Mappemunde

Poetry as substitute for mating-ritual has a long history of Harold Bloom-looking shinbones currently immersed in evolutionary agon for hipster bedhead. I'm eagerly looking forward  to writing poems that will repel a listener and cause him/her to get out of bed with me.

DEMOLICIOUS features Ben McCoy

Open-Mic, Followed by Poetry
and Multimedia Feature Artists

Demolicious focuses on featuring experimental poetry, as well as video, performance art, and a growing range of etceteras. But when it comes to the open-mic, we focus on YOU and whatever you bring us. Please join us on SUNDAY, DEC. 5 as we welcome

Ben McCoy
Writer, Performance Artist, Visual Artist

Ben McCoy will have you on yer knees. Resisting trans- and homo-assimilation, Ben is fighting for radical change, resisting the hetero-normative privilege principle with a tongue as sharp as spike heels. He's spent most of 2004 on the road, performing from Olympia, Wash., to Los Angeles, etc., and very soon right here!

Sunday Dec. 5 & the first Sunday of every month

At the Green Street Grill
280 Green Street
Central Square, Cambridge

Open-mic sign-up: 2:15 p.m.
Performance begins 2:30 p.m.

$5

For more information, contact Demolicious at
mercuridooley@yahoo.com
or 617-661-3515.

It may be that the theorist and the philistine are really covering the same mental territory (there being only so much of it to go around), but that the former begins by using an abstract public language to name it while the latter starts with a specific-to-a-life but inarticulate (Pound to Williams: "gargling") private language which parodies the former's investment in structures of power like a funny balloon, floating above your digest as you read the things you want to in it. But it could be that we all perhaps ellided ourselves into teams too soon, an equation becoming indifferent, chortling even, at the specific nouns you came in touch with that failed to bring nebulousness into perspective, a whole drowning lake in itself. And for a while it seems that way, the goalie, storks and similar myths crouching in the half-lit crotch of corporate generalities. But then as it hit you: you are just a substitute for me! This was having consequences and for a short burst of silence it seemed that continuing would be impossible, tearing through you like tissue paper into fountains lined with ink and the police swarming over barricades of brand slogan. To continue, a scant slut budget objective bastes teams in a heady mix of pitch and yaw, as moderation amuck churned a ruling lawlessness into hidden law breeches. It seemed that continuing would perhaps be false, yellower than the other bedfellows and somehow dishonest to your own. But then as you lifted your mouths tore at the fascicles perambulatory and aloneness snug tarnished falling open slightly bronzed with a few taboo gestures to imbue drama, content with no content. And with fronds like these, who needs the merchant marine oratory inflamed a little bit by that tongue-in-cheek rally cresting the squat hill? Things looked ugly. You delighted to spy you gloating over the indifferent magenta populace dumpster with whom you thought to discuss the end of a stovepipe time, your idealism, lightly frosted with syrup and a little choral impulse to do, but stop thinking egghead diatribe. Peroxide. Were this an either/or question in the sportsbar the demure putti could have turned their heads toward us stammer ochre and burnt contrapposto, but instead remained inert along with our rhetorical figures, dead form that wind ache whistled through. Rules broke teflon of course; we staged that failure like a Frigidaire in full knowledge that others might learn nothing patent from the weed tucked into the inert garden but a possible proliferation of "focus groups" this season. Thus the kevlar sucking night came on with a delicious red gore urn in tow advancing prominently before what you had meant to say and had somehow floated away from now stampede, but could not have known where or when your mouth first sounded worlds so incidentally finite. "You don't reflect, you just continue." Shit, I messed it common orchard up.

As much as I like and respect Gary, I have to disagree: Lansing is most definitely in. And not only that -- he's also a valued friend from whom I've learned a great deal.

