Off to NYC!

AWP, Knock-Knock Jokes & Other Forms of Regicide

Zach & I will be tabling Octopus at table # 457 in the Americas Hall II, Access from 3rd floor.

I'll also be the the Diagram / New Michigan Press Table signing chapbooks at Saturday, 1-2pm. I will not sign anything personal to you, though I will buy you lunch. But not your lunch. I am willing to sign any signs you bring in. Street signs. Shaking signs. Signs of danger. Signs of payment & crumbs from the sesame bagel.



But you should know about this, because it's going to be better than all of the other things you've ever known about:



Steal This Reading:
a Brooklyn Book Burning
w/

C.D. Wright, Eleni Sikelianos, Graham Foust, Joyelle McSweeney, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Julie Doxsee, Max Winter, Adam Clay, Zachary Schomburg, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Lily Brown, Rauan Klassnik, Cindy Savett, Jon Thompson, Melanie Hubbard

hosted by Black Ocean, Cannibal Books, Free Verse Editions, Kitchen Press, Octopus, Tarpaulin Sky Press & Typo.

Thursday, January 31st
Doors 7 PM, $6 =Admission + Two Drinks
East Coast Aliens
216 Franklin Street

(see directions at the end of message)

Author Bios

Lily Brown is from the east coast but currently lives on the west coast. She is the author of the chapbook, The Renaissance Sheet, published by Octopus Books in 2007. Her second chapbook, Old with You, is forthcoming from Kitchen Press. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Typo, Octopus, Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, Cannibal, Handsome and 26.

Julie Doxsee was born in London, Ontario. Her poems have appeared in over thirty-five national and international journals, including Aufgabe, Fourteen Hills, and Tarpaulin Sky. Forthcoming publications include two books: Objects for a Fog Death (Black Ocean, 2008/2009) and Undersleep (Octopus Books 2008), and two chapbooks: You Will Build a City Out of Rags (Whole Coconut 2007) and New Body a Seafloor Body (Seeing Eye Books 2008). The Knife-Grasses (Octopus Books), and Fog Quartets (horse less press) are now available. She is full-time faculty at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey.

Graham Foust lives in Oakland, California with his wife Amy and his son Merle. He teaches writing and literature at Saint Mary's College of California, and his most recent book is Necessary Stranger (Flood Editions, 2007).

Rauan Klassnik was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. In his early teens he moved to Dallas, Texas with his family. Much of his time is now spent in Mexico. His poems have appeared in Caesura, Hunger Mountain, Pilot Poetry, No Tell Motel, The Kennesaw Review, Front Porch, The Mississippi Review, The North American Review, MiPoesias, Handsome, and many other journals. His chapbook, "Stitches" was published by Firewheel Editions in 2002 and his first full-length collection, Holy Land, will be released by Black Ocean in the spring of 2008.

Melanie Hubbard lives in Ruskin, FL, with her family. Recently the recipient of an NEH fellowship, she has spent the past year completing a scholarly book on Emily Dickinson's poems in relation to developments in philosophy and linguistic theory, the invention of photography and the discovery of electricity, and changes in rhetoric, editorial theory, and popular manuscript activity. She also writes personal essays, commentaries, book reviews, and features for the St. Petersburg Times. Poems can be found in Typo, Swink, Fence, Cab/Net, horse less review, and Cannibal.

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of Nylund, The Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007). She is also the author of three titles from Fence Books: Flet, The Red Bird, and The Commandrine and Other Poems. She is a co-founder and co-editor of Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web quarterly for international writing and hybrid forms. She writes regular reviews for Rain Taxi, The Constant Critic, and other venues and teaches in the MFA Program at Notre Dame.

Cindy Savett teaches poetry workshops at psychiatric institutions in the Philadelphia area to both acute short-term and residential patients. Her first book, Child in the Road, has recently been released. In addition, she is published in numerous print and on-line journals, including Margie, Heliotrope, LIT, The Marlboro Review, 26 Magazine, Cutbank, and Free Verse. She is also at work on a memoir on the death of her daughter. Cindy has served on several school Boards and other non-profit agencies, and spent fifteen years in the retail business, traveling extensively overseas. Born and raised in the Philadelphia area, she currently lives in Merion, Pennsylvania with her husband and children.

