Class Anthology

In my intro to poetry class I asked the students to submit a single contemporary poem that they both like and think demonstrates some important ideas about poetry. We're treating it as a set of poems for an anthology and I'm asking them to arrange it in such a way that it demonstrates their editorial decision making. I think it makes an fun little batch with a nice variety of aesthetic and thematic interests. Here are the poems so you can read along at home:

Adrienne Rich "An Atlas of the Difficult World - XIII (Dedications)"
Edward Smallfield "(american lit 4)"
Anne Sexton "Her Kind"
Samuel Hazo "Seesaws"
James Tate "The New Ergonomics"
Jake Adam York "Elegy for James Knox"
Beth Ann Fennelly "I Need To Be More French. Or Japanese."
Lynne Knight "Veiled Illusions"
Adrienne Rich "In a Classroom"
Blueprint "Final Frontier"
Matt Hart "Rhinoceros"
Allison Titus "Mix Tape for Valentine, Nebraska"
Mark Strand "The Remains"
Rex Wilder "Sounding Aboard the Rafaella"
Miguel de Unamuno (Trans. Robert Bly) "The Snowfall is so Silent"

Movies!

Worked on my manuscript this weekend, gave it a serious overhaul, which included scrapping the name Hot Dogs. It is now entitled This is Not Your Donkey. I figured it would be wiser to have a truth statement as a title. People would pick it up, read the title and how could they do anything but agree that this bundle of paper secured with a black binder clip is, in fact, not their donkey?

Oh but I love the title Hot Dogs. Just think about it:

Editor: Oh, and what's the title of your manuscript?

Me: Hot Dogs.

Ed: Like the...?

Me: Yeah, Hot Dogs.

Ed:

Me:

Ed:

Me: Hot D--

Ed: Anyways! It was nice meeting you. I gave you my card, or...

Me: No I don't think you...

Me:

Me:

It is not for that reason that I changed the title, though. I ended up cutting out the recurring images of the hotdog, so there was no reason to call it hotdog anymore. Unicorns would be a good title.

Also had a meeting & margarita-fuel discussion of a film project my friend Robbie is working on. Robbie, his brother Pat, Rebeca, Ben & Liz were all acked into my tiny apartment arguing over ideas until 1AM. It is for a show at the Beamis in Omaha & they give out a set of elements that must be incorporated into the film. It is a bit fo a silly premise but i think we'll have an impressive short film.

Though all I could think about for a bit was Ostashevsky, on Saturday I also received Jess Mynes' birds for example and Christopher Rizzo's Zing. I like the Mynes a lot. Not sure what i think of Rizzo's yet.

Oh, and check it out: Zach has a case of The Pines.

DJ Spinoza

I just received Eugene Ostashevsky & Eugene Timerman's collaborated chapbook "Infinite Recursor or the Bride of DJ Spinoza" yesterday in the mail. Opening this book literally caused my jaw to drop in amazement. Now ordinary people are not supposed to enact these kinds of cliches; it made me feel like the cat in Tom & Jerry when he would see the sexy cat and his jaw would hit the pavement and his eyes would explode from his eyes, dangling on what I can only assume are a mix of veins and arteries. I greatly enjoyed Ostashevsky's Iterature, but there was something in it that also caused me to be hesitant. I did not trust the ways I found that book enjoyable. This chapbook is so immediately exciting and compelling that is completely circumnavigated a critical response.

Baroness Showdown

The Baroness vs. Baroness.

This one might go all fifteen rounds.



Baroness Elsa Hildegard Ploetz is so much a figure of study, as if she were simply a piece of lifestyle art. Short references to her will usually mention her participation in the literary scene of the 20s, her flamboyance, her arrests for her radically revealing fashion, then, somewhat sheepishly, they mention that she was an artist and poet. Yes, I am aware that I replicated that form in the last sentence. I'm glad to see that Green Integer will be publishing a new selection of her work so that there will be more of her poetry in print.

GI put her poem "Subjoy Ride IV" on their new on-line component, Green Integer Review. This poem has been tickling me all week.

