. until 9:30 p.m.

* Bo McGuire ~ poetry
* Lori Lechien ~ music
* Richard Siken ~ poetry
* Jeremy Serwer ~ music
* Ander Monson~ poetry
* Maggie Golston ~ music
*Jane Miller ~ poetry
* Emilie Marchand and Naim Amor ~ music
* Amelia Gray ~ writer invited by Spork Press

Club Musicians (in the club)
9:30 p.m. until 1 a.m.

* Emilie Marchand and Chris Black
* Iods
* Kate Becker Project
* Tom Walbank and the Ambassadors

2009-04-18T21:50:00.001-07:00

2009-04-14T19:24:00.002-07:00

A review of Mariani's Hopkins biography.

JM Coetzee on Samuel Beckett.

On Philip Larkin.

A review of the new Doves.

Upcoming Shows in Tucson:

M. Ward 4/18
Calexico 5/2
Animal Collective 5/31
Grizzly Bear 6/18
Wilco 6/18

Two Classes to Consider

2009-04-13T21:16:00.001-07:00

ART 298 T5
BOOKBINDING
Pima Community College

Fall 2009 August 26th-December 16th
Wednesdays 4:00 pm to 8:30 pm
West Campus Room ART 120

Class Limited to 15 students
3 credits— No prerequisites

Introduction to the field of Book Arts: discuss and critique historical and contemporary practices; preview a cross section of artist books; create sample books using a variety of binding techniques; and develop personal projects that explore the relationship between material, text and image.

Please email instructor for further information:
Heather Green
hgreen1@pima.edu

ART 404/504 | Topics in Studio Art: LETTERPRESS
Summer Session 1, June 8th-July 9th, 2009

Monday-Friday
5:00-8:50 pm
Room 201
Class limited to 10 students
3 credits, no prerequisites

Learn how to hand-set type and use early twentieth century printing presses to create printed ephemera. Traditional hand-set type, photoengraved zinc plates as well as photopolymer plates will be used. Integrate the tactile quality of letterpressed type and image with other media. Conceptual and material aspects of letterpress will be discussed.

Email Heather Green for more information: cartagrafia@gmail.com

2009-04-04T23:11:00.001-07:00

Congrats Adam!

2009-04-01T12:20:00.000-07:00

The news...

2009-03-31T17:39:00.001-07:00

Hello Friends,

Flying Guillotine Press wants to read your poetry.

We are reading submissions that make it to us in April for our upcoming book.
Please send a manuscript of 32 pages or less to this email address.

And feel free to forward this on to poet types and post it on your blog or on listserves or what have you.

If you haven't heard of us, Flying Guillotine was founded by Tony Mancus and Sommer Browning in 2008. We make small editions of handmade poetry chapbooks.

We've published four books so far by Melissa Koosmann, Michael Rerick, Brett Price & Ana Božičević.

Czech out our website here: http://flyingguillotinepress.blogspot.com/

Thank you very much and good wishes!

Sommer Browning & Tony Mancus

On Puns

2009-03-28T07:38:00.002-07:00

In the New York Times.

2009-03-25T21:12:00.001-07:00

If you want to begin to understand the bailout situation, Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone is a great place to start.

2009-03-23T15:26:00.002-07:00

Perloff on O'Hara.

Beirut does Hallelujah.

David Shapiro talking with Kent Johnson.

An interview with Zach Schomburg.

The Dickman fiasco continues.

Sound poetry.

2009-03-13T14:29:00.003-07:00

An interview with Michael Schiavo in two parts.

30...

Well, well, well, University of Arizona Press.

Sell-Out

2009-03-09T17:41:00.002-07:00

Friends of CUE and CUE Editions,

As of today there are only 30 copies left of CUE Edition's first chapbook, Let It Be Nearby, prose poems by Mark Horosky.

Help us sell out this first run. If you haven't yet bought your copy, please do so now.

LIBN is gorgeously printed on 15 unbound 6 3/4" x 6 3/4 " chap-cards that have both a Side A and Side B.

Chaps come in four vibrant colors (red / mustard / blue / teal) and are slipped inside a 7" paper record sleeve, which is in turn slipped inside a plastic slip case.

$10.00

Go here for pictures and ordering.

New Poetry Prize

2009-03-09T17:22:00.002-07:00

New Measures Poetry Prize

Parlor Press’s poetry series, Free Verse Editions, is pleased to announce The New Measure Poetry Prize, which will carry a cash award of $1,000 and publication of an original, unpublished manuscript of poems. Cole Swensen will select the winning manuscript. Submissions for the prize must be postmarked in April or May of 2009. Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions will announce the winning manuscript no later than December 1, 2009.

