Me~Tronome

CSoP Weekly Salon: Two Sessions Only $100

2011-12-22T06:10:00.000-08:00

The Chicago School of Poetics offers classes with video, audio, plus note and video sharing all happening in real time. We also have the ability to record online classes and replay them. Gotham Writers’ Workshop's online classes, by comparison, merely offer students the capability to comment in writing on one another’s work.

In addition to online classes, our Weekly Salon (click the link), for example, is relatively cheap: $50 apiece. Students can purchase as many workshops as they would like. A 20% discount even applies to bulk Weekly Salon workshop purchases:

2 Weekly Salon Workshops are $100 (no discount)

 5 Weekly Salon Workshops for $200 (20% discount)

Who Would You Like to See at Myopic Books in Chicago?

2011-11-08T09:39:00.000-08:00

Seeing David Meltzer, Ron Silliman, Duriel Harris, and Bill Berkson read at Myopic were some of the best moments of my writing life. But also seeing Patrick Culliton, David Trinidad, Paul Hoover, Dana Ward, and Kevin Coval read were some of the best moments of my writing life. Sometimes it blurs together a bit because SO many poets have read at Myopic Books in the past few years but now I would like to know. Who would you like to see read at Myopic Books?

Some of those who have read at Myopic Books over the past six years:

Aaron Fagin, Abraham Smith, AD Jameson, Allyssa Wolf, Amy De'Ath, Andy Fitch, Arpine Grenier, Barry Schwabsky, Ben Doller, Bill Allegrezza, Bill Berkson, BJ Love, Bob Archambeau, Brandi Homan, Brandi Homan, Brandon Downing, Bruce Covey, Carlos Soto-Román, Carol Novack, Carolyn Guinzio, Carolyn Guinzio, Carrie Etter, Carrie Olivia Adams, Catherine Wagner, Charles Ries, Charlie Newman, Cheryl Clark Vermeulen, Chris Glomski, Chris Green, Christian Hawkey, Chuck Stebelton, Cole Swensen, Crag Hill, Dan Godston, Dana Ward, Daniel Borzutzky, Daniel Nester, Dave Awl, David Meltzer, David Trinidad, Debrah Morkun, Diane Wakoski, Don Share, Donna Stonecipher, Duriel Harris, Ed Roberson, Edmund Berrigan, Eileen Myles, Ela Kotkowska, Elizabeth Harper, Erika Jo Brown, Erika Mikkalo, Erin Teegarden, Farrah Field, Francesco Levato, Gabriel Gudding, Garin Cycholl, Garrett Brown, Gary Sullivan, Gene Tanta, Gina Myers, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Ish Klein, James Bellflower, James Shea, James Yeary, Jason Bredle, Jason Pickleman, Jen Tynes, Jennifer Karmin, Jenny Boully, Jeremy Davies, Jerome Rothenberg, Jesse Seldess, Jessica Savitz, Jill Magi, Joel Duncan, Joel Felix, Johan Jönson, Johannes Göransson, John Beer, John Gallaher, John Keene, John Tipton, John Wilkinson, Jon Cotner, Jon Thompson, Joshua Adams, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Judith Goldman, K. Silem Mohammad, Karyna McGlynn, Katy Lederer, Kent Johnson, Kerri Sonnenberg, Kevin Coval, Kim Gek Lin Short, Kostas Anagnopoulos, Krista Franklin, Kristin Dykstra, Kristina Jipson, Kristy Bowen, Kristy Odelius, Larry Sawyer, Laura Carter, Lauren Levato, Lea Graham, Lewis Freedman, Linh Dinh, Lisa Fishman, Lisa Janssen, Liz Marino, Luis Valadez, Luis Valadez, MacGregor Card, Mark Tardi, Mark Wallace, Marvin Tate, Matvei Yankelevich, Maxine Chernoff, Megan Volpert, Melissa Severin, Michael Robins, Michael Rothenberg, Mirela Tanta, Monika Rinck, Nate Slawson, Nathalie Stephens, Nathan Hoks, Nico Vassilakis, Nina Corwin, Oni Buchanan, Patrick Culliton, Patrick Durgin, Paul Hoover, Peter O'Leary, Philip Jenks, Ralph Hamilton, Ray Hsu, Reb Livingston, Robert Archambeau, Robert Fernandez, Roberto Harrison, Roger Bonair-Agard, Ron Silliman, Sandra Doller, Sarah Riggs, Seth Landman, Simon Pettet, Simone Muench, Stella Radulescu, Stephanie Anderson, Steve Halle, Thax Douglas, Tim Kinsella, Tim Yu, Todd Heldt, Tom Orange, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Tony Trigilio, Tyehimba Jess, Uljana Wolf, Wayne Miller, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Zach Harris

