Monthly archive March, 2010
Post 3 from Guest Blogger Brenda Coultas
Hated the Martin McDoughal play “A Behanding in Spokane.” Racist, I kept waiting for some point to be made. None was. An audience of white tourists laughing at the n-word.
Wish I’d waited till the reviews, esp. New Yorker one, were in before buying tickets but I wanted to see Christopher Walken on stage.
March 19
Eleni and me are hanging out, run into Lee Ann Brown who makes us extras in Tony Torn’s movie. The Cellbutross. Its a scene in a bar where everyone is texting or talking on their cells. A giant cell phone overhead, that rings, its someone’s boss.
Then its onward to the Whitney to catch an hour of the biennial.
March 20th
KiKi Smith show at the Brooklyn Museum. Main figure must be Elizabeth Murray, its a beautiful elegy. Clearly about transmission from one generation of women artist to another.
March 21
8th Anniversary of the Iraq Invasion Reading in a Williamsburg loft. Eleni Sikelianos, Major Jackson, Pierrie Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte and their family band.
March 22
Notes from a Talk on The Book of Jon by Eleni Sikelianos. Eleni was the guest writer for John High’s MFA class called Writers on Writing. The Book of Jon is a memoir of Eleni’s father, Jon, a handsome, talented man who struggled with drug and alcohol addiction. He died broke, alone in a hotel room.
Mistranslated notes from her talk:
“Poetry as a way to cool the material down. To tell an emotional truth without skirting the issues/ hot middle…how blind we are to ourselves… It is possible to get in trouble [some family members disapprove]… The disappeared father… Of some fragment we all have, bodies, brains, stories… Part 1 I wrote while he was alive–Part 11 after…about grieving… Who am I writing it for? Me… Not curative because we forget about the art… The notion that the living help the dead… He needs help now even on the other side…‘need oven mitts for the material’ Tom Clark to Jo Ann Wasserman [on writing The Escape, her poems on her mother’s death in a car crash]
Books Received
The Port of Los Angeles, Jane Sprague, Chax Press
The Tsatsawassans, Vol. #2, Ed. by Bernadette Mayer
March 23
Morning composition class. We walked to Madison Square Park, wrote and walked for thirty minutes. No one wanted to share their work. So I did:
Who is Roscoe Conkling?
Frozen custard
Floats, cones, shakes
Tue is Mango Madness.
Pinot Noir $22.
Suspended walkway between buildings.
Wedge of the Flatiron
Empire State silver needle in the sun
Dogs sprung from penthouse prisons
Morning sun blazes on my coat
Leaf blowers buzz like gnats
Dogs in designer coats
Doberman in Burberry plaid
English bulldog in rhinestones.
Night composition class uptown. We are covering “The Metamorphosis.” So I ask the students to write about a time when they or someone they knew was treated or felt like a bug. One student, a Trinidadian woman about my age, wrote about taking the 6 hour bus ride to see her son in prison, “faces on the bus knew no color or age” and about how the visitors felt like bugs, powerless. Images conveyed through the senses, “the guards are the thorns” “steel met
steel “(clanging of the gates and cells) her son keeps his milk cold by storing it in the toilet. “This prison it’s mine.” Her last line reminds me that when one person is incarcerated the whole family is in effect also imprisoned.
Some photos from the Janet Hamill & Margaret Randall reading
3/24/2010
All photos (c) 2010 by Star Black. Thanks Star!
Introductions for Norman Fischer & Rae Armantrout – 3/17/10
Norman Fischer is a zen priest. He is a former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, and the founder and teacher for the Everyday Zen Foundation His zen comrade and poetic daddy, Philip Whalen, compared his work to “a Baccarat crystal paperweight, a smooth clear ball of glass containing intricate designs in many brilliant colors.” A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Fischer has been associated with the Bay Area literary scene since the 1970s. Fischer has published over a dozen collections of poetry; the most recent are Slowly But Dearly (Chax Press, 2003), I Was Blown Back (Singing Horse Press, 2005) and Questions/Places/Voices/Seasons (Singing Horse press, 2009).