-Jon Thompson

Congratulations....Again!

2009-03-07T12:04:00.004-07:00

Boyer Rickel's chapbook, reliquary, has been accepted for publication with Seven Kitchens Press as part of its Editor's Series.

Also:

Narwhal

(seven chapbooks)

Four Cities by Kazim Ali
Luminal Equation by Maureen Alsop
House by Sommer Browning
Into the Eyes of Lost Storms by Karla Kelsey
Sycorax's Retinue by Laura Goode
You do damage by Kate Schapira
Yellowcake by Jared White

180 pages, hand-sewn in signatures, screen-printed cover, limited edition of 100
$20

Get it here.

Schiavo

2009-03-04T15:31:00.000-07:00

Rant or review?

Two Great Profiles

2009-03-03T11:27:00.001-07:00

One of David Foster Wallace.

Another of Ian McEwan.

2009-02-27T08:19:00.004-07:00

Last night's Peter Gizzi reading was pretty spectacular. And what a sweetheart. Generous, humble, and scary-smart. It was truly an honor to welcome him. Thank you, Gail.

Peter Gizzi Introduction

To come across reviews or criticism of any one of Peter Gizzi’s collections—be it his first, Periplum, published by Avec Books in 1992, or the three books that followed: Artificial Heart (1998), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003), and his latest The Outernationale (2007)—is inevitably (and quite regularly) to come across swells of admiration and praise. Variously, his work elicits words like passionate, baffling, numinous, plaintive, unnerving, quixotic, generative, haunting.

It’s an appreciation that carries over to his diligence as an editor, most recently of The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer and My Vocabulary Did This To Me, Spicer’s collected poetry, two volumes in a four-volume project that have been widely hailed as some of the most important curatorial work in the past 50 years.

For these endeavors and others, Gizzi has been recognized with a number of honors, including the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets, as well as fellowships from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

But let me return briefly to the poetry by way of an excerpt from an interview, one in which Gizzi is reflecting on his time in residency in Mareseille, France:

“The past is always visibly haunting the present: you see a building that begins in the first century, the second floor is from the 13th century, and the third floor is from the 20th century – some incredible piece of architectural genius. Everywhere you look, the Modernist notion of parataxis or collage surrounds you . . . . there are always structures being worked on. Wherever you go, there's no vista where there's not some crane or some team of people rebuilding something. People are actually repairing the view.”

The surprise and delight Gizzi registers here, and so elegantly,—that “people are actually repairing the view”—gets right at the heart of Gizzi’s project, at a creative destruction or on-building, that is also one of the more ambitious impulses in all of contemporary American poetry: On the one hand, to acknowledge how poetry is “haunted by textuality” while, on the other, to insist that poetry remain vulnerable to emotion, and determined to “know” something, anything, however fleetingly.

This, I think, begins to explain why Gizzi is already lauded as one of the best poets of his generation. He’s a reconciler, a poet intent on repairing the view. Like Wallace Stevens, a poet to whom he is often compared, Gizzi, is a poet of the imagination, one for our moment, if not Romantic, then perhaps Remantic—deft at delivering pleasures both sensual and intellectual, even (or maybe especially) when composing out of doubts:

I am far and I am an animal and I am just another I-am poem, a we-see poem, a they-love poem.
The green. All the different windows.
There is so much stone here. And grass. So beautiful each translucent electric blade.
And the noise. Cheers folding into traffic. These things.
Things that have already been said many times:
leaf, zipper, sparrow, lintel, scarf, window shade.
(from "It was Raining in Delft")

What a great pleasure it is for me to welcome to Tucson Peter Gizzi.

Introducing...

2009-02-24T19:45:00.002-07:00

A reading I've been looking forward to for some time:

Peter Gizzi
Thursday, February 26, 8:00 p.m.
Helen S. Schaefer Building (a the U of A Poetry Center)

Peter Gizzi is the author of The Outernationale, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and Periplum and other poems: 1987–1992. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been translated into numerous languages and anthologized here and abroad. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships in poetry from The Fund for Poetry, The Rex Foundation, Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L’Atlantique, and the Centre International de Poesie Marseille (cipM). His editing projects have included o•blék: a journal of language arts, The Exact Change Yearbook, and The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. He is currently the poetry editor for The Nation. He works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Now Out

2009-02-22T07:55:00.003-07:00

My new chapbook, L=u=N=G=U=A=G=E, is now up at Scantily Clad Press, along with Joseph Main's brilliant new sonnet cycle, TO LIVE DON\'S LIFE: A FILM IN 15 CREAMS, and eight other SCP e-chaps.

