Mappemunde

Reforesting: An Homage to Gil Ott (& release party for Ott collected works, vol 1)

Eli Goldblatt writes:

Join us in February for Reforesting: An Homage to Gil Ott at the Painted Bride Art Center, opening February 3rd.

This is a culmination of years of collaboration with Julia Blumenreich in homage to our friend, the poet Gil Ott, who died in 2004.

You’ll find it surprising, delightful & in all ways a rich experience. We’ll have a book release party for the first volume of Gil’s collected work—A Defined Anarchy: vol 1, Poetry and Fiction (edited by Tim Trace Peterson & Gregory Laynor, published by Chax Press)--on Sunday, February 26 at the Bride.

More information about the event here.

My Top 11 Books of 2011 for Third Factory's Attention Span

I am pleased to participate in Steve Evans' wonderful Attention Span project once again this year. Read my list for 2011 here.

I'm Reading at Queens Library on Nov 3 with R. Zamora Linmark

Filip and EOAGH in the New York Observer

Just a quick note that Filip Marinovich's prescient EOAGH chapbook Wolfman Librarian and the Trembling Pair of Actor Hands is featured in the article "Occupy Wall Street and the Poetry of Now-Time" in the New York Observer.

Wow, we're in Original Plumbing

Original Plumbing Magazine just published an article on the trans/genderqueer anthology (forthcoming from EOAGH Books) that TC Tolbert and I are co-editing.

Read the article here.

Hooray!

Book Party for The Feeling is Actual, by Paolo Javier

Join me tonight at the book party for Queens Poet Laureate and dear friend Paolo Javer's new book, The Feeling is Actual.

I also kinda designed the book so there's that.

The Feeling Is Actual Book Party*
Saturday, October 8
630 pm
F R E E
Bliss on Bliss Art Projects
41-49 45th st, ground floor, 
Sunnyside, Queens
7 train to 46th st
Doorbell on black gate off the NE corner of 43rd Ave.


* BBAP is an intimate space with limited seating. RSVP a.s.a.p. to queenspoetlaureate@gmail.com to secure your spot!

New EOAGH Issue, New Website, New Everything

 
The new issue of EOAGH is going online now. In keeping with the nature of the "social web," this will be a rolling launch. You can see our progress now at:

http://eoagh.com

and check back for new updates--it will be moving and changing fast!

Another easy way to keep track of us is via our Twitter site, to which all new uploads will be posted as they happen.

Look forward to some contributing editors and other new surprises coming up soon!

Open Call: Anthology of Trans & Genderqueer Poetry

OPEN CALL FOR AN ANTHOLOGY OF TRANS & GENDERQUEER POETRY

Dear Author,

We want your words.

What is the project: We are creating an anthology. An anthology of the best poems out there by trans and genderqueer writers and we would love to include your work in the book. Our assumption is that the writing of trans and genderqueer folks has something more than coincidence in common with the experimental, the radical, and the innovative in poetry and poetics (as we idiosyncratically define these categories), and with your help we’d like to manifest that something (or somethings) in a genderqueer multipoetics, a critical mass of trans fabulousness.

This anthology is edited by TC Tolbert and Tim Peterson (Trace)—both trans-identified poets. It will be published by EOAGH Books in early 2012, and you can bet it will be widely distributed!

Deadline for Submissions: Nov 30, 2011
What to Submit: 7-10 pages of poetry, and a prose “poetics” statement (see below)
Where to Submit: email us at transanthology@gmail.com

More information at the book website (including more details about what will be in the book, who we are, and how the process is going to work!)

 

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Douglas Rothschild preformance at Zinc

 

Here's a video of Douglas doing his thing at Zinc on 7/23/11. Those are the voices of Adeena Karasick, Nada Gordon, and possibly also Kristin Prevallet in the background.

I made this video thinking I could rotate it later, but alas Android doesn't seem to have editing capability, unlike iphone and imovie. Oh well.

Intro for Joe Ross (Zinc Bar 7/23/11)

Joe Ross is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently, Wordlick, Green Integer Press (2011) and Strata, Dusie Press (2008). He has also published Fractured // Connections . . . , bilingual Italian/English, La Camera Verde Press and EQUATIONS = equals, Green Integer Press, 2004. He presently resides in Paris.

