(That's Mark Horosky on the left -- the one wearing the shirt.)
I've got some new poems in the first online issue of CUE here. Thanks to guest-editor Mark Horosky who did a terrific job on the issue.
This issue of CUE also includes new work by Elizabeth Willis, Richard Siken, Matt Hart, Sarah Manguso, Tony Mancus, Dorothea Lasky, Reb Livingston, Chaz McCallahan, Mathias Svalina & Julia Cohen, and Jason Labbe.
EARSHOT!
Join us at Rose Live Music in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for the last event of the Spring '09 season!
Friday, June 26th at 8 PM
SEASON FINALE EVENT!
@ Rose Live Music
Admission: $5 + FREE DRINK!
Hosted by Nicole Steinberg
Featuring:
CAConrad (Advanced Elvis Course, The Book of Frank)
Tim Peterson (Since I Moved In)
+ MFA Students:
Elsbeth Pancrazi (New York University)
Maria DiLorenzo (Hunter College)
Liza Monroy (Mexican High, Columbia University)
ROSE LIVE MUSIC is located at 345 Grand Street in Brooklyn, between Havemeyer and Marcy. Visit their website for directions: http://roselivemusic.com.
EARSHOT is a bi-monthly reading series, dedicated to featuring new and emerging literary talent in the NYC area. Visit http://www.earshotnyc.com for more information or e-mail Nicole Steinberg at earshotnyc@gmail.com.
Eileen Myles writes:
WHAT ?!: TUESDAYS ON THE TERRACE: THE COLLECTION OF SILENCE
WHERE: 155 St. & BWAY
WHEN: June 30, 7PM
WHY: PEACE, AIMLESSNESS, RELIEF, SOLDARITY, RESISTANCE, SOLACE, IRONY,
FRIVOLITY, HAD ENOUGH
Being invited by Dia to curate a performance for a summer evening vaguely in response to Zoe’s show and the Hispanic Museum’s collection. I have invited five poets who invited five other poets (so there’s 25 of us, names below.) Invited as well are The Village Zendo, soprano Juliana Snapper, dancer Christine Elmo and four cohorts and about 40 kids from PS 4 conducted by poets Julie Patton and Christine Hou and finally a life drawing group from Brooklyn known as F>A>R>T>S (Friends of the Fine Arts) ; all will converge to sit, move, read and perform SILENTLY for one hour on the Hispanic Museum’s incredibly spacious and evocative Audubon Plaza. You as audience are invited to come up and stroll amongst this silent happening at your own genial pace. You’re urged to dress vividly & shamelessly as if you were attending a wedding or a renaissance fair or a nature hike, an art opening, poetry reading or to spray-paint things on your roof. At 8;15 the silence will end and morph into a decent party.
With Who: MONICA DE LA TORRE, CHARLES BERNSTEIN, STEPHANIE GRAY, TIM LIU, RACHEL ZOLF, JENNIFER BARTLETT, DANNY SNELSON, CA CONRAD, FRANK SHERLOCK, RENATO GÓMEZ, KIM ROSENFIELD, ANGELA JAEGER, JEREMY SIGLER, TIM PETERSON, LYDIA CORTES, NATHANIEL SIEGEL. PAOLO JAVIER, MARK BIBBINS, NICOLE COOLEY, LINDA GREGG, JEFFREY MCDANIEL, LILA ZEMBORAIN, TONYA FOSTER, RACHEL LEVITSKY, EMILY BEALL, CHRISTINE HOU, JULIE PATTON, STUDENTS FROM PS 4 AND EILEEN MYLES, PROJECT ORGANIZER
Additional info here.
Segue Introduction for Stacy Szymaszek
Stacy Szymaszek is the author of Emptied of All Ships (Litmus Press, 2005). Recent chapbooks include Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane (Faux Chaps, 2008) and from Hyperglossia (Hot Whiskey, 2008). Hyperglossia, the complete poem, is just out from Litmus Press in 2009.