MYOPIC BOOKS CHICAGO
1564 N. Milwaukee Ave Chicago, IL 60622
Conveniently located near the Damen Blue Line CTA stop.
Contact: 773.862.4882 / Larry Sawyer, curator

Dylan Thomas: Wild Child

2011-10-20T09:32:00.000-07:00

I was recently marveling over this poem by Dylan Thomas, "Who are you who is born in the next room..." (published in 1945) from a series of pattern poems called Vision and Prayer because of what it does or enacts so successfully and in doing so transcends its arbitrary form. I don’t have the entire series in front of me, so it may be that this particular shape has some relevance that isn’t obvious when it’s viewed out of context because apparently these shapes form a series. What seems most interesting to me is how this writing works so well to set a scene and create a poetic equation with an ending that comes as somewhat of a surprise in a visceral way with such depth of metaphor, while it almost completely resists its own rhyme scheme. It provides an almost perfect balance between meaning and form that still manages to raise interesting questions because of certain effects. I’m drawn at the outset to the two somewhat cavernous caesuras. The first comes after “In the birth.” It seems appropriate that the poet creates this gap in the line after the word birth (where the reader nearly falls in), and the second occurs after the word “alone.” Both caesuras offer a perfect physical illustration of what is being described because the reader is forced to involuntarily pause after these words, which not only gives them emphasis but reemphasizes in a very graphic way the visual provided a few lines earlier with “I can hear the womb opening.”

From the poem’s opening there is a double meaning established because dramatic tension is established succinctly in the first three words. The intentional ambiguity almost has the reader questioning himself or this might also be Thomas asking the question of himself.

Dualities cascade throughout it. In the idea that Jesus was man and god. The two physically separated rooms exist showing the reader separate from what goes on in the other room and mention of a “wall thin as a wren’s bone” seems to underscore a difference between what the speaker perceives as the natural and unnatural world. “Wren bone” is also an anagram of “new borne.” Other imagery underscores an idea that this event on some level is holy but again, a duality within the structures finds the reader noticing a shift of perspective in the mirror image of the poem that begins as the lines reach a midpoint and then recede in the second half. The poem’s structure mimics what is described, i.e., the poem itself is turning or shifting. These lines could be read in multiple ways “In the birth/bloody room/unknown to the …” or “In the birth bloody/room unknown to the…”

The poem, although only 71 words, does start with a vision and end with a sort of prayer but is Thomas describing his own thoughts on his own life that started with a similar birth but resulted in the many physical, mental and domestic problems which plagued him for years? Or is this a meditation on our relation to the natural world and the unnatural, as represented in the poem, is the overlay of religiosity that is placed upon us that begins at birth. Thomas encapsulates a prime moment, birth, which serves as a hinge between these two “worlds” i.e., the natural and the world of civilization and all the socialization that civilization entails.

As the wall is a part of the natural world or natural order, the infant is not, yet anyway, and the point is emphasized internally as the rhyme scheme pairs “wild” and “child” together as a final example of the mysterious duality that ripples throughout what might have been a poem that Thomas wrote in one sitting in a very short amount of time.

