Camille Guthrie’s most recent book, Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois, was recently featured in the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. When describing why she chose Guthrie’s book, book club board member Camille Dungy writes that she enjoys Guthrie’s work as much for what it leaves out as what it includes.

One of the things I admire most about Articulated Lair is that Guthrie does not require her poems to tell us all there is to know about Bourgeois or her oeuvre. She does not ask language to say everything. In fact, Guthrie seems to revel in gaps and silences, the nuances occasioned by what cannot or will not be directly articulated. Guthrie creates poetry within these gaps. She builds her poems around them. She emboldens my ear as it “imagines/ the tenor of the unsaid” (Cell IV), and she guides me as I begin to perceive Bourgeois in a new light.

To delve more into Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois, we recommend reading the edited transcript of the online discussion between Poetry Book Club Members and Guthrie. It’s an extensive conversation, but we enjoyed learning more about Guthrie’s interest in Bourgeois and seeing what aspects of the book sparked readers’ interest. The following exchange about the biographical nature of Bourgeois work and how Guthrie approached biographical information in the poems is illuminating:

Camille Guthrie: LB’s work is indeed very biographical, very much about deeply personal emotions and memories. I’m not a confessional poet at all; in fact, it’s always quite a surprise to me if private things emerge in a poem! But I did have a powerful reaction to her work and was drawn to some pieces in particular more than others. I noticed recently that in my book I write a lot about the artworks about mothers and sisters, when many of LB’s works are about her father. A real patriarch.

Brian S: It did seem to me that the fact that LB’s sculpture was so family-driven that the poems couldn’t help but reflect that in a way. When I returned to the book a second time, I did so with Google image search on (while others around me were sketching a model) and the poems opened up in a different way for me. Reading it both ways was enlightening.

Camille Guthrie: Yes, and I did include some biographical information in the poems themselves: her sister was Henriette and had a stiff leg; she was born on Christmas Day by a river. But I didn’t want to be a biographer in the poems, I wanted the poems to be an enactment of what I experienced when I looked at her work, and how I interpreted what she said and wrote about her art.

You’ll find the rest of the transcript at the Rumpus.

Kent Johnson has written a note for the new issue of the Chicago Review called “Marjorie Perloff, the ‘Avant-garde,’ and the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics” that is receiving a good amount of buzz, with the editors of The Claudius App noting that their Facebook post about the “parallax corrective” has received a record numbers of looks, about 1,200 in 24 hours.

Johnson commends the reference book on including in its fourth edition “essays on numerous ‘Third-World’ ethnic and national poetries,” where it had lacked in previous editions; Perloff’s entry for the “Avant-Garde,” however, “fl[ies] directly in face of the more capacious, internationalist gestures of the new Princeton, according to Johnson:

Moreover, the entry’s myopic purview is in dramatic contradiction with the internationalist outlook that the avant-garde itself (even on its minority right wing!) has long maintained at its ideational core.

Johnson goes on to details the non-mentions of César Vallejo, Aimé Césaire,and Japanese Surrealist, Kitasono Katue, of whom Johnson writes: “The momentous Gutai movement of the 50s doesn’ t happen without him; neither does Fluxus, probably.” There’s also Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik and Chilean poet Raúl Zurita:

Is Perloff aware of Alejandra Pizarnik, from Argentina? Though there has been some English translation and commentary, the absence of a full consideration of her oeuvre is a yawning gap in our understanding of the Latin American vanguardia. She died, a suicide, in 1972; her often disturbing, avant la lettre intertextual/appropriative works, in sophisticated dialogue with Continental theory (she lived in Paris for many years, where she was Julio Cortázar’s dear friend), along with a fierce, self-reflexive deconstruction of authorial self and signification—including employment of New Sentence-like procedures—beats the Language poets by a good decade. Various critics have written of how uncannily her work enacts proposals only later elaborated by Julia Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language and Black Sun; others have claimed her as Latin America’s answer to Artaud and Bataille. Her poetry, now Verlainesque in its cut transparencies, now Celanesque in its harsh lyricism, now abject, manic, and shocking, is among the most astonishing products of postwar world writing.

The situating of the avant-garde, then, is most certainly in flux:

Even the White House approves. We’ve traveled a long way and with great velocity from the proud, insurgent days of the New American Poetry, and it’s time to simply say it: the “avant-garde ” is now utterly at College—poetry’s Museum—and with all the perks. Perloff’s total inattention to the field-shift symptomizes, I’d submit, the ideological mood that’s come to suffuse the American post-avant’s late-stage trade: an amorphous “autonomy of art ” creed that is, of necessity, blithely oblivious to the institutional habitus that generates its very assumptions and operations. The formation wants both its “autonomous” social critique 214 and the official, legitimating patronage that now makes its poetic function thoroughly heteronomous. But there is no such Adornian cake, alas, that can be had and eaten too. And the layered irony of the dialectic is deepening.

Read the whole piece here, and don’t forget the footnotes.

Though they missed the chance to capture Amy Lawless’s (can we say…trademark?) huge blue eyes by photographing them in black-and-white, Interview Magazine did bring the world some joy by interviewing the poet about her work. To be specific, Lawless has a new book out, My Dead, from Octopus Books, about which she speaks here. Her interlocuter, Ryann Donnelly, writes:

My Dead delves into the process of mourning loved ones with Lawless’ calm, characteristically non-melodramatic poise. She cites videos of elephant mourning rituals seen on the Internet as a main source of inspiration. While humor might have been used to subvert heavier topics in the past, she chooses control and intimate dissection this time around. Lawless will be heading out on the “Sex and Death” tour with fellow Octopus writer James Gendron, with a reading at Goodbye Blue Monday in Brooklyn today. In preparation for her book’s release, she sat down with us to discuss her creative development and how it all started with a hatred of peas.

From the interview:

DONNELLY: What is your writing process like?

LAWLESS: I talk about this with my friends that also write poetry, and we notice that if we don’t write for awhile, we get kind of grumpy. I don’t have a particular process, but its usually I’ll just be in my room, sometimes just sitting at my desk, and I’ll have Microsoft Word open, and there’s something on my mind—ideas or images or a character. But, the most fun I’ve had lately writing poems is while watching Planet Earth episodes. I like to multi-task. I like to watch a movie and be on my phone and writing. I do well in that chaos. Like, if my life has five windows open at once, I can soften the other four, but they’re still there.

DONNELLY: Do you regiment yourself about when you’re going to write?

LAWLESS: If I haven’t written something in a week, I make sure I have time for it. Lately I’ve been writing prose as well, and that usually has to be first thing in the morning. I don’t feel like I have to do it every day, though.

DONNELLY: What was the editing process like for you? Some of this was done during a trip to Colorado, correct? What was it like to work outside the New York environment?

LAWLESS: The two editors that took the lead in editing my book were Mathias Svalina and Alisa Heinzman. Mathias lives in Denver, and I happened to be going to visit two poet friends, Maggie Wells and Dan Hoy, for New Year’s Eve, so it made sense for Mathias and I to meet up and go over the edits when I was out there, as opposed to doing a three-to-five-hour-long Skype conversation. It was a really empowering process because I had never had such an attentive editorial experience. Mathias is a brilliant poetry editor, and it felt like those little crazy things you think in your head about your words are validated by this person who is not crazy. It became clear that these are things we all think about. Being able to have that conversation was so exciting. And I guess one of my blind spots is putting together a poetry manuscript. When I first gave it to them, the sections were all different. I had made choices, but in working with them, it became whole.

DONNELLY: Were there thematic adjustments that came out of editing the structure?

LAWLESS: Yeah. I write so many different kinds of poems—funny or scatological or whatever. There were certain poems that just didn’t fit My Dead. My Dead is a book that is mostly concerned with death, and things swimming around that topic. There were certain poems that were really funny that just didn’t speak to that. That was the other thing that Mathias was good at pointing out in a very kind way. That goes over so much better when you’re in the room with someone than when you see a Microsoft Word comment next to something that’s like, “Meh.”

DONNELLY: Can you expand on what we can expect from My Dead?

LAWLESS: It was written in four sections. Two of the sections are long poem sequences. “Elephants in Mourning” I wrote after a few of my relatives had died—three in a year and a half. I sort of hadn’t dealt with it for a variety of reasons. One day I was just home watching YouTube videos of elephant mourning rituals, and it moved me so completely, because they remind you of humans keening and mourning. Suddenly, I felt so overwhelmed with my own personal loss. I just wrote the whole “Elephants in Mourning”—a 17- page poem—in a day. It took me a year to edit it, but that was the first piece.