In her new book Hyperglossia, a key text for our time, Stacy Szymaszek embarks upon a multi-persona allegorical narrative whose serial variations embody sound and experience: "trap earth neath pater." Fragments of partially swallowed diction allow several (possibly contradictory) realities to manifest themselves simultaneously. The reader is interpellated among linguistic fragments as sounds dispersed in composition by field, a textual body whose "larynx / is a mimic." A transgender-tending self is simultaneously negated and multiplied through alternating moments of empathy and critique. Szymaszek's third person avatar Eustace is a sympathetic sort, a public persona with his own foibles which map equally the poet's interiority and the reader's projections about what he might correspond to, reminding us that the interior is always public, and that public language is always creating an interior. The lavender pirate flag of this you-stance becomes both a "shroud" and a "splendid tour," and the fluidity of its anagram ("a cut see," "ate cues," "sauce et") truly manifests as "an ailment I will fight with." We're pleased to welcome Stacy Szymaszek to the Segue Reading Series today
The Segue Series Presents
Stacy Szymaszek
& Patrick Durgin
Saturday, May 30, 2009 ** 4PM SHARP**
Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, NYC
$6 admission
hosted by Kristen Gallagher & Tim Peterson
Stacy Szymaszek is the author of Emptied of All Ships (Litmus Press, 2005). Recent chapbooks include Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane (Faux Chaps, 2008) and from Hyperglossia (Hot Whiskey, 2008). Hyperglossia, the complete poem, is forthcoming from Litmus Press in early 2009.
Patrick Durgin has collaborated with Jen Hofer since 1998 to produce The Route (Atelos, 2008). On his own, Durgin has published Imitation Poems (Atticus/Finch, 2007) and Color Music (Cuneiform Press, 2002).
Segue Introduction for Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, most recently I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (University of California Press, 2006) and Concordance (Kelsey St. Press, 2006), a collaboration with Kiki Smith.
Mei-mei’s Berssenbrugge’s poetry uses the process of narrating perception to negotiate between life and art. In the process, she demonstrates how experience and artifice are mutually dependent upon one another for realization. Through long, rhizomatic lines, Berssenbrugge achieves a sonic momentum that outlines atmospherics of space and cognition, a kind of poetry sonar that senses the body’s relationship to space. She is investigating “what could happen, what a person probably or possibly does in a situation,” but this process is more complicated than it sounds. For example, we may ask what constitutes a situation, especially when the landscape of language in her poems is composed of a patchwork of metaphors yoked together from different discourses, as when “gaps create a reservoir.” In this context imagery, not so much a representation of the world as a series of touchstones, appears disguised in the unreal half of a simile, and nouns that name the world become enfolded within a description of how the mind locates itself in language, “ an exterior relation, like a conducting wire, light fragment by fragment.” Berssenbrugge’s “truth effects” in language are thus both extremely specific and generously utopian, offering a hushed vocabulary on the edge of intellect and intimacy, opening a gap between naming and environment, always about to evoke an affect you might recognize but which you can’t quite put your finger on. We’re very pleased to welcome Mei-mei Berssenbrugge to the Segue Series today.
I'm pleased to announce that the movie of the Poetry & Architecture event I put together for Segue is now available at PennSound here. Thanks to Meredith Drum for her thoughtful filming of the event.
Also, my new author page was just announced today and is located here.
The Segue Reading Series Presents
MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE & JONATHAN SKINNER
Saturday, May 23, 2009 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
Hosted by Kristen Gallagher and Tim Peterson
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, most recently I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (University of California Press, 2006) and Concordance (Kelsey St. Press, 2006), a collaboration with Kiki Smith.
Jonathan Skinner is a poet, translator and critic, as well as editor of the journal ecopoetics. Skinner completed his Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo. In 2005, he published his first full-length poetry collection, Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press).
Segue Introduction for Erica Kaufman
erica kaufman is the author of several chapbooks including Civilization Day and several installations of Censory Impulse, her book-length poem, which was published by Factory School/Heretical Texts in January. She co-curates and co-edits Belladonna/Belladonna Books and lives in Brooklyn.