Yes, It's an extremely quiet Thanksgiving here in CT (where I'm currently spending the holiday with family). An excerpt from the police log this week in The Glastonbury Citizen:

On 11/19: Officer Vanskiver went to Melrose Street after a white male in a flannel shirt was said to be intoxicated; Officer Stone responded to the Foote Road area of Main Street where someone was reportedly blowing leaves in the roadway, causing a hazard; Officer Carpenter went to Arrow Drug on Welles Street where someone said to be from Wood Pond Road was reportedly using the store's dumpster; Officer Gray went to Main Street to investigate a report of two males, around 15, covering a case of beer with a black jacket; and Officer Carpenter responded to Griswold Street after someone reported being defrauded by a seller on the e-Bay auction web site.

On 11/20: Officer Arsenault reponded to Naubuc Avenue and Putnam Boulevard to a report that a vehicle had been parked in an area for 30 minutes, with no operator; Officer Minor went to Knox Lane to investigate a report of people that refused to leave; Officer Minor returned to the same house on Knox Lane two hours later, because the people were still inside the house; Officer O'Brien traveled to Buttonball Lane to a report that a woman's husband stole her poetry; Officer Barter went to Conestoga Way to investigate a report of a fight in progress; and Officer Lee responded to Dayton Road to a report that a silver two-door car was in the woods.

Also, please note the terrific batch of new chapbooks that Faux Press just announced today: Carl Annarummo, Micah Ballard, Corina Copp, Joe Elliot, Mitch Highfill, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Michael Magee, some guy named Tim Peterson, Christina Strong, Stephen Vincent, Alli Warren. Special emphasis on a debut e-book by text artist Kelly Sherman, fresh from her Analogous reading a month ago here in Cambridge...

As you will no doubt notice from a trip to the Fall Schedule webpage, the last 2 Analogous Series events this fall have been rescheduled. So please keep an eye out for readings by Nick Piombino, Allison Cobb, Jen Coleman, Maria Damon, and Alan Sondheim in the spring season instead...I will be announcing the new schedule as soon as dates are decided upon...within the next month, I hope.

Since I am slightly behind in my journalism here, the next thing to talk about is the Analogous event with Jack Kimball, Brenda Iijima, and Christina Strong which took place on October 30. Brenda Iijima greeted Xtina, Jack, and me in the hallways of MIT that Saturday wearing a dashing Bogart-esque suit complete with tie and fedora hat: she had prepared a special 24-page chapbook for the occasion to commemorate her collaboration with Jack. The two of them went on stage first. They showed quicktime videos of Brenda interviewing Jack, in which her complex, sometimes challenging anti-Freudian questions ("What do you think of that phrase, 'a performing animal on top of another performing animal'?") provoked a wonderful range of at once poised and evasive responses  from him against a changing set of different rooms, outfits, and backdrops in his Newton home. Their fleshly counterparts sat on stage reading from copies of the chapbook that contained a textual interview in which Jack interviewed Brenda (going the other direction). In performance, these textual snippets were from time to time spliced together with scenes from the video interview in a back-and-forth rhythm centered generally around the recurring theme of "the octopus," and the corresponding notion of  "too many naves." It was a kind of (dare I say) mutual poetics statement arising in the really wonderful context of a conversation -- amazing to me that these two (very different) personalities could nonetheless exist in the same space and articulate their concerns in this cooperative way. Brenda seems to operate by a principal of accrual, saying a lot in a complex way that feels at times slightly impenetrable on purpose, wheras Jack tends to use evasion: humor, leaps in thought and context, appropriation, ridicule of the apparently self-evident, turning the question back on itself. I (and many others I spoke to after the event) was particularly struck by how much more intimate the presence of the giant video Jack Kimball up on the projector screen seemed than the one sitting there on the stage in front of us. The discussion of the evasive Octopus (spurting a cloud of ink that hides it from prey yet is toxic to the creature itself) culminated in a long poem compiled for the occasion by Jack. I'll quote two stanzas of this beautiful piece here:

Man, she is weird. Is there room in the room

For wood origins & cribbage boards? A fiend's

Umbrella? Let's rewrite Biotherm, she says.