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books, including The California Poem and The Book of Jon. Du Soleil, de l’histoire, de la vision, a selected poems translated into French appeared this fall. Forthcoming are Body Clock and her translation of Jacques Roubaud’s Exchanges de la lumière.

Zachary Schomburg was born in Omaha, Nebraska, spent his childhood in Iowa, and received his BA from College of the Ozarks. Currently, he's pursuing a doctorate in creative writing from the University of Nebraska. Schomburg edits Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books, and co-curates the Clean Part Reading Series in Lincoln, NE. His poems have appeared in the Canary, CutBank, Diagram, Ducky, Fence, Forklift, Ohio, Good Foot, the Hat, La Petite Zine, Lamination Colony, LIT, Mid-American Review, Mipoesias, No Tell Motel, Northwest Review, Parakeet, Pettycoat Relaxer, Spork, Swink, Tarpaulin Sky, Unpleasant Event Schedule, and Washington Square Review. His debut collection, The Man Suit, was published Black Ocean in 2007.

Morgan Lucas Schuldt is the author of Verge (Free Verse Editions, 2007) and Otherhow (Kitchen Press, 2007), a chapbook. He lives in Tucson where he edits the literary journal CUE and the chapbook series CUE Editions.

Jon Thompson teaches at North Carolina State University where he edits Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics and the new poetry series, Free Verse Editions. His first collection was The Book of the Floating World, which was reissued in a new expanded edition in 2007. His current poetry manuscript is titled Strange Country.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the co-author, with Noah Eli Gordon, of Figures for a Darkroom Voice (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007). He is also the author of Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Pinball, 2005), Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (U of Iowa, 2006), and The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (forthcoming from Tupelo Press). He holds a PhD from University of Denver and lives in Chicago where he teaches at Loyola University. His first film, Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape, is due out in 2008.

Max Winter is the author of The Pictures (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007). He is also the winner of the Fifth Annual Boston Review Poetry Contest, and has published poems in Free Verse, New American Writing, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, The Canary, Denver Quarterly, and Typo. He has published reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, and BOMB, and is a Poetry Editor of Fence.

C.D. Wright was born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She is the author of a dozen books. Her most recent titles are One Big Self: An Investigation (Copper Canyon, 2007), Like Something Flying Backwards, New and Selected (Bloodaxe Editions, 2007), Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (Copper Canyon, 2005). Rising, Falling, Hovering will be out in 2008, also from Copper Canyon Press. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Lannan Foundation. Steal Away: Selected and New Poems was a finalist for the 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2004 she was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 2005 she was given the Robert Creeley Award and elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Wright is the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University. She lives outside of Providence with her husband, poet Forrest Gander.


Directions to East Coast Aliens

by taxi (recommended)

from Midtown Manhattan

Take the upper level of the Queensborough Bridge into Queens & turn left on 21st Street. Cross the Pulaski Bridge, which turns into McGuiness Boulevard on the Brooklyn side. Take the third right after the bridge at Huron St. After two blocks turn right on Franklin St. East Coast Aliens is on the right side. The ride from Midtown (w/ gratuity) should cost between $20-25.

from Lower Manhattan

Take the Williamsburg Bridge to the BQE (Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) north to McGuiness Boulevard (Exit 33). Turn left onto McGuiness Boulevard. After approximately eight blocks turn left on Greenpoint Avenue. After three blocks turn right on Franklin Street. East Coast Aliens is four blocks up on the right side. The ride from Lower Manhattan (w/ gratuity) should range between $20-25.

by train (for the adventuresome & frugal)

from Midtown Manhattan

Take the Queens-bound 7 train from Times Square, Bryant Park or Grand Central to Vernon/Jackson (the first stop after Grand Central). Exit at Jackson Ave. & walk one block east to the B61 bus stop at 11th St and Jackson Ave. Take the B61 two stops to Manhattan Ave. between Freeman and Green. Walk right on Green St. one block to Franklin St. & turn left. East Coast Aliens is on your left.

from Lower Manhattan (simpler than from Midtown)

Take the Brooklyn-bound L train to Lorimer. Transfer at the station to the Metropolitan stop of the G train. Take the Queens-bound G train two stops to Greenpoint Ave. Exit at India St. & walk one block north to Huron St. Turn left on Huron, walk one block to Franklin St. & turn right. East Coast Aliens is on your right.

from Brooklyn and Queens (or ride your bike!)