Norman Fisher begins the poem “Hereafter” with the line “Hereafter, or here, in the pace and in the rigor.” The poem comes early in his new book and was the line that grounded me in the book, clued me in on how to “be with the work”. When Alan Davies reviewed I Was Blown Back he brought up pace as something that is key to Fischer’s work – “good poems can help to pace us (so that we don’t lose track of us)”. One way Fischer brings his vocation as a teacher of mindfulness to the page is by creating an environment where the distance between successive words is related to the distance between successive breaths and with acute awareness to how the reader’s eye will traverse the page. It is generous in its considerations of the human body and how we experience time, or how we can alter the way we experience ourselves. The shorter lines of the longest section of the book, “Seasons” invites endless retracings with the month of March forming its node. There is a really great quote on Fischer’s Website that I will read in full to conclude this intro: “Meditation is when you sit down, let’s say that, and don’t do anything. Poetry is when you get up and do something. Somewhere we’ve developed the misconception that poetry is self-expression, and that meditation is going inward. Actually, poetry has nothing to do with self-expression, it is the way to be free, finally, of self-expression, to go much deeper than that. And meditation is not a form of thought or reflection, it is a looking at or an awareness of what is there, equally inside and outside, and then it doesn’t make sense anymore to mention inside or outside”. Please welcome Norman to the Poetry Project.
Rae Armantrout’s recent book, Versed (Wesleyan, 2009), was a National Book Awards finalist and just won The National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Next Life (Wesleyan, 2007), was chosen as one of the 100 Notable Books of that year by The New York Times. Other recent books include Collected Prose (Singing Horse, 2007), Up to Speed (Wesleyan, 2004), The Pretext (Green Integer, 2001), and Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Armantrout received an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. She is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego.
In a late 90’s interview with Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout says that she is “interested in the psychology of perception, and for me this interest is associated with the political. I keep asking what happens to the subject—the “cogito”—in a society where perceptions are commodities, already shrink-wrapped”. Armantrout’s body of work presents a subject dignified by the eschewal of voyeuristic identification and its dark side that tempts us with power and then strips us of culture. In Versed, some of my favorite poems call attention to the agency that metaphor has to connect, yet at the same time is unable to sustain that connection. The voice in the poem “Like,” says “What’s it like / to be me.” And later, “How much of me / could be lost / while like remained?” What are the costs and pay-offs in making one more like another? Readers of Armantrout’s work will recognize how “various elements [are] hissing and spitting at each other” (RA). While the self is presented in positions of solitude and uncertainty these positions are offered to us as truly generous, generative and subversive. Please welcome Rae to the Poetry Project.
-SS
Stephanie Young & George Tysh
[This event took place on March 10, 2010]
Report by Alice Whitwham
“I’ve never even been to a reading here,” Stephanie Young said, stepping up to the podium. She was nervous, but excited – New York is a bigger place than Oakland. “I’m also deeply over-stimulated. ”
Young began with the first poem from Picture Palace, a collection which, as Stacy pointed out, quoting Stan Apps, engages with memoir “as process rather than product.” The Gaston Bachelard epigraph – “We are unable to relive duration that has been destroyed” –was followed by Young’s qualification: “And yet it has not been / I set out to write a memoir / a plot of originary relation.” Young’s refreshing, immediate excitement gave the next sequence of lines an energy – a kind of pressure that pushed against the constraints of a frustratingly resistant syntax:
One church is a building on Wadsworth Ave.
[…] one opens onto a series of schools
One is a marriage, itself having taken place inside another church
One is the father’s workweek […] church that supports the other churches.
One thought she-child could eventually step outside. She found she could not.
A pause followed. The audience still. The list of church, schools, marriage, wages—opening into, enclosing, supporting each other—confronted us as a system as rigidly constructed as the lines themselves; the anaphora felt inflexible, stilted, the sentences caught on a repetitive loop. The monotony of the sequence only made the possibility of escape seem more remote. Ending in the she-child’s disappointment, it felt like a disappointment I had already been anticipating.
