Mappemunde

Segue 5/17: Samuel R. Delany & Paolo Javier

The Segue Reading Series presents:

SAMUEL R. DELANY & PAOLO JAVIER
Saturday, May 17, 4PM-6PM
308 Bowery, just north of Houston

$6 admission goes to support the readers
Hosted by Tim Peterson (curated by erica kaufman & Tim Peterson)

SAMUEL R. DELANY is a novelist and critic who lives in New York City and teaches English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is a winner of four Nebula Awards, two Hugo Awards, and the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a Lifetime's Contribution to Lesian and Gay writing. His novels include Nova, Dhalgren, Trouble on Triton, Hogg, The Mad Man, Phallos, and most recently Dark Reflections. His short fiction has been collected in books such as Aye and Gomorrah and Other Stories and Atlantis: Three Tales. His nonfiction has been collected in volumes such as Silent Interviews, Longer Views, Shorter Views, and About Writing, and he is the author of a best-selling study, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

PAOLO JAVIER is a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Writer-in-Residence. He is the author of LMFAO (OMG! Press, forthcoming), Goldfish Kisses (Sona Books), 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books), and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada), which received a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award. He edits the online journal 2nd Ave Poetry, and lives in New York.

The Segue Reading Series is made possible by the support of The Segue Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts. For more information, please visit www.seguefoundation.com, bowerypoetry.com/midsection.htm, or call (212) 614-0505.

Segue 5/10: Gladman & Levitsky

The Segue Reading Series presents

Renee Gladman & Rachel Levitsky
Saturday, May 10, 2008
4PM (sharp!)
at the Bowery Poetry Club
(308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
hosted by Erica Kaufman & Tim Peterson

Renee Gladman is the author of Arlem, Not Right Now, Juice, The Activist, A Picture Feeling, and of a work in-press, Newcomer Can't Swim. Since 2004, she has been the editor and publisher of Leon Works, a perfect bound series of books for experimental prose. She was previously the editor of the Leroy chapbook series, publishing innovative poetry and prose by emerging writers. 

from A Picture-Feeling

pre rust the iron
twists were dull
and new just
about to pull apart
just as I was flooded
with picture-feeling
--attached to ideas—
except this one
which was nameless (V
pinned beneath
unbearable weight)
or was
the moment before
the real thing and
V underneath—
the verb not
the subject

Rachel Levitsky's first full length volume, Under the Sun was published by Futurepoem books in 2003. She is the author of five chapbooks of poetry and is currently writing a prose novella. She is the founder and co-director of Belladonna*, an event and publication series of feminist avant-garde poetics.

from The Story of My Accident is Ours

"From Almost Any Angle"

We'd woken to the world like characters you'd see in a science fiction movie, the ones without parents, cloned for the purpose of replacing the organs of the rich, or jailed indefinitely or repeatedly for our child-bearing abilities. We had the appearance of arriving whole, the sets of our features predetermined and complete.

We were defined by limitation. We'd been kept away from history by serial clearances: the slums, the streets, the poor, then the rich, then the home, then the street, then the neighborhood, then the mall, and then the mall. The mall.

We recognized each other by the vacant look in our eyes and the sophistication of our speech, when we had the energy to speak. We were not quite like the creatures in Zombie movies that were popular again in our time, we didn't join in the common cause of destroying another or making them more like us, for we didn't have killer instincts, nor did we think that what we were should necessarily be multiplied, though we were confused about the ways we did have, what they were and how they'd come to be. What we knew better than what we were was what we were strange to.  We were strange to the ways of smiles possessed by the ones on television1 and outside in front of the church. Or of the two passing each other while one is on the sidewalk and another is driving to deliver a package from a truck. We did not mean to be unfriendly nor dour though I can now see we most certainly appeared so/were so. We ourselves didn't know how else to be; we were mostly all one way.

