Saturday

Or call it what you will… it’s the poets that are dragging cinema back to the gutter where it belongs. Watch LIVE in the Parish Hall of St. Mark’s as performers Ariana Reines, Eileen Myles, Bruce Andrews, Brandon Downing, Edwin Torres, Felix Bernstein, the trio of Michael Barron, James Copeland, and William Rahilly, and others stage major interventions and subterfuge of the moving image.

Wednesday

At last! John Ashbery’s translation of French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s final masterpiece before abandoning poetry at the age of 21, Illuminations (Norton, 2011) has been published. Ashbery’s rendering of all forty-four poems powerfully evokes the kaleidoscopic beauty of the original and creates “a vision of postdiluvian freshness” out of “the chaos of ice floes and the polar night.” This is a major literary event and we are going to celebrate it with poets and musicians Edwin Torres, Anne Tardos, Nicole Peyrafitte, Franklin Bruno, David Shapiro, Bree Brenton, Julie Patton, Madeline Gins, Richard Hell, Melinda Faylor, Anna Williams and Sharon Mesmer.

Edwin Torres Me No Habla Spic

“No Lie _ H  onest”

Edwin Torres no lie

Read Edwin’s Buffer Zone Galactica on the blog “harriet.”

Report by Nada Gordon

Edwin Torres was stylin’ in his official MTA pop lettrist NY School subway socks and fine loud maybe zinnia print shirt in shades of burgundy, pumpkin, scarlet, neon cantaloupe, and 50s aqua on a warm cream background. I watched him psych up gathering energy to be, as Stacy quoted him in her introduction, “sincere in [his] weirdness.”

Once at the podium all that gathered and focused energy sprung out in his rhythms and, in the initial poem, in / ^ / sounds. It seemed an address or response to a child: sucking, cup, child, and duct were some of the phonemes he lingered over here. These were, in his words, “brokens laced together by brokens,” and I confirmed my sense that Edwin is the sort of poet-presence who could stand up and read a phone book, so attentive is he to language sounds and ways of performing them to maximize and energize meaning.

This first poem was in the mode of a kind of child’s story, but not in any kind of infantilized way. He intoned parts of it in keys that kept modulating upwards, and that was beautiful.  “A shape snailed in the curries.” There was something, I thought, a little old-timey classic Steinian about Edwin’s way of working, its associativeness, how each line took a hint from the previous and transformed: “so I take another step.”

Next was his version of “I Remember,” but with a mischievous twist. Most memory-sections ended with some variation of the exclamation, “what a cute spic!” I loved how this was both discomfiting and true, for isn’t that kind of what one thinks encountering Edwin, although maybe not exactly in those terms? Can I say that? It’s a complex statement, auto-infantilizing, charmingly self-regarding, epithet-neutralizing, ironic but also not ironic, and I can’t imagine anyone but Edwin presenting and defamiliarizing it the way he did, never the same way twice, and always unexpected, nestled at the end of sections that included phrases like “I remember the audience levitating in the middle of a poem” and “wrapped up in the viral opportunity of a cute spic.” The lines were way too long to write down, but there was something about a writing machine, something about skin color; I couldn’t keep up with transcription, and I loved that, because, you know…

…subtraction and erasure and minimalism do very little for me (ha!). It is just my nature to always want more and more and more, and the whole evening, both Edwin’s and Will’s poems were exercises in, meditations on, agglutination and accretion.

What accrued in the next poem was moths, lots and lots of them, in this poem that was so visual it was almost like a screenplay. First there was only one moth and then several moths “eating special sidewalk bugs” then hundreds of them fluttering around on the sidewalk. I could tell that Lee Ann Brown liked the moths. I heard her make some noises indicating as much, and recalled a conversation she and I had had about the figure of the moth in Bernadette’s writing, how the moth is a kind of muse or symbol of muse, and the moth is also mouth and mother.

Next Edwin read a flarfed-up address to Allen Ginsberg celebrating their “unrequited bromance”; I wondered if this was Edwin’s translation of Ginsberg’s address to Walt Whitman, “A Supermarket in California.” The brilliance flowed thick and fast here: “Emily Dickinson bedsheets,” “unformed Unicorns,” and “Christian Bök umlauts”: again, too fast for transcription but not too fast to amuse and charm.