In Wordlick, Joe Ross masterfully synthesizes a personal jargon of jury-rigged compound words, inventing a corresponding syntax as he goes along, locating us alternately above, below, within, and around his energized linguistic constructions. We can feel the excitement of invention and the pleasure of sonic juxtaposition as the consistently grotesque and dense texture he creates channels any number of voices: Jackson Mac Low? Susan Howe? Bill Luoma? Yoda? But no, these poems sound different than all of those people, and they are more than just parataxis for sure: most notably, there’s an odd kind of pathos here, as if these garbled musings, hovering somewhere between past participle and present occurrence at the moment of writing, were a shorthand for jotting more extensive thoughts about critique, culture, and desire. I love what I’m finding in this new work by Ross, and I’m pleased and honored to welcome him to the Zinc Bar reading series today.

(an afterthought: Joe told me he writes the Wordlick poems very quickly, in the intervals when his son is asleep...so in terms of writing process they are like stolen moments of time, a fact that seems significant here)

Intro for Geoffrey Olsen (Zinc Bar 6/3/11)

(photo by Lawrence Schwartzwald)

Geoffrey Olsen lives in Brooklyn, New York and works at the Cooper Union in Manhattan. He is the author of the chapbook End Notebook (petrichord press, 2008). His chapbook, Not of Distends * Address Panicked, is out from Minutes Books (http://notofdistends.blogspot.com/)

I greet Geoffrey Olsen at the beginning of a great career, having longing which for yet foregrounds some starter where. Geoff in his multiple manifestations thus far is clearly onto something, and we are here today pleased to celebrate the publication of his second chapbook, Not of Distends * Address Panicked, published by Minutes Books. Being a friend of Geoff’s and having learned a great deal through fascinating conversations with him over the years, I understand his writing as influenced by the innovations of Language poetry along the axis where it intersects with the body and with what we would traditionally refer to as experience, the relationship between thought and phenomena. Geoff’s poetry hovers with regard to the philosophical problem of skepticism, arguing neither that words are merely textual objects nor that words merely refer to external things, but taking on a more nuanced and complex position by means of which we experience the pleasures of organic embodiment on a macro and micro scale. Geoff’s language is cell division and multiplication at the intimate level just as much as we can feel the presence in it of breathing, jotting, glancing, presence, and song. Geoff’s writing “wrecks the mind” as Scalapino says of Philip Whalen’s poetry, by using a virtuoso toolbox of effects, by arriving at ostranenie through the detour of parataxis (Gesundheit!). The way Geoff tweaks parts of speech so that they deliberately disrupt or fail to fulfill the syntactical contract we expect creates ardent moments, sincerity effects. The music carries force and momentum despite, or perhaps even because, it is so grammatically garbled, clipped, deranged, and interrupted. As in the work of Coolidge, one figure who comes to mind as I read this new chapbook of Geoff’s, the moments when grammar turns aside from its ordinary syntactical functions are not noise; rather, they are one level of music in play, another of which is the system of internal rhymes that weaves throughout this text. As writing my rubbed writes my eye rhyme, my A game. As in Emerson the writer is a transparent eyeball, but having to work through language as material, finds that eyeball continually situated somewhere and thus implicated, embodied in this instance for example like that of a sheep or hunted animal. The gaze in Geoff’s work is not liberated so much as laden with pathos, stunned. If two familiar definitions of distends here are “to enlarge or stretch out from internal pressure” or “to become expanded,” the writer is not so much extending self into landscape or into memory out of imperialistic self-importance, as he is narrating the experience of being impinged upon, of being radically sensitive to stimuli. All this is a way of saying that, of course, he does Leslie Scalapino proud, and in this text we can hear new music which we need to heed carefully, which demands our best attention. Please welcome Geoffrey Olsen to Zinc Bar.

Intro for Samuel Ace (Zinc Bar, 6/3/11)

(photo by T Peterson)

Samuel Ace has published widely in periodicals and journals, including Ploughshares, Eoagh, Nimrod, The Prose Poem, an International Journal, and the Kenyon Review. He is the author of two collections of poetry: Normal Sex (Firebrand Books) and Home in three days. Don't wash. (Hard Press). He is a two-time finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, winner of the Astraea Lesbian Writer's Fund Prize in Poetry, The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in poetry. He currently lives in Tucson, AZ and Truth or Consequences, NM.