The visual pattern creates interesting parallels that otherwise might not have existed had the poem been left aligned in a ragged block. The final interesting afterthought is that the form provides the reader with an object to be stared at, which it gives it an element of spectacle. Because of its symmetry the object simultaneously resembles a box, a shape of some sort like a pyramid reflected in water, a crucifix, the human form with arms outspread, and finally and obviously a diamond. Sixteenth Century alchemist Agrippa also include this shape and its opposite, which would look like a jagged hourglass, in his “Of the Proportion, Measure, and Harmony of Man’s Body,” which included diagrams of geometric shapes aligned with the human form. These two shapes comprise the ebb and flow of the alternating patterns in the book.

By starting with such an unanswerable question, by including such vivid imagery (e.g., heart print), and ending with such a violent twist the poem registers like a minor earthquake and we stare down into its dark abyss and wonder what it meant to the author, as well as what it might mean to everyone facing the riddle of human existence.

Announcing The Chicago School of Poetics at www.chicagoschoolofpoetics.com

2011-10-11T11:48:00.000-07:00

The Chicago School of Poetics site is now up (rollover and click it) and ready for inspection. Thanks, Poetry Foundation, for mentioning it on Harriet.

Face-to-face classes will be held at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington St., Pedway East and online classes require only some basic computer system requirements for the 8-week long classes. You’ll need a computer with:
• Macintosh, Windows, or Linux operating systems.
• A microphone (most have one built in) for voice conferencing.
• A web cam for video conferencing.
• An internet connection (preferably high-speed, like cable or DSL).
and that’s it! Sign-up is quick and easy via PayPal.

Rollover and click on each of the following to read more:

• Poetics: Level I

• Erasure to Automatism

• The Poetry of Cubism and discovering your

• Personal Archeology.

Register today. Class size is limited for maximum instruction.

New ::: Myopic Poetry Series summer dates

2011-05-09T08:08:00.000-07:00

Saturday, June 11 - Udayan Das, Connor Stratman

Saturday, June 18 - Peter O'Leary, Ray Bianchi

Saturday, July 9 - Stella Radulescu, Nina Corwin

Saturday, July 30 - Andrea Rexilius, Megan Martin

Saturday, August 6 - Christeene Fraser, Anthony Madrid

Saturday, August 13 - Mike Hauser, Noelle Kocot

Saturday, August 20 - Laura Goldstein, Chris Glomski

Saturday, October 8 - Chicago Calling w/Dan Godston: including Jen Besemer, Tim Armentrout, Eric Elshtain, Gregory Fraser, Nick Demske, Dolly Lemke, William Allegrezza, Philip Jenks, & the Next Objectivists

New interviews up at Big Bridge and WWAATD

2011-04-29T10:47:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Michael Rothenberg’s Big Bridge includes an interview with me about my new book, Unable to Fully California plus

The letters of Stan Brakhage and Michael McClure, the poetry of Lew Welch, and poetry by Basil King, Sandy Berrigan, Clayton Eshleman, Anne Gorick, Susan McKechnie, Robert Kelly, J.J. Blickstein, and many others, along with translations of Rimbaud by Bill Zavatsky, Rilke by Art Beck, Nakahara Chuya by Jerome Rothenberg, and 25 Venezuelan poets translated by Rowena Hill and reviews of books by Valery Oisteanu, Louis Armand, Bobbi Lurie, Ami Kaye, Jack Foley and A.D. Winans among many other features. I’m still pouring through it all.

Also: check out this mini-interview in Daniel Nester’s We Who Are About to Die where I discuss 1970s vintage leather jackets, Stanley Kubrick, Santorini, my new book Unable to Fully California, Pocahontas, 1920s Paris, and Billy Joel.

PRESS RELEASE:::::THE DUST OF SUNS BY RAYMOND ROUSSEL

2011-02-22T05:48:00.001-08:00

For Immediate Release

2/19/2011

Contact: John Beer

jbeer@uchicago.edu

773.255.5587

The Chicago Poetry Project presents

a staged reading of the play

March 4-6; Fri, Sat 8pm; Sun 3pm.
The Charnel House, 3421 W. Fullerton St., 773.871.9046

The Dust of Suns

by Raymond Roussel

Trans. Harry Mathews

French poet, novelist and playwright Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) faced almost universal incomprehension and derision during his lifetime, for works that neglected traditional character and plot development in favor of the construction of elaborate descriptions and anecdotes based on hidden wordplay. While the premieres of his self-financed plays caused near-riots, admirers included Surrealists Andre Breton and Robert Desnos, who called The Dust of Suns (1926) “another incursion into the unknown which you alone are exploring.” Roussel never enjoyed the posthumous fame of his hero Jules Verne, but he has exercised a powerful fascination upon later writers and artists including the French Oulipo group, Marcel Duchamp, John Ashbery, Michel Foucault, and Michael Palmer. New editions of his novels and poetry are forthcoming this year from Princeton and Dalkey Archive.

