Hippocratic Fingers

A review of Robert Hass's Time and Materials.

Kenneth Goldsmith: "Conceptual writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos. Language as material, language as process, language as something to be shoveled into a machine and spread across pages, only to be discarded and recycled once again. Language as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless language, meaningless language, unloved language, entartete sprache, everyday speech, illegibility, unreadability, machinistic repetition. Obsessive archiving & cataloging, the debased language of media & advertising; language more concerned with quantity than quality. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?"

Read the rest of the interview with some of the participants who will appear at the U of A Poetry Center's Conceptual Poetics Symposium this May.

There's a chapbook exhibition over at the U of A Poetry Center.

Cystic Fibrosis Fact: People with CF often develop clubbing of their fingers and toes due to the effects of chronic illness and low oxygen on their tissues. Hippocrates was probably the first to document clubbing as a sign of disease, and the phenomenon is therefore occasionally called Hippocratic fingers.

Hart Crane, American visionary?

The new Latino Poetry Review.

Tucson Weekly

The first review of Verge.

Poets Off Poetry

My piece on Elliott Smith is up at This Recording. I've never written on music, so I'm grateful to Jackie Clark and Alex Carnevale for the opportunity to contribute.

Up also are essays by Matt Henricksen, Clay Matthews and Amy King.

O one, O none, O nobody, you . . .

Johannes Göransson of Action Books answers some of his students' questions on small press publication.

"And then there is another death, which is the one that cannot not happen to language because of what it is, that is to say: repetition, slide into lethargy, mechanization, etcetera. The poetic act thus constitutes a kind of resurrection: the poet is someone who is permanently involved with a language that is dying and which he resurrects, not by giving it back some triumphant aspect but by making it return sometimes, like a specter or a ghost: the poet wakes up language and in order to really make the "live" experience of this waking up, of this return to life of language, one has to be very close to the corpse of the language. One has to be as close as possible to its remains . . . The poet is someone who notices that language, that his language, the language he inherits . . . risks becoming a dead language again and that therefor he has the responsibility, a very grave responsibility, to wake it up, to resuscitate it . . . neither as an immortal body nor as a glorious body but as a mortal body, fragile and at times indecipherable, as is each poem by Celan. Each poem is a resurrection, but one that engages us with a vulnerable body that may yet again slip into oblivion. I believe that in a certain way all of Celan's poems remain indecipherable, keep some indecipherability, and this indecipherability can either call interminably for a sort of interpretation, a resurrection, new breaths of interpretation or fade away, perish again." --Derrida on Paul Celan

A review of CD Wright's latest--One Big Self: An Investigation.

Cystic Fibrosis Fact: Poor growth is a hallmark of CF. Children with CF typically do not gain weight or height at the same rate as their peers, and occasionally are not diagnosed until investigation is initiated for poor growth. The causes of growth failure are multi–factorial and include chronic lung infection, poor absorption of nutrients through the gastrointestinal tract, and increased metabolic demand due to chronic illness.

Elizabeth Willis poems over at the Boston Review.

Sunscape, Nope

The Lehman brand gets slammed.

No, he doesn't have yet another book coming out, but JMW does interview Dorothea Lasky.

CA Conrad Somatic Poetry Exercise No. 10: At a street corner pause to see how the sunlight comes down to enter the landscape just as it has for millions of years. After a while imagine the ferns or blackberries from before the buildings and sidewalks. Was there a nest of squirrels? The death of a snake? Where are you in time? After your time travel, sit the hell down and write a poem! Don't let anyone interrupt you! You're busy!

A review of Max Winter's The Pictures.

Cystic Fibrosis Fact: Symptoms include coughing up blood (hemoptysis), changes in the major airways in the lungs (bronchiectasis), high blood pressure in the lung (pulmonary hypertension), heart failure, difficulties getting enough oxygen to the body (hypoxia), and respiratory failure.

New work by Karen Volkman. Her new book, Nomina, drops April 1.


Jason Zuzga, Hallway, Tiny Tour from Dorothea Lasky on Vimeo.

BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb killed four U.S. soldiers in Baghdad on Sunday, the military said, pushing the overall American death toll in the five-year war to at least 4,000.