I fear the sarcasm.

Sex is a sardonic comfort with a sober edge.

They leaked this against my wishes.

Smoke circles your face. Homonyms cleave.

Admit it, you miss smoking. You miss Bono.

He imagines you wearing his credentials.

You miss the first drag. The smoke takes you in its stride.

His eyes are all red. Yay.

I've just noticed you haven't said anything.

Gossipy with the odd moment of reverence or emotional connection, mercurial, moving in and out of other voices which it may or may not be parodying, this prickly cloud of utterances remains resolutely heterogeneous in the midst of its own impish deadpanning.

The second half of the program that evening was a performance by Christina Strong. Christina showed a number of poems she had written in Flash (most of them political and polemical in nature) while interacting with them and showing the audience how they worked. She also showed a video of the NY protests during the Republican national convention this year. But the highlight of her set for me was a performance in which she read a fast-moving (Kerouac-like) poem against the backdrop of a video she had shot out the window of a train. The correspondence of movement between the imagery in the poem and the imagery out the train window was quite exhilarating and moving. In retrospect I can see the roots of her interest in visual and kinetic digital media through her use of language in poetry (composition by field, vis-po, sometimes scattered meditations). However, in a question-and-answer session with the audience afterward, Christina proudly displayed her usual resistance to the theoretical, cheerfully beating back any hypothetical questions (one might say, questions of "meaning") with the self-evident, the reflexive, what's in front of your nose and "because I wanted that way." But good for her: someone with a political conscience who knows what she wants, at least in her art. I'm impressed by that momentum, all of us then still looking toward the soon-to-be-disaster election. Well, the night itself was fun; we had dinner with friends and fans, critiqued wardrobes, and discussed what a "nihilistic used-car salesman" would in fact entail. Later that evening (and inspired by Brenda's attire), Jack, Brenda, Christina and I went out to Jacques downtown (with appropriate Halloween accoutrements -- yours truly in a miniskirt, fishnets, drag boots etc) and danced all night.

The Analogous Series: Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein

 

("The Parts Are Greater," from Little Orphan Anagram) 

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Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein

http://www.analogous.net/bernsteinbee.html

November 13, 5 PM
45 Carleton Street, room 111(next to the Kendall Square T stop)
Cambridge, MA

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Susan will give a slide talk about her work, focusing on her collaborations with various poets and artists including Susan Howe, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, and Jerome Rothenberg.

Charles will show some slides of his collaborations with Richard Tuttle and also read some poems accompanied by Susan's projected images.

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Susan Bee is an artist, editor, and designer who lives and works in New York City. She shows her paintings at A.I.R. Gallery in New York City. She has published five artist's books with Granary Books, including collaborations with poets: Bed Hangings, with Susan Howe, A Girl’s Life, with Johanna Drucker, and Log Rhythms and Little Orphan Anagram with Charles Bernstein. She is coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artist's Writings, Theory, and Criticism, with writings by over 100 artists, critics, and poets, that was published by Duke University Press in 2000. Her web site is at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bee.

Charles Bernstein is the author of With Strings (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Republics of Reality: Poems 1975-1984 (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999) and two new chapbooks, World on Fire, from Nomados Press and Let's Just Say, from Chax Press. He is the editor of Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford University Press, 1999) and 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Duke, 1998). Bernstein is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the co-director of PennSound, a web audio archive of poetry readings. His home page is at the Electronic Poetry Center (http://epc.buffalo.edu.)

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DIRECTIONS: 45 Carleton Street is also known as building E25. It is adjacent to the main T Station in Kendall Square, behind the Cambridge Savings Bank on Main St. (near the corner of Main and Ames) in Cambridge, MA.

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The Analogous Series is curated by Tim Peterson

Fall Schedule available here.

Don't miss this: Piombino psychoanalyzes Bush.