Subjoy Ride IV

You can teach a saelect
seal packerparrot -rinso -
postum lister world-war
on saxo salve --
Try a veenotoic semi-
sofit of a stiff indigestion
Don'’t scratch!
Original sunshine makes
Tanlac children

Do you know that made
from rich pure shaving
cream Jim Henry tired
out? -

Famous fain reduces
reg'’lar fellows to the
toughest korry-krome
pancake apparel - kept
antiseptic with gold dust
Rapid transit --
It has raised 3 generations
of mince-piston-rings-pie.

There are two more of her poems on their site.

This poem bursts with phonal and syntactical delight. The slurred speed of "You can teach a saelect/ seal packerparrot" butts directly into the halting trochaic sound of "rinso -– / postum lister world-war / on saxo salve—" And then the creepily yet humorously motherly moment of "Don't scratch!" bursts the linguistic materialism bubble by placing it directly into a recognizable physical event. Followed by the laxitivity of the end of that stanza.

The next stanza does a similar work in reverse, beginning in common syntax and devolving into nonsense, but this is a nonsense that enacts the tiring of the statement. The statement ends too soon. It falls off the cliff of the stanza break.

The third stanza is a bristling syntaztic construct in which the "famous fain" both "reduces" and "kept." The referent "it" in the next sentence grammatically must speak about the fain, but because the language of this stnaza pushes so far from referentiality, it also will not be the fain. The sound-play here is again sugar-sweet but given a harder edge by moving from the roll of Rs into the crackle of Ks. The last sentence (the only complete sentence of the poem, if you're looking for a sense of finality and closure) is simply exquisite. If you don't think so I will think you are someone who thinks things incorrectly about things such as, but not limited to, this last sentence of her poem.

It has raised 3 generations
of mince-piston-rings-pie.

I just wanted to type it again because it is so nice.

The danger for this poem, a lot of Dada poetry in general, is that it will come across as dusty, an experiment that is no longer necessary, Edison's lightbulb that used his own hair as the filament. But of course, language ain't no monkeywrench. Beyond the play and fracture and collage of this poem there is a poetic event that taps into advertising language, creepy maternalism and the public transportation nerve system of the city. This is not only a candied treat of sound and syntax.




Baroness is a crust-metal band that I saw in Richmond, VA last year opening for VCR. Their show that night left me floored, an ever-escalating wall of noise and screaming that was somehow uplifting rather than pessimistic and brutal. For the sake of this posting I ask you to go to the sound section of their website and download their song "Rise."

This is a pretty good song, squiggly doubled guitar lines. Open spaces that could sound like Tortoise. The buildup intro is a bit much to listen to on headphones, it seeks to thrill but does not quite thrill. Then a kind of southern-boogie/Unwound-esquerhythmg bass ryhthm kicks in. For the most part the song sounds like an indie-metal by numbers piece for the beginning. What I loved live was the unrelenting building of these songs. Instead it feels like they are keeping a close eye on each other to be sure they hit their changes in the studio. There is nice gutteral screaming, not too nu-metal, not too punky. It has structural tension and release, though that bass solo moment is terrible. The breakdown part that opens space for the screams about 2/3 of the way through the song is cool and I can listen to it really loud. It allows for the more pensive next movement that attempts to develop into a final climax, but it never forces me on board.

For the most part, however, this song is decent for its genre but fails to deliver anything that transcends the genre. It does not have the intenisty and emotion that I saw in their live show. This seems to be mostly an inability to translate the constant sonic development of their live show into the studio. While identicalnot identicle to such bands as Isis and Pelican, they could take a few production cues from either of those bands. I highly recommend that you see them live, but this recording may not thrill you.

So the winner in a clear knock out is Baroness Elsa Hildegard Ploetz. I predicted that this would be a tougher fight but she came on strong and never let up. Dada poetry defeats crust-core metal today, but don't worry fight-fans, I smell a rematch.