“Song of the Red Lamb” he read like blues or gospel, but not singing: on the edge of song: “who lives on that lamb red leg?” Echoes for me of blues masters, Tracie Morris, and oddly, Eraserhead, and it turned almost towards the end into a train beggar’s chant.

It got druggier. The whole evening was gloriously druggy, but the next piece Edwin read really put me into an altered state. He read a piece full of spelling mistakes, respecting the spelling mistakes and elevating them into some kind of other world, a space of druggy art:  “What ig you had a privet club– What if yiz was a nark chen  – Menartade the pump of my duz– your freebaloo” (these misspellings are of course approximated) everything half deformed, with just enough of something to hang on to. Towards the end Edwin moved into a funny whispery voice– every phoneme COUNTED even though only half comprehensible and I felt like I was underwater but perhaps I’m too easily inducted into that space, because I so much want to be there, near that “lamb red leg” because “Audrey has flat feet.”

If Will Alexander’s fashion statement was muted (black baseball cap with no logos, black jacket and pants, olive sweater), his poetry was not, and neither were his preambles to the poetry, which sounded to me like a combination of preaching and auto-consolation:

“We must break the plane… move with vertical insistence [toward the] …rediscovery of the human being”

“Words have energies in sound and look,” he said, that are sometimes “painterly” and it was in a 1957 dictionary that he found the word “loxodrome,” and he decided to make that word a name of a sailor.  A few unconnected lines from the first section he read:

“a riddled scorpion typhoon”

“a stinging pottery of nerves”

“kino synthetic shockwaves”

“a body below the simulation of the trilobites”

“be it the pelvic whale or the caudal dolphin”

The sailor, I began to realize, was absolutely navigating through vertical layers of undiscovered planes – as Stacy had said in her introduction, on “a trajectory of potentia” and “[with] accretion through unprecedented structure.” Every line was exploratory, Loxodrome a kind of “vulpine” “oneiric” “sea wasp.” “He exists at nervous solitary limit.”

Will said in another interlude that poems come to him “not so much as flashes but as seepage… a murmuring always going on at the oddest times and the oddest moments… kind of like the cosmos.”  (Here I heard Erica Hunt exclaim, “yeah, right!”) He continued… “That’s not outer space: we’re outer space…. most people don’t know where the Orion Spur is in the universe:  we’re on it.”

Lines from “Nexus of Phantoms”:

“In a lorikeet cave”

“the swans looking back on solemn blood perusal”

“the scent of each lorikeet is consumed & brought to dazzling eclipse”

…and throughout I had the sense of cosmic (im)possibility.

The next preamble was on water and the infinity of water.  We are, Will said, “always walking around with water,” and it is “all one flow.”  He mentioned an “occlusionary consciousness” but I don’t know what he meant by that… perhaps that it is obstructed? or obstructing?  and called water a “dysphoric medium,” but again I wasn’t sure why, as surely it is not only dysphoric unless we drown in it or are lost on it or if it is pressing on our brains and stressing us out. Anyway.

He stood with a wide stance, as if in second ballet position. I don’t know why I noticed that or what that meant, except that its rootedness was somehow in contrast with the wildly interstellar nature of his verse.  He spoke of the “dark conduction of saliva.”

He continued, “Seepage transpires… beyond what you know…sometimes  toward a deeper understanding of what you already know.”

The next poem he read was called “The Optic Wraith.” Some lines:

“tortured hummingbird’s sortie”

“a sun in a squandered maelstrom house”

“each of my shadows collects around a pole of a fierce & blazeless assessment”

“harems of spittle”

“pariah plunged through psychotic mirages”

and I thought to myself, you know, this poetry is very interesting almost as artifact. He writes as if Objectivism, the New York School, Language Poetry, and the internet had never happened.  Its mysticism almost seems quaint.  There is no body in it, nothing personal, no obvious intertextuality, and absolutely no irony at all.  Instead it is a relentless orientalist surrealism, a grammatical exercise in endless appositives that aim to extend perception the way nested phrases in a diagrammed sentence send the mind off into various diagonal directions.