Take the G train to Greenpoint Ave. Exit at India St. & head north one block to Huron St. Turn left on Huron, walk one block to Franklin St. & turn right. East Coast Aliens is on your right.

Denver Quarterly 42.2 & Diode 1.2

I think I've read this issue of Denver Quarterly more times than I've read any print journal before. Props to Ramke, Sara Veglahn & Andrea Rexilius for putting this issue together.

The five poems from Imants Ziedonis are wonderful & he's someone I'd never heard of. They have one poem available on the DQ website:

That Evening

That evening when rooftops burned red in the sun, red chimneys rising above them.
That evening I called to you across the river.
A crosswind swept my voice sideways, and drove it downriver and out to sea.
That evening when the sugar beets rallied, dark green, I called to you. A headwind hurled my voice through the door of a cafe. The doorman pushed it back out; there wasn't room, he said. (I never wanted to be there!)
That evening the black-eyed Susans bloomed.
And the nasturtiums were innocent.
The wind flipped the bark jackets of the birches inside out.
That evening I struggled with crosswinds, headwinds, cross-purposes.



Translated from the Latvian by Bitite Vinklers

But I'm also really taken with the poem "We Are the Roof People," a beautiful poem about escapism & the space where the imagination conflicts with the facts at hand. It is a particular kind of sadness, the failure of faith. It's so close to nostalgia. The song ends though it should go on forever. The end of this poem is:

Once, one of them fell from the roof. He lay here, moaning by our stone foundations, and died. We didn't have time to talk to each other.

That slays me.

Mark Yakich has some wonderful poems, Cole Swensen has an extraordinary ghost poem, Janaka Stuckey represents with the best poems of his I've ever read... Actually to list out all the bangers in this issue would be pretty much to just list the ToC.

The poem that really knocked me out was "Girl" by Edward Bartok-Baratta, another poet I'd never read before. It starts off as a stable personal narrative from a single speaker & then with every stanza opens a new axis. Just one line from it:

With my first blood, I painted a fire escape.

Also the new issue of Patty Paine & Jeff Lodge's Diode is out & it's a zinger. The issue features work by:

Paul Guest
Tarfia Faizullah
Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Kathy Davis
The Pines
Kurt Brown & Philip Dacey
Rigoberto Gonzalez
Adam Clay
Sheila Black
Steven Schroeder
Alexis Vergalla
Keith Montesano
Ann Fisher-Wirth
Eireann Lorsung
Anne Heide
Patrick Lawler
Bobbi Lurie
Christopher Casamassima

This messes up the formatting, so I apologize, but Anne Heide's poem knocks me out:

Speak

I am no jewel thief cutter. I am not the red haired giant I seam

in this place. Certain I’ll show that no one I say is as big I am as I draw my forged
mouth.

I am not a robber the color of

I am not my blushed hair.

Some say no I say

how tall I am can be frightening & how I pull my false teeth out

how I mourn by fire and arms how I am a baritone &

how my house is all too small, it folds up and into me.

“I know who my comforter is”

The Pines is going to make you want to bite all the tongues off.

Vale Tudo, by Sommer Browning now available from Horse Less Press

See it in action

Buy it here!

Readings from Jan 19th

Click to listen or right-click / cntrl-click to download:


Lily Brown



Steve Langan



Claire Becker





The Clean Part Reading Series: the best documented reading series in the midwest.