I Am Predictions of the Sounds of Tides and This

In Mexico cleaning up CUE7 and working on the new manuscript. Five new poems going, two of which mark a return to the prose poem. We'll see how how and where they go.

A new page for CD Wright is up over at Penn Sound.

"It is an execrable and damnable monosyllable, Why; it exasperates God, it ruins us."--Donne

Tim Peterson writes thoughtfully on Charles Bernstein.

A poet's life, on average, is about a year shorter than that of a playwright, four years shorter than a novelist's life, and five-and-six-tenths years less than that of a non-fiction specialist.

" . . . we're all roses, we're all crates." --Rod Smith

SHAMPOO issue 32 is out and includes new work by Michael J. Wilson,
Kim Vodicka, Mathew Timmons, Naomi Tarle, Jordan Stempleman, Erika Staiti,
Siel, John Sakkis, Daniel C. Remein, Mark O'Hara, Eileen Myles,
Heather Anne Mullins, K. Silem Mohammad,Cassie Lewis, Bill Luoma,
Patrick Lawler, Rodney Koeneke, Jack Kimball, Kevin Killian,
Aby Kaupang, Yuri Hospodar, Deja Earley, Claire Donato, Melissa Dickey,
Amanda Deutch, Melissa DeGezelle, Ian Davisson, Jennifer Dannenberg,
Ryan Courtwright, CA Conrad, Todd Colby, Joshua Butts,Bill Berkson,
and Jim Behrle.

All Arizona Artists--Important

Take Action Now- Contact your Senators to Vote No on SB 1330 !

URGENT! SB 1330 – is going to the Senate floor for a vote of the full Senate – we must STOP this bill by asking Arizona Senators to vote NO!	Take Action!
Bill would reduce Arizona Commission on the Arts grant funds by 40%
Senate Bill 1330 proposes a permanent reduction to the Arizona Commission on the Arts grants budget of 40 % (approx. $1.6 million annually). SB 1330 proposes the transfer of Arts Trust Fund receipts that the Commission has received since 1989 to the Department of Mines for safety issues surrounding abandoned mines. The bill passed out of the Senate Appropriations Committee Call on March 11, 2008 (this committee is chaired by the bill sponsor, Senator Bob Burns). We knew the votes were against us – and we did speak on behalf of the arts and against the bill. TIME FOR ACTION ------ NOW it is time to let every Senator in Arizona know how strongly you feel about this attempt to decimate arts funding in Arizona. Call and/or Email your Senator and Senate Leadership and ask them to vote NO on Senate Bill 1330. 1) Contact your State Senator and all Senate Leadership: Senate President Tim Bee- D30- tbee@azleg.gov (602)-926-5683 Majority Leader Thayer Verschoor- D22- tverschoor@azleg.gov (602)926-4136 Majority Whip John Huppenthal- D20- jhuppenthal@azleg.gov (602) 926-5261 President Pro TemRobert Blendu- D12- rblendu@azleg.gov (602) 926-5955 Minority Leader Marsha Arzberger- D25- marzberger@azleg.gov (602) 926-4321 Minority Whip Rebecca Rios- D23- rrios@azleg.gov (602) 926-5685 Assistant Minority Leader Jorge Luis Garcia- D27- jgarcia@azleg.gov (602) 926-4171 2) After sending your message, find your Senators phone number by clicking here: http://azleg.gov/MemberRoster.asp?Body=S

Into the Meatyard

The introduction to Mark Ford's new Selected O'Hara.

CA Conrad Somatic Poetry Exercise No. 9: :Write "silver tonic for a bronze day" on a tiny piece of paper. Put the tiny paper and one ice cube in a plastic baggie, then seal it tight. Where do you most need to wear this? In a back pocket? Shirt pocket? Carry it between your ass cheeks? Or crotch? Tie it around an ankle, or have it rest on your head under a hat--it's your choice, it's yours to know where. Leave it in that spot for the duration of your walk outside in your neighborhood. Later, before going inside, go where no one can see you and SMASH the baggie to let the water wet yourself on the spot where it was carried. It's just a little water. Just a little tonic. Go home and write your poem."