Segue 5/3: Miles Champion & Ted Greenwald

The Segue Reading Series Presents:

Miles Champion and Ted Greenwald

Saturday, May 3, 2008 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

hosted by erica kaufman & Tim Peterson

Miles Champion's recent or forthcoming books are Eventually and How to Laugh. His recent collaborations with artists include one on paper with Trevor Winkfield and one in latex with Jane South. He moved to New York—the bulk of the traffic was heading the other way—from London in 2002.

"Wet Flatware"

Two docks, up at the scent door.
Rigid mirrors check my building
                        tears & service
Eye    like a silent film cleaning
                        out the reference
desk, a focus is expecting dust
                        the top took to kiss
assume neutral article
it came loose           You make
                              the sounds: ah, ee, oo
                                              No mistake, some view

Ted Greenwald was born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, and has lived in New York City his entire life. During the course of a career that has spanned some 30 years, he has been the author of numerous book of poetry and of a video, "Poker Blues" (made in collaboration with Les Levine), in which he also appears as the sole performer.

from Two Wrongs

Inside person
Speaks to
Outside who
The one with

Alongside
That's the one
Blueprint
New leaf

50 shots into an unarmed Sean Bell and complete exoneration for those responsible? I saw a huge vigil happening over near 8th Ave and 25th on Friday evening.

Starting salary for a police officer in Manhattan in $25,000/year. That means they are essentially like grad students walking around with guns.

My friend Shelly Taylor, a terrific poet, appears in a recent NY Times article on the "Girls Write Now" mentorship program.

SEGUE 4/26: Thomas Fink & Elizabeth Willis

The Segue Reading Series Presents:

Thomas Fink and Elizabeth Willis

Saturday, April 26, 2008 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

hosted by erica kaufman & Tim Peterson

Thomas Fink is the author of five books of poetry, including Clarity and Other Poems. He is the author of two books of criticism, most recently A Different Sense of Power, and he is the co-editor of Burning Interiors: David Shapiro's Poetry and Poetics. His paintings hang in various collections. Fink is Professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia.

from "Deconstricted Sestina 5"

Dialogue will swerve repeatedly before it survives
patriarchy. Thanks for not smoking inside. I
trust you to profit from any experiment
that respects the survival of those not

yet as fit. Reach into my pocket
and husband what's left. My husband assumes
immortality, but one attentive scribe is becoming
my sole access to recommencing dialogue, into

which labors or equalization should
be poured. My thanks are
colored by suspicion of vested

recollection. Lately, many fund Plato's
experiment; mine could take several

millennia to breed a profit.

Elizabeth Willis' most recent book is Meteoric Flowers. Other works include Turneresque, The Human Abstract, and Second Law. Formerly poet-in-residence at Mills College, she now teaches at Wesleyan University and lives in central Massachusetts.

"Her Mossy Couch"

I stain lengthwise all I touch. The world is so touching, seen this
way, in fleshtones, aggrieved, gleaming as the lights go out, look-
ing into the crease of relativity. We've seen this before, why? Tri-
umph arches over us like bad emotion. We were supposed to feel
more connected to it, we were supposed to feel humanly moved
by imaginary strings. All the words in the world are moving pic-
tures to the dizzy ear, fleas, inadequate deceptions of nocturnal
hair, pushing buttons, pushing papers, pushing pedals up the
long hill. Who could get over the blatant radiance of a name like
Doris Day, throwing your finest features into political relief, a
warehouse in the shadow of apples and streams?

At CUE Art Foundation this week:

Cynthia Miller: Curated by Ron Silliman
David Krueger: Curated by Judy Pfaff
April 24 - May 31, 2008
Opening reception: Thursday, April 24, 6-8p

and on Friday, April 25, at 6:30 PM, a performance:
words+music    
CUE curator Ron Silliman &
Charles Alexander, poetry &
James Fei, saxophone.

CUE Art Foundation
511 West 25th Street (between 10th & 11th Aves.)