It goes on. Read it all here!

Cover to Lamantia’s Destroyed Works. Collage by Bruce Conner, published by the Auerhahn Press in 1962

Last week we posted our enthusiasms for the forthcoming Collected Poems by Philip Lamantia, in which we did some digital digging into the archives of Poetry and assembled a list of reviews of Lamantia’s poetry from the 1940s through the 1970s. Our searching failed to located one review, one very important review, and one very important rebuttal, that Steven Fama very kindly pointed us to. Richard Howard writes a take-down of Lamantia’s Destroyed Works in the June 1963 issue as part of the magazine’s “Poetry Chronicle.” Howard begins by writing:

Puzzling over Philip Lamantia’s Destroyed Works, I cannot determine whether these lines were produced by a program of conscious cruelty or in the boundless jazz of a drug fantasy, nor can I see that it matters: their effect is that of The Throes—straining for, in, and from ecstasy.

Howard goes on to fire the following salvo that becomes the crux of the matter:

When such utterances (thirty-two pages) are “destroyed works”—destroyed perhaps because Breton and Ginsberg have written already the poems these spasms so relentlessly parrot—I wonder what works will be permitted to survive.

Ouch. And, not true! As Fama points out, Howard’s review prompted Ginsberg to write a letter to the editors which was published in the January 1963 issue under the header: Lamantia as Forerunner. Ginsberg sets the record straight, writing that Lamantia’s “interest in techniques of surreal composition notoriously antedates mine and surpasses my practice in a quality of untouched-ness, nervous scattering, street moment purity…” Ginsberg goes on to declare:

Since I’m cited as a stylistic authority I authoritatively declare Lamantia an American original, sooth-sayer even as Poe, genius in the language of Whitman, native companion and teacher to myself.

Quite an endorsement, and one that’s quite true. Read both review and rebuttal in their entirety. And thanks, Steven, for pointing us there.

Ange Mlinko, perhaps non-ruffled after Carol Muske-Dukes’s critique of her “re-track” of Adrienne Rich, has published a piece at LARB on Leonard Barkan’s Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures, which asks the question, “Why do painters sometimes wish they were poets–and why do poets sometimes wish they were painters?” Mlinko writes:

Barkan’s book is not a comprehensive history of ekphrasis (descriptive writing about artworks), nor does it track the co-evolution of image and word. Instead, he meditates on different facets of poetry and painting under a series of chapter headings that emphasize their binary relation: “Visible and Invisible,” “Apples and Oranges,” “Desire and Loss.” He doesn’t offer a single line of argument. There are contests: the old contest between reality and images, first staged by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, and given a new twist in Dante’s Commedia; and a contest between poetic image and painted image, such as Petrarch staged in his sonnets praising Simone Martini’s portrait of Laura. And of course there are contests between artists. A crucial one is the painter Zeuxis’s famous competition with Parrhasius, as related by Pliny. Zeuxis’s talent for mimesis was such that his painting of grapes attracted real birds, which flew up to peck at them. But his triumph was short lived: when he demanded that Parrhasius pull back the curtain on his painting, the joke was on him: the curtain itself was painted. Whereupon Zeuxis conceded the prize, “saying that whereas he had deceived birds Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist.”

Deception: this is the crux of all criticism of image-making, whether linguistic or pictorial. Parrhasius’ particularly egregious deception resides in the fact that he “paints an invisible picture, that is, the one Zeuxis imagines behind the curtain.” The most famous Platonic argument against art (it’s in The Republic) is an ontological one — pictures are thrice removed from Ultimate Reality (the realm of the eternal Forms — but, as Barkan demonstrates, it’s the rhetorical nature of image-making that really perturbs the philosopher. Pictures aren’t just neutral reflections of things in this world, much less the eternal one. And this is why pictorial and linguistic practices are so often yoked together; they are interchangeable not when they are mimicking nature but when they exploit their medium to emphasize perceptual differences and introduce relativism into discourse. Plato, Barkan tells us, “uses the fact that the same thing can look different from different vantage points as an analogy to the dangerously conflicted and changeable state of imitative poets and their audiences.” This has political consequences for his ideal state: artifice (of either painting or poetry) leads to perspectivism, perspectivism to relativism, relativism to division and ultimately deception.

If Plato’s argument seems slightly recherché in our age of riotously proliferating images and information, it’s worth remembering that, all over the world, there are still taboos around depictions of sacred objects, including mimetic representations of God’s creatures. Even some poets have accepted it: W.H. Auden, after his conversion to Christianity, decided that poetry was after all a frivolous activity, a copy of a copy of God’s mind. And since you can’t wade into a controversy in American poetry without hearing complaints that it is dead, irrelevant, unreadable, or inauthentic, it is heartening to remember that these are just the latest episodes of a long argument through the ages.

Read on, read on; Mlinko also includes some Ashbery….

The Black Took Collective Performing at Red Rover

We’re fan’s of Jennifer Karmin’s multidisciplinary projects and the long-running Red Rover Series in Chicago. Over at Poets and Writers, Karmin and co-curator Laura Goldstein talk about their collaborative curatorial process and recent performances by the Black Took Collective. From the beginning, organizing events at Red Rover has been an organic, open process. Karmin notes that:

Red Rover has tried to create an environment where anything can happen and often does. Our audience never exactly knows what they’re walking into. We’re interested in an interdisciplinary approach to events. This often includes nonliterary genres, audience participation, exploring a theme, and playing with seating in the space.

We see the curator as a facilitator of group experience for the writers, artists, and audience members. This is one way we’re trying to challenge the usual hierarchies that often play out in the literary and art world. Our main mode of operation is collaboration.

In February, the Red Rover Series hosted the Black Took Collective in Chicago as part of the IN>TIME Festival. We’ve been mesmerized each time we’ve seen the Collective, and regularly follow the work of Duriel E. Harris, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Ronaldo V. Wilson. If you’ve never seen them perform, Red Rover audience member’s reflections of their visit will be especially illuminating. Here’s what J’Sun Howard, a  writer and dance artist, had to say:

Two Macbooks with blank documents open for the audience to read periodic automatic writing from the collective, as the piece went along, spread across opposite walls from each other. The third wall facing the audience housed another projection that was a small phantasmagoric video of smiling faces behind a clear makeup-ed mask, Wilson dancing while Lundy read, and more text in bold white letters contrasted eerily with the sleekness, absoluteness, and unfussiness of the other automatic writing projections. In the center of the floor, a table held all the equipment and was flooded with microphones, water bottles, more text, poetry books, props of a gun, and a black mask.

Every year we celebrate the lifetime achievement of a living U.S. poet, and this year we’re thrilled to announce that poet Marie Ponsot has won the 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. At $100,000, it is one of the nation’s largest literary prizes. Established in 1986, the prize is sponsored and administered by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. The prize will be presented at the Pegasus Awards ceremony, along with the announcement of the new Children’s Poet Laureate, at the Poetry Foundation on Monday, June 10.

Marie Ponsot has had a remarkable career as a poet. Born in 1921 in New York, Ponsot has published six poetry collections, including The Bird Catcher (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her other collections include Easy (2009), Springing (2002), The Green Dark (1988), Admit Impediment (1981), and True Minds (1957). With Rosemary Deen, Ponsot co-authored a guide to teaching writing, Beat Not the Poor Desk (1982). She has translated more than 30 books into English from French for children and adults, including Love & Folly: Selected Fables and Tales of La Fontaine (2002), and The Golden Book of Fairy Tales (1958).

The editors of Poetry are, of course, excited to present this award to Ponsot for her distinctiveness as a contemporary poet. Of Ponsot’s writing, editor Christian Wiman noted: “T.S. Eliot once said that modern poets had lost the ability to think and feel at the same time. If only he could have read Marie Ponsot! Her poems are marvels of intellectual curiosity and acuity, and they will also break your heart.” Poetry senior editor Don Share added, “Marie Ponsot is one of the most beloved poets in the country; both her work and her life are exemplary.”

Be on the lookout for a portfolio of eleven poems by Ponsot in the May issue of Poetry. If you can’t wait until then, go here to read some of her work from previous issues of Poetry.

It’s true–the Ben Fama/Andrew Durbin art-poetry collab Wonder has announced its first-annual book prize, to be judged by Macgregor Card! Wow! Here’re the details:

♥WONDER BOOK PRIZE ♥

Wonder is accepting manuscripts March 15-May 15 for our first annual Wonder Book Prize, judged by Macgregor Card. We are accepting full-length manuscripts of any genre. The author of the selected manuscript will receive a $300 prize and publication.