Another preamble:  “we are taught not to think but to respond… poets and people of depth take this on, this energy.” He quoted Bob Kaufman, whom he called the founder of the Beats, as saying that the poet works a 24-hour shift, and said that we are “saturated with this whole continuum…this whole range of awareness.”

more lines:

“God a philosophical Torment”

“macropositional scalding”

“beyond the scope of oppositional turquoise”

“subsumed in the body with a rudderless experience”

“Poetry,” he said, is “such an intense listening experience… so I try to keep it compact.”  Compact?  No, that is the last word I would use for his poetry.  He continued, “Nero went on so long one of the audience members had a baby.”  Will did kind of go on for a long time.  I almost had a baby, but instead decided to get up and stretch.  Those chairs at the Project are a torment for me, sort of concave at the back, ouch.  He went on speaking about the long poem, how it “speaks at different levels.”  Poetry is, he said “a living conduction.”

More lines:

“ambit of an iris transcribing its folios in trance”

“a brackish melancholia”

“narcotic iridescence”

“an epileptic maharajah” [this rhymed internally with pasha and noxious]

“pre-Columbian gerbils” [Drew Gardner wrote this down, visibly delighted.  He also wrote down “A mongoose can love,” which struck me as a perfect Drew line]

“abstract carking”

“a fetid indigo dalliance”

His last line pretty much encapsulated his poetics, uncharacteristically compactly:

“the electrical route of 100 solar masses”

Well, even if I did get a little antsy towards the end, this was truly one of those rare readings where I felt myself in the presence of two poets who are ALWAYS ON DUTY working that 24-hour shift, totally present to those “murmurings” and “seepages” that are the stuff of our art. To me, Edwin’s poems are more considered as form, in that they frequently have some sort of axis from which exude parallel but varying structures, and in that each poem makes a formal statement somehow different from every other poem.  Will, on the other hand, seems to be tapping into one immeasurably huge poem, of which the shorter pieces seem to be sampled segments. Still, the force and immensity of his project are undeniable, and both poets managed, in only about two hours, to open multiple doors to multiple worlds.  I salute them both.

Will Alexander’s poems are “alphabetically living.” Clayton Eshleman evokes a comparison to Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers. Indeed, accretion through unprecedented structure gives us a place to start our “upper and lower world[s]” sprawl. We must also be prepared for form to obliterate, “where the body of the captain reappears & disappears.”  In The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, the 70 page title poem/dramatic monologue in the book of the same name, the sailor Loxodrome sails the Indian Ocean on a trawler, on a mission to catch and de-poison sea snakes. Unlike Pessoa’s Maritime Ode, where the story ends with a heart that won’t heal and a narrator who cries out to be saved from what is within him, Alexander’s story charts “a trajectory of potentia” through strife to being lifted from it – to arrive and find existence at the “source of the instantaneous”.  His gift is to bring his readers into this subnormal virtual body to feel perpetual in his burning love of verbs. I’ve never meant it more than I mean it tonight when I say it is a total honor to be hosting Will at the Project. Will Alexander.

Edwin Torres has collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that intermingle poetry with vocal & physical improvisation, sound-elements and visual theater. His work has been published in many anthologies, and his CD “Holy Kid,” (Kill Rock Stars Records) was part of The Whitney Museum’s exhibition, The American Century Pt. II. He’s inventor of a noh-boricua inspired non-movement called NORICUA, and has performed its non-ideologies with Spanic Attack in the Bronx, Berlin and Loisaida. He is co-editor of the poetry journal/DVD “Rattapallax.” His books include, Fractured Humorous, The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker and The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language. This reading launches his new book, In The Function of External Circumstances, from Nightboat Books.