Following this plotting of structures that contain, construct, constrict, Young brought us closer to the she-child’s attempt to position, and reposition herself within them. What occurred was a giddy-making shift from hopefulness: “Instead she found it everywhere. Repetitive arrangements with more than one side” to suspicion: “But she couldn’t stick with it either; couldn’t ‘spelunk.’” What was that? Spelunk? Either excitedly diffuse, or awkwardly disoriented, the she-child seemed to be losing it.
Post 2 from Guest Blogger Brenda Coultas
March 6
(From Woodstock)
Bernadette and Phil are going to see The Crazies, a horror flick, in Hudson tonight. Last film we saw with them was Boogeyman in Catskill.
Bird songs, fresh mint crawling out from the snow.
Deer scat in back yard.
Going for a walk with Grace Murphy, that one, the one with all the 2nd generation NY school poems dedicated to her. Esp. from Bernadette, Steve Katz, etc. Bernadette, Grace, and Peggy DeCoursey went to high school together.
Books Received:
Gurlesque, ed by Lara Glenum & Arielle Greenberg
Volt, Volume 15
Either She Was, Karin Randolph, Marsh Hawk Press
Town, Kate Schapira, Factory School
The Imperfect, George Tysh, United Artists
Thirty Miles to Rosebud, Barbara Henning, BlazeVOX.
Courtesy of Tonya Foster, 5 chapbooks from Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative series: The Amiri Baraka/Ed Dorn Correspondence,The Kenneth Koch/Frank O’Hara Letters: Parts I & II, Philip Whalen’s Journals: Selections, Parts I & II, Robert Creeley: Context of Poetry with Selections from Daphne Marlatt’s Journals, Muriel Rukeyser: Darwin & the Writers.
Reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. A relief to read something smart about the crap we’re being fed. She also traces the origins of the positive brainwashing culture back to the 19th century.
A blog is not a journal or diary. The temptation is to pour my heart out as in a private document, but in reality, I would out myself as well as others, even though that these words will mostly go unread except by Stacy (who posts it) and the next guest blogger checking in. That I like, the thought of writing to an audience of Stacy and myself. Rumor is the “comments” command is dysfunctional. Good. No thumbs up/down on my posts. I want this space to be silent like the page. This is a monologue not a conversation. Or is it gossip? Too thin-skinned to be a full time blogger, I want to be liked too much.
Thinking of the problem/pleasure of writing in a public space, the fluid nature of online writing, and how ugly the word “blog” itself is. Like slog or clog. And how every blog at some point requires the writer to acknowledge the medium, just as I am here. Still the temptation to put it all down is present, the quietness of composing is seductive. Filling the endless void of cyberspace with letters is a silent luxury, yet I censor myself.
March 11
(back in East Village)
The raven is at the top of one of the largest trees on the cemetery outside our window. In the fall, it stayed close to the ground. I heard that was rescued from a ditch in Arizona, and that it hates men and loves women, and eats dog food.
Sometimes Red Tail Hawks perch in the treetops too and hunt pigeons.
Rat ran across the top of backyard wall in the rain.
Went to see “Time Stands Still” by Donald Margulies, on Broadway, set in Williamsburg loft, about photojournalists and the Iraqi war. Not a great play but a good one. It deals with the role of the photojournalist: the job is to witness, not to intervene. All of the characters except for the Sarah, played by Laura Linney, decide that there is nothing they can do about the war but snatch at happiness by having babies and forgetting about it. Except Linney’s character, who has returned home to heal after being blown up by a roadside bomb. She goes back to the war zone as a witness.
I ignore pain, haven’t dealt with it directly in my writing. A friend of mine, did a self-portrait with a nail, penetrating her forehead. “It’s my pain,” she said.
March 13
Rain day and night. Simon Pettet over for dinner. He walks in soaked to the bone, takes off his raincoat and boots, and from a book bag pulls out a very dry copy of Other Flowers, James Schulyer’s uncollected poems that he co-edited with James Meetze. Mixed review in the LA Times.