I think Samuel Ace is one of the most original, smart, and vital queer poets writing today. I’ve known Sam and have been reading his work for over 10 years now—I remember his readings of “how to be a boy in domremy” and video performances of “home in three days, don’t wash” from that time in Tucson vividly--but in recent years I’ve been honored to get to know him better and to call him a close and rare friend. Thinking about Sam’s work over time, there has been an ongoing interest in leaps between perceptions, and the relationship between these leaps and the act of listing. We might place such activities under a heading like “non-sequitor,” but Sam’s writing isn’t nearly so predictable. We might mention his fascination with the way “schizophrenic” language connects different insights together through seemingly nonsensical parallelism or skewed juxtaposition, and how this makes a kind of sense to the sympathetic listener, but that doesn’t entirely explain what’s so exciting about his work either. We might observe his attempts to articulate in language queer, liminal, confounding, sometimes even portentious bodily experiences for which we don’t have an easy linguistic shorthand. Yet it seems to me that the way Sam’s work evades such quick summations is central to the kind of radical work it does. And in Stealth, his collaboration with Maureen Seaton just published by Chax Press, all of these issues get multiplied into the interstitial space between two people, two voices sometimes trading off, sometimes running parallel, sometimes splicing together different realities as a kind of playful gesture. Under (and between) these playful exchanges, we can hear a range of emotions at work which inform Stealth’s complex and sometimes confounding Rube Goldberg economy of vessels and tropes: sadness, bemusement, anger, exasperation, yearning, ambivalence, and love. Please welcome Samuel Ace to the Zinc Bar Reading series.

Intro for Timothy Liu (Zinc Bar 6/3/11)

(photo by Lawrence Schwartzwald)

Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) was born in 1965 in San Jose, California. He is the author of eight books of poems, including Of Thee I Sing (2004), a Publishers Weekly 2004 Book-of-the-Year, and Vox Angelica (1992), awarded the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. Translated into ten languages, Liu's poems have appeared in such places as Best American Poetry, Bomb, Grand Street, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. Liu is a Professor of English at William Paterson University and a member of the Core Faculty at Bennington College's Writing Seminars; he lives in Manhattan.

I find myself momentarily humbled at the task of introducing a writer of Timothy Liu’s stature, with little new to add to what has already been said about this major poet’s work. We all know he is someone who has consistently been one of the most moving, innovative, graceful, and sexy users of language in our field. We know that he has had a central role in our historical understanding of queer writing as the editor of the anthology Word of Mouth. We encounter him this evening writing across and between genres, as the author of a new novel which includes poetry and prose, and which builds on his earlier work in surprising ways. One of the exciting things I see happening as Liu makes this foray into fiction is that it allows him a kind of electric, ambiguous relationship between confession and trope. Though he has always been a memorable love poet, the experience of writing fiction finds him meditating more intensively on how literal events become symbolic and vice versa when it comes to sex, and on the way sexual language has meta-resonances for literal and metaphorical registers simultaneously. In his most riveting moments here, Liu’s prose suggests an ambiguous relationship between one’s own identity and the identity of another, with the available language we have for sex acts (and by implication the sex organs or bodily organs that carry them out) providing the common site at which this confusion occurs, and at which we meet as listeners. Liu reminds us that we carry baggage in our memories and our bodies and these accrue a vocabulary of metaphors over time, that these resonances and overtones are precisely the alchemical elements from which desire is forged, whatever our object choice or whatever our genitalia. I’m pleased and honored to welcome Timothy Liu to the Zinc Bar reading series.

Intro for Charles Alexander (Zinc Bar)

(my intro for Charles from his terrific reading in February at Zinc Bar, with Tracie Morris)

Charles Alexander is the founder and director of Chax Press, in Tucson. His books include Hopeful Buildings (Chax 1990), Arc of Light / Dark Matter (Segue 1992), Near or Random Acts (Singing Horse 2004), and Certain Slants (Junction 2007), which includes 30 sections of the ongoing work Pushing Water, which is expected to be published in its entirety in 2011. He is currently at work on a book about the pleasures of poetry. Chax Press has published some 120 books over the last two and a half decades.