Please send a cover letter, your manuscript and a $10 submission fee ($15 if you would like a final copy of the selected book). Please do not include your name in the manuscript. Each submission will be read blindly by the judge.

Submit here, kitcats.

There are all sorts of interesting things happening right now at Southern Oregon University. Not only is there a new issue of the West Wind Review, but they have recently announced a new, one-week summer writing program, the Institute of New Writing \ Ashland.

The program, which will take place August 12-17, is part of their preparation for a new MFA program at SOU set to launch in Fall 2004. Craig Wright, Robert Arellano and K. Silem Mohammad will host workshops, and Vanessa Place, Kevin Killian and Sharon Mesmer will participate in colloquia and give readings. The 2013 Lollapaganza Festival of New Writing, sponsored by West Wind Review, will end the week with more festivities and visiting writers.

We think it sounds incredibly fun! Head over to the Institute’s website for more information.

We enjoy the combination of poetry and post-ironic graphics in CA Conrad’s video magazine Jupiter 88. Conrad has been spending some time in southern California recently, and the latest installments of the magazine provide a fabulous overview of what writers in Los Angeles and San Diego have been up to. Recent posts include readings by Ben Doller, Jose Antonio Villaran, Brett Zehner, Kendall Grady, Jeanine Webb and many others.

We’d always wondered about the name of the magazine. Fortunately an interview from last July with Conrad in Coldfront helped us clear up this mystery. In it, he says:

I love the planet Jupiter, and I have always been in love with the number 88. So I put them together. And I LOVE and value poetry and believe that poets deserve to be reading with the planet Jupiter – the largest planet in our solar system – behind them, you know, Jupiter has our backs!

More Jupiter 88 southern California installments are forthcoming, so stay tuned.

Käthe Kollwitz

The Rumpus has a great piece up by poet and essayist Mary Ruefle called “Lectures I Will Never Give”–it is, of course, an excerpt from her book of essays Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books 2013). Here’s a bit of this amazingness:

The composer Dmitry Shostakovich’s certainty that musical notes radiated from a piece of shrapnel lodged in his brain.

I have always believed I became a writer because in the fifth grade I had a pencil fight with a classmate and a piece of graphite has been lodged in my palm ever since.

*

If art were about intellect there would be no artists there would be only intellectuals.

*

Someone gave me a lecture this summer. A woman I know very, very, very slightly was sitting next to me at a lake where we had come to swim. As it happens, the lake has been the backdrop of my life, and I was looking out at a raft that was so rotted and bleached and lopsided that it was apparent its life was nearly finished. This made me sad, for I loved that raft; in fact, if you were to look inside my wallet right now, as it sleeps quietly in my purse, you would find a picture of the raft tucked in a secret compartment.

In a rare moment of emotional candor I turned to this woman and told her how sad I was sitting there looking at the dilapidated raft. That was when she gave me her lecture. “YOU’RE SO NEGATIVE! STOP IDENTIFYING WITH A PIECE OF WOOD! IT’S NOT YOU! SNAP OUT OF IT!”

I went into something resembling shock. That is not a lecture I could give—it’s not something I believe in. The next day I returned to the lake and the raft was gone.

Bin of animals

at the Goodwill—

all my friends

in one place.

*

For a long, long time I wanted to write a lecture called “Asylum.” An asylum is a secure place of refuge, shelter, or retreat. It is a sanctuary, an inviolable place from which one cannot be removed without sacrilege. An asylum is a benevolent institution affording shelter and protection to some class of the afflicted. It is also an insane place, full of shouts and cries and cries and whispers. An asylum is a place of hopeless suffering and endless misunderstanding, a place of restriction and desperation. I like the word asylum. Poetry is an asylum to me. Do you know what insanity is? Insanity is “doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.” That’s writing poetry, but hey, it’s also getting out of bed every morning. The argument over madness can be reduced to this: madness is excluded from thought vs. madness is “one case of thought (within thought)” (Derrida). The whole history of poetry could ensue from such a discussion. I don’t want to have it.

Once I spent hours in a room trying to decide which was more accurate:

I am paved with purple rushes

or

I am paid with purple thrushes.

I was in agony, trying to decide.

And apologies for being out of order, but we like this part too:

Once I wanted to write a lecture on two self-portraits by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz, who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and achieved recognition when it was still extremely rare for women artists.

Single self-portraits are not half as interesting as two self-portraits by the same artist painted thirty or forty years apart. When Käthe painted herself as a young woman she had a very pale and serene face against a dark background. Her hand rested on an open book. She was reading by lamplight. She was, obviously, a young woman with an inner life, and the portrait is composed as if to say, “I am a sensitive, curious, intelligent being, and in my search for knowledge and experience I will learn all there is to know about the world around me—here, I give you my pledge by placing my hand on this open book.” It is a nineteenth-century oil painting of quiet and penetrating elegance.

Thirty-five years later she draws herself again—for it’s a drawing this time and not a painting—with excruciating rapidity. Her face is scrawled in black ink out of a series of highly agitated circles and at a distance might easily be mistaken for a tightly wound clockspring. Gone is the book—this time her hand appears to be driving itself into her forehead with the force of a nail. She’s pressing her head so hard the viewer is taken aback.

This twentieth-century drawing says, “All that was to be known was inside me and bit by bit it did its work and made this tormented and exhausted head.” Her face has become the open book.

But that’s a lecture that has to be lived.

Turns out that some people went to AWP for the panels! The good folks at Ploughshares share their favorite moments from the festival, which include “listening to Seamus Haney[sic] and Derek Walcott on Thursday night,” attending “Post Black? Culture, Craft, and Race in Verse (Mitchell L H Douglas, Douglas Kearney, Evie Shockley, Khadijah Queen, Randall Horton),” the “Copper Canyon Press 40th Anniversary Reading (Michael Wiegers, C.D. Wright, Jean Valentine, Bob Hicok, Dean Young),” “We Are Homer: A Reading of Collaborative Poetry and Prose (Ryan Teitman, Traci Brimhall, Laura Eve Engel, Adam Peterson, Brynn Saito, Marcus Wicker),” “Bring Out Your Dead: Writing Ghosts (and Zombies) in Literary Fiction,” organized by Ploughshares blogger Rebecca Makkai, and “Essaying the Essay, with David Lazar, Phillip Lopate, David Shields, and Lia Purpura.” There’s more, writes Abby Travis:

Outside of the panels, though, I mostly enjoyed the opportunity to talk to such a wide range of people, reunite with former professors, meet editors at other journals, and kick it on Emerson Row with alumni now at Birds LLC, Rose Metal Press, and Gigantic Sequins, and of course, grad student run Redivider. I discovered exactly the poem I needed: Ana Bozicevic’s “About Nietzsche” (from Rise in the Fall, by Birds) and finally got my mitts on The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction, ed. Dinty Moore, which I desperately need, 1) because the first essay is by Lia Purpura, and 2) because brevity is as difficult for me as breathing is natural.

The New York Times has profiled Anne Carson, with a piece titled “The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson,” and check out that photo; she’s looming. But it’s more than a profile:

Anne Carson was uncomfortable with the idea of a traditional profile: a journalist following her around for a few days, like a private detective, noting her outfits and mannerisms, shadowing her on errands, making lists of furniture and wall decorations and pets, quizzing her students, standing behind her holding his breath while she tried to write in her journal. Carson is a private person. She prefers to be alone.

Dot dot dot: “In the end, she agreed to exchange some e-mails. This felt like a significant victory.” Before those, Sam Anderson writes:

Carson gives the impression — on the page, at readings — of someone from another world, either extraterrestrial or ancient, for whom our modern earthly categories are too artificial and simplistic to contain anything like the real truth she is determined to communicate. For two decades her work has moved — phrase by phrase, line by line, project by improbable project — in directions that a human brain would never naturally move. The approach has won her awards (MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan) and accolades and an electric reputation in the literary world.

The emails do come up. It’s a lovely five-page piece, in fact. “On contradiction: ‘i realize all this sounds both chaotic and dishonest and probably that is the case. contradiction is the test of reality, as Simone Weil says.’” More (and on her newest, Red Doc >):

I was e-mailing with Carson on the occasion of the publication of her new book, “Red Doc >” (that angle-bracket is, yes, a part of the title: “Red Doc >” was the default name Carson’s word-processing program gave to the file, and she stuck with it). “Red Doc >,” too, is arguably not poetry. Most of the text runs like a racing stripe down the center of the page, with a couple of inches of empty space on either side. This form was also a result of an accident with the computer. Carson hit a wrong button, and it made the margins go crazy. She found this instantly liberating. The sentences, with one click, went from prosaic to strange, and finally Carson understood — after years of frustration — how her book was actually supposed to work.