erica kaufman’s destabilizing poetry is a cyborg experience, poised between the body and the virtual, the intimate confidence and the public utterance, while pushing at the boundaries of gender. The work evokes the experience of being “stockinged, / Flagrant, ready to go outside / Autosomal dominant / Fashion. Heeled and high.” But kaufman also has an offhand way of making reference to more intimate or obscured situations, evoking a tone of confiding without the confession. Is this a matter of secrets, layered signification, language as inevitable mediator, or a way of speaking to several audiences at once? Drawing inspiration from Hannah Weiner’s advice, “be very careful in your intercourse with strangers,” kaufman also embodies the full ramifications of Stein’s comment “I am I because my little dog knows me.” This work negotiates a mediated, nuanced address to lovers, friends, and strangers alike through a critical exploration of the experience of being femme: “Embrace pink shirt / pink makeup, pink cheeked / I go underground. Slip on / Fake skin.” This is a vision of the feminine as a kind of armor like language, alternately empowering the writer and perhaps also hiding aspects of the writer from herself as she uses it to process physical and virtual experiences: “o, take your binaries and run all / Vaseline Olympic fettered self.” There’s a distinction being made here between the ability to reflect upon oneself and the experience of being made into an object by others, and at times it carries with it a kind of ambivalent humor: “if I’m going to join this body candelabra / and become the integration of barbeque / and faith, dress my knuckles in parsley.” The courageous leaps in the work and its impressive momentum reveal here a committed queer feminist to be reckoned with, a passionate poet who knows, “To say I like to partner is a slogan / For countering the power / Of the empire.” Please welcome erica kaufman.
The Segue Reading Series Presents
ERICA KAUFMAN & JOAN RETALLACK
Saturday, May 9, 2009 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
Hosted by Kristen Gallagher and Tim Peterson
erica kaufman is the author of several chapbooks including Civilization Day and several installations of Censory Impulse, her book-length poem, which was published by Factory School/Heretical Texts in January. She co-curates and co-edits Belladonna/Belladonna Books and lives in Brooklyn.
Joan Retallack’s most recent publication is her Gertrude Stein: Selections with an extensive introduction/discussion of Stein’s work, brought out by University of California Press. She is the author of seven volumes of poetry including Errata 5uite, which won the Columbia Book Award chosen by Robert Creeley. A collection of Retallack’s procedural poems is forthcoming from Roof Books.
SEGUE INTRODUCTION FOR JULIAN T. BROLASKI
Julian T. Brolaski co-curated the New Brutalism series in Oakland from 2003-2005 with Cynthia Sailers and the Holloway Poetry Series at UC Berkeley from 2004-2006. Brolaski is the author of several chapbooks including The Daily Usonian (Atticus/Finch 2004), Madame Bovary's Diary (Cy Press 2005), and Buck in a Corridor (flynpyntar 2008).
Julian T. Brolaski’s poetry -- tough and extravagant, political and pleasureable -- initiates lexical trouble through the deployment of neologisms for maximum critical effect. Does it make more sense to see such words as deformed, or in the process of formation? The semi-recognizeable terminology here, which includes “disasspossessed,” “unmerriwether” and “gormless,” combines Brolaski’s interest in and knowledge of archaic literatures with a keen ear for how to make language new. This is not just a matter of being unheimlich, a scenario which would require essentialist gender roles – Brolaski’s poems consistently employ gender-neutral pronouns to articulate the position of the speaker, listener, and other characters. Neither is it a submerged private language in which pathos arises because what really needs to get said can’t be communicated. On the contrary, there’s something radical about Brolaski’s theatrical weariness with prescribed roles, something new here about how foundational paradoxes of gender and power can be referenced in an offhand way that bemoans the social becoming merely a cliché. In this sense Julian’s exposés depict entre-nous nicknames that don’t exist yet, positions that we’re peripherally aware implicate us but which frustrate us by not having overtly entered discourse. Because after all, “who hands out thir fucking pronoun paradigm at parties??!!” Or said another way,
This critical stance complicates mimesis and naturalism, “to act in opposition to one’s genitals
for or against nature,” so that new kinds of comparisons can happen, only to emerge as pre-polluted by ideology, “martini slick as the gowanus with oil.” Inhabiting partially a pastoral, partially a wasteland, the voice that presides over this disjointed landscape is incisive, oddly vulnerable, and keenly aware of every act of reification:
Please welcome Julian Brolaski to the Segue Reading Series today.