Pie & Pie

So one thing I forgot to mention was that the woman who won the pie at The Clean Part was my student Katy. Today she brought the pie to class. She even went and bought napkins, forks and little plates, which is more than I imagine I would do if I were to bring a pie to class. It was surprisingly distracting to have a huge chocolate pie in class. Classrooms are typically pie-free zones. Cake? Sure. Cookies? Don't mind if I do. But pies? Pies are about homes, about dinner tables or at least diners. I have to say it was a tasty, tasty pie.

I think the raffles at The Clean Part seem mysteriously incestuous. Denny won Anthony's chapbook. Anthony won Jake, Josh & Noah's books. My student gets a pie. Someone should start a reading-series-raffle version of Foetry.

Class today was a rambunctious discussion of Matthea Harvey's Sad Little Breathing Machine. I tried to keep myself from giggling constantly at her poems as we were discussing them. I think that book has more fun per square inch than any other book I've read in the past few years. Actually Geraldine Kim's Povel might have trumped her, though her book is so expansive that there is a lot more square inchage to fill.

Another thing is that, though I might be wrong on this one, I think the former singer for Smashmouth was at the reading.

My favorite trad poet right now is Beth Bachmann.
My favorite superhero is Thor.
More Thor. (Laura Sims)
More Thor. (Ann Jaderlund)
Thor's blog.

The Clean Part Reading Series Keeps Getting Cleaner*

Saturday's installment of The Clean Part Reading Series was a great success. Jake Adam York, Joshua Marie Wilkinson and Noah Eli Gordon all brought the rock. I can not thank them enough for driving in from Denver to read, especially after some bozo gave them bad directions. It was a fascinating reading because each one of them are not only terrific writers but skilled and distinctive readers. Joshua's lyric poetry flows out, Noah spits fire and Jake's warm voice alternately lulls and stabs you. I could not have asked for a better reading. I'm consistently tickled by how each reader here has thrown down their own gauntlet. Turn out was strong and as always the crowd was enthusiastic, even if we did only have about a half a dozen peanuts. Mad love to Tugboat Gallery, Gomez Art Supply, Denny Schmickle, Joey Lynch and Hadara Bar-Nadav for all the help. Jake was kind enough to record the reading so we might have some downloads available soon

The weekend was a blast, Yia Yias twice, Kuhls, lots of poetry talk, fun poking through Novel Idea and even the Jake Bellows and the The Elected show at Duffys. I think perhaps my favorite moment of the weekend (outside of the reading) was when Noah, Joshua and I were down in my squalid basement trading poems back and forth. That or when Noah was eating frozen peanuts in the back of my Saturn. Despite Jake's engine popping and my pipes bursting everyone got out safe and sound.

Zach has some nice pictures from and his thoughts on this weekend. I'll put some up here as soon as I get my camera to cooperate. If you live in Lincoln and you'd like a The Clean Part shirt stop by Gomez Art Supply with five bucks and you'll be walking out in style.

*this not to imply that Alex, Adam, Anne, Amanda or Anthony were unclean. Geez that is a lot of A names in a row.

Barbara Guest, 1920-2006

Remember navigators
tasting lemons from the trees
of their birthplace.
Do we know how they felt,
born under different signs?
Silent are honies in velvet cups.

I Spent the Last Twelve H R S with Blood in My Mouth

Today is day one AD (After Dayquil). We’ll see how it goes.

Went to Tugboat last night to see the MMMM (Mid-Month Multi-Media) Show, which was Jadon Ulrich’s “Text.” His write up about the event claimed that he would explore “the ideas of textual communication in an installation where your text message will be written, typed, printed, inputed, and converted into looping audio.” The show consisted Ulrich and two secretaries in the back room of Tugboat, which had been set up with office furniture, including two desks, shelves, a coffee station and a sad looking office plant. On one desk Ulrich received text messages and transferred them into his computer. As his computer looped a cycle of reading the phone number, date and message from each text one secretary handwrote the messages on a form and passed them to the other secretary who typed them on her electric typewriter (this secretary also had a Dictaphone on her desk, though she didn’t use it). All the while an image hovered behind the three of an old black telephone being constantly dialed while the receiver was picked up and placed down repeatedly.