“Red Doc >” is the sequel — sort of — to Carson’s most popular book, “Autobiography of Red,” which was published in 1998. In the intervening 15 years, “Red” has become known as one of the crossover classics of contemporary poetry: poetry that can seduce even people who don’t like poetry. It boasts one of the more impressive roster of blurbs you are ever likely to see: full-on gushing from Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Susan Sontag. The book is subtitled “A Novel in Verse,” but — as usual with Carson — neither “novel” nor “verse” quite seems to apply. It begins as if it were a critical study of the ancient Greek poet Stesichoros, with special emphasis on a few surviving fragments he wrote about a minor character from Greek mythology, Geryon, a winged red monster who lives on a red island herding red cattle. Geryon is most famous as a footnote in the life of Herakles, whose 10th labor was to sail to that island and steal those cattle — in the process of which, almost as an afterthought, he killed Geryon by shooting him in the head with an arrow.

“Autobiography of Red” purports to be Geryon’s autobiography. Carson transposes Geryon’s story, however, into the modern world, so that he is suddenly not just a monster but a moody, artsy, gay teenage boy navigating the difficulties of sex and love and identity. His chief tormentor is Herakles, a charismatic ne’er-do-well who ends up breaking Geryon’s heart. The book is strange and sweet and funny, and the remoteness of the ancient myth crossed with the familiarity of the modern setting (hockey practice, buses, baby sitters) creates a particularly Carsonian effect: the paradox of distant closeness.

“Red Doc >” is both close to and distant from its predecessor. The cast of characters has changed almost entirely. Geryon is referred to only as G. (The book is obsessed with initials and acronyms, which G at one point calls “name rations.”) Geryon has returned to his pre-Herakles state as a herdsman, lovingly tending a group of musk oxen. This idyllic life is interrupted, however, when he meets a woman named Ida, who introduces herself by knocking him unconscious with a two-by-four. The two of them, along with a traumatized war veteran called SBG (Sad But Great), embark on a picaresque road trip. There is a dreamlike journey into the heart of a glacier, where Geryon meets a flock of ice bats: “They are blueblack. They are absolutely silent. They are the size of toasters.” There is a sweet lyrical passage in which Carson takes us inside the mind of Geryon’s favorite musk ox, Io, as she wakes up one morning. There is a combination auto-repair shop/psychiatric hospital. There is an erupting volcano. Throughout the book we hear from a kind of Greek chorus — called, mysteriously, Wife of Brain — which pops in to comment elliptically on the action.

Read the full piece here.

Earlier this week I posted Notes from the Fence Family Brunch, Part 1, wherein I covered topics such as: Fence managing editor Rob Arnold’s possible contribution to statewide gun violence in the pacific northwest, how the first piece of literature I ever inspired told the story of a watermelon filled with human flesh, what author Jacob Wren wants you to know about Canadians, and the story of a man who left his formidable porn collection to a catholic college (which becomes the story of a man who has to catalogue that porn collection). 

Here’s the second half of those notes, wherein I’ll report on: How Flarf is like Buddhism, poet Brandon Downing‘s thoughts on the goodness of marriage, how excited Fence fiction editor Andrea Lawlor is about the first ever Lit. anthology of trans and genderqueer writers, and what writer and editor Brian Blanchfield has to say about the retention/ release of masculine energy.

***

In late February I had the pleasure of meeting Brandon Downing for the first time when we read together at the New School in NYC.  His book Mellow Actions (one of Fence’s recent-est releases), includes a reference to bandage-flavored ice cream.

Hannah Gamble: So what can you tell me?

Brandon Downing: I don’t think I’m good at rambling. Lob me a softball and I’ll try to hit it.

HG: Other things we’ve all been talking about today: porn, joy, godlessness, gender identity…

BD: I have no truck in any of those. I have no gender.

HG: You have no gender?

BD: I like to write as if I have no gender.

HG: You like to write as if you have no centralized identity.

BD: I know. I love it.

HG: It makes you so big and formless; do you feel like a god?

BD: What? No! I feel like a minion!

HG: Why a minion?

BD: Ask me a question!!

HG: I am! I did!

BD: Ask me easier questions! Ask me “yes and yes” questions!

HG: Brandon: I’m scared of marriage. Can you tell me why I shouldn’t be?

BD: Okay, yes, so you pay less rent, you get more presents (now her family gives me presents at Christmas), utility payments are cut in half, which goes hand in hand with rent, but still.

Rebecca Wolff: That’s just domestic partnership.

HG: That’s true– all of these things could happen without marriage.

[Various agreements and objections sound throughout the room.]

BD: This will sound lame, but I do mean it: We had been together nine years [before marriage], but getting married really did change our relationship. Now it’s this different thing. I want to protect it and defend it and be awesome about it and thicken it and fill it. I was thirty-five when we got married; we had been together eight years and I thought I’m in– I might as well be all in, [and then when you get married] the “all in” becomes ever more all in.

***

I’m now sitting on what later came to be referred to as “the best bed” with Fence editors Brian Blanchfield and Andrea Lawlor. I’ll bring you back to Brian a little later, but for now what you need to know is that Andrea Lawlor has an amazing belt buckle upon which there is an impressive two-horse stampede.  Andrea is excited about an AWP panel she’d been to on Friday (to the point that, typing-wise, I’m having trouble keeping up with her as she tells me about it). I turn my laptop over to her. Here’s what she writes:

The best panel I’ve been to this week: a discussion of and marathon reading for the anthology called Troubling the Line from Nightboat Books. It’s going to be a landmark anthology; it has “syllabi” written all over it. The book anthologizes trans and genderqueer writers, many of whom write about about self-determination/ self-selection. There is a sort of magical generosity of the editors—a really wide call to writers who identify in such a range of ways. The reading on Friday night felt historic: amazing gorgeous work from Dawn Lundy Martin, Ari Banias, Julian Brolaski, Max Wolf Valerio, Trace  Peterson, Stephen Burt, Duriel Harris, HR Hegnauer—so many others, too many to name. Troubling the Line feels like the big queer anthologies from the early 90s (the High Risk books, Eileen Myles’s The New Fuck You, In the Life, etc)—You’ll want to run out and buy all the books from all the writers included. (Hey Hannah, great to meet you! See you on the internet!)

***

Before taking off to attend one last panel, Andrea also recommends what she had heard of Brian Blanchfield’s essay project, Onesheets. At the Writing Masculinities panel/reading on Thursday morning Brian read an essay from the collection called “A Page on Man Roulette, Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source.” (A couple essays from Onesheets just went up on Web Conjunctions and the Seneca Review site.) Brian notes that it did seem that gender destabilization was a dynamic energy of the conference this year. I asked Brian about what he didn’t get a chance to say about masculinity in his panel. He told me the story of the mascule.

Brian Blanchfield: My boyfriend John and I, living in western Montana a couple of years ago, invented the term. Mascule: a unit of masculinity. We decided that one can observe an exchange–a net gain or net loss–of mascules in any social transaction: In the coffee shop, between pairs at the father-son train show (a big deal in Missoula and a favorite spot for such espionage.) We were sort of citizen scientists about it and even made a schematic of our findings (which has gone missing: it looked like a topographical map). We had just started dating and it was part of how we knew we were right for each other.

HG: So how would you determine who was losing or gaining more mascules?

BB: You begin by asking which way the mascules flow; which party is mascule-retentive, etcetera. (If someone asks “Are you using this chair?“ he or she who doesn’t wish to appear more alone may suffer a retention of mascules in this exchange.) Men and women lose and give mascules all the time, in each encounter. It may be a zero-sum game, I don’t know. One interesting thing is that the mascule is not a measure of power; on the contrary, the mascule is full of insecurity and covering. Mascules gather around the mumbler. Also the “Hail fellow well met” sort of exaggerated salute.

[Brian's phone buzzes.]

BB: Someone just texted me and called me by my last name only. Mascules can also transmit virtually.

HG: Do you like it when someone calls you Blanchfield? I always like it when people call me Gamble. Of course, the mean gym coach in my head who berates me for having feelings also calls me by my last name only (as in “Suck it up, Gamble!!!”) so I don’t know what that says about me/ it/ anything….

BB: But Gamble is a better name. I wish I had a verb to answer to.

HG: It is better, and me too, buddy. (Did I just steal some of your mascules???)