Admission to the reading is FREE. Reservations are required. Seating is reserved for members. Remaining seats on a first come first serve basis. To RSVP, please call 212-206-3583 or e-mail ryan.white@cueartfoundation.org

Julia Cohen writes about, and posts images from, our Friday reading at East Coast Aliens, which drew a very good crowd (where do all these people hide during the other poetry readings?). It was difficult for me to go after Jim Behrle's reading that he did in that giant styrofoam troll mask, so I took the tone way down to a quieter level. Matt Henriksen said he had hoped that I would be in drag, but it turned out to be Brenda Iijima who was really in drag. Was fascinated by Dottie Lasky's flat insistence in her poems that she is "both a modernist and a romantic." An anti-irony or anti-anti-irony theme throughout the evening provoked mention of a friend's neologism: "confrontessional." Also observed some unexpected socio-cultural sympathies between my reading, Jim's, and Brenda's. It was a pleasant surprise to see Mark Horosky from Arizona days -- he is now a teacher here in Brooklyn and I'm excited that he's publishing my work in his position as guest-editor for the next issue of CUE: A Journal of Prose Poetry.

Segue 4/19: Ruth Lepson, Walter Crump, and Dan Machlin

The Segue Reading Series Presents

Ruth Lepson, Walter Crump, and Dan Machlin
Saturday, April 19, 2008 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

hosted by Tim Peterson

Poet Ruth Lepson and photographer Walter Crump are the authors of the collaborative book Morphology (Blazevox Books). Ruth Lepson is also the editor of Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology and the author of Dreaming in Color. Walter Crump's photography is included in numerous private and public collections including: Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Museum of America Art (Smithsonian), and the National Museum of Fine Art, Hanoi. His website is www.waltercrump.com.

Regarding Morphology, Tina Darragh says:
"'Awake' is now 'Aquake,' and we are more sensible souls for the 'light tablets' this collaboration tones us."

and Charles Alexander says:
"This book is magic. I want to read it a thousand times."

        From "Morphology"

                         *

"Can anyone think of a
Realist writer? I ask. A guy
In the back of the room
Raises his hand. "Simmonds
Hoote," he says.

                         *

                *

Robert Creeley's new poems are
black                    and white
maps                       of America
clear                        as new
Mexico.                   The clouds
are verti-                cal curliques
chalked              through Nebraska
and Kan-                      sas. The
Midwest                          map
strikes                              me--
its neck,                           the
North-                              east,
has been                      severed.
Later I               notice the absence
of words,                          the
silence.

                           *

 

Dan Machlin's first full-length collection of poems Dear Body: was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Fall 2007. He is also the author of several previous chapbooks: 6x7, This Side Facing You, In Re; and an audio-CD collaboration with Singer/Cellist Serena Jost, Above Islands. He is the founding editor of Futurepoem books.

From "Dear Body"

Meanwhile you were hiding underneath the table. At one time, they too could
assemble you out of grass – an abandoned rug and decaying vegetables.

We prayed to your effigy like to a beautiful library book you wanted to steal –
the perfect never-noticed crime.

Many years later indexing doubts about your presence you uncover lost plans
for some extreme city.

Or you as your own forbidden lover who meets yourself
Late at night in a forgotten deco motel.

A brief conversation about ephemera (each word drenched with sexual potential).

You know, I've never believed in your hope. So somehow the limbs attached to
a trunk of meat and toes a face lips that say a nose balding teeth barely –

O how this house whispers beneath the dinner table!

Only Kevin Killian could wring so many marvelous tones of pathos and undertow out of an awful disco song title, as he did in an amazing reading last week for belladonna. I don't know what it looks like on the page in his poem, but this is how I heard the refrain:

Is it all
over my face?

you've caught me...

love-
dancing...