On one level the show was surprisingly entertaining. The repetition of the messages continued for the hour or so that I was there, intoning in that portentous Mac voice, gaining a hypnotizing rhythm. Some of the messages were obviously Ulrich’s friends, some the audience, some people who had texted in from far away. Each time the cycle repeated we knew there would be new messages at the end, and it gave a kind of expectation. At the same time the early messages took on different meanings. The silly ones grew less interesting, while the ones from friends began to twist their meanings in odd ways. The second message in the loop was "I spent the last twelve h r s with blood in my mouth" and each time it came up I had a different reaction to it, from laughing at the notion to laughing at the program's way of reading the abbreviation of hours to thinking about how the program's relationship to the human entering the message to just listening to the message as sound.

This repeating cycle of messages alone might have been interesting, but what set the show apart for me was the performanceof the artists involved. All through the show the three bustled, hard at work. Ulrich claims that he’s interrogating the simple technology that is supposed to be a time-saving device. For this he set up a flurry of pointless industriousness. He applied the technology to nonsense and made it a pure form of production. It became a satire of both the banality of the use of this complicated technology and a satire of office settings that may desire a paperless utopia but continue to waste energy in double-speak-like activities.

I wasn’t expecting too much out of the night and I’m pleased to say I was wrong.

Tonight Z.Z. Packer reads at Wesleyan. Should be good.

Also, I read all the texts for my Postcolonial Poetics class for NEXT week. So I gotta get my Fanon on.

The Clean Part Reading Series

Zach may not have mentioned it but I beat him in chess again Sunday night. I'm undefeated.

Discussing Kevin Young's Jelly Roll in my intro to poetry writin' class today. It's good timing with V-Day, I forgot how much booty is in that book. When I chose it for class and reread it I was thinking of how it engages traditions in a different way that received forms do. It somehow didn't strike me that the first third of the book is mostly sex poems. Should be fun.




Joey Lynch is a damn fine artist & makes a mean t-shirt. Check these out. We'll be selling them at The Clean Part Readings for $5 but if you want one and you won't be there contact me or Zach and we'll get you dressed all nice.

Getting all ready for The Clean Part, sending out emails, prepping. Very, very excited.

Some info:

The Clean Part Reading Series and Tugboat Gallery Present Poets Noah Eli Gordon, Joshua Marie Wilkinson & Jake Adam York
Saturday, February 18th, 6PM
Tugboat Gallery, 1028 O Street
(alley entrance behind Gomez Art Supply), Lincoln, NE
Free: peanuts will be provided at no extra charge

The third installment of The Clean Part Reading Series brings Noah Eli Gordon, Joshua Marie Wilkinson & Jake Adam York to Lincoln to give readings of their poetry. Full bios of the readers and links to samples of their work are available at www.thecleanpart.blogspot.com.

The Clean Part Reading Series brings innovative and exciting young poets to Lincoln. These are poets who are reinventing traditions and creating new styles of poetry. This isn’t a coffeehouse open mike reading nor is it a formal event.

Free peanuts! Chances to win fabulous prizes and/or a pie!

Po + Crit = Yum

Feeling a bit under the weather today. I want to take some medicine but that stuff makes me loopy (I once bought a pair of pants six inches too long under the influence of Dayquil) and I have to be sharp in order to crush Zach in chess again.

I feel like I’m putting myself out here as an anti-theory kind of poet, that the magic of the poetic is an experiential rhetoric that can’t be expressed with critical dissection. My brief posts on Circumference and Legitimate Dangers have asked for the poems to take precedence over the editorial or ideological intentionality. And yet I don’t mean that to be so simplistic. I want sharp, witty, sly, muscular and possibly molluskular theory to expose the socio-political underpinnings of art, but (god help me) I also believe that Kant’s aesthetic ideas of purposeiveness without purpose still present a valid argument, one that has been (willfully? Stubbornly?) misread by Baudrillard, Bourdieau and Foucault.