BB: [Signals confirmation] Net gain, Gamble.

***

Notes from the 2013 Fence Family Brunch: Concluded. Thanks for reading, sweet people of the internet. I’ll see you next week.

Slate posted an interesting article today showcasing Langston Hughes’s collection of Harlem rent party advertisements. Kind of like the Facebook invites of their day, “These cards, collected by Langston Hughes and held with his papers in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, advertised ‘rent parties’ to be held in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s.” You may be wondering what a rent party is:

Hosts of these gatherings opened up their apartments for a night, charging a fee to guests in return for live music, dancing, and socializing. Food was extra, and the accumulated cash went to help the hosts pay their rent. Sandra L. West points out that black tenants in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s faced discriminatory rental rates. That, along with the generally lower salaries for black workers, created a situation in which many people were short of rent money. These parties were originally meant to bridge that gap.

As advertisements for the parties, the cards name the kind of musical entertainment attendees could expect, using lyrics from popular songs or made-up rhyming verse as slogans. Kathleen Drowne writes that the cards always used euphemisms to name the parties’ purpose. You can see the use of the names “Social Whist Party” and “Social Party” here, but Drowne also mentions cards from the 1920s that advertised shindigs under the names “Too Terrible Party,” “Boogie,” or “Tea Cup Party.”

How did Hughes come to collect these cards? The poet wrote about rent parties and rent party cards in the Chicago Defender in 1957, explaining, “When I first came to Harlem, as a poet I was intrigued by the little rhymes at the top of most House Rent Party cards, so I saved them. Now I have quite a collection.”

Make the jump and check them out for yourself.

The latest editions from Canarium Books have recently dropped. And we’re thrilled to see some authors old and new back in the saddle or making their way onto their list. While many poets get their first books out there and struggle to place their sophomore collections, Canarium is doing their authors a solid by publishing their second collections. Robert Fernandez returns with Pink Reef, as does Paul Killebrew with Ethical Consciousness. Then, entering the Canarium family is Farnoosh Fathi with Great Guns.

And they’re taking their show on the road. If you’re in Ann Arbor today, you can catch Fahti and Anthony Madrid (published by CB last year) reading at the University of Michigan. And if you’re on the west coast, fear not, Fathi will be reading with Canarium editors Josh Edwards and Lynn Xu at Open Books in Seattle. It’s like a Canarium Convoy!!!

For other readings near you, go to our Community Events page here.

This morning at the Paris Review Daily you can find a great article about reading Eileen Myles and living the experience of reading Eileen Myles. Rachel Hurn writes about her first encounter with Myles’s work while living in San Diego and buying a copy of Chelsea Girls from a used bookstore. She writes:

The first thing I noted about Myles was that her voice on the page reads like she is reading to me. She was reading to me that day in San Diego, sitting on my Craigslist couch with grad-school applications laid out on the floor across the room, about to go study creative nonfiction, whatever that meant. Chelsea Girls is a book of prose that reads like memoir and is called fiction. I didn’t know this at the time. I thought it was all true, all about Myles, and in a big way I still think so.

The essays jump around thematically and sequentially, beginning in a gay bar in Augusta, Maine, where Myles tackles a police officer: “I’m a poet, you fools, you asshole cops!” She describes New York in the eighties, taking the F train to Queens to collect her “light blue pills,” which she would buy for thirty-five dollars and sell for a hundred: “Go someplace out of your life, come back new, bring it around and make a little money. Clean your apartment. Write some.” Myles has a boyfriend: “I thought we looked alike … ‘Is that all,’ I asked as his dick ‘entered’ me. That’s all I’ve got, he said.” She has a girlfriend: “The first woman put her head between my legs and the complete sin, the absolute moment of sex came back and I was all in one piece coming apart. I was willing to sacrifice all for that moment.”

She publishes a book of poetry, A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains (1981), and throws a party at her publisher’s loft, where her friends found her discomfort amusing: “How’re you doing, Eileen? [Ted] put this faggy little turn on ‘Eileen,’ like it was a made-up name, something I’m pretending to be. It sounded right.” She works at Little, Brown in Boston, a position “underpaid but prestigious,” sneaking poems on her electric typewriter. She lives in the East Village on $250 a month, and friends offer her drinks, drugs, and cigarettes, but she is too embarrassed to ask for a steak: “I was thirty-one years old and it was too humiliating to admit I wanted food.”

Hurn goes on to talk about how Myles’s writing was a sort of life companion as she moves from San Diego to New York, through graduate school and beyond. And finally meets her literary hero:

After the reading at St. Mark’s, I approached her, this badass poet who sat at the information desk in the back of the store. All I could manage to say was, “Your voice. Your incredible voice.”

She smiled. I told her about leaving San Diego to come to New York, which she had also recently done, except that she was coming back after having taught writing at UCSD. Now she was home. I handed her Chelsea Girls—“Woah, I haven’t seen this in a while,” she said. On the title page she inscribed a message that looks like one of her poems:

Rachel —
us escaping from
SD now in NY
yay —
E

It sounds very nice, right? Well, we don’t want to pull any spoilers so go to the article and read to the end. Eileen might be getting creeped out!

The folks at fashioncentric Flaunt magazine have devoted a recent Au Contraire section to poetry. 18 pages of John Ashbery, Fiona Banner, Caroline Bergvall, Derek Beaulieu, Erica Baum, Kenneth Goldsmith, Christian Bök, and Alexander Grant, to be exact. Who knew Flaunt was interested in poetry, let alone innovative and emerging conceptual literature?

Since the publication of its first issue, Flaunt Magazine has examined provocative issues and ideas pertaining to art, fashion, film, music, media, and literature. Twelve years on, the publication continues its original intent of preserving the core value of constructive inquiry and artistic freedom.

Flaunt is a wholly independent magazine published 10 times a year and distributed in over 32 countries.

We find the texts a bit difficult to read and view online, but despite this design flaw hope that Flaunt continues to feature more poetry in the future.

Kit Schluter, translator of Marcel Schwob’s The Book of Monelle (as we elaborated upon here), spotlights today none other than Danielle Collobert, the French poet whose suicide in 1978 left us with some of the “most enigmatic and innovative bodies of work in contemporary French letters.” Collobert’s first novel, Murder, has just been published by Litmus Press, in a new translation from Nathanaël. As the press site notes: “Originally published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard while Collobert was living as a political exile in Italy, this prose work was written against the backdrop of the Algerian War.”

Schluter writes of it in detail: “Murder speaks a language profoundly its own, unlike anything else she was to write, and quite possibly unlike anything else you may have read. Reading this prose gives one the rare impression of being in the presence of a voice speaking from the honest and cutting edge of present urgencies: that is, this is not a voice responding to conventions or trends in literary necessity, but one singularly engaging the emergent necessities of life itself, in all its complexity and danger.” Excitingly, Schluter has just interviewed Nathanaël at HTMLGiant. An excerpt:

KS: The language of Murder’s passages is slippery, but in a productive kind of way. Although Collobert’s later work seems almost entirely irreverent of traditional genres and forms, the language of this early work, written around the age of twenty, seems to skirt the boundaries between the short story and the prose poem. Nobody is named, no locations are specified, no motives for actions are explained. And yet these prose pieces seem to function toward the development of short narratives that retain these traditional tools of the “short story,” however non-traditionally they might be getting used.

How would you address the issue of genre in this book? What are we dealing with here? Do you sense any influences informing the form of the pieces in Murder, or does this seem to be a mode of writing that Collobert can call entirely her own?

N: I would resist attempting to attribute a generic definition to Meurtre; I would not seek to inscribe it in a lineage, either. Which is not a rejection of eventual antecedents – often Collobert’s work is read against Beckett, for example. But a habitual reliance on lineage as a way of reading seems limiting to me, and a decidedly academic concern. Before even beginning to attempt to make this kind of attribution, one would need to recognize the distances the text has had to travel between French and English, and then acknowledge the divergences between generic constructs in those two (much more than two) literary cultures (though there is increasing adherence to English language delineations in French, which is indicative, perhaps, of a desire for change, but more cynically, of the global influence of specifically American industry, since this direction is distrustful of the generic fluidity for which French literature of the twentieth century came to be known), and take some note of the development of those movements over time, because, like anywhere else, they are not static, whatever limits are imposed to prevent alterations from loosening them from their categorical holds. Which is to say that the bolstering of the boundaries governing generic territories, such as they are defended, is in large part contextual. I would argue that it is no less accurate to categorise Meurtre as prose than it is to categorise Il donc as poetry; Meurtre has a strong poetics, as is Il donc continuing to grapple with the sentence. But one might suggest just as convincingly that all of her work has something of the film script (her language is at times much more succinct than passages in some of Antonioni’s film scripts, for example, which read like prose). I might offer these lines of Derrida’s as more eloquent provocation: “ ‘What / is…?’ laments the disappearance of the poem – / another catastrophe. By announcing that which is /just as it is, a question salutes the birth of prose.” (Tr. Peggy Kamuf)

KS: Collobert, in the final passage of the book, defines the book’s namesake, murder, as follows: “One does not die alone, one is killed, by routine, by impossibility, following their inspiration. If all this time, I have spoken of murder, sometimes half camouflaged, it’s because of that, that way of killing” (96). This, for me, is provocative and explosive language. And, I should say, that goes for the whole book: this isn’t a neutral work, but one that digs in its heels and takes a firm political stance. What political urges do you find central to Murder?