Through juxtaposition with Killian's memories of Arthur Russell, the vapid bloodlessness of the original line is somehow re-animated as a confrontationally vulnerable "who, me?" gesture, an overheard Blanche du Bois utterance with existential overtones.

photo by Stacy Szymaszek

The Burning Chair Readings present:
a Chair Burning Retrospective
at East Coast Aliens

Friday, April 18th
Doors 7:30 pm, readings from 8-10 pm

featuring:
Andrea Baker, Jim Behrle, Brenda Iijima, Dorothea Lasky, Tim Peterson, Thibault Raoult, Craig Morgan Teicher, and Dara Wier

w/ music from Walter Baker
& an after-party featuring
the dreams [of the congregation of details

East Coast Aliens
216 Franklin St
btwn. India & Huron
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
G to Greenpoint Ave (exit at India St)
B61/B43/B42

eastcoastaliens.com
myspace.com/thedreamsensemble
typomag.com/burningchair
flesheatingpoems.blogspot.com
 

SEGUE 4/12: TONYA FOSTER & ANNE TARDOS

The Segue Reading Series presents
Tonya Foster & Anne Tardos

Saturday, April 12, 2008 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
hosted by erica kaufman & Tim Peterson

Tonya Foster is the author of poetry, fiction, and essays that have been published in a variety of journals from Callaloo to The Hat to Western Humanities Review. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna Books) and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art. She is currently completing a cross-genre piece on New Orleans, and Monkey Talk, an inter-genre piece about race, paranoia, and surveillance.

From "(In)Somniloquy"

History swarms in
the marrow of your thoughts (,/.) as
she lies there (,) sleepless

history swarms in.
To eat or not to? Then what?
She clears her throat.

"You can't be eatin'
from everybody," her aunt warned
after the first loss.

"You can't be eatin'
like you don't mind trading a
baby for red beans."

That yarn's redness bleeds Persephone, Eve, Jemima, Rine. More
squirrels.
That yarn's redness: eating from a strange pot/tree/hand/mind draws
blood or sleep.

Anne Tardos is a poet and visual artist. She has published several books of poetry and the multimedia performance work and radio play Among Men. She is the editor of Thing of Beauty by Jackson Mac Low, from the University of California Press this fall. Her new book I Am You  is just out from Salt Publishing.

                                                    81

It's time to let go of the narrative section of this poem and let the ride begin

Haa-ooh-aah

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

Won't you be my silicone doll
Won't you be my forever stamp
No I will not fix your computer

Music You

Possibly                                           

                                   --from "Letting Go"

Terrific interview with Stacy S and Sina Queyras regarding the Autoportraits book here.

(photo by erica kaufman)

Saturday was a terrific start to our section of the Segue Series this year. I always enjoy working with Erica, and her introduction for Wayne Koestenbaum was terrific as usual. Though it was a packed crowd, the fact that few of the series regulars were in attendance was evidence to me that we are genuinely doing something new and different. Among these people was my friend the poet Matt Rotando, who was in town visiting from Tucson and giving a reading from his new book The Comeback’s Exoskeleton from UpSet Press at the Bedford Lounge in the SUBO Building at Brooklyn College on Monday, April 7 at 2PM. Matt was totally amazed by both of Saturday’s Segue readers. He couldn’t help noticing how “Marjorie Welish started out by reading several poems from Word Group in which the arrangement of words on the page had consequences for the rising and falling pitch of the poet’s breath while reading. Indeed, for a writer who produces such analytic lyrics with that flat or shallow space of tone, Welish is surprisingly embodied and animated when she reads, making various bodily cues and feeling the analysis of feeling. It was very mimetically anti-mimetic. She followed these pieces with a reading from the first section of Isle of the Signatories, and these poems were more abstract, exploring more specific tropes around themes of inscription and memory. Particularly memorable was a long passage from ‘Unfolding Yes’ which juxtaposed numerous assertions about the beginning date of modernity against an Enlightenment discourse of ordering history: ‘Unclear – see me.’ This poem spliced together written lines from different contexts that the poet then read almost as if it were a collage of different voices arguing and interrupting each other.”