I’ve always been a fan of aesthetic eclecticism and juxtaposition. From the things I read, listen to and view. Reading Glissant recently has given a kind of theoretical underpinning that I can glom onto, that juxtaposition allows for relations to be created. The resonances and conversations can be glorified rather than setting up a system by which one simply rejects those things that do not fit an ideology.

Speaking of places where conversations are happening, holy smokes!: Fascicle. I got to be honest with you, though, it scares me. So much work. It’s like picking up the Norton. It’s an interesting counterpoint to Typo’s latest issue, which is so tightly focused.

Have I mentioned my absolute love of Joshua Poteat’s poetry? You should check out his book Ornithologies, that hit the stands last month. I started to get interested in poetry as more than just a personal expression by hearing and reading Larry Levis and Levis is still one of my guiding lights for what a certain kind of poetry can do. I think he shredded and reformed the personal meditative narrative. Levis, however, is a terrible guy to emulate. I had this conversation with Martin Arnold some years ago,* that anyone writing like Levis ends up with the most schmaltzy crap. Joshua Poteat is the only poet I’ve read who has picked up the kind of meditative riffing and personal introspection that made Levis great and has transformed it into his own aesthetic.

Also, Anthony Hawley’s The Concerto Form should be on your todo list.

Joey Lynch, painter-screen printer extraordinaire, made some delicious t-shirts for The Clean Part Reading Series & Octopus Magazine, will put up some images later.

*Not the New York Times writer, the young and dashing poet.

Circumference

A friend with a nice hat asked me to expand on why I like Circumference so much, or perhaps he asked me to do something else but I am going to write about why I like Circumference so much and it has to do with something Zach talked about in our Postcolonial Poetics class. He was musing about how a non-western poet gets translated and enters into the poetry conversation outside his local space. He was considering the cultural and class-conscious aspects of even possibly gaining entry into this world-po scene and how a Japanese poet he liked (I missed the name) has plenty of lovely poems of domestic or personal experience but only his poems about Japanese-ness end up in anthologies. Seanna Oakley had previously mentioned a paper on Estonian poetry that reported that the only Estonian poetry that makes it into Western Eurpoean languages is the stridently political though there is a wide variety of exciting Estonian poetry that is not politically minded. For a certain uses of poetry this is fine, but, to paraphrase James Engelhardt, poetry ain't the news.

Circumference consistently collects poetry in translation without a need to further an ideology via the poetry. The poems stand as poems, rather than as ethnological, theoretical or political sacrifices to the Anglo audience. While this might sound like the journal is apolitical I do not mean to say that they only have pleasant poems, or only personal lyrics. Instead Circumference allows a reader to interperet the poems with whatever lens the work asks to be viewed. Through a wide variety of regions, nations and times it also puts poems into intimate contact that will probably never be bumpin uglies between two covers again. In this respect it takes some of the pressure off the poems. Circumference is a place where poems can go and hang out and just be poems. In another respect it puts a new set of pressure on the poems. The poems create a cosmopolitan conversation through their aesthetic.

Additionally, Circumference actually has an eclectic mix of styles. This is genuinely refreshing when so many lit journals assert their eclectic tastes in their mission statements or submission guidelines but then seem to toe a particular party line. My loves in poetry range from Avianus to Robert Penn Warren to Geraldine Kim (Povel is dreamy, by the way, you really, really need to read it). I want to see a place where a mix of poems are allowed to speak to each other. Suddenly you can see the O’Hara-esque qualities of lAdrienne Ho's translation of the 1st century BCE Latin poet Sulpicia and resonances with Armantrout in Bidel's ghazal. There should be a journal of poetry in English that really dares to put poems of drastically different styles and lineages in their mix. On-line I think Diagram does a great job of this, but wouldn’t it be interesting to see T-Koose counterpointed with Jennifer Moxley? Actually, it might be interesting to see him mix it up with Armantrout. I have a sneaking suspicion that they have more in common than Armantrout & Silliman or Hejinian do (insert indignant comment response here, please).