N: You have identified what is for me perhaps the most powerful passage from the work (these are the same lines I borrowed into the afore-mentioned epigraph). Out of this passage, I would signal the unlikely conjunction of routine and inspiration. There is here the suggestion of the sublimation of emotion into bureaucratisation. “That way of killing” is not distinct from the way of language, from a poetics or an aesthetic impulse; ‘inspiration’ is the incipit of murder – the very breath of it. This admission walls the text off from anything resembling hope. And yet it is also anything but nihilistic. It is snared by its own realisations – with emphasis on the real.

Please find the full conversation here.

Photo by Jeff Feuerzeig

We first read Chris Stroffolino’s poetry in the late 90s, shortly after he co-edited, with Lisa Jarnot and Lenoard Schwartz, the Talisman Anthology of New (American) Poets. His most recent book is Speculative Primitive which came out in 2005 on Tougher Disguises, the San Diego-based imprint edited by James Meetze which also published Stephanie Young’s first book as well as K Silem Mohammad‘s now-classic Deer Head Nation. In other words, Stroffolino has been in good company for a while.

He’s also a musician. In 1998, he played keyboard and trumpet with David Berman and Steve Malkums on The Silver Jews’ American Water Album (Drag City) and put together a tribute to Anne Sexton’s rock band for the Poetry Society of America. We saw his band Continuous Peasant in Washington, DC sometime in 2003. Now, he’s in LA, living and playing in his van, and the LA Weekly has noticed.

Recently, filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig, the director of indie smash The Devil and Daniel Johnston, was riding his bike on Sunset near Maltman. He heard somebody playing piano and singing his heart out.

“I’m looking around, I don’t see anybody,” says Feuerzeig. “I’m thinking, man, that sounds like Daniel Johnston, it’s so weird.” He kept riding but, his curiosity piqued, he circled back. “Inside this van there’s this guy playing piano to no one, and wow! It sounds so great. I took out my iPhone with that Super 8mm app and started rolling. I was like, man, this is crazy, what is going on here?”

You can find that Super 8mm app footage on the LA Weekly article, which happily does a good job describing Stroffolino’s poetry and musical background:

What was going on was Chris Stroffolino, a.k.a. Chris the Piano Van, who, it turns out, is not just another broke busker but one rather major dude with an interesting back story. A published poet with a doctorate in Shakespearian studies, the Philly-born Stroffolino had taught creative writing at NYU and Rutgers, and held the post of Distinguished Poet in Residence at St. Mary’s College in Moraga. More intriguingly for Feuerzeig, he’d also been a member of Silver Jews, the critically hailed indie-rock combo led by David Berman and whose varied ranks included Stephen Malkmus of Pavement.

But Chris the Piano Van had lately suffered more than his fair share of shit. He’d lost that cushy teaching job up north, gotten his leg bashed bad in an auto accident, and had his heart broke in an ill-fated love affair. He said, “Screw this,” loaded his piano and trumpet into a clanky old Econoline and made his way to Hollywood.

But what we’re really, really excited about is the fact that Feuerzeig did a 12-track, “lo-fi, Daniel Johnston-style” recording session with Stroffolino in “a quiet place in Griffith Park.”:

The resulting 12-track album, The Piano Van Sessions, is now in the can. Feuerzeig’s agent has heard Stroffolino’s record and story, and is helping him get a publishing and label deal. He’s got a website and even a Twitter. The past few weeks have found him holding court in front of clubs, stores and farmer’s markets in Hollywood, Silverlake, Echo Park and downtown — most anywhere he doesn’t get told to pack up and move on.

Meanwhile, Stroffolino is still sleeping mostly in the Econoline on these chilly nights. He suffered a mild stroke a while back, and has that bum knee, conditions that require daily therapy to keep himself in working order — and he has just had his disability claim denied again. Yet he has a curiously upbeat attitude about his situation. When Chris Piano Van gets a bit down, he oddly thinks about one particular gritty place:

“Motown is the workaholic paradigm, which to me is the American dream, and it needs to come back in some way or another. If you don’t have startup capital, and can’t get a small business loan? The Piano Van is the only way for me to be an entrepreneur — that’s my entry to Motown.”

If you are in LA, get thee to one of those clubs, stores or farmer’s markets so you can hear Stroffolino play, and keep an eye out for The Piano Van Sessions. If you haven’t been lucky enough to read his poems, there are still a few copies of his books at Small Press Distribution.

Photo by Hannah Andrews

Congratulations to Eryn Green, chosen by Carl Phillips to be this year’s Yale Series of Younger Poets winner for his book ERUV. More from the Yale Press Log:

Carl Phillips says that ERUV “reminds us how essential wilderness is to poetry—a wilderness in terms of how form and language both reinvent and get reinvented; meanwhile, the sensibility behind these poems points to another wilderness, the one that equals thinking about and feeling the world—its hurts, its joys—deeply and unabashedly, as we pass through it.

Yale University Press will publish Green’s book in April 2014. The manuscript is Phillips’s third selection as judge and the 108th volume in the series. Carl Phillips’s second selection, Will Schutt’s Westerly, will be published by Yale University Press on April 16, 2013.

Eryn Green is a doctoral candidate at the University of Denver and holds an MFA from the University of Utah. His work has appeared in Jubilat, Colorado Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Denver.

Awarded since 1919 by Yale University Press, the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize celebrates the most prominent new American poets by bringing the work of these artists to the attention of the larger public. Earlier winners of the prize include such talents as Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Jack Gilbert, Jean Valentine and Robert Hass. It is the longest-running poetry prize in the United States.

And remember this item on the James Merrill House partnership with Yale University Press? No?, well, read on:

Yale University Press will also continue its partnership with The James Merrill House. Winners of the Series will receive one of the five writing fellowships offered at The James Merrill House in Stonington, CT. The fellowship provides a furnished living space and daily access to James Merrill’s apartment for a writer in search of a quiet setting to complete a project of literary or academic merit.

Over the summer we posted on Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity, published by Action Books and reviewed by Barry Schwabsky at Hyperallergic. So you can imagine our excitement to see that Burning City editor Jed Rasula will be in conversation with Josh Schneiderman about the project tomorrow at the Center for the Humanities in New York. Here’s the deal:

“The fascination of cities,” wrote Langston Hughes, “seizes me, burning like a fever in the blood.” In their new anthology Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity (2012), Jed Rasula and Tim Conley reshape the poetic landscape of modernism, collecting poems inspired by Paris, Cracow, Buenos Aires and many other urban hubs, that reflect all the feverish innovations of that era. Join poet and scholar Jed Rasula for a reading and conversation with Josh Schneiderman.

If you’re around 365 Fifth Avenue around 6:30, stop by room 4406 and feel the burn!

We’re happy to help announce that one of our favorite small presses–Flim Forum Press–has just published The Problem of Boredom in Paradise: Selected Poems by Paul Hannigan, potentially reviving the readership of the late poet, who was born in Cambridge in 1936 and kept the company of Boston-area writers like Fanny Howe, Bill Knott, William Corbett, DeWitt Henry, Tom Lux, and James Tate. “His publishing life extended from the late 60s to the late 70s with a small number of books and chapbooks. He taught at Emerson College and was an occasional editor/reviewer for Ploughshares and The Harvard Review. Hannigan suffered from a series of debilitating illnesses for most of his adult life, from which he eventually succumbed in 2000. He left behind a world of notebooks, unpublished poems, short stories, unfinished novels, fragments, comics and drawings.” More about the book:

The Problem of Boredom in Paradise contains selections from a young Hannigan’s A Theory of Learning (1966), the chapbook Holland and the Netherlands (Jim Randall’s Pym Randall Press, 1970), selections from his books Laughing (Houghton Mifflin, 1970) and The Carnation (Tom Lux’s Barn Dream Press, 1972), and the entirety of Bringing Back Slavery (Dolphin Editions, 1976). Also: a large portion of an unpublished manuscript The Higher Slum (1975), an assortment of other unpublished works from the 80s and 90s, and a few original drawings.