L to R: Robert Kocik's Prosody Building; Quasi Table by Aranda Lasch; World Trade Center by Acconci Studio
My Poetry and Architecture event for Segue this past weekend – featuring Vito Acconci, Benjamin Aranda, and Robert Kocik -- was a surprising success. People really turned out for this event: I counted over 70 in the audience including David Antin, Ellen Zweig, Gail Scott, Wystan Curnow, Eileen Myles, Andrew Levy, Abigail Child, Walter Lew, Jonathan Skinner, Jennifer Scappetone, Andy Fitch, and many Segue regulars. But a portion of the audience was people I had never seen before, people connected with architecture who would otherwise perhaps not have the experience of attending a poetry event. Why wouldn’t they have had that experience? This phenomenon was hilariously demonstrated in a slide during Robert Kocik’s presentation in which he showed a "cattle egret" standing under the legs of an enormous cow – this, he said, represents poetry’s relationship to the larger culture:
It’s a relationship I also addressed in my intro, where I was trying to create a bridge by using terms like “interdisciplinarity,” which is used in both architecture and literature but which has a very different and specific meaning in architecture, tied to the debate between critical and post-critical approaches, and the question of whether one can do social critique by making buildings or whether one needs to be, as Dwell Magazine calls it, a “Nice Modernist”:
Robert Kocik’s presentation came first. He began with a schematic floor plan of the Prosody Building, a building designed specifically for poets, then cycled back through his process and how he got to that point. He talked about the notion of business as a medium and argued that the form of a building constitutes only a use or a decoration – asserting that creativity must also be given to questions of the building’s function, the organization of labor, and who benefits. Kocik combines architecture and writing through “non-dual construction” which engages such issues as part of the construction process, in some cases inventing “missing services” for the construction of a particular building. As someone with much experience in the practical aspects of architecture as well as an acute awareness of language, Kocik understands like hardly anyone else the extent to which the "transparent" or functional procedures of building are themselves a function of language.
Central to this investigation is the question of why there are not more buildings dedicated to poetry, and how this is related to the inconsequence of poetry in the larger cultural sense: “Is poets’ architectural status as interlopers in provisional spaces (bars, coffee shops, living rooms, etc) related to a freely chosen lack of regard for design, or is this condition a consequence of their inconsequence?” The two buildings dedicated to poetry that Kocik used as examples were the University of Arizona Poetry Center and the new Poets’ House location in Battery City. From here, Kocik explored a more concrete example of what happens when you try to combine the disciplines in a more literal way, ie through building plans composed entirely of words such as his Stress Response building designed for the Environmental Art Department at the University of Art and Architecture in Helsinki.
Kocik’s hands-on experience as a builder was demonstrated through a number of idiosyncratic instances of problem-solving, as for example in the case of a round log he joined to a square timber in a tension truss, while still managing to pass the building code. Other creative approaches which combine the design indifference of poets with an architect’s understanding of the profession included the notion of “prefunctioning architecture,” ie the idea that whatever you envision the building needing to do, you start it within an existing building. Under this rubric, every act of conversation is design specification. Toward the end of his talk Kocik raised the question: what would happen if poets were fully facilitated? Would they freak out and be unable to function, or would it be helpful to them?
Pavilion by Aranda/Lasch (in collaboration with Matthew Ritchie)
Benjamin Aranda’s energetic presentation drew connections between writing, drawing, building, and scripting in architecture. He showed various ways in which a building can be built from language using scripts to generate self-perpetuating forms which have analogies to the way nanotechnology works. Aranda’s discussion captured a fascinating dynamic between building and dismantling, as when he noted that “in architecture, and perhaps also in poetry, you need to break things down and decompose them into their finite parts in order to build them up again.” This analytic activity is related to the analogy of sand piles and the way in which they can model what he calls “aggregate assemblies,” noting with a slightly anthropomorphizing delight that “the parts themselves know how to reproduce or grow into larger structures.” Aranda discussed three projects by his firm Aranda/Lasch, the first of which appeared in the MoMA show Rules of Six, which addressed ways to move computation into the physical realm of construction. These experiments included projects from wall surfaces to independent structures such as a table (shown above), which was randomly generated out of 4,000 rhombic parts, a process which resulted in no exact repetition of elements across the scale of the table.