Like much of Roussel’s writing, The Dust of Suns has a colonial setting. Against the backdrop of fin-de-siecle French Guiana, a convoluted treasure hunt unfolds. Along the way, Roussel fully indulges his penchant for bizarre invention and juxtaposition. The Frenchman Blache seeks his uncle’s inheritance: a cache of gems whose location lies at the end of a chain of clues that includes a sonnet engraved on a skull and the recollections of an albino shepherdess. Meanwhile, his daughter Solange is in love with Jacques—but all Jacques knows of his parentage is a mysterious tattoo on his shoulder...

This script-in-hand performance of Roussel’s play, directed by John Beer, with design by Caroline Picard, features an array of Chicago writers and artists. Performers include: James Tadd Alcox, Joshua Corey, Joel Craig, Monica Fambrough, Sara Gothard, Judith Goldman, Samantha Irby, Lisa Janssen, Jennifer Karmin, Jamie Kazay, John Keene, Jacob Knabb, Francesco Levato, Brian Nemtusak, Travis Nichols, Jacob Saenz, Larry Sawyer, Suzanne Scanlon, Jennifer Steele and Nicole Wilson.

Where: The Charnel House, 3421 W. Fullerton St., 773.871.9046

When: March 4-6; Fri, Sat 8pm; Sun 3pm. ALL PERFORMANCES ARE FREE.

The New Chicago School

2010-11-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

[I'm reposting this here now that digital emunction is going out of business. I had linked to it when it first appeared but soon the link will dry up, I'm guessing.]

My proposal: That the closest thing we presently have to a “School” of younger, rigorously innovative poets in the U.S. (one that stands closest chance of being retrospectively seen as akin in significance to the NY School in its first-generation, proto-formation years–and when I say “School” I mean in that sense of fortuitous constellation, something very different from a self-identified tendency or “movement”) is what I’ll call the New Chicago School. It’s a list of accomplished, experimental writers, more poetically focused as a collective, perhaps, than the contents list of the City Visible anthology of a couple years back, and more geographically focused, too, inasmuch as all the poets have roots in the city, even though a few of them have recently moved elsewhere (though in most cases still nearby), and one now lives abroad:

William Fuller, Ed Roberson (these first two the elder figures of the group), Anthony Madrid, John Tipton, Devin Johnston, Peter O’Leary, Robyn Schiff, Bill Allegrezza, Dan Beachy-Quick, Michael Robbins, John Beer, Arielle Greenberg, Lisa Fishman, Jesse Seldess, Nick Twemlow, Suzanne Buffam, Srikanth Reddy, Jennifer Scappettone, Francesco Levato, Eric Elshtain, Jennifer Karmin, Leila Wilson, Nathalie Stephens, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Garin Cycholl, Joel Felix, Chris Glomski, Erica Bernheim, Larry Sawyer, Patrick Durgin, Joshua Corey out in the suburbs, Tony Trigilio, Daniel Borzutzky (though something of a separate case, the work of these last two, perhaps)… and a gaggle of brilliant scholar-editors associated, past or present, with the Chicago Review, along with Robert Archambeau, on the outskirts of town at Lake Forest.

To these names one could add an active (and often activist) group of even younger poets and publishers: Michael Slosek, Kerri Sonnenberg, Steve Halle, Eric Unger, Luke Daly, Brooks Johnson, and Barrett Gordon, for example (the latter four have close connections, and their work engages the visual arts and music scenes, as well).