Bonga, John Zorn, Denize Lauture, Amiri & Amini Baraka – Benefit for Haiti this Sunday!
Sunday, March 14th, 6:30 PM
A Celebration of Haitian Culture: Benefit for Earthquake Relief
Please join the Poetry Project , Danspace Project, Ontological-Hysteric Theater and St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery for a celebration of Haitian culture. All proceeds from the evening will be donated to Partners in Health: Stand With Haiti. http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti
Tickets to the benefit are available for advanced purchase here, and will also be sold at the door. Please visit the benefit blog for updates and ticket options. http://benefitforhaiti.wordpress.com
Thanks to our friends at Ugly Duckling Presse for printing and donating the gorgeous posters!
Introductions for Stephanie Young & George Tysh
Stephanie Young lives and works in Oakland. Her books of poetry are Picture Palace (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 2008) and Telling the Future Off (Tougher Disguises, 2005). She edited the anthology Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and her most recent editorial project is Deep Oakland.
I’m probably not the only person in this room who first discovered the poetry blog through Stephanie Young’s highly esteemed The Well-Nourished Moon. She is also the first person I knew of to post photographs of poets and readings on the internet and the first person to make my name appear on the internet, which gave me the feeling that I had somehow “made it” and led to a period of unhinged self-searching – but more than anything, I realized that poetical loneliness would never be the same, that poets are social, if awkward, people, and this new technological engagement could and would facilitate collective experience / what I know today as my community.
Her most recent book, Picture Palace, called “an anti-lyric-memoir-sob”, engages with autobiography “as a process rather than a product” (that’s Stan Apps in ON 2). Apps points out that in traditional memoir “the reader is not mired by language” – however, Young sees the state of being overwhelmed by language as a prerequisite for something to happen to her person and by extension the person of the reader. This is not a poet who would never “unfairly limit us to description” especially when writing about the several that we are (to paraphrase Bachelard) in our trial lives in childhood, or the complexity of the kinds of interconnectivity and solitude we seek as adults. Please welcome Stephanie to the Poetry Project.
George Tysh was born in Passaic, NJ, and educated in Detroit. In Paris in the ’60s, he edited Blue Pig with poet David Ball, and collaborated with conceptual artists Christian Boltanski and Sarkis. From 1980 to 1991, he directed LINES: New Writing at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a series that brought more than 300 authors to read and discuss their works in the Motor City, and (with poet Chris Tysh) edited In Camera, a project devoted to works of the sexual imaginary. His latest collection, The Imperfect (United Artists Books), completes a sequence that includes Ovals (In Camera) and Echolalia (United Artists Books). Currently, he teaches at the Roeper School in Birmingham, MI.
In the book Dream Sites, George Tysh responds to the Dieter Roth drawing “2 Times 5 Trophies” – a drawing that shows a Rorschach-like blot, a bust of 2 facing each other with speech balloons springing from their heads each containing the word “trophy” – with the lines “Poetry / dreams up / its own rewards”. The rewards of Tysh’s poetry are here apparent in his rigor, concision and wit.
The content of his new book The Imperfect is on one hand less overtly erotic than Echolalia, on the other hand, he, always “very hot brain” (to quote Bob Holman) comes to achieve eros in language itself, through craft. There are few poets who are as wildly successful at allowing poetry to lead “to the same place as all forms of eroticism—to the blending and fusion of separate objects” (That’s Bataille). Tysh appeals to our senses, which of course means our bodies, eyes, ears and tongues, with linguistic fusions such as “sees / it seize / my inner seas.” And mustache / must ache / mind over matter in / a body of thought”. Please welcome George to the Poetry Project.
Joel Bettridge – from PRESOCRATIC BLUES – 2/15/10
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Geoffrey Olsen – from END NOTEBOOK – 2/15/10
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Franklin Bruno – from “Policy Instrument” – 2/8/10
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