In a new book of essays about the pleasures of poetry, Charles Alexander is making some long-awaited comments about the relationship between sound and the body that have guided his innovative and original work. At the center of these ideas is the deceptively simple argument that “speech is a physical pleasure,” yet the more closely we look at this claim the more interesting and unusual it becomes. He places emphasis on it as an annex to Zukofsky’s “sight, sound, and intellection,” fleshing out the ghostly materiality of words with that of the body’s connection to them. Whereas Charles Kraitsir in Glossology argued that there was a connection between a phoneme and its meaning, as well as the meaning of the word in which it appeared, Alexander claims that an important meaning of language lies in its tactile quality, its sounds. These sounds call up a kind of motor memory of pleasurable actions for us; they contain the possibility of a kind of deferred or implied body which is recreated, recovered, or reenacted in the process of reading. Poetry is pleasurable for us and it moves us because that basic experience of sounding syllables reminds us of other such experiences that we’ve had, and that we’ve given to others, with our mouths. Writing, reading, and sounding bring together this motor memory of sounds whether the words make sense or nonsense, whether they are a solid or a flowing liquid, whether they are translated from the Greek, greek to us, or simply greeked on the page. Please welcome one of my favorite poets and people, Charles Alexander.

Zinc Bar 4/22: Philippe Beck, Serge Gavronsky & Michael Heller

Zinc Bar Reading Series:
Philippe Beck, Serge Gavronsky & Michael Heller

Friday, April 22
at 5:30 PM

at Zinc Bar
82 W 3rd St
NYC

Philippe Beck, Ph.D, is a contemporary French poet, writer, and philosopher. In 1994, Mr. Beck received his Doctor of Philosophy at l'Ecole des hautes études en sciences socials in Paris under the direction of Jacques Derrida. Along with 14 published books of poetry, Beck has produced an intellectual biography titled Beck l'impersonnage (Beck the Impersonality, 2006) and a book of prose with the pithy title A Journal (Un Journal, 2008). To date, only two of Philippe Beck's books have been translated into English: Crude Marivaux: Critical Texts (Textes critiques, 1999) and Vault of the Dissolvable Novel (Chambre à roman fusible, 2002). Beck has received widespread recognition as a poet, philosopher, and writer in France and in literary communities throughout the world. Many of his poetic works have been translated into German, Chinese, Korean, Dutch, Flemish, and Galacian.

Serge Gavronsky was born in Paris in 1932 and fled Hitler in 1941. He is Professor of French at Barnard College. A renowned author and translator, Gavronsky has published many books, including Lectures et compte-rendu (1973), Je le suis (1995) and many others. Amongst his translations are French renderings of Louis Zukofsky's A (1994, 2001) and of Joyce Mansour's Essential Poems and Writings (2008).

Michael Heller has published twenty volumes of poetry, essays and memoir. His most recent books are Eschaton (2009), a book of poems, and Beckmann Variations & Other Poems, a work in prose and poetry (2010). His collection of essays on George Oppen, Speaking the Estranged, was published in 2008. Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics,appeared in 2006. Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2003. His memoir, Living Root, was published by the State University of New York Press in the Fall of 2000. Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The Study, a collection of fiction, was published in 2009. His libretto for the opera, "Constellations of Waking," based on the life of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, has been set to music by the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson and performed at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. His critical study, Conviction's Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry, was published by Southern Illinois University Press. For many years, he was on the faculty of New York University and has taught at The Naropa University, The New School, San Francisco State, Notre Dame and other universities.

Like the very Gods in my sight is he who
sits where he can look in your CV, who marvels
at your gigantic list of reviews, its sweetness
        murmur at the buzz your career

accumulates, all for him. Hey, just noticed
it's National Poetry Month underneath my breast.
Let me only glance where you are, the voice dies
        I can say nothing.

Here are some photos of my peeps, stricken
underneath my skin the tenuous flame
my ears are muted and nothing shows
        we plug in thunderous content

in contrast to the dominant fever trend
but also complementary to it caveat, in case
my future tenure-track MFA boss reads this, I feel
        that death has come near me.