Speaking of journals Bridge snapped up four poems yesterday. Get 'em while they're hot, friends.

Also, you really should read Kim's Povel. It'll make you sweat.

Best Simile Ever

Or actually it's a metaphor & a simile. Quote from Jahan Ramazani's The Hybrid Muse:

The ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek adapts graphic idioms, images, and rhetorical strategies from Acoli songs: his spurned character Lawino complains--in language unprecendented in English poetry--that her husband's tongue is "hot like the penis of the bee" and "fierce like the arrow of the scorpion,/ Deadly like the spear of the Buffalo hornet."

Hot like the penis of the bee.

Damn.

There are Mad Scientists Everywhere

Suppose you were a brain in a vat, that you liked to repeat the word "envatted." Envatted you say as a man wearing a yellow suit spreads roasted garlic over a hunk of black bread. Envatted you say as the young woman with a shaved head who lives in the apartment above you turns the stereo up at 4 AM. Envatted you say as the semi blows a tire. Envatted as the sun sets into the lake. Envatted as the doorbell ring.

The man at the door is wearing a labcoat.

I am a brain in a vat you say. Would you like a cup of hot chocolate.

No, thank you, says the man in the labcoat. I couldn't impose.

Well, do you mind if I have one, you ask. I quite fancy a bit of chocolate.

No, not at all, the man in the labcoat says.

It's really no trouble to make you some as well, you say. It's actually easier to make two cups, you lie.

Well, in that case... says the man in the labcoat.

Sitting beside the fire in the leather easy chairs, sipping hot chocolate, you look the man in the labcoat in the eye. I am a brain in a vat deceived by mad scientists to believe that I am a brain in a vat.

I know, says the man in the labcoat. I am your mad scientist. I am here for you.

Jake Gillespie

Congratulations to Hadara Bar-Nadav!!

I received Patrick Phalen’s new cd Cost in the mail yesterday. I’d known Patrick for a while, he’d dated my old college friend Lesley Foster, and when I first moved to Richmond he was one of the few people I knew. I can’t say I ever became friends with him, but I’ve always adored his music. I hadn’t heard anything about him for a long time so I was surprised and pleased to hear this new cd was coming out. I’ve always thought he deserved to be a worshipped cult figure in indie rock—maybe with the level of status his label has garnered over the last few years he’ll get more recognition.

Possibly the most striking show I ever saw was Patrick’s old band South playing their cd release in Richmond at an old Karate dojo, a big open loft of hardwood and windows in the romantically rundown part of Church Hill. The room was lit entirely with white candles and South, at that point a band of 7 or 8 members, had the whole rom under their spell. I was living in DC at the time and came down to Richmond to visit Dave Carillo and Robert Cataldo; it was only by chance I was even at the show. I remember that night as mostly dream, a long swoon of melody and flickering light, shadow on white fabric, reflections of faces in tall, age-mottled windows.

South were the best band to come out of Richmond, even better than the (Young) Pioneers (who were amazing). Their cd, however, was released during the initial backlash against Tortoise-style instrumental complexity. Their label was tiny then and the record was easily dismissable as another Chicago-prog sounding wannabe. But it is so much more, the child of both Slowdive’s dreamy guitar production and Reichian attention to repetition South never dug into 70’s era Miles Davis as a source of its complexity as Tortoise did, and it never let structure take precedence over mood and sweep. His new record still washes and sweeps, but with an organic glitchiness and breathily genuine confidence. For Patrick, a dedicated devotee of the shoegazer wash of guitar, it's almost rockin.

Also I got the new issue of Circumference yesterday. This and No are probably the two print journals I look forward to the most. The Osip Mandelstam, Boleslaw Lesmian & Maria Negroni in Circumference are especially tickling. The Paul Celan selection is incredible--I could have said breathtaking, but I chose not to. Because I care about you. Circumference makes me excited when I see it. Driving home from the bookstore yesterday I kept peeking inside during red lights, getting honked at. Speaking of translations, though, the new Typo is pretty dreamy.