This technique, which Aranda calls “aperiodic construction,” creates a texture/structure/series of effects which undermines our accustomed ways of seeing and would probably not have been produceable through the human eye alone. There’s something utopian about this discourse, the notion that “through both writing and mathematics you can imagine possibilities that only later can be substantiated.” Aranda then showed a very different kind of project, a giant video billboard connected with the Fresh Direct store in Queens, which Aranda/Lasch had helped convert into a giant algorithm-driven, constantly-shifting color field that changes the colors and feel of the surrounding streetscape.
Finally, he discussed a recent collaboration with artist Matthew Ritchie which drew more literal comparisons between drawing, writing, and construction. In this project, begun with a system tested at the Venice Biennale last year, Aranda/Lasch took a kind of picture-language developed from Matthew Ritchie’s drawings and transformed it into spatial language by way of translation onto a system of tetrahedral structures. As long as the drawing met each shape at one point on each side, Aranda determined, then the drawing could be used “to calculate structural loads” of the resulting forms. Here not only does the drawing double as structure and produce the space, it also shows you how to construct it, as Aranda showed in his images of one structure created at an estate at Seville in October; the picture-language on one surface corresponds to the picture on the face of another shape where they are supposed to join – so the language is also the instructions for building the space.
Acconci Projects: Performance Piece, Umbruffela, United Bamboo Store
Vito Acconci gave a stunning presentation that traced the connections between his writing and his architecture over the arc of his career so far. Noting that what he does now is design and architecture and that the primary way he knows how to do it is through words, Acconci read from a mid-eighties essay on housebuilding while showing a background of slides from this same period in which he was exploring architectural games through performance art. One example of such a game would be a seat that the performer sits down in, and this act causes walls to appear, creating a rudimentary house around the person. The text that Acconci paired with these images consisted of a series of “Assignments,” which had a kind of wry humor and a playfulness that we don’t get to hear in writing about architecture very often (he notes that instead of columns, you could simply have four people hold up the roof). This quality was enhanced by Acconci’s habit of reading with iterations and repeated emphases on certain parts of the text:
The odd “you” character here is deployed to evoke architecture as a response to a series of problems. But they seem less to be problems of solving for program or site, and instead more like meandering, quizzically existential reflections in a Beckett-like space.
Acconci then discussed how this method coalesced into the activity of a designer and Acconci Studio formed at the end of the 80s. While they mostly did public art working under the 1% program at first, he found his way in architecture through essays such as “Making public: the writing and reading of public space,” an excerpt of which he read from. This piece, which he showed against a background of some early Acconci Studio works, has an activated ambivalence that refuses easy lyrical platitudes about the importance of public space; instead the discussion is fraught. One of the reasons he gets away with this is that Acconci is such a good writer -- his buildings are held together more by the notion of a powerful linguistic concept than by the transparently vague, inherited vocabulary of public altruism that one sometimes finds in discourse about urban planning or architecture. Other projects that Acconci showed included the twisting, transforming structure of Mur Island in Gratz, a proposal for a museum in Russia, and a 2004 public art project for a performing art center in Memphis which imitates a swathe of liquid flowing out from beneath a roof:
These works feature many of the innovative qualities that Acconci's work is known for in the context of architecture, namely certain kinds of flowing spaces made possible through new ways of using scripting or algorithms. It seems like it would be a great critical project to further explore the nature of the relationship between scripting as an architectural prompt and Acconci's performative written prompts or instructions for buildings.
I was surprised to find that performance did come back in as a concern in Acconci’s work later through an interest in “multipurpose, multifunction design” – particularly a hypothetical invention that Acconci calls the “umbrufflla,” and in this instance the design is quite literally generated by the onomatopoetic and physical sounds of language: “ruffle, verb, to agitate the surface of, ruffles, noun, pleats, folds, ruffle, now, noun, our definition, superfluity, miasma, luxuriance, swarm, swoon.” Another architectural project involving performance that Acconci discussed was a clothing store designed for Tokyo in 2003. The store itself is clothed in a PVC skin, and the description includes the following text which, like the others, is part building description, part instructions for a performance:
It’s difficult to describe the type of slightly deadpan humor being used here, but it works and Acconci’s charisma is unmistakeable. Perhaps my favorite moment in his talk was the discussion of a proposed “pre-exploded” building design for the World Trade Center, a “building full of holes” like a giant hunk of swiss cheese which Acconci claimed would provide “urban camouflage”; “a terrorist flying by above looks down and says ‘we don’t have to bother about this building; it’s already been dealt with.” If we’re wondering what poets bring to architecture and vice versa, one eloquent answer could be as simple as this incisive combination of humor and political awareness.