For sure, there are others I’m just blanking on, or don’t know, and apologies for that (please add). And obviously (!) there are all kinds of superb poets in Chicago doing important work who don’t quite fit the avant-aesthetic parameters of the grouping–Don Share being one prominent case, or David Trinidad, another.

From a poetic standpoint, what would justify the set? It is a diverse group (as was the original NY School) and a large one, but it’s held together by a vibrant, active scene and certain broad affinities of poetic predisposition and–quite often, and with the necessary exceptions–affect. The tilt is towards a “scholarly,” brainy, less “pop-cultural” and more self-consciously “critical” mode than tends to be the case around St. Mark’s, for example. And, I’d argue, the work by and large tends to be more thematically ambitious, more novel and challenging in its registers and forms, more earnestly in tune with the international than the work of the younger NY scene, still largely caught, the latter, within tonal frames of the hip, the pop, the vernacular, the anecdotal, the flarf.

I know that some of the poets above–Johnston, O’Leary, Tipton, and Fuller–have already been “aesthetically” grouped together by Stephen Burt (Bobby Baird has pointed out here that this group represents a rhetorical and formal drift locally known for some time already as “Flood Poetry”), in his recent essay “The New Thing,” where he also identifies recent theory coming out of the University of Chicago as key source for what he sees as a developing current of poetic epistemology. Burt is referring to “Thing Theory,” as promulgated by, among others, Douglas Mao and Bill Brown, the latter living in Hyde Park, apparently. In short, these younger poets are turning away from the still-fashionable modes of linguistic and conceptual abstraction and towards a rediscovery of “reference” and “concrete, real things,” tending to render their experience with terseness and concision. Though some of the poets he names, it should be noted, are not exactly laconic…

Now, I fully agree with Baird, in his post here some months back, reporting on aforesaid essay, that Burt is a terrific critic. I suppose Burt and Adam Kirsch are more or less neck and neck right now to be the next Helen Vendler, Burt the horse on the left, Kirsch the one on the right, striding to the pole, pulling their critical sulkies behind. (Though who, one wonders, will be the next Marjorie Perloff?) So there’s no question he’s very good. But I find his neo-Objectivist “Thing” grouping to be something of a stretch: Johnston, Mark Nowak, Juliana Spahr, Joseph Massey, and Jennifer Moxley, for example, placed in the same stable according to the poets’ (very different) renderings of their attentions to objects and their (usually wildly different) thematic application of these phenomenological encounters? Well, OK, I guess, though really, I wonder what U.S. poetry since Williams’s isn’t haunted at least a little by some manner of Husserlian susurration inside it. Come to think of it, forget Williams; even spooky Dickinson is chock-full of stuff and Things. So is Whitman, and in overdrive, though he’s not quite “concise,” so maybe he wouldn’t qualify as a “thing” poet. In any case, what’s all that “new” about the New Thing, if such a thing actually exists, is not all that clear.

As you can see, I feel Burt’s argument is a bit forced and constraining, a bit too much of a bit and halter, as it were. (Incidentally, interesting to me, and as I wrote Burt after I first saw his essay, I’m pretty sure the first-ever serious application of Thing Theory to post-avant poetry, including quotations from Mao and Brown, et. al, was in Eric Hayot’s 2005 PMLA essay, “Araki Yasusada: Author, Object.”) In any case, both Baird and John Latta have pretty neatly taken Burt apart on all this.

And maybe my grumpiness with Burt’s bridling classification isn’t all that necessary, anyway. Superior poets will almost never try to conform to this or that critic’s taxonomic criteria, and I’m sure someone like Burt would be the last to want them to. The point I’m trying to make, though perhaps I don’t even have to, is that you don’t need–as again, the New York poets proved, or the Black Mountain poets proved, or the Beats proved, or even the Objectivists proved–any kind of solid critical-philosophical frame to constitute a vigorous “school,” or even tendency, of poetry. You don’t even need a quasi one. All you need is a locale(s), smart ambitious people, and a certain affective habitus (often found in taverns) that is friendly, contentious, gossipy, mutually supportive, and professionally incestuous to some degree. The modal, organizing affinities, which rarely funnel down to strong affinities of “program,” grow out of these. If something is right, and who knows what that is or how it works, things flower.