2009-02-20T15:35:00.003-07:00

A review of the new Beirut.

A review of M. Ward's Hold Time.

Now out with Flying Guillotine Press--Ana Božičević's new chapbook God, Sebastian, Amy, a 28 page, hand stitched book of poems printed in an edition of 74. There are three different covers with photographs by Shannon Davies and Tony Mancus. $8, includes shipping.

Stephanie Strickland on e-poetry.

For those attending Peter Gizzi's upcoming reading at the Poetry Center on the 26th, Gizzi's page at the Electronic Poetry Center.

Demitri Martin's journal on Slate.

And this: A new chapbook press, Boxwood Editions, whose first release is Lisa Fishman's Lining,a hand-sewn pamphlet-stitched chapbook with a vellum cover. Lining is limited to 75 copies, it's $7 which includes postage.

2009-02-10T06:43:00.002-07:00

A big thanks to Andrew Lundwall over at Scantily Clad Press for accepting my chapbook, L=u=N=G=U=A=G=E, as part of his e-chap series.

Now Out

2009-02-07T17:13:00.001-07:00

Cannibal #4:

Featuring poetry from Stephanie Balzer, Zach Barocas, Laura Carter, Dot Devota, Christopher DeWeese, Claire Donato, Buck Downs, Christopher Eaton, Bonnie Emerick, Jeff Encke, Clayton Eshleman, Lucas Farrell, Drew Gardner, Garth Graeper, Meg Hurtado, Ethan Hon, Kevin Holden, Bethany Ides, Shannon Jonas, Pierre Joris, Friederich Kerksieck, Michael Koshkin, Mark Lamoureux, Hank Lazer, François Luong, Amanda Nadelberg, Linnea Ogden, Akilah Oliver, Cate Peebles, Lanny Quarles, Elizabeth Robinson, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Brandon Shimoda, Stephen Sturgeon, Janaka Stucky, Amish Trivedi, & Allyssa Wolf

140 pages, hand-sewn in signatures, screen printed cover
$15

Get it here.

2009-02-02T06:38:00.005-07:00

On the Collected Poems of Barbara Guest.

A new issue of Free Verse.

A new Poets Off Poetry.

And congratulations to Ann Fine whose book A Nest This Size was just accepted for publication by Shearsman Books!

2009-01-26T06:27:00.003-07:00

An interview with Tony Mancus.

The latest installment of the usual suspects.

Congrats Michael Rerick

2009-01-24T20:42:00.002-07:00

Michael Rerick's beautiful new book, In Ways Impossible to Fold, is now available from Marsh Hawk Press.

Read his poems here, here, and here. Listen to some here.

2009-01-23T17:16:00.000-07:00

Boyer Rickel has a new web page.

2009-01-20T17:34:00.000-07:00

Now Available

2009-01-17T17:26:00.004-07:00

Mark Horosky's chapbook, Let It Be Nearby (CUE Editions 2008), is still available for purchase here.

Copies of LIBN are also available at Antigone Books.

~

Also, check out these:

from Cannibal Books
Someone Else's Body
by Claire Donato
32 pages, hand-sewn
$6

from Flying Guillotine Press
Trouble with Mapping
by Brett Price
32 pages, hand-sewn
Limited edition of 74
$8

2009-01-11T13:14:00.001-07:00

Stephanie's news is official. But she has more . . . a second chapbook forthcoming from Kore Press. Congrats Steph!

Also this from the good people over at Cannibal:

Pals far & wide,

Cannibal Books is growing up. In 2009 we will have a studio space in Fayetteville, Arkansas through a local artist co-op, & we've compiled a mostly complete list of our books for the year, inlcuding chapbooks from Claire Donato, Carolyn Guinzio, Thomas Hummel, Shane Jones, Patrick Morrissey, Keith Newton, & Marvyn Petrucci. Newton & Petrucci's books are available now.

We are currently selling subscriptions for $60, which includes all our 2009 publications, including Cannibal: Issue Four & Narwhal, a journal of seven chapbooks by Kaziim Ali, Maureen Alsop, Sommer Browning, Laura Goode, Karla Kelsey, Kate Schapira, & Jared White which we put together with Typo co-editor Adam Clay.

More on our new space, Cannibal parties in Fayetteville, New York City, & elsewhere, and on AWP off site events, will appear on the Cannibal Blog at flesheatingpoems.blogspot.com.

Thanks to everyone who supported us in 2008.

Warmly,
Katy & Matt
Cannibal Books

Uninterested in Titling

2009-01-02T09:16:00.006-07:00

Been in Jersey, thus the drop-off in posts recently. But here's some stuff you should know about:

A new Diagram is up.

So is the 4th issue of Tight.

