Mappemunde

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.

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.

Intro for Filip Marinovich, 3/20 at Zinc Bar

   
When I think of Filip Marinovich’s poetry, I think of the word “energy.” Marinovich uses language in a way that has a kind of wild, excited, urgent flow, part garrulousness part enthusiasm part adrenalin rush. His penchant for confrontessional bursts of direct address, which includes the lovingly embarrassing effect of apostrophe, stands out among his contemporaries and lends his writing a momentum and immediacy rarely seen today. This is also what I think of as shaggy poetry: there’s also a willingness to be playful and messy and seriously silly: “people will hug in the street Elizabethanly” or “for the porpoises of this poem sunning there on the rocks.” Then at other times the playfulness can turn on a dime into darker, more surreal ruminations, often stated as refrain “peripheral vision greenery wolverines gnaw at me  / and vomit me up /  a new man / with powers to heal.” Channeling aspects of Ginsberg, Kenneth Koch, Williams, Bob Holman, and other charismatic forebears, this poet transfigures them into a sound all his own, into a kind of impossible generosity. The exigent urge to see himself as boundariless, filtering everything from voices to images through his poem-body, like a cosmic amoeba, coexists in a moving dialectic with more frustrated autobiographical moments of blockage or process: “I must pause and nap / My Wolfman paws tearing apart the notebook” as we are sometimes given an equally generous inner glimpse of the attempt to write as if written through, a peek under the hood into the Martians at work. Oh Marinovich’s poems, which I love and which I hope he keeps coming for many years and many apostrophes, I am continually disarmed and split down the middle by you. Please welcome Filip Marinovich.

Zinc Bar Series Schedule for February / March

Zinc bar schedule February / March 2011
curated by Tim Peterson and Franklin Bruno
all events take place at Zinc Bar, 82 W 3rd St, NYC

Friday, Feb 25 at 6:30 PM
Andrew Levy and Jesse Seldess (EOAGH Books launch)

Sunday, Feb 27 at 6:30 PM
Eddie Berrigan and Brenda Coultas

Saturday, March 5 at 5:30 PM
Jennifer Moxley and Vincent Katz

Sunday, March 20 at 6:30 PM
Tenney Nathanson, Lee Ann Brown, and Filip Marinovich

Sunday, March 27 at 6:30 PM
Mike Boughn and Victor Coleman

Photos from Peripheral Writing Launch Event for EOAGH

I should have taken more photos from the EOAGH "Peripheral Writing" launch event on Tuesday, but I was inspired and pleasantly distracted by what was happening. Photo ID top to bottom: a peripheral reading [note empty mic], Tan Lin, Bruce Andrews, Filip Marinovich.

Peripheral Writing: A Launch Event for EOAGH 6

Celebrating the launch of "Peripheral Writing," this issue's feature edited by Tan Lin: http://chax.org/eoagh/issuesix/tanlin.html, which includes:

Chris Funkhouser / Alejandro Crawford / E. Shaskan Bumas / Chris Alexander / Jeremy Sigler / Danny Snelson / Jennifer Moxley / Jerrold Shiroma / Juliana Spahr / Ben Lerner / Bernadette Corporation / Kit Robinson / Frances Richard / Diana Hamilton / Dan Machlin / Mashinka Firunts / Josef Kaplan / Brian Kim Stefans / Jonathan Skinner / Bruce Andrews / Kristen Gallagher / Chris Nealon / Diana Kingsley / Darren Wershler / Katherine Jaeger / Matthew Landis / Mina Pam Dick / Kieran Daly / Lee Ann Brown / Michelle Taransky / Edward Hopely / Jeremy James Foxtrot Thompson / Danielle Aubert / Amy Wright / Rachel Zolf / David Buuck / Mark Nowak / Patrick F. Durgin / Louis Asekoff / Rebecca Mertz / Paolo Javier / Amanda Raczkowski & Joseph Reed / Steve McLaughlin / Gordon Faylor / Sara Wintz / Prageeta Sharma

on Feb 1 at 6:30 PM
in the James Gallery
at CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, NYC
(Free Admission)

Join us on Feb 1 at the James Gallery for a launch event hosted by Tim Peterson (Trace) featuring poetry readings and multimedia artworks/performances from the forthcoming Issue 6 of EOAGH, including:

Alejandro Crawford
Ana Bozicevic
Andrew Levy
Amy Wright
Bruce Andrews
Chris Alexander
Diana Kingsley
E. Shaskan Bumas
Filip Marinovich
Jeremy Sigler
Jesse Seldess
Jonathan Skinner
Josef Kaplan
Kristen Gallagher
Marc Nasdor
Michael Scharf
Paolo Javier
Rebecca Mertz
Tan Lin
Traver Pam Dick
Vincent Katz

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Tan Lin's Introduction for Peripheral Writing:

This issue looks at how and in what spaces writing takes place, i.e. the ambient environment of reading as well as the ecology of writing practices. If the amount of text being generated today is voluminous and threatens to transform a once-visual era into one structured by data and various communications protocols, the site specificity of the EOAGH cluster is distributive and ethnographic, like a reblog. What would a site-specific ethnography of writing look like? In an environment of re-circulated PDFs, scripting languages, the built environment, e-commerce, photo sharing as a discursive practice, network architectures, and the social more generally conceived, forms of non-writing comprise a re-distribution within the sphere formerly known as poetry. From this generic standpoint, the spaces poetry is said to occupy, or drift in create shared or communal references and appropriations. A few authors are a few allusions. Although individual authors are listed, a page functions best without them.

Tim had initially inquired about an issue of ambience, as a literary idea, and this section of EOAGH tries to site ambience, where ambience is understood as a medium rather than a genre. Non-writing is one of the forms such a medium might take. For this particular issue I asked individuals to:

send anything that is PERIPHERAL to their current writing (these could be actual words) or current writing practice (more generally), i.e. not immediately sensitive to a desire to do writing or intended to "be" writing.

It can be an image, a text you've read and not really thought about, a thought about something that you didn't write about etc etc etc.

It can be a series of linked items or it can be a single item, anything really but unconstrained by a desire to make it into something that it is not.

It should not have much to do with you, at least textually speaking.

I'm hoping this project might continue beyond the strict bounds of the invitation, with further entries submitted post February 1.