Dead Meat Snores

School starts tomorrow. If you'd like to follow along at home my classes will be reading:

The Pink Institution, Selah Saterstrom
A Got a Man in Staunton, William Henry Lewis
The Age of Wire & String, Ben Marcus
Collected Fiction of Amy Hempel, Amy Hempel
Story Matters, (an embarrassingly named anthology of fiction, but it has interviews with all of the writers about the craft & I like those)
Anchor Book of New American Fiction, ed. Ben Marcus
Next American Essay, John D'Agata

Also, tomorrow night you could do this:





I love this poem by Beth Bachmann in the new Gulf Coast:

Luminous Mystery

Darwin describes the death of God as the coming of light.
This happens slowly: a scaffold of singed paper

before it blackens; copper beneath corrosion;
the acoustics of the finch's song after a tear

in its vocal tract. Forget what you've been told.
Love is not immutable.

See this handful of birds I release on the church steps?
I do this to remind you.

I read this poem when screening for a book prize & was knocked out by. I copied it down & sought out the author's work online after that was all done. I read her poem in Blackbird & there was a picture along with it. Soon after that at AWP in Austin I walked by her & stopped her & started geeking out about how much I loved her manuscript. She backed away slowly with a frightened look in her eyes.

You can also find this killer poem by Adam Clay in the issue. It's a sonnet:

Sonnet

I am trying to find a line of tenderness
to walk tonight. But wishing for something--
a deer, a possum, a squirrel, anything--
to make its way across the boulevard
as we dissect it would suit me fine. Do we ever wish
for words and have them come to us? Do we ever wish
for words and say the opposite? Syntax
has never eaten from my hand. One night,
I gnawed a bone long after the wine was gone
and you picked the cork down to nothing.
You drove, reached to shift gears,
remembered the car was an automatic.
I would not and will not touch you
before we find a word to settle between us.

Lately I've been listening to:

Yndi Halda: Enjoy Eternal Bliss
Valet: Blood is Clean
Sun O)))) & Boris: Altar
v/a: Cult Cargo: Grand Bahama Goombay
Daturah: s/t
Richard Villalobos: Fabric 36
Geronimo: s/t
The Eternals: Heavy International
Boris With Michio Kurihara: Rainbow
Radiohead: In Rainbows
Es: Sateenkaarisuudelma
v/a: Zanzibara 3 : The 1960s sound of Tanzania
Xasthur/Leviathan: split 12"


I've decided to start watching Fassbinder films. So far I think Katzelmacher is pretty great & Beware of a Holy Whore was pretty bad.

Mo Moms Mo Comments

The Clean Part Reading Series (Performed by various humans)

Thanks to Steve Langan, Lily Brown & Claire Becker for coming to Lincoln & reading here for The Clean Part. It was a great reading with lots of hot poetry & hot, free banana bread (thank you Neil!!!).






Lily read first, watch for her new chapbook Old With Me, coming this summer from Kitchen Press.






Steve read second, make sure to check out his books Freezing & Notes on Exile.





Claire closed up the reading with poems such as those availablein her new chapbook Untoward from Lame House Press.





The crowd loved it & crawled around on the leaves.

































This is what a portion of a human child looks like.

The Clean Part (performed by various insects)

Thanks to Steve Langan, Lily Brown & Claire Becker for coming to Lincoln & reading here for The Clean Part. It was a great reading with lots of hot poetry & hot, free banana bread (thank you Neil!!!).




Lily read first, watch for her new chapbook Old With Me, coming this summer from Kitchen Press.






Steve read second, make sure to check out his books Freezing & Notes on Exile.






Claire closed up the reading with poems such as those availablein her new chapbook Untoward from Lame House Press.






The crowd loved it & crawled around on the leaves.











This is what a human child looks like.

Word from Pilot

Hello friends of Pilot!!

We're so very happy to announce the release of Mary Ruefle's comic book , GO HOME AND GO TO BED!

To purchase this book, you can go to the Pilot Books catalog.

Or, for an even more thrilling maneuver, you could get a Season Two Subscription and receive Mary's comic, along with Sophie Klahr's _____VERSUS RECOVERY (available now) and Joshua Marie Wilkinson's BOOK OF FLASHLIGHTS, CLOVER & MILK (available soon) for the low low price of $25 (includes shipping)!!

We also want to mention that we will be sharing a book table at the AWP book fair in NYC later this month, with Small Fires Press and Factory Hollow Press, so if you are going to be there please come and find us and say hello! We would love to see and/or meet you! We are table 91 in the Gramercy Room.