I was impressed that Matt found Welish’s reading to be such a vivid experience. Matt also introduced me to his mom, who “thought Wayne Koestenbaum’s reading was a true highlight among recent events in the New York poetry scene.” Matt’s mom was particularly fascinated by how “Koestenbaum started out by reading several poems from his book Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, and in these works an ostensible narrative continually yielded to elaborate and hilarious digressions. Koestenbaum’s outrageous sense of humor and comic timing lies chiefly in the loving linguafranca of these analogies which create multiple layers to the text at hand. He retains fragments of the story frame in a pop sensibility while simultaneously bringing the reader’s nose right up close to the act of language becoming metaphor, so that something as small and innocuous as a pudding cup can take on a sinister significance: ‘Pudding sees itself / as brazen. I perceive it / as possessing the odorless, refined / atmosphere of a eunuch evangelist.’ This poem, from Koestenbaum’s work ‘No My Talk is Not About Hannah Arendt’ from the Queering Language issue of EOAGH, was among the second group of poems he read that evening. I was particularly delighted by the charismatic way that Koestenbaum performed, leaning into the mike and earnestly whispering with a tinge of camp intimacy.”

I said to Matt’s mom, really? You got all that from his performance? “Not only that,” several audience members called out from behind me, “but the highlight of the evening was Koestenbaum’s reading from his new (he reports, at this stage 1,500 page)  book in process on Harpo Marx. The conceit of this fascinating project was to do an ekphrasis of every movement Harpo Marx made in every Marx brothers movie. These pieces were original and wild, the slow motion narrative and the repetitions suggesting a slightly obsessive dreamlike symbolism through close description. But their conversational quality and offhand gestures kept them from turning into some kind of overly stern Shklovsky experience: ‘Harpo is not someone I would trust with nuclear secrets.’ Wayne Koestenbaum’s lush anamorphoses are unlike anything else in contemporary literature.” I replied to these people: what liberated, active, and participatory readers you are! But before I could finish speaking they were gone, and I was left standing in the middle of my blog in my pajamas with a cup of tea and a muffin, ready to get some rest and do it all again next week.

SEGUE APRIL 5: WAYNE KOESTENBAUM & MARJORIE WELISH

The Segue Reading Series presents

Wayne Koestenbaum & Marjorie Welish

Saturday, April 5, 2008 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

hosted by erica kaufman & Tim Peterson

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of poetry: Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and five books of nonfiction: Andy Warhol, Cleavage, Jackie Under My Skin, The Queen's Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Double Talk. His newest book, Hotel Theory, a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2007. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and currently also a Visiting Professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art.

"Brahms Piano Quartet No. 1"

Brahms dreamt
the complacent
girl's allergy to calamine
lotion screwed up her cat's
psyche.  Clara's
hubby had a writing
block, which threatened
the Chinese dinner en famille.
Insensate, whorish,
the taxi failed to bring me here.
The hoodlum gang
coalesced.  The dime
novel mugged
the Madonna of the Postpartum
Exasperation, a rain of
alphabet-soup letters alighting
on a background landscape's pinched fronds.

***

Recipient of the Judith E. Wilson Fellowship, the Howard Foundation Fellowship, twice winner of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, and other prestigious awards for poetry, Marjorie Welish is the author of Isle of the Signatories--just out from Coffee House Press, Word Group, and also The Annotated "Here" and Selected Poems, which was an Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize finalist and a Village Voice Best Book of the Year. Her book of art criticism is Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 (Cambridge University Press). Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Books) compiles papers given at a conference held at the University of Pennsylvania devoted to her writing and art. She teaches at Columbia University and at Pratt Institute.

from "Dedicated to"

11.
Translated and with a commentary
Fire, a transient

syllabus, its first word occluded
impending

terrace, identifying the occasion its
element in shadow

being pounded in
signals a scene change

so what
Water, an apparent shroud

pouring
access read at a distance

a proposition from time to time
from the desk of

Jack, a kind of taste weathervane really, predicts a front of handsome new chapbooks coming in from the northeast.