In an interview awhile ago, Edwin Torres, answers a question about what he wants to communicate in his work with: “Sincerity, I guess. Being sincere in my weirdness.” His hyper-awareness of the world inside him and how it effects his being in the world is likely the tendency in Torres’ work that Rodrigo Toscano calls the Deep Emotional, as opposed the Surface Emotional. In the poem “Do Not Be Swayed By External Circumstances,” from his new book, the narrator and his beloved companion face the danger of an incoming tide, escape being impaired by mud – hardly a poem where we would expect to meet a “Mrs. Ladybug” but there she, a partner in peril, till she remembers her wings. He writes: “When you’re pulled by something unexpected, what you know / gets replaced by what you feel…” And what Torres feels, and what we feel, is not always comfort, or rather, we feel the question in comfort, set down the travel guide, and learn to see with feelers. Please welcome Edwin back to the Poetry Project.

-SS

We are a church, mass happens at every reading, right?
Oh PoProj, I give you my last blog entry as a popopoom>>>

I have jumped the castle-making pontiff machine
Scraping the hem of clergymen at low tide

I have sunk my grabb on stank pot putty
Paging Homer Bomar, the Bixter Funk

Hey, the Times had an article this Sunday in the real estate section about a writer who creates those blurbs for property listings. The article was entitled “The Poet of Property,” and I was amused at yet another use of the word ‘poetry’ or ‘poetic’ or ‘poet’ to lend a mysteriously arty flair to a benign experience. Whenever a movie needs to attract the non-poets it boldly exclaims “A Poetic Masterpiece.” Or else, attached to food … Mmm, this brownie, pure poetry … This chef is a real poet with the knives…or else in passing … He was a good speaker, a poet of words (?) … A true fighter, a swordsman and…a poet! … This hash makes you want to kill a poet, etc.

She dances like a poet.

I get curious about where the ‘poetry’ appears in the thing being written about. That soft-focus-nature-vibe or retro-beatnik-coolness which automatically signals poem to the masses. Maybe I’m too overprotective about what makes a poem a poem, or a poet a poet, and in whose eyes…and how imperialist is that? According to the media writing about the thing, I am as much poet as blogger.

I have vamped on the pyre of adolescent chin straps
Using inguish as a second anguish
      Yes, I cause cringe
      Mirrorfaction obelisk
          Got sit on the brain
          Go get a sit bone

I have tried to memorialize the barbecute
      Only to be with you
      Only to be with you

Now, keep all these videos open on your screen at the same time, sound on or off up to you. Get pen paper to catch every other image. When thing becomes thing
      Skip vowel
      And star psyche the rat out

Chris Funkhouser’s fantastically lo-fi text videos are gloriously un-digital in feel and loaded with smarts. I love how the letters breathe in their jitter as they evolve across the screen. Quite a feat, to sense the artist’s hand in a digital medium. A poetic feat, dare I scratch.

      i want to do a smoothie but
      the blender will wake him up
          go outside on the patio
          and close the screen door
      but it just started raining
          it’s just drizzling…stop thinking
          about him all the time
          you’ve got to do something for yourself
          go ahead and live life
      but won’t i get electrocuted
          oh

I have been intelligencer succubus
womanizer, drug fiend, smackhead, imperialist, racist, begged and stole from friends,
lord byron, samuel taylor coleridge, john keats, rudyard kipling, t.s. eliot, dylan thomas*
match the skill set with the poet and win your very own harrasment suit

(*from poetry in a times article again, twice in one week)

And within these austere territories I leave you, dear readers with a set of viewings
and some mange that chatters.

Thank you Stacy, for letting me ride a bit these cyber hallways of the Poetry Project.
Until next…
Edwin

Hiding behind screens of populated jams, where to find this week’s inch? On The Bowery, in The Bunker, from the travelled lungs of a certified poetry icon.

John Giorno’s reading at the Project last week was one of those pinch-me-I’m-alive events that reboots the mainframe and makes you want to write, perform and bask in the lifeline again.

This was the first of three fundraising events for the Project this year—along with the John Ashberry and Jack Spicer readings. In full command of his beyond earth talents, Giorno treated us to a master class on storytelling, breath, restraint, rhythm, humility, humanity and on and on. And considering the range of willing participants in the audience, his spell has deepened over time.