NOTE: Videos and sound files of this event are now available at PennSound here.
"Pressing Between: The Aesthetics of the Contemporary Small Press"
Charles Alexander at the Threads Series
During Charles Alexander’s recent visit to town, I was pleased to attend a talk he gave for the new Threads series at Granary Books, co-curated by Steve Clay and Kyle Schlesinger. Just as Threads uses the book arts as a lens through which to explore collaboration between different fields, so the title of Charles’ presentation, “Pressing Between,” addressed the many ways in which he sees the role of the bookmaker as “between”:
Between the poem and the book
Between the letters
Between this reader and that reader
Between the book and not the book
Charles’ thesis was, in a way, that the book is an extension of the poem or part of the poem. Several possibilities arise from this, that the text is only part of the experience of reading (that physical context matters), and that a book constitutes a reading in itself, a way of reading the text. Charles talked about how this understanding became clear to him when he printed an edition of Edward Dorn’s work and found himself wondering about whether he would actually want his edition of Dorn to be the definitive one – the answer, of course, is that it could never be, that the book itself is a reading.
I was struck by certain similarities between the talk and, in some ways, Wordsworth’s Prelude. Charles was able to obliquely address the vital importance of his biography without the bad pathos of the isolated or overly precious self. On the contrary there was an emphasis on “the context of family, or those with whom we are connected.” He examined how certain types of personal details obliquely made their way into informing the work of Chax Press, from the name (Charles Haskell AleXander) to his father’s work as a mathematician to the places he grew up and the way Charles himself first became acquainted with poetry – he notes one of the things that first fascinated him about poetry was the use of white space and the fact that “it didn’t take up the whole page.” The first work he read in any college class, Williams’ Spring and All, was for him like the experience of “the book set free” and acted as trigger to him seeking out all of Williams’ works. The history of reading thus has a narrative arc and a series of surprises, changes in direction. This unusual combination of the themes of memory and destabilization was foregrounded throughout the talk by Alexander’s repeated refrain “Let’s go back between” which was sounded many times.
I found myself thinking that this is the kind of information you always wanted to know about poets and publishers but you’re always having to imagine it or reconstruct it from scratch. But context is important, and the way the political interacts with the personal is important here, too. Our sources for inspiration can be unexpected too, for example Charles mentioned that he was first introduced to Olson’s work in, of all the unlikely places, a class by Donald Davie, who was involved with New Criticism. And this vision of the editor/publisher was something he felt was given to him by reading Olson, despite phenomena such as grants panelists who might in the past have asked “What gives you the right to select which books are to be published?”
I was also moved by Charles’ emphasis on the physical qualities of the book as “between” here, his coming into awareness of letters as simultaneously “a bit of sound” and also “a piece of metal or wood, a building block.” Though he can justify the design of every book he has ever made, he said that this is always a question of the individual materials, circumstances, and writers: “there are no rules / not to break.” This relentlessly independent sensibility has guided the publishing process by avoiding certain types of useless or arbitrary branding: Chax Press has no logo, no consistent size, and no official typeface. Yet Charles has strong opinions – I can remember a time working as an intern in his studio when he was having us stamp red letters (Cs, Hs, As, and Xs) on broadsides, and we were instructed under no circumstances to spell the words “HA” or “AH.” In the case of a book like Mac Low’s French Sonnets for example, it made sense to design a book that would reflect the sensibilities of “a radical and a classicist rolled out together.”
The rest of the talk consisted of a review of many fine art books Chax has done over the years. Take a look at the Chax Press website for some examples of these. He discussed how finding paper size, margin, etc is “like finding a form for a poem.” I find this projection of organic poetic form into the material conditions of the book to be fascinating, and I’ve never heard it articulated in quite this way before: “Read margin, read covers aloud.” And finally, there was the reminder that through books something else is made – through making books Charles knows all these people. It is as if books act as a kind of connective tissue, a fibrous language or connecting point. I was intrigued by a question that Kyle asked toward the end of the event, namely "To what extent do you design when you write?" and Charles' answer that he thinks about the shape of the poem and the relationship to the page it's written on, but that ultimately he wants other people to publish what he writes, to read it and make decisions and in some ways complete the circuit, so that writing and design become part of a social conversation.