Until we meet again...

Dean Gorman & Betsy Wheeler
co-editors

The Clean Part in 08! [insert election-related humor here]

This Saturday at the Sheldon Museum, The Clean Part Reading Series returns. Lily Brown! Claire Becker! Steve Langan! I'm so excited for these three to read here. I think you should be there as well: Saturday, 7pm at the Sheldon, 12th & R.

It's been kind of a funny season so far, one reading canceled, another moved to the wonderfully gracious Jones Coffee space. Maybe this time a pack of wild dogs will secretly infiltrate the audience & make rude, condescending clicking sounds during the reading. And then all three readers will nod to each other in the unspoken connection that all great poets share via their spirit animals & transform into gigantic falcons that will pick the wild dogs up & fly them upstairs to stand awestruck before the red&yellow Rothko. At which point the wild dogs will become buckets of soapy water with human arms attached & they will travel the country performing the penance of washing everything they encounter. Even brussel sprouts still on the stem. Even the hooting calls of plastic owls set up to scare away mice from the fields. Even the hot air balloon you lost during your sophomore year of college. Maybe. Either that or there might be a pie. You never can tell these days.

I actually did see Steve transform into a hedgehog once. But it was a a very human-ish hedgehog. Bipedal too. And about 6 feet tall. Looked just like Steve, actually. But everyone knew he was a hedgehog. I saw Claire transform into a bank of snow once, with real working ATMS & actual snowmoney & a snow-Claire in a smart business snowsuit managing the whole affair.

Saturday

Awaiting the arrival of the clean part readers, working three of many overdue projects.

listening to this:



I'm trying to put some thoughts together on doom metal/essayistic tendencies in poetry. I'm new to thinking critically about drone elements in music--i know what i want to say but i don't know the existing conversation. Anybody have any interesting suggestions about things to read regarding drone elements of contemporary western music?

Anybody want to give me a new logic board for my mac?

Just checking.

Jake Gillespie, everyone has beards

www.jakegillespie.com

Man's Last Greater Good

Man's Last Great Invention plays tomorrow (thursday, maybe today when you read this) night at the chatterbox with the folk-punk rockers Thunder Power! & I, Colossus.

If we could only find bands with semi-colons, colons, question marks, periods, dashes, parentheses, hyphens & interrobangs in their names we would have the full set punctuation. I guess we aren't nearly as close as I thought we were when I started that sentence.

If you'd like to hear some mlgi, including some stuff ande & I recorded you should look here & then click on some stuff. And turn your speakers up. And turn your ears in the direction of the sound. You'll want to do that.

Very Good Things Not in Lincoln This Coming Week

In Richmond, VA, organized by Liz Canfield, who rules:

Sunday, January 20th from 1-5 join Chop Suey Books for a Chapbook Festival. Poet, teacher, and friend Liz Canfield has organized this event and has gathered a number of poets and fiction writers who will read from their chapbooks (a small, limited edition publication which is usually self-published or printed by a small press). This event seeks to celebrate independent publishing and to showcase authors who have published through this alternative process. A panel discussion will follow the reading and will include a conversation about how to get published, the benefits of working with small presses, DIY publishing, and how to start/run an independent press.

Authors will include Joshua Poteat, Allison Titus, Nathan Long, Susan Settlemyre Williams, Nan Byrne, Lee Capps, Dan Abergotti, and others.

This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

January 20, 2008
1-5 PM
Chop Suey Books
1317 W. Cary St.
Richmond, VA 23220
804-497-4705
For more information, check the web site.





In Omaha, part of the ongoing Joey Lynch plan for midwest domination:


The third and final installment of "Tugboat Presents:"and Bemis Underground's 3 Saturday Art Series is here.

On January 19th, from 7-10 pm there will be a free opening reception for the exhibit of Visual Art By Musicians at the Bemis Underground (724 S. 12th, Omaha, NE).

