Mappemunde

I predict there's now going to be a rise in people holding up gas stations.

Reading Julia Cohen's chapbook Who Could Forget the Sensational First Evening of the Night (H_NGM_N):

"Try to keep us warm in the best way possible
Away from the pinstripes hiding their accurate suntans the hubcap seduction of car shows"

"Occasionally we mistake reading in high doses for no longer living"

Reading Lisa Samuels' book The Invention of Culture (Shearsman):

"Much as I told you, your eyes having lunch in the little town of my face."

"You've made a place for scrupulous delay, the fulsome bite of syllables, the 'what we do not need' printed pack-wise on your parts."

"Sorrow, it is sorrow to get somewhere you don't efface nor half-belong - to soft-formed people moving in their shadows, they know 'how to be' there, company procured."

 
at the Audre Lorde Project: http://www.alp.org/

I just couldn't resist posting a link to this.

Also, be sure to check out Uncalled-For, a reading series happening at Unnameable Books this summer!

Geoff Olsen now has a blog.

Bouquet

“So, how are the kids?” They are suffering from their lack of existence, in the park, chasing a kite or morphing into moebius-strip-like shapes of language mesh, it’s scary how a zoo can make you feel safe. We like to elide into the crowd, the mass, the prow of the boat cutting through the echo of the snowglobe, keeping an appointment and bereft of the appropriate forks. Instead we’ve developed a new, all purpose utensil that incorporates every angle, a Picasso painting of a utensil, which though slightly tortured looking and sometimes beaten up on the street, is nevertheless parking transgressively in your spot when you’re not looking. Here’s a gesture only an entitled punchbowl hand can make, we attempt while leaning over the banister to carouse with people who make half a million, then go home and hide, the syntactical confusion crooning us into velvet sheets of the poem. As long as we could hide, internalized normative surveillance coming over for a little red wine and some brie cheese in the evening, we’d catch the bouquet before knowing what it meant.

Wrestled a little with Ron's blog today in response to this post. My comments:

Not sure I want to get involved in another one of these accursed fantasy football taxonomy conversations, but here goes:

What's with all this top-down conceptualizing? Coalitions? Reeeeaaaallly.......What you're describing sound to me like two planks with hardly anyone standing on them yet. Plank? Plunk!

Why don't we try to build up from actual social formations and their accompanying political tendencies by describing existing groups that are currently out there? Writing is foremost a phenomenon of individuals overlapping as social sub-groupings (with their associated politics) before these are articulated movements.

There are a couple as-yet-unstated tendencies that I'd like to describe, and I will. But in the meantime I'd like to think the Queering Language anthology (over 100 writers, a selection from which was recently published as chapbooks by Faux Press) represents one of those tendencies and political groupings which is prevalent, as yet unarticulated as a poetics of the avant garde, and not included among this taxonomy you're setting up above. I could probably describe at least three other current tendencies in poetic community and sociology which need to be named and which you'd really be shooting yourself in the foot to leave out of this binary system. And all of them have equal claims to be considered as what you're calling "the new."

Ron, I'm just having a spasm here in the comment box because you're usually much subtler, much better at articulating this stuff than the hastily sketched out and reified categories above. I'd be interested to see you, and us, try to expand the demographic categories here a little beyond the plank. Does aesthetics MATTER? Or is it the politics evinced by a community formation that lends energy to poetics?

Furthermore, what we perhaps most disastrously lack is a believable working definition of what might constitute "Official Verse Culture" at this point. Oh boy is it out there, but the definition is sorely out of date. Of the two planks you describe above, neither offers a convincing vision of what we're up against. One evokes a non-existent "political correctness" bogeyman, while the other evokes an absurdly overdetermined romantic poet caricature which appears to describe what...the protagonist of I Heart Huckabees?