So I’m making the case that there is something that has developed in Chicago over the past few years, an accretion of poetic felicities whose parts and sum are unrivaled by any other avant locale in the country: St. Mark’s has a wealth of talent and enough in-house sound for a School, but the textual ambition seems comparatively slight; Austin has Slow Poetry, and this is full of promise, but it’s more an embryonic movement, not a School; the Bay Area has a great scene, but the crazy variegation of it all (see Bay Area Poetics) makes any notion of School untenable; Philadelphia is loaded with smarts, but true Schools of poetry cannot abide venerable Headmasters (well, OK, excepting the Sons of Ben, during the reign of Charles I); Iowa City has the most expert practitioners of the period tachisme, but that is not any kind of School, it is a career; Providence has riches, but it takes more than students; Buffalo is home to some fine outlier poets, but SUNY is covered in snow; Boston, apparently, has fallen into the sea.

In conclusion, what I’m proposing (it would appear I am beginning to repeat myself) is something that’s beginning to have a sense of the self-evident to it already, I think, and no doubt others have noticed it, too: that Chicago, right now, is home to the most interesting and vital avant “poetic cluster” in the country.

And I feel confident enough of the claim to name it again, even though I know the name is not all that flashy, but that’s appropriate to the city’s spirit, too: The New Chicago School.

–Kent Johnson

[One hundred miles from Wrigley Field, in Freeport, Illinois]

Vanitas 5: Film :::: available now

2010-10-12T08:25:00.000-07:00

Purchase Vanitas, Vol. 5 , because it's available now with: Louis Armand, Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Mary Joe Bang, Michael Basinski, Michael Brownstein, Tom Clark, Steve Dalachinsky, Ray DiPalma, Elaine Equi, Clayton Eshleman, Jim Feast, Richard Hell, Robert Hershon, Anselm Hollo, Jack Kimball, Gerard Malanga, Eileen Myles, Jerome Sala, Tom Savage, Larry Sawyer, Ilka Scobie, Peter Jay Shippy, David Shapiro, Tony Towle, Anne Waldman, and John Yau among others .. (that's the editor Vincent Katz,in Vienna, as photographed by Vivien Bittencourt)

Unable to Fully California (Otoliths Press, 2010)

2010-08-30T08:23:00.000-07:00

Unable to Fully California with cover by Krista Franklin is officially available on Lulu and Amazon .

I love the clear style, unforced music. It is not so much a strange poetry as the poetry of a stranger, the way Bishop was a Brazilian in Boston and a Bostonian in Brazil. I fell in love with your “blue fruit” and “inescapable tomorrow,” also what seems like renunciation not of sentimentality but of cliché …I like even the quasi-Romantic dislocations here: “There is a beauty to ice/only a statue understands.” I’m not a statue, so I only partially understand, but that should be more than enough for Sawyer’s uncanny picnic on no grass … seemed as real as the Bronx, and I couldn’t stop thinking: I am so lucky that this poetry is so good.

—David Shapiro

The split infinitive title that is Unable to Fully California prompts the question: What in 2010 is most real? Larry Sawyer leads us in response to “the exotic trigonometry” that invokes twirled concepts, blended wines, plus deliciously intentional mistakes. In this spree of sight and sound, nouns take up residence while collocating in new roles as verbs alive in trans-plantation. The tenor and vehicle of similes yield a vivid array of bleached blond poems that skid across the page. Their x axis is transmuted from horizon line to stars as yet unnamed from which we readers readily infer we’re not in Kansas anymore.

—Sheila E. Murphy

The poetry of Larry Sawyer arrives free of any investment in a “poetics” or worldview and therefore ties its shoes on the run: “The city is a Smith and Wesson covered in noon.” The sublime lies in “covered in noon,” the waking world in the Smith and Wesson. So there’s a spontaneity of composition (anything can happen and does) that reminds us of what René Char was supposed to have been. On first impression, the poems can seem scattershot, like the art works of Niki de Saint Phalle composed by shotgun. Some of the pellets form patterns, some impressions they make are deeper than others, and some even pierce the metal canvas. Because Sawyer’s style is so open, the casual and intense find comfort in each other and the remarkable detail emerges: “What horizon / spreads in the distance / muscles ripening?” Much of this work is therefore fresh and unexpectable, like the final line of his elegy at Char’s gravesite: “Quiet snow, gossip over the hero’s grave.”