Also I’m really fond of Brigitte Byrd’s Fence Above the Sea, Sarah Menefee’s Human Star, and Aaron Teiger & Jess Myers’ Coltsfoot Insularity chapbook. I got to read a lot yesterday.

Typo 7 & Pete's Big Poetry

Two Announcements

After many months of sweat and tears, TYPO 7 is alive. Curated by Johannes Göransson, this issue highlights Modern Swedish Poetry and features the work of:

EDITH SÖDERGRAN
GUNNAR BJÖRLING
HENRY PARLAND
GÖRAN SONNEVI
GUNNAR HARDING
ANN JÄDERLUND
JACQUES WERUP
LARS MIKAEL RAATTAMAA
JOHAN JÖNSSON
AASE BERG
JAN SJÖLUND
JENNY TUNEDAL

http://www.typomag.com/issue07/index.html


And If you're near NY

Pete's Big Poetry : Spring 2006 Series

Friday February 10th -- 7pm -- FREE

Joanna Fuhrman & Noelle Kocot

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of three books of poetry published by Hanging Loose Press, Freud in Brooklyn (2000), Ugh Ugh Ocean (2003) and Moraine (2006). Some poems she wrote with others, including Noelle Kocot, are in Saints of Hysteria: Fifty Years of Collaborative Poetry, forthcoming from Soft Skull Press. She lives in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn and teaches poetry in the public schools.

Noelle Kocot has published two books with Four Way Books, 4 (2001) and The Raving Fortune (2004). Her next two books, Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems and Home of the Cubit Idea, will be published by Wave Books, formerly Verse Press, this spring and in 2008. She currently teaches at The New School, St. Francis College and LaGuardia College. Noelle lives in Brooklyn, where she was born and raised.

Only at Pete's Candy Store
709 Lorimer Street, Brooklyn
"L" to Lorimer, "G" to Metropolitan
Curated by Sommer Browning

A Still Life of a First Draft

Some stanzas from a poem I'm working on called, tentatively, The Counting Keys

Got me anthrax
called sugarfoot.

Got turnstiles
willed for hogweed.

Little labrum
of cold pennytone.

Browsing software
for crania.

Holy quote:
not found error.

Dislike, the holy
cake labret.

Inoculation
& then collection.

Puts the lac
in shellac.

Into ether
& jelly stop.

Jingle Jangle Morning

Some mornings you wake up & there is the nearly teleological beauty of the blueness of the sky & motes of dust in the sun & birds & squirrels chickling in the trees & you have a bag full of books & free time to read them & it’s warm but not too warm & sunny but not excruciatingly so. Excited for coffee. Delirious with potential. Half-smiles from strangers. Friends honking as they drive by.

Today I woke up with the word penis written on the back of my hand. I knew how it got there in the sense that I in no way forgot Deirdre’s silly elementary-school joke about the Pen 15 club, but in another sense how did it get there? How is it that I can wake up one morning in February with the word penis written on my hand?

Walking back from having soup with Ben & Kaleb the winter sunlight knifed everything into surreal. I noticed that there were a lot of freaky people around—more than usual. Limping & muttering to themselves. Sweatpants & strangely oversized stocking caps. Missing teeth & slippers. For the whole walk every person I saw seemed like an extra from a zombie film, but not the zombies. These were people the early part of the film in which the director sets the scene of normality as itself skewed by overemphasizing the extremes of human physicality and frailty.

And of course I was in the mix, so I had to accept that however freaky I might find these people I am one of them. Any definition of freakiness I might apply to them would in fact be a projection of my own state. And it was an apt reflection of my feeling of being in the world just then. It was as if casting had sent in a group of people to mirror my inner mode.

My favorite part of No Direction Home was when Dylan is talking about why he changed his surname and says something to the effect of "It wasn't for any the reasons that I've read about."

The Clean Part Reading Series

Noah Eli Gordon
Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Jake Adam York

you so need to be there



it'll be kind of sad if you aren't there



we'll miss you



everyone will be like "Where is s/he?"