An oldie-but-goodie essay by Mitchum Huehls on Harryette Mullen's punning and anagramming.

A review of Lisa Russ Spaar's Satin Crash.

"The Poetry of Anywhere"--an essay by Matt Henricksen.

Another by Patrick Morrissey on reading John Taggart.

Language as game-play.

Some words on Christopher Rizzo's brilliantly titled new chapbook, Naturalistless.

RIP

2008-12-25T17:44:00.001-07:00

Harold Pinter has died.

Nobel Lecture
Art, Truth & Politics

In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.
I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.

'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.

It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.
Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.

Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.

Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.

But as they died, she must die too.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.
But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.
The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.'

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: 'But in this case "innocent people" were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?'

Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,' he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'
The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.
Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.

But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act.

You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.
Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a Few Things':
And one morning all that was burning,one morning the bonfiresleapt out of the earthdevouring human beingsand from then on fire,gunpowder from then on,and from then on blood.Bandits with planes and Moors,bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,bandits with black friars spattering blessingscame through the sky to kill childrenand the blood of children ran through the streetswithout fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despisestones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,vipers that the vipers would abominate.
Face to face with you I have seen the bloodof Spain tower like a tideto drown you in one waveof pride and knives.

Treacherousgenerals:see my dead house,look at broken Spain:from every house burning metal flowsinstead of flowersfrom every socket of SpainSpain emergesand from every dead child a rifle with eyesand from every crime bullets are bornwhich will one day findthe bull's eye of your hearts.
And you will ask: why doesn't his poetryspeak of dreams and leavesand the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets.Come and seethe blood in the streets.Come and see the bloodin the streets!*

Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.

'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'

A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called 'Death'.

Where was the dead body found?Who found the dead body?Was the dead body dead when found?How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brotherOr uncle or sister or mother or sonOf the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?Was the body abandoned?By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead?Did you declare the dead body dead?How well did you know the dead body?How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead bodyDid you close both its eyes? Did you bury the bodyDid you leave it abandoned? Did you kiss the dead body?

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.

* Extract from "I'm Explaining a Few Things" translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

Now Available from CUE Editions--Mark Horosky's Let It Be Nearby

2008-12-11T11:20:00.007-07:00

Let It Be Nearby (CUE Editions, 2008), Mark Horosky's debut collection w/ cover(s) art by Amie Robinson is now available in a limited edition of 100 chapbooks. LIBN is printed on 15 unbound 6 3/4" x 6 3/4 " chap-cards that have both a Side A and Side B. Chaps come in four different colors (red / mustard / blue / teal) and are slipped inside a 7" paper record sleeve.

Get it here.

Friday, December 5--Be There, Or, Well, Be There and Get a Square Chapbook

2008-12-02T11:04:00.001-07:00

TOAST the Exclusive East-Coast Release of Cue Editions' First Chapbook, LET IT BE NEARBY by Mark Horosky

Eric Baus is the author of The To Sound (Wave Books) and Tuned Droves (Octopus Books). He edits Minus House chapbooks and writes about poetry audio recordings on the site To The Sound. He lives in Denver.

Adam Chiles' first book Evening Land was published this year by Cinnamon Press in the UK. His work has appeared in Best New Poets 2006, Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Free Verse and others. He currently teaches English and Creative Writing at Northern Virginia Community College.

Mark Horosky was born in the 1970's and raised in New Haven, CT. He was educated at Southern CT State University (BA), University of Arizona (MFA), and Pace University (Masters of Science in Teaching). He is a Special Education Instructor in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared recently in Cue and Tight magazines. His new chapbook is out: Let It Be Nearby (with artwork by Amie Robinson; Cue Editions). He lives in Brooklyn with Miriam and Lucas.

Miriam Benatti lives and works as a licensed massage therapist in New York City. In between changing diapers, rubbing bodies, and cooking cutlets, she's currently working on a chapbook of poems called Open Your Mouth.

Only at Pete's Candy Store
709 Lorimer Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
(718) 302-3770

"L" to Lorimer, "G" to Metropolitan.

FREE!

Visit http://www.multifariousarray.blogspot.com/ for links to their work and email me for more information.

Inter-viewings

2008-11-26T11:24:00.008-07:00

My interview with Keith Montesano is now up at the first-book-interview blog. Thanks, Keith.

Also, big congrats to Stephanie Balzer for winning the Mary Ann Campau Memorial Fellowship from the University of Arizona Poetry Center. As part of her award, Stephanie receives $1000 and will read at the Poetry Center in February. CUE Editions will publish her still-untitled first chapbook later this winter.

The new issue of Coconut is up.

Happy Thanksgiving!