—Paul Hoover

New Myopic Poetry Dates, 1564 N. Milwaukee, Chicago, 7pm

2010-07-24T16:59:00.000-07:00

Sunday, July 25

Devin King & Peter O'Leary

Saturday, August 7

Amy De'Ath, John Wilkinson, Kristina Jipson & Joel Duncan

Tuesday, August 17

Nico Vassilakis, mIEKAL aND, Crag Hill, and James Yeary

Friday, September 10

Catherine Wagner & Dana Ward

Saturday, September 18th

Adam Golaski & Jennifer Karmin

Saturday, October 2

Chicago Calling with Dan Godston (guests to be announced)

Saturday, October 16

Mark Wallace

Saturday, October 30

Carol Novack

Past readers at Myopic Books include:

Duriel Harris, Joel Craig, Jessica Savitz, Mark Tardi, Thax Douglas, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Jennifer Karmin, Lisa Janssen, Brandi Homan, Daniel Borzutzky, Katy Lederer, Gabriel Gudding, Patrick Durgin, Kristin Dykstra, Krista Franklin, Tim Yu, Marvin Tate, Liz Marino, Dan Godston, Bruce Covey, Daniel Nester, Ed Roberson, Francesco Levato, Gina Myers, Simon Pettet, Joel Felix, Jason Bredle, Diane Wakoski, Jenny Boully, Todd Heldt, Eileen Myles, Tyehimba Jess, Michael Robins, Nate Slawson, Philip Jenks, Garin Cycholl, Kristy Odelius, Ela Kotkowska, Melissa Serverin, Bob Archambeau, Garrett Brown, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Carrie Olivia Adams, Jesse Seldess, Arpine Grenier, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Patrick Culliton, John Beer, Kostas Anagnopoulos, Lea Graham, Jeremy Davies, John Tipton, Charlie Newman, Edmund Berrigan, Gene Tanta, AD Jameson, Joshua Adams, Carrie Etter, Dave Awl, Chris Green, Bill Allegrezza, Peter O'Leary, Nathalie Stephens, Megan Volpert, Luis Valadez, Simone Muench, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Carolyn Guinzio, Chris Glomski, Farrah Field, Zach Harris, Lauren Levato, Steve Halle, David Meltzer, Paul Hoover, Kerri Sonnenberg, Cheryl Clark Vermeulen, K. Silem Mohammad, James Bellflower, Aaron Fagin, Maxine Chernoff, Tom Orange, Fred Sasaki, Wayne Miller, Karyna McGlynn, Tony Trigillio, David Trinidad, Kent Johnson, Linh Dinh, Judith Goldman, Reb Livingston, Jen Tynes, Elizabeth Harper, Mirela Tanta, Erin Teegarden, Chuck Stebelton, Stella Radulescu, Roberto Harrison, Charles Ries, Kristy Bowen, Bill Berkson, Oni Buchanan, Donna Stonecipher, Abraham Smith, Ray Hsu and many others...

Bright Lighghts, Big City

2010-05-30T14:49:00.000-07:00

Is the cultural mix lonelier, emptier, thinner and far less interesting now than it was in the 1960s? I would guess not lonelier or emptier, given that more are writing poetry now than at virtually any other time in American history. As to whether it's less interesting, that's a purely subjective question, but again not from my perspective, although all of these players are some of my heroes/heroines of poetry. Of course, Saroyan's poem "lighght" is still the pop-cultural, conceptual tour-de-force it always was.

New Myopic Poetry Series Dates

2010-02-08T17:33:00.001-08:00

Come spend some time in a cozy bookstore rubbing elbows with poets and ... books. The Myopic Books Poetry Series is free, which is best of all. This, however, is an interior shot of Filter, the venerable Wicker Park landmark, while it was still kicking.