More:

Paul Hannigan, society reporter on safari, sketches serpentine philosophers and corporate baboons, chronicles “these degrading surprises we call our days.” Like a good comedian, he paints these fools on his own face, in othered self-portraits, alternately toothy and toothless, sad saccharine, smothered in “moral sherbet.” Hannigan mumble mumbles a messy subjectivity, all the insecurities of our race, gender, sexuality. He can be rhapsodically self-felicitous in fantasies of self-pity. He can be witty, crude, and brutally cruel. Paul Hannigan, fall-guy, castaway, shackles Milton with suburban shopping malls and maps over happiness with The Bush, that colonial/genital beachhead. Hannigan’s poems are busy napping, bong coughing, constantly undressing, disabling, donning a series of hospital gowns. Perverted lyrics parade from his hopelessly open mouth.

You have already
had enough fun
now you must
what watch watch
and listen and
remember. Sort
according to subject.
And cross-reference.
At your dwindling
so-called leisure.

Flim Forum’s entire catalog is worth a serious peruse. Last year’s The Death of Pringle, by Justin Katko, had us at an operatic “The.” And Jennifer Karmin’s aaaaaaaaaaalice “is the sound and sight of the disappearing rabbit,” as Vanessa Place wrote. Buy this newest, and read more about, by and for Hannigan, at the Paul Hannigan website. And a terrific interview with Flim Forum co-editor (with Matthew Klane) Adam Golaski about Hannigan can be read in the current issue of Open Letters Monthly.

Our trusty Green Integer copy of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life will always be held dear, but get ready for something new–Wesleyan University Press has just published the seminal book in a new edition! It includes My Life in the Nineties, too! More from their site:

New edition of one of the founding works of Language writing

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many ways in which language—the things people say and the ways they say them—shapes not only their identity, but also the very world around them.

And an excerpt:

It was awhile before I understood what had come between the stars, to form the constellations. They were at a restaurant near Los Gatos owned by Danes. Now that I was “old enough to make my own decisions,” I dressed like everyone else. People must flatter their own eyes with their pathetic lives. The things I was saying followed logically the things that I had said before, yet they bore no relation to what I was thinking and feeling. There was once a crooked man, who rode a crooked mile — thereafter he wrote in a crooked style characteristic of 19th century prose, a prose of science with cumulative sentences. The ideal was of American property and she had received it from a farmer. It includes buying thrillers and gunmen’s coats. I was more terrified of the FBI agents than of the unspecified man who had kidnapped, murdered, and buried Stephanie, the girl in the other fifth grade, in the hillside behind school. A pause, a rose, something on paper. It was at about this time that my father provided me with every right phrase about the beauty and wonder of books…

from “I wrote my name in every one of his books”

Each year the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) holds a conference in a different US city that, for about 4 days, will swarm with (among others) poets, novelists, essayists, graduate students, and college professors, as well as people hoping to one day be counted among those previously listed. Also in attendance are editors and administrators affiliated with a huge number of the country’s book presses and literary magazines. Apart from the spring of 2010 when I had tonsillitis, I have attended every AWP conference since 2008. This year, for me, was different from past years in that it was my first AWP where I had a book sitting on a table at the book fair and thus felt fully inducted into my press’s family of authors. It has become a recent tradition for Fence editors, authors, and board members to have brunch together in Fence editor and founder Rebecca Wolff’s hotel room; this year was my first year attending.

Knowing that I had to come up with a blog post for the following week, I had my laptop open the entire time, and conducted impromptu mini-interviews with many of the brunch attendees, often while sitting on one of the two hotel beds, sometimes pausing to add more water to the hotel coffee maker. What follows are brief records of some of these conversations which I hope will tell you things you didn’t previously know, not only about my Fence brothers and sisters, but other topics including but not limited to: Fence managing editor Rob Arnold’s worst job ever, my first experience with light workplace molestation, author Jacob Wren’s feelings on joy and art’s undeserved reputation as something really important, the surprising accessories of a 1970s sex doll, and how looking at someone else’s porn collation can help you become a poet.

[In Part II (available later this week): the new trans/ genderqueer Lit. anthology that you need to purchase STAT, whether poet Brandon Downing is sur or subhuman, why I shouldn't be afraid of marriage, and a new unit of measurement invented by  writer and Fence Editor Brian Blanchfield to quantify the exchange of  masculine power in various social interactions.]

***

Approaching the hotel room, I see Fence’s managing editor Rob Arnold and a few other people standing in the hallway while the housekeeper finishes cleaning. I tell Rob that as a college student one of my favorite jobs was working as a housekeeper at the Hilton Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee.

Rob tells me that though he was not fond of the time he spent in Kmart’s gun sales department, his worst job was working at a hardware store in Washington state. At the time he was so poor that he had to live off of the popcorn served to hardware store patrons from a carnival-style machine by the cash registers.  At the end of his first 2 weeks Rob’s boss told his staff that he “was hoping” to be able to pay them, but that the store hadn’t made a sufficient profit for this actual happen.

I tell Rob that my worst job was taking delivery and pickup orders for Hungry Howie’s Pizza the summer before I left for college. Being the only female employee, I caught the attention of a tall skinny guy named Jake who liked jazz, Andy Kaufman biographies, and fondling me while I was on the phone with customers. He wrote a short story that he asked me to read and I said okay. The story was about a man who washes up on a deserted island and is greeted by a young blond girl in white dress who says that she will feed him and nurse him back to health. The girl takes the man to a table laden with a single but enormous watermelon. The man scoops out the watermelon’s pulpy flesh and, after he’s eaten a great deal of it, is told by the girl that the flesh of the watermelon is actually the flesh of her grandmother whom she’s recently killed. Jake told me that I was the girl in the white dress, because I wasn’t as innocent as I seemed.

***

We’re inside the hotel room now, and I’m talking to Canadian writer Jacob Wren, whose story “A Film That Will Make the Audience Feel Pure Joy” appears in a recent issue of Fence.

Hannah Gamble: Is there anything you want to tell me about Canada?

Jacob Wren: Canadians are passive aggressive. It’s our national trait. But maybe that’s just me and I’m projecting.

HG: Is your story ["A Film That Will Make the Audience Feel Pure Joy"] titled ironically?

JW: No, it’s not.

HG: What’s it about?

JW: It’s about art and life and how to put more real life into art. In the story there’s a woman, a film maker, who decides that instead of filming the screenplay she’s written, she’s going to live the things in the screenplay.

HG: And all this will be completely undocumented–as in, she’s not replacing a scripted movie with a documentary about her endeavor to live the script she wrote for a movie.

JW: Right–she’s not doing this to document it. The message is that the real art is to live– to make art at the expense of living one’s life has less integrity. Art has a good reputation, but I think somehow it’s unearned. There are historical reasons for [art's importance], of course: other forms of religion broke down, people replace belief in God with belief in art. It’s a thing that makes life mean something, so it’s like faith in that way.

HG: That reminds me of this bit from a Matthew Zapruder poem: “I have/ no master but always wonder,/ what is making my master sad?” [Read the full poem, "Erstwhile Harbinger Auspices" here] I always loved the lines, but I think it was only recently that I came to understand them as talking about the anxiety that one feels when living without god, or a rulebook of any kind. You’re free, but you also still want to be a good person, and you feel that someone or something must know more than you know. You want to do right, and you worry that you might be doing wrong. You try to be a good person, but there’s no way of knowing if you’re succeeding since, if there’s anyone or anything who knows what that kind of success is, you don’t know its name or what its face looks like.

What do you do each day to generate meaning in your interactions with people? Do you have faith? Do you have a god?

JW: I don’t have faith or a god. There’s this line from Vladimir Holan: “We who do not believe are always expecting something.” In other words,  What’s happening now isn’t filled with belief so something better has to happen soon to make it (life) worth it. Joy itself can be that thing.

HG: Do you have a lot of joy?

JW:  No, I’m not good at joy. It doesn’t come naturally to me, but I see it’s value.

***

Next I talk to Farid Matuk, a poet and editor for Fence magazine. His preschoolish daughter holds his hands while she jumps up and down in front of his armchair. Farid tells me about the best job he ever had: cataloguing porn for his professor of film studies while an undergrad at UC Irvine.