Katy Henricksen on Hanne Hukkelberg.

Radicalradio on the web.

Cystic Fibrosis Fact: Lung disease results from clogging of airways due to inflammation. Inflammation and infection cause injury to the lungs and structural changes that lead to a variety of symptoms. In the early stages, incessant coughing, copious phlegm production, and decreased ability to exercise are common. Many of these symptoms occur when bacteria that normally inhabit the thick mucus grow out of control and cause pneumonia.

A review of the Marc Scroggins Zukofsky biography, The Poem of a Life.

Check It

Tight 3 drops. This spring.

Featuring: Nora Almeida, Aaron Belz, David Berman, Sommer Browning, Michael Carr, Shanna Compton, Buck Downs, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Gabriel Gudding, Matt Hart, Mike Hauser, Katy Henriksen, Mark Horosky, David Huddle, Lisa Jarnot, Robert Kelly, Evan Kennedy, John Koethe, Maurice Manning, Chris Martin, Joseph Massey, James Meetze, Andrew Mister, Ryan Murphy, Jess Mynes, Daniel Nester, Cate Peebles, Arlo Quint, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Sandra Simonds, Ed Skoog, Kathleen Winter, and Charles Wright

A Enjoyable An Action

"There is something that could be called the prose of cinema and that’s all the movies that we see, all the five different stories that Hollis Frampton says movies can tell. That’s the prose of cinema. I’m putting this in quotes: “It produces novels. It produces all our prosaic information including much of our documentation.” It is really prose, just as it is in the books that we get at the library and read. Then there’s poetry, and poetry is something distinct. And the only problem with making a distinction of poetry is that people tend to think poetry is more important than, or greater than, or more significant than prose, or vice versa. That needn’t be the case at all, and isn’t as far as I’m concerned. I mean it is in the sense that I love poetry very deeply and I’m more involved with and care more about poetry, but otherwise there is a distinction between prose and poetry which is not based upon one being better than the other. One goes to the movies for a certain kind of experience just like one reads a novel for a certain kind of experience. And one would be hard put if you started trying to read a poem in the way in which you read a novel. I mean, it would be very discouraging in fact. Poetry would come to seem to be hard rather than, which it truly is, different. And I think those people who regard my films as hard are simply disregarding the fact that they’re poems, that they’re little cine-poems. They’re to be looked at completely differently. You’re not trying to find out who’s going to ride off into the sunset with whom. Is this beautiful yellow shape going to ride off into the sunset with the purple phallic shape or what? No, it’s absurd. A poem is a poem." More of the interview with Stan Brakhage.

Hugh Kenner on Stevens: "[He] did not aspire toward specialties of feeling but toward a working grasp of what teased Lewis Carroll, the world-view a dictionary seems always nearly to enunciate . . . you have made sense or so made it that the words make sense . . . . [T]o reflect that sense can look strangely like nonsense when words do not look as if they meant what they do . . . . Words make a world of words . . . the poem enacts the creation of a necessary fiction."

An interview with Matthea Harvey.

Cystic Fibrosis Fact: It is most common among Europeans and Ashkenazi Jews; one in twenty-two people of European descent carry one gene for CF, making it the most common genetic disease in these populations.

A new POP piece is up.

World-renowned writers from China and North America marked International Human Rights Day by launching We Are Ready for Freedom of Expression, a campaign that challenges the Chinese government to release all the writers and journalists it is holding in prisons before the August 8, 2008 opening of the Olympic Games. Noted Chinese authors Liu Xiaobo and Zheng Yi were among those joining international counterparts including Margaret Atwood, Francine Prose, and Salman Rushdie in issuing the challenge on behalf of PEN.

Sign the petition the Chinese government. Read the letter.

Sign the petition to the U.S. Congress.

CUE7

CUE 7 is on its way and includes new work by Karla Kelsey, G.C. Waldrep, Michael Schiavo, Ravi Shankar, Barbara Cully, Stephanie Balzer, Mark Horosky, Shelly Taylor, Ann Fine, Jon Thompson, Arianne Zwartjes and a retrospective of Kora in Hell by Stephen Cushman.

