Mappemunde

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.