Farid Matuk: [The porn in need of cataloguing included] magazine cut outs from 1940s as well as films on 8 mm, Super 8, Beta Max cassettes, and VHS tapes. All this had belonged to one man who, in his will, bequeathed the collection to his alma mater (a small Catholic college).

Hannah Gamble: Uh.

FM: Right. They wanted to burn it. But the college librarian was friends with Linda Williams, my professor, and gave the collection to her before the school was able to destroy it. [The collection] was super personal; he would clip out pictures of certain models and put them in certain folders. He had a personal coding system for all the folders but our researchers were never able to uncode it. There was also a bunch of anthropological photos of naked people, pulp fiction, and doll. She was folded up when we found her; she had a brunette wig and a blond wig, and and external vagina.

HG: [request for clarification]

FM: The vagina wasn’t built into the doll– she came with diaper shaped thing, or like a white padded bikini bottom that strapped to the doll; the padding, then, had a built-in soft plastic insert for the penis. And this was what affected me the most: the cloth around the insert had sweat stains, I imagine from the man’s belly pushing into it. Seeing that was so intimate.

HG: Has any of this ever made it into your poems?

FM: I think the experience helped me to become a poet: this man’s collection gave me a sense of connection through time to another person. It was icky and uncomfortable, but also gave me an empathetic view into someone else’s sexuality, which, in turn, gave me a more empathetic view into my own developing sexuality.

HG: All of the literature I love encourages compassion, even if indirectly. And I think that compassion for others often leads to some kind of self-forgiveness too…

[At this point Farid’s daughter needs help eating something and I join writers and Fence editors Brian Blanchfield and Andrea Lawlor on the bed by the window. Notes from my conversations with them and also with poet and collagist Brandon Downing are forthcoming. In the meantime, if you’d like to read some of Farid’s poems, please enjoy those featured in the Boston Review as introduced by poet Noah Eli Gordon.

Compline, an Oakland-based publisher of “difficult books for difficult people,” is scheduled to publish two fantastic new collections of poetry:the ordinary, by David Brazil and The Antidote, by Jackqueline Frost. Both titles are much-anticipated first full-length collections, and Compline is asking readers to purchase them in advance to fund the publication:

As opposed to chapbooks made from re-sourced and recycled materials, full-length books are incredibly expensive to make. Like, really expensive. Further, Compline receives ZERO institutional funding, which means I pay for these books completely out of pocket. In other words, every book I make takes food directly out of the mouth of my innocent, six-month old baby. Which is finally to say that, by preordering these books, you are directly helping to feed a defenseless baby and you’re also receiving two of the most important poetry publications of the decade to boot. Seriously.

These books are going to be BIG, they are going to be BEAUTIFULLY PRODUCED, and they will be ready for the post in April/May. In the meantime, I hope you’ll trust my decisions as a curator and a book designer, and invest in these books NOW so I can afford to get them in your hands. There are a few ways to do this: you can order Jackqueline or David’s books on their own for $15 a piece, and I’ll cover shipping and postage when they’re ready. OR, you can order both books for only $25 (cheap!), I’ll cover shipping and postage, and I’ll throw in an additional Compline publication of your choice FOR FREE. That’s how we do it!

Compline is edited and published by Michael Cross, who used to publish equally fantastic books under the imprint Atticus/Finch. We admire Cross’s work and love Compline titles like Craig Dworkin’s The Crystal Text and CJ Martin’s Two Books. For more information about the press, and to pre-order Brazil and Frost’s forthcoming books, check out the Compline website.

The Sacramento Bee writes up Zach Houston, who has been writing poems on the fly on a 1968 Hermes Rocket typewriter and selling them to passersby in the Bay Area for going on eight years…

Houston looked up and smiled. “I love the typewriter, man,” he said. “I’m only 30, but I feel a severe disconnect between analog and digital. I like ‘em both.”

Then he resumed banging away, finishing the ode to music for Felder just as, coincidentally, he ran out of paper. He ripped it from the roll and handed it over, and Felder proceeded to read it aloud.

… all are equal in experience audio

electronic transform from several

hundred miles away thats

the ticket to in concert we

all go together acoustic

to refuse to listen

is near and far

impossible

to deny…

She stopped mid-word.

“Love this!” she exclaimed.

She finished reading, pocketed the 5-by-7 inch paper (thick stock; Zach doesn’t skimp), then mused on the utility of poetry in our lives.

“It’s a complicated world, and we need heightened language to get through it,” Felder said. “And poetry is like looking out at the ocean, you know. It’s a way to achieve that. Street poems, street art – beautiful contribution to society. It’s a subversive way to look at commerce, also. You pay the artist directly. How often do you do that anymore? It’s all very ancient Greek.”

Felder asked Houston if he knew of another street poet she’d encountered, one who often haunts the 16th and Mission Street BART station, where, Felder added, “the acoustics are great for a manual typewriter.”

“That must be Lynn Gentry,” Houston said. “He started doing it a couple of years after I did.”

In the pecking order of Bay Area typewriter street poets, Houston stands (sits, rather) as the originator. There’s no Yaddo-like organization in which to check, no PEN Center for street-corner scribes, but given Houston’s vita, he certainly has the credentials.

He’s had an artist-in- residence installation at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, exhibitions at SF Camerawork, composed on demand on the streets of Berlin and The Hague, Netherlands, and “performed” at galleries from New York to Los Angeles. He recently opened a studio in downtown Oakland, thanks to a grant from a San Francisco arts organization called Southern Exposure.

His style is stream of consciousness, though he admires e.e. cummings more than the Beat poets. He laments that he once sat in front of the famed City Lights bookstore and got nary a taker. These days, you can find Houston on Saturdays at the farmers market at San Francisco’s Ferry Building, though he has so many other projects that he sometimes blows off the gig.

Not bad for a self-styled artist with no MFA to his name and little formal training – though he did study linguistics, art and sociology at Sonoma State University before dropping out.

“I wanted to major in ‘information’ and – do you get the joke? – they said information didn’t exist as a study,” he said. “I said F-you. I’ll check back in 15 years when information (technology) is all you’ll study. It’s, like, the most advanced science in the world. That was kind of frustrating, you know, being rebuffed by a mediocre school.”

But Houston doesn’t have time to elaborate. He’s banged out Felder’s poem and another on the subject of “secrets, coincidences and triangles” for Helena, a barista at a Temescal Alley cafe. And now Spinazze is requesting a poem. Subject matter: winter.

Read it all here. And for more of the lovely Zach Houston, check out his site. Portrait of the artist courtesy of the SF Gate.

Watch “The Touring Machine: Flesh Thought Inside Out,” which “explores some issues that emerge at the convergence of cognitive science (selfhood), political theory (sovereignty) and black poetics (slavery),” below.

This must be the year of collected poems by neglected masters. Or at least that’s the case with the much anticipated collecteds by Joseph Ceravolo and Philip Lamantia. We’ve expressed our enthusiasms for Ceravolo a couple of times here and here, and now we’re overjoyed to see Lamantia’s collected will be coming out this summer! From the UC Press site:

The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia represents the lifework of the most visionary poet of the American postwar generation. Philip Lamantia (1927-2005) played a major role in shaping the poetics of both the Beat and the Surrealist movements in the United States. First mentored by the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, the teenage Lamantia also came to the attention of the French Surrealist leader André Breton, who, after reading Lamantia’s youthful work, hailed him as a “voice that rises once in a hundred years.” Later, Lamantia went “on the road” with Jack Kerouac and shared the stage with Allen Ginsberg at the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, where Ginsburg first read “Howl.” Throughout his life, Lamantia sought to extend and renew the visionary tradition of Romanticism in a distinctly American vernacular, drawing on mystical lore and drug experience in the process. The Collected Poems gathers not only his published work but also an extensive selection of unpublished or uncollected work; the editors have also provided a biographical introduction.

To whet your palate a bit more, we went digging through a few past issues of Poetry and found these three reviews. The first from 1947 is less than enthusiastic of Lamantia’s Erotic Poems, and is unappreciative of their surrealist edge. To our ears “I am a criminal when your body is bare upon the universe” sounds mighty fine, thank you. The second from 1967 is by Tom Clark who finds much to admire in Lamantia’s Touch of the Marvelous. He quotes a poem in full written when Lamantia was between fifteen and seventeen. And coincidentally, in the same review Clark looks at Ceravolo’s Fits of Dawn, from Ted Berrigan’s “C” Press. Finally, John R. Carpenter’s review of The Blood of the Air appears in the June 1972 issue.