$5

Pre-order it here.

I Had Such Sharp Ornament

A new Diagram is up.

Reginald Shepherd's revised essay on Defining Post-Avant-Garde Poetry.

CA Conrad Somatic Poetry Exercise No. 8: "Take a stroll and stay walking for this one. If you could have the clouds rain any fluid of your choice what would it be? Imagine it coming down on the street in front of you. How would the other people on the street react to your chosen liquid. Is it something they would fill mugs with and drink? Would they run screaming for cover? What if this liquid came down as a flash flood, how would the streets smell after the storm? What would the weather reports sound like on the news? If they interviewed a scientist what would be the expert opinion given? If the sun beat down 100 degrees every day for a week how would it smell? Sit down somewhere and begin to write, but write about sandwiches, write about peanuts, write about apricots and sushi, then write about eating this, being thirsty, and filling a mug with the fluid of your choice. Write as much as you can as fast as you can no matter how silly it seems to you. A day later start to mine this writing to find the hidden poem."

An interview with Campbell McGrath.

Cystic Fibrosis Fact: Cystic fibrosis is one of the most common life-shortening, childhood-onset inherited diseases. In the United States, 1 in 3900 children are born with CF.

Unreflecitve Ritual Enjoyment

The new Octopus 10 is here.

This summer in Tucson--Conceptual Poetry and its Others
with keynote speakerMarjorie Perloff

May 29-31, 2008

WITH FEATURED ARTISTS CAROLINE BERGVALL, CHARLES BERNSTEIN, CHRISTIAN BÖK, CRAIG DWORKIN, PETER GIZZI, KENNETH GOLDSMITH, SUSAN HOWE, TRACIE MORRIS, COLE SWENSEN .

The recent publication of Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Anthology of Conceptual Poetry (based on the online Ubuweb Anthology of Conceptual Writing) is only one sign of the recent interest in the “tensions between materiality and concept” (Dworkin), in a “new new formalism,” based on constraints, both the Oulipo and Cagean variants, on citationality and found text, on sound play, and visual device. Is such “non-expressivist” poetry too extreme? Conceptual Poetry and Its Others brings together a variety of leading poets to debate the issue.

An interview with John Ashbery in Guernica.

CA Conrad Somatic Poetry Exercise No. 7: "Ok, so you find out you're going to die, or be killed later today. What meal would you like? What meal is your favorite? Make that meal for yourself. Sit and write a few lines from the smell and sight of it. Put your ear to the plate and move it around with your fingers or fork, or chopsticks. Listen, smell, look, and eat it, slowly, very, very, slowly, eat, it. It's your favorite meal, it's your last meal, enjoy every single flavor. Promise me you're slowly eating? Good. As soon as the last bite is gone move quickly into the bathroom. Blast the cold shower while you strip naked. As soon as your clothes are off then shut the water off. Light a candle, shut of all lights, then sit on the floor of the cold, wet shower with your candle and write your poem, addressing some of what you wrote earlier aout your final meal. If someone should catch you and call you a weirdo yell back, YES I AM NOW LEAVE ME ALONE I'M BUSY!" You are busy, and you are a weirdo, and it's a marvelous thing, now go back to your writing. Forget about them, it's not your fault you're more interesting than they are."

A profile of Casey Dienel by Katie Henricksen.

An interview with Matt Henricksen.

CUE Editions & the New CUE Editions Bookstore

I'm happy to announce the new CUE Editions bookstore, where you can now purchase individual back-issues of CUE: A Journal of Prose Poetry, each of CUE's final two print issues of the journal (7 & 8), as well as all forthcoming CUE Editions chapbook titles, including our first--Mark Horosky's Let It Be Nearby, coming in April and with cover art by Amie Robinson.

Other chapbooks in the series will include those by Stephanie Balzer, Sommer Browning and Michael Schiavo.

Sez Hard Heads Sez

Thanks to Tight for accepting two poems for the first forthcoming issue in years. I hear I'm in good company, sharing space with David Berman and Charles Wright, among others.