The show will consist of artists from the region including Derek Pressnall (Tilly and the Wall, Flowers Forever, Flamboyant Gods), Jacob Thiele (The Faint), Austin Skiles (Eagle*Seagull), Teal Gardner (UUVVWWZ), Ben Swift (The Killigans), Darren Keen (The Show is the Rainbow), among many others. Non-local artists include Gillian Welch (Gillian Welch, Dave Rawlings Machine), Rachel Blumberg (M. Ward, Norfolk and Western), and Nick Zinner (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) among others. Later in the evening a special musical performance is scheduled to take place also.

Aside from this exciting cap to the 3 Saturday Art Series, the 'Figurative Work by Four' exhibit that debuted last week will still be on display. That show includes work by Claudia Alvarez, Jake Gillespie, Seth Johnson and Ashley Wick.

This night also celebrates the return of a current Bemis resident Jamie O'Shea back "from the past." O'Shea has kept himself locked in his studio since
midnight, January 1. He has blocked out his windows and set artificial light to timers, has turned back his clock and all news and communication via internet
is on a delay to represent a 36 hour day which he has been living on. His exodus will send him 6 days into his future and our present day.

Lastly this marathon of a day will start on the Bemis Center's 2nd floor as all the residents will open their doors from 4-7 pm for Open Studios.

The 3 Saturday Art Series sparks an exciting start to the 2008
Bemis Underground Season, which begins February 1st, with the group show "Another Stab: The Family of Man".

Thanks to Upstream Brewery for their support of this series.

http://www.tugboatpresents.com
http://www.bemisunderground.org

Mostly Just Liquids Right Now

The second issue of Saltgrass is now out. Check out this line-up, it's just hit after hit:
Alex Lemon
Julie Doxsee
Adam Peterson
Brandon Shimoda
Ana Bozicevic-Bowling
Julia Felsenthal
Frank Sherlock
Matthew Rohrer
Jane Gregory
& Ben Fountain
(oh, I'm in it as well)

order it here










New issue of Fence is out, full of great poetry, especially Andrea Baker, Rae Armantrout (as usual rocking it), Prageeta Sharma & a cool set of "(Soma)tic Poetry Exercises" by CA Conrad.
















Rereading Kathleen Fraser's Discrete Categories Forced into Coupling (which you should order here if you don't have it already) I was again struck by this piece:

You can hear her breathing in the photograph



What causes a person—say, in a family—to feel he or she is different from the other members, separate, an extra bit of jigsaw puzzle with unreliable hump, listing to one side of the table after the entire cardboard picture lies perfect and flat?

Who, finally, complies and merges—at every point—with the agreed upon shape of a human torso or preferred community type? Is arrival focused by admirable intention or by an off-camera genetic predictor, trapped just at the periphery of departure? Perhaps it is more like the snapping back of a stretched rubber band to its inherent ovoid design? (Even now I see my current favorite—wide, flat and intensely violet in color—resisting an equal force designed to hold three stems of broccoli in place, pulling away from them and then returning to its familiar elastic function closing in around them.)

And what of disruption, departure… even from something that lodges so functionally within one’s grasp?

*

For instance, these opening lines—led by grammar and punctuation into the promise of coherence. Now I must turn my back on them. Is it the turning awaythat marks me? Is everyone else in my “family” looking inward to a center, or are they also turning their gaze sideways? Do they see the gray animal shadow whizzing along the floorboards? Do they hear the parquet geometry of the wooden floor expanding, as if giving-up an hour of footsteps randomly wandering backwards, forwards?

*

Daphne is rushing into leaves. Her mouth is stretching sideways into the opposite of an expanded, purposeful plan. Bernini’s chisel lingers inside Apollo’s right foot; he’s finally coaxed the marble of the left leg into a sprint, showing veins breaking through. But Daphne’s traveling ahead of herself. Why must the photograph of the two of them come out of its envelope every year and be pinned to the wallpaper? A. still believes D. is the girl he thought she was and continues describing her to herself, even as tree bark is creeping between her thighs and pushing from roots that lift her body higher with the force of minute-by-minute growth.

*

They are two perfect bodies, entirely hard white marble caught in absolute dark. Bernini found the immense hunk of marble, brought down with ropes to the masonry yard near Pietrasanta. A wealthy man paid for the purchase of it, as in gaining on a dream that left nothing in him but the mute feeling-around for something lost—another gamble of horses or dogs contested and persuaded into predatory sport.