Let’s go back between!
I've been meaning to post this for awhile but I keep getting distracted...it's the extremely generous intro by erica kaufman from when I read in the Belladonna series awhile back. I like what she has to say here about a kind of feminism that would critique the conspiracy of gender essentialism and its implication in structures of power, and I'll certainly be learning from and extending such radical observations as I proceed to further "flesh out" my next book of poems:
Thanks to Brenda Iijima, who will be stepping down as art editor after this issue, for including me as the featured artist in Boog City 56. My graphic design website (currently under development) will be located here.
The Segue Reading Series Presents:
Julian T. Brolaski
& Magdalena Zurawski
Saturday, May 2, 2009 ** 4PM SHARP**
Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, NYC
$6 admission
hosted by Kristen Gallagher & Tim Peterson
Julian T. Brolaski co-curated the the New Brutalism series in Oakland from 2003-2005 with Cynthia Sailers and the Holloway Poetry Series at UC Berkeley from 2004-2006. Brolaski is the author of several chapbooks including The Daily Usonian (Atticus/Finch 2004), Madame Bovary's Diary (Cy Press 2005), and Buck in a Corridor (flynpyntar 2008).
Magdalena Zurawski was born in 1972 to Polish immigrants in New Jersey. Her first book, The Bruise, won the Ronald Sukenick Prize in 2006, and was published by FC2 in 2008.
Segue Introduction for Charles Alexander
Charles Alexander, poet, bookmaker, and publisher, is founder and director of Chax Press. His books of poetry include Hopeful Buildings (Chax Press), Arc of Light / Dark Matter (Segue Books), Near or Random Acts (Singing Horse Press), Certain Slants (Junction Press), and several chapbooks.
Dear Charles Alexander's poetry: we appear to be approaching a meadow. Where IS this meadow, anyway? On the page? In the words? Outside the page? Where the body-image collides with the page? Whatever you like. A poetics is made to be broken, a book is made to be bodied, changed by reading. Charles Alexander’s poetry demonstrates a unique sense of openness and generosity – antihegemonic, radically decentered – in which a wide range of formal strategies remains in play from one moment to the next. Add space. Imperatives become invitations to enter this place of permission through strategic affect, the scene and thought moving with quicksilver speed. While listening to some of Alexander’s poems at a reading once, I closed my eyes; what I saw was an unreadable letterform rapidly morphing into and through a series of body-shapes, malleable objects. His subject is this flux of language and experience, a test of to what extent words can manifest themselves as physical objects and to what extent they can shoulder this metaphor in a complete way:
she found the raspberries along the fence
Found along
Creeley’s boulder? Well, there’s the book certainly. Brooks maintain fair anomalies. Watch your transitions. You can even be influenced by people who don’t write like you, imagine! Alexander’s odd, unpredictable leaps and diversions enact the process of how thinking happens, in the present of the writing moment a la Stein. Who else is here, from Cynthia to friends to Dahlen to Duncan, from Dorn to Olson, all acknowledged amidst a torqued bricolage, “dance steps with pots crashing / of language.” Because “the lens distorts as soon as / I sees, against its will,” this becomes a poetry that foregrounds memory’s fragility: “this man strange turning / forgetful but not in a line.” The ardent tone helps to facilitate transitions from one moment to the next while allowing a staging ground for desire: it’s true, Alexander’s poems dare to include the orgasms. The partly-submerged sense of drama in the writing is thus not some repressive urge but rather the consequentiality of lived experience where it hits the page in a proprioceptive flourish, tackling the full complexity of language as medium, “Stirring, making a perfect froth.” These qualities are most evident in Alexander’s ongoing poem Pushing Water, in which the governing metaphor of language as sheets of water evokes a rich range of paradoxes about representation, breath, embodiment, and synesthesia. I’m grateful for Charles Alexander’s restless and inspiring presence in contemporary poetry, and I’m pleased to welcome my friend and mentor to the Segue Reading Series today.