Okay…so the MC moves the crowd, the poet moves the people, the sage moves the mind, the shamen moves the air. Giorno has this capacity to levitate his body, and ours, while engaged in a deep rooting of soul. His feet dancing light on stage letting his balance just catch weight before the fall. A precariously beautiful dance between escape and height. His tales—intoned by that unmistakable accent, Jersey meets Georgia—wrap mortality around a Buddhist seed but never preach, allowing our chance to meet his.

And then there’s the proudly delicate love affair he has with intimacy…both physical and spiritual. If freedom were eros it would call itself Giorno. Don’t know what that means…but I suppose a shamen, a connected shamen, knows a thing or two about seduction…and getting lighter.

Here’s a link to a recent interview he did with Bomb Magazine along with a video of his poem, “Everyone Gets Lighter.” The video is from a longer movie “Nine Poems in Basilicata” directed by Antonello Faretta, and captures a filmic reading of the poem direct to camera.

I’m glad this footage exists and the movie itself, showcasing nine interconnected poems, is true to Giorno’s austerity—but for me, the live performance is where the both he and the poem shines and delves and bounces.

He led us through a brief excursion into a longer piece about Burroughs—tight tight writing—that put us right there at Giorno’s side, selecting the outfit that Burroughs would wear on his journey into the afterlife.

There was a hallucinatory piece started before 9/11 and completed a few months afterwards…where a “beautiful ugly tree” kept getting “more beautiful and even more ugly” everytime it was chopped down. Its Boschian imagery growing through the poem’s infinite fire.

His last piece was a hilariously profound take on graciousness. A littany of life-long thank yous, a definition of sarcasm, aimed at whoever pissed him off, made him come, brought him wisdom, everything brought into one light—expertly paced around the need to appreciate and love each other for differences and divinities.

Pardon my sermon. The self-less reality in the words and performance at odds with the self-full reality is a friction that mines the experimental with the body. A purity that we can all glean lessons from.

Until next…
e

The Poetry Project is my hub. I heed the darkening pull—Grand Central—Shuttle—Time Square—every morning, a disfigurement of propulsions unfolding, like the city I love, like the dad I’ve become.

“Whoah, unfold like reality, dude.”

“Disease is a feel called love.”

“Those bottled packs of Salinger under my puffed teabags? Sulfuric ganja!”

A smattering of the scattered dollops I heard at the book party last Thursday. The annual small press book party sponsored by The Segue Foundation at Jack Shaiman Gallery. These publishers on the edge, Belladonna, BootStrap, The Figures, Granary, Roof, Talisman, Ugly Duckling, United Artists, and Portable Press at Yo-yo Labs, display the year’s harvest in a celebration for our blessed community, honoring the incredible task of getting brilliant work published…of someone believing enough to invest, support and nurture our work into an object called “book.”

But I wasn’t there!

Told you that Mercury’s retrograde would do me in…I had what I thought was the right address written down. I passed back and forth but couldn’t find the gallery. I left my cell phone home, semi-remembered the gallery name, called information from payphone, they gave me the same address I had, walked by again, was a photography opening. For some reason, the building had disappeared into a fog of recollected openings. I went up and down 2 streets on either side between 9th and 10th Avenue in a workout called “Thursday Night In Chelsea” and instead, cursed fate, chalked it up to chance, and wandered into a handful of art openings.

There was a fabric-stretched installation set within a gallery. Black mesh crumpled and pulled into fishnet squares to create a sort of torture room-within-a-room which contained dubious ‘paintings’ of mal-adjusted loners…against which very tall people wearing matching black, holding free cups of blood would prowl for the newest id.

“And then my dealer Twittered…”

There was an it-gallery drive-by, red-haired blondes and euro-boys on pagers seething in and out of a tiny cultish membrane. Polaroid-looking chaos paintings looking for a pulse. While up a small flight of stairs, artifacts of pasted spoons and welded parts shmeared with chrome and shellacked to repel radium, sat spread-eagled on pedestals, masquerading as sculpturic ganja (where’d I hear that before?).

“Dawn’t let him in jus cuz he got condo!”