Bernini works in marble without knowing what it may deliver. He’s in love with the slow revelation of the chase: Apollo’s concentration, Daphne’s uneasiness. She’s disappearing. He knows that much. Apollo’s claim of certainty should be gaining on her, shouldn’t it? You can hear her breathing in the photograph as it’s unpinned from the wall and put away in a box, exposing the anatomy of imagined capture, even when you’re not looking at it.

*

The museum photographer, noting the Villa’s high windows, lights the bodies to catch the dramatic hollows of ribs and male trunk. But it is Daphne’s eyes, sliding with the immense pull of gravity, that you stop… you have been taken by the hand and led to this.

Bernini has entered them. The photographer is talking to himself and shifts the armature of high-wattage lighting. Apollo almost has her, he thinks. You can tell by his floating, unclenched hand and the conviction in his eyes as deep and particular as oxygen entering cell walls, he needs—what?—to stop her and tohold the thing he knows must be his, even though some part of him back there in the dark—and because of tracking her inside and outside of time—notices the tough green leaves, probably a kind of tree he doesn’t recognize as local, and he’s only now seen that they’re sprouting, and not just from herhands.

*

She did not think—or did she?—running towards herself an dhaving no idea of where the next life might be. Out of sight seemed the place.

She was inside and outside of him and visible, forced too soon by his definiteness.

Her indefiniteness was not tolerable to his practiced will.

She wanted the shape of a lintel.

When Bernini chipped the final piece of stone from the block of marble, he saw what he’d done. But it was too late and he’d already turned away.

-- for E. B.

Patrick Durgin said in the Chicago PoMoPo interview site:

2) Is poetry a synthetic or organic process for you?



I know others on your site have grappled with what, exactly, the terms “synthetic” and “organic” imply here. I’m more interested in the assumption that poetry is a “process.” It makes me want to insist on the processural nature of reading (as opposed to writing, which is at least as variously processural). But, anyway, when I write I don’t consider what I’m doing organic in the way that I’d consider certain physical processes organic. That is, I don’t make any arbitrary distinctions between procedure (which is by definition premeditated and forced, thus synthetic) and process. As with biological processes of mutation and elasticity, process is always definitive, while procedures simply get you there without characterizing that temporary destination of “meaning.” This is something I learned from my long engagement with Mac Low, both the man and his work. A major misconception about his work is that his notations for reading and performance mirror the constraints of his compositional procedures, making the works vaguely fascistic in the demands they make on the reader—and these demands are stringent and uniform. But every self-situating, wandering thought process is always-already cued. I just try to be as conscious of how I’m being cued when I write as I am when I read. It’s a matter of being responsible for your prosody.

Yesterday I was in a coffeeshop in Park Slope reading in prep for the coming semester. Suddenly I was aware that something had changed in the place. I'm not sure how i noticed, but people were acting strange. I looked up from my book & saw that the people in the place were no longer paying attention to their computers & newspapers but we sort of stealing half-glances at the counter. And then I noticed that [famous but hip celebrity actor X] was in line for coffee, holding her baby. Now this is a kind of hipster-leaning coffeeshop for Park Slope: blasting some cool-again Touch&Go sludgey punk from the 90s, baristas with properly broken in hats & tatts, "edgy" logos. So none of us were going to acknowledge that they were staring at [celebrity actor X], yet we were all glancing up at her. I was pretending to still be engrossed in my (extremely engrossing) short story, but really was in this state of being aware that [celebrity actor X] was in the room. But it was as if her celebrity had introduced a new kind of gravity to the room, distorting the room. And strangely, I gained some pleasure from the simple act of looking at her, registering her presence, while at the same time acting like I couldn't care less that she was in the room. And rationally I couldn't care less. I like her movies, but I don't feel, like, impressed by her. But there I was, ignoring the Mary Gaitskill story in order to spy on her ordering her latte. And this is my first blog about a celebrity spotting. On the other hand, that squirrel above is driving a carrot car through a beautiful tunnel.

Fo Real