Threnody

I've received a bunch of cool books these past two weeks & am slowly finding time to read them among the other things I have to get done. One that struck me today is Tom Clark’s Threnody. This single poem chapbook is an entrancing meditation on the emptiness of post-industrial spaces. It is a poem about the empty industrial spaces that persist in post-industrial America. Threnody constantly pushes me to understand this space both as a concept & a real place through it’s meditative cycling through particular scenes & obsessive repetition of seemingly commonplace, almost photo caption-like, descriptions of abandoned buildings & empty railways. Through this I’m drawn into the meditation of the poem.

The book itself, which contains Clark’s line drawings of these scenes, adds to this feeling as well. It is a big chapbook; it feels like holding open a folder as I read it. The line drawings almost all pull out into a perspective point that emphasizes the empty loneliness. As I read the text that images gapes at me from the left. The repetition of this perspective movement also matches the repetition of language & image.

They only thing that threw me off in this poem is the Smithson reference—while ideologically it makes sense it seems outside of the focus & this is tightly focused poem. The set of diction returns & returns to the desolation of “dark low brick structures,” “abandoned industrial buildings,” “long low abandoned factory building” & “long low hulking warehouse[s].” Take one of these lines out of his poem & it is not particularly imagistic, but through the repetition this somewhat distant language becomes a kind of everyplace in America. It is the spot by the tracks in every city in which all things are cracked & corroded.

Through the repetition & the final turn in contemplation of irony Threnody requires me to consider this sense, and not the essence, of a place abandoned by people, economy &, seemingly, time. the poem is moral, but not didactically. Its morality lies in the way it uses attention. The final section, entitled "Irony" leads me out of the meditation with a consideration of what relationship I actually have with this kind of place:

Rust covers everything an irony a blight of time oxidizing
We won't be back his way again soon
We were never here so how can it be we're leaving
The blight of time an irony corroding what we've left behind

When the physical breakdown is an irony, then what is my attention? Why do I love the quiet of abandonded warehouse districts? Is this the same as the Romantic affection for ruins? Is it a longing beyond my middle class background?

But Still We Stand Tall

Biking downtown this morning I found myself singing outloud Europe's "The Final Countdown." I only realized it when I was starting to really put some passion into it and my scarf touched my tongue. Somehow that touch of wool brought me back to reality. And reality was filled with shame.

Am I a Spammer or a Solicitor or a Crunchiest?

So, you ever heard of Legitimate Dangers? If you haven't blogged about it you've probably never heard of it.

I kind of feel like weighing in on the discussion but a) I haven't read it, b) much of what I would want to say would regard wanting people to read it before they respond and c) I think have a little Lincoln, Nebraska pride. I like Michael and the more ad hominem attacks I see the more I want to support his work. Go Cornshuckers.

K. Silem Mohammad's post seems valid (keeping in mind I haven't read the book) but it seems to me that he loses too much by choosing not to mention the poems at all. Yes, there is a critical structure behind the editorial process and it seems like Mohammad does a good job of putting pressure on it to watch it fall apart (this is not the ad hominem stuff i was talking about). He's a ninja, that's how ninjas operate. I like ninjas. But is it inherently conservative of me to want someone who talks about the anthology to acknowledge that it has poems in it?

In other news I think Zach & I might have tried to send out spam today--or perhaps it was just a solicitation, which doesn't sound much tastier. We just want everyone to know they can refill their inkjets for cheap, cheap, cheap.

Also: "The voiceless man who walks keeps on carting his black sand from a distant volcano known only to himself, to the beaches he pretends to share with us. How can he run faster when he is growing so desperately thin? One of us whispers" 'He goes faster and faster because if he stops, if he slows down--he will fall.'

We are not going any faster, we are all hurtling onward--for fear of falling."
--Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

Also, hello back at you Adam, Anne.

Also, new Paul Motian Band release!

Also, spellcheck wanted to switch Cornshuckers to "crunchiest." It's a good revision.