CA Conrad Somatic Poetry Exercise No. 6: "If you can be naked for this exercise it is best. Plan to be outside for 9 different sunsets. Get yourself comfortable and seated an hour before the sunset. For 50 minutes focus on your feet. Look at them. Where have you walked in this world? Are they tired? How do they smell? Can you suck your toes? Give them a good taste. But mostly give them some serious concentration, they're your feet, no one else's. This is a meditation for your feet. Imagine they had their own thoughts and told you some things about themselves you did not know. Think of nothing but your feet. Think about one, or both of them gone. Or damaged. Think of them in every way you can imagine thinking about them. Then for the remaining 10 minutes before sunset, just before twilight, write at a fever's pitch about some of those thoughts you have had about your feet. For the other 8 sunsets focus on each of these 8 different body sections, one per sunset: Legs, Genitals, Navel, Breasts, Arms, Hands, Neck, Head (exterior), Head (interior). If when you meditate on your genitals you feel the urge to masturbate that is fine, but try to not orgasm because we want to keep the energy challenged and in flux, not depleted. Of course if you do orgasm don't worry, no big deal. But try to keep yourself from doing so. And if you do masturbate try to not do it for the full 50 minutes, there are many things your genitals would like to tell you if you would only imagine that they could. After the 9 sunsets are completed, take your 9 feverish streams of writings and on a fresh piece of paper put the first word from word from the second meditation, then the second word on the fresh piece of paper is the first word from the second meditation, and so on, keep going until all the words from all the writings are now fully mixed and on one document. From here you must become the natural editor you are, looking closely, moving words, removing words, working it into the poem that's waiting to be found. Take your time with this, it's nobody's business how long you take.

Christian Wiman's essay on reading Milton in Guatemala.

New Reading Series over at Casa Libre--Edge: A reading Series of Emerging and Younger Writers.

Shannon Cain & TC Tolbert
Thursday, February 28
730 pm
Suggested Donation: $3

And this:

Jon Anderson Memorial Tribute

Friday, February 29 at 8 p.m. at the Modern Languages Auditorium Join us to celebrate the life and work of Jon Anderson. Poets and friends of Jon Anderson will gather on February 29 at 8 p.m. at the Modern Languages Auditorium to reflect on Jon's poetry and his teaching.

Disarming Poetry: The Work and Influence of Jon Anderson

Saturday, March 1 at 11 a.m. at the Poetry Center A roundtable to discuss Jon Anderson's contributions to contemporary poetry and his continuing influence on contemporary writers.

Verge

For those of you in town skittish about ordering Verge on-line, you can now purchase a copy at Antigone Books.

P.S. i.e. Almost Dreamt

Now available over at Kitchen Press--Joseph Massey's Out of Light.

The Things That Surround Us

The entire world was there. The magnetic north pole was there. Prince Patrick Island was introduced to Prince of Wales Island and these were not the only islands being introduced to other islands. One room was completely filled with the space around all the islands.

When you asked me if I was an island, I told you that I was not. When you asked me to join you in the drawing room, I told you that I could not, that I was in fact an island and I couldn't join anyone anywhere.

Saddened, you revealed to me that you were not the two things that jut outward into the sea as I had assumed, but the little bit of gray sea between them.

Then I told you I was the entire Arctic Ocean sometimes.

by Zach Schomburg

CA Conrad Somatic Poetry Exercise No. 5: "Go to a bookstore. Go to the History Section. Close your eyes and randomly choose a book. Turn to page 108. Read that page and pull one word you like from it. Go to the Romance Section, repeat process. Then go to these other 7 sections and repeat process: Gardening, Religion, Biography, Children's, Cookbooks, Law, Horror. After you've collected these 9 words sit in the store, even if you must sit on the floor, then write a poem which includes these 9 words. This poem must be immediate, and it must be written in the store where the 9 words were found on page 108 of 9 different books. I hope you show me your poem one day. Thank you ahead of time."

The U of A Poetry Center gets some attention on the Poetry Foundation blog.

Cystic Fibrosis Fact: CF is caused by a mutation in a gene called the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR). The product of this gene is a chloride ion channel important in creating sweat, digestive juices, and mucus.