There were the concreticized mutant cotton balls, lovingly stabbed by overgrown q-tips into walking slabs of happy-paralysis. Actually, these glazed over mechanisms had a life-affirming awareness much like Elizabeth Murray’s canvases joyously exploding outside their constrictions…with a sloppy kiss by Koons & Oldenberg.

“Dondalista, where’s yer siista”

And how significant to infuse 2D dimension with 3D crit. To see poetry, to hear art, to stand on the outside and witness the mess. In the current issue of Poets & Writers, Anne Lauterbach talks about the many centers that exist in poetry at this moment and the clarity she gets from the edge. Living away from the city for the last year, after being so entrenched in its many centers, I understand the need to breathe that foreign air on the edge, unpolluted maybe…but I miss the smog’s complexity. Although complexity is where it finds you.

Makes me wonder if poetry itself is an edge, of language on the verge of speaking. Of secrets revealed by a walk around the perimeter. Observing each center from a safe distance…but the mess, I miss the mess.

Finally, I heard Jeffrey McDaniel read on Mother’s Day. He’s a poet with a fabulously gallows imagination who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and was reading upstate in Cold Spring, NY. His little girl and my little boy share the same little dance class. So we went even though my wife and I knew it would test Rubio’s little fight-or-flight meter. It was in a spare, elegant church overlooking the Hudson, he lasted for two poems before his not-so-inner crit took over. Yes, I was one of those parents who hushes and jello-molds his child out of a poetry reading while hearing: Awe we finished awlweady? I wanna plway.

Until next…
Edwin

I am such NOT a blogger…but I will attempt to present tidbits and odd bites over the next few weeks. Thanks Stacy, for giving me another deadline…I mean for delving into the nether reaches of such facile humility.

Oh, and guess what, Mercury will be in retrograde for the length of my guest blogging…and Mercury rules communication…which means that everything on this blog is immediately useless…or at least mis-interpreted. Like lens on static mirrorfaction or an East Village yogi, a groggy veneer of the unknown will obscure these very words as you try and read them. JUST TRY AND READ MY WORDS! Phenomenal!

So you’ve been warned, dearest reader, if you find yourself bored by lame observations, ask yourself…did he really write that or did I just read it wrong?

What a primo first salvo! Am I done? (Stacy, how many words do I get?)

Okay, smack me on the head now. Did you ever record a TV program, play it back at a super-slowed down speed and add your own dialogue to it in a fake slow voice while drowning your phlegm in popcorn? Well, there was a great event at Dixon Place last week that was almost as much fun.

Something called “Movie Nite: A Mini-Festival of Live Interactives, Musical Attacks, Neo-Benshi, Experimental Video and other damages to the World’s Cinematic Legacy” on May 1 & 2.  Tastefully curated by the multi-limbed Brandon Downing, it featured a fabulous collection of poets narrating their text to assorted film scenes in a format using traditional benshi (live film narrating) propelled into the now, via overdubbing, music, subtitling among other ingredients. Neo-benshi has recently become a vehicle explored by writers, performers and film editors yielding unexpected results but always some envelope pushing. For some riotous reviews of the Friday show, check out Nada Gordon’s blog. And then Nick Piombino’s review of Saturday’s show.

In the weeks to come, I’ll drop by some Poetry Project events and report on them here. But the other reason to mention Movie Nite is that I ended up being sick and not able to participate. And I wondered if there was some value worth sharing in that kind of non-performance.

In the experience of creating a project, seeing it through its conditioning, and then watching it buck in its gate unable to ride. Where does that energy go, that molten core regenerating.

Continuing its churn, its spin, either within itself or as a second skin riding over you. A sort of stillborn memory of all you accomplished. So that your physical body becomes a living, breathing product of your incompletions as much as your completions. That mortal tug. Dynamic. Relentless. Empowering the babble yet to be…or obscuring it in that nagging clip waiting to get off your back and go free. Made real by the lightlessness you choose to carry…hmmm?

Here’s where you can cash in on that Mercury chip, cuz…I’m a little lost myself.

Until next…
e