Myopic Books
1564 N. Milwaukee Ave Chicago, IL 60622
Contact: 773.862.4882
larrysawyerpoet@yahoo.com

Saturday, January 23 : Roger Bonaire-Agard & Kevin Coval

Sunday, January 24 : Nick Demske & Michael Bernstein

_________________

IN CONJUNCTION WITH
The Chicago Review
Saturday, January 30 : Christian Hawkey, Uljana Wolf, & Monika Rinck

_________________

Sunday, January 31 : Robert Fernandez & Anthony Madrid

_________________

Sunday, February 7 : Philip Jenks & Allyssa Wolf

Saturday, February 20 : Michael Robbins & Daniel Borzutzky

Sunday, February 21 : Aldo Alvarez & Dave Awl

Sunday, February 28 : Jon Thompson & Lisa Fishman

_________________

Sunday, March 7 : Michelle Taransky & Jordon Stempleman

Saturday, March 14 : Jamie Kazay & Lina ramona Vitkauskas

Sunday, March 15 : William Allegrezza & Chris Glomski

Saturday, March 20 : Seth Landman & Lewis Freedman

Sunday, March 28 : Carrie Olivia Adams & Josh Corey

_________________

Saturday, April 3 : Laura Carter & Erika Mikkalo

Sunday, April 4 - Steve Halle & John Keene

Wednesday, April 21 - Jerome Rothenberg

Saturday, April 24 - Ben Doller & Sandra Doller

Sunday, April 25 : Barry Schwabsky & Matvei Yankelevich

_________________

Sunday, May 2 : Connor Stratman & Philip Jenks

Sunday, May 9 : Robert Archambeau & Don Share

Saturday, May 15 : Brandon Downing & Macgregor Card

Sunday, May 16 : Aaron Fagan & Daniela Olszewska

Sunday, May 23 : Andy Fitch, John Cotner, & David Trinidad

Sunday, June 13 : Debrah Morkun & Kim Gek Lin Short

Thursday, June 24 : Greg Purcell & Joel Craig

Saturday, July 10 : Chicago/Milwaukee Poetry Fest!
Roberto Harrison, Nick Demske, Mike Hauser, Brenda Cardenas, Caryl Pagel, Larry Sawyer & more!

Saturday, October 16 : Mark Wallace

Saturday, October 30 : Carol Novack
________________

Metrophobia: Poetry as Last House on the Left

2010-01-11T10:09:00.000-08:00

Are you afraid of poetry?

I’m afraid of it only to the extent that it has given me some sense of the awesome power of language to expand awareness. So, to some extent poetry is a conduit that has increased my awareness and an expanded awareness can seem to shift our perspective and unfamiliar ground can be frightening, but can’t that particular definition of frightening also be more aptly described as “exhilarating”? My two cents.

There's an interesting post at Robert Archambeau's great blog, Samizdat, re: “poetry is being read by an ever-smaller slice of the American reading public” which begs the question “is it being taught ‘wrong’”?

When poetry is defined as 'self-expression,' which is how I believe that it might be taught at the high school level, then students of poetry walk away with a stunted awareness of the possibilities of language. In fact, most would probably opt to get their self-expression ya-yas out in any other way that might be construed as more "fun." Making a movie for YouTube or starting a rock band for example. Poetry is a distinct art form with distinct tricks of the trade. If no awareness of craft is imbued in students then there won't be any appreciation of the multi-levels of meaning and the depth of observation apparent in poetry that was written by the most skilled practitioners of the art.

(And further “news” today at HuffPo about the issue.)

Of course, the fact that fewer people seem to be reading poetry can also have much to do with the fact that we’re witnessing a huge shift in how information itself is being transmitted. From newspapers and books to the Internet, for example. You’re reading this now via computer screen rather than a printed page, but I’m glad you tuned in. Here are a few poems that can help you to expand your own parameters. (This is a pic of Drew Barrymore after her first reading of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.)

Here are a few poems that are well worth the fright.

Song by Frank O’Hara

from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein

No Liquor in the House by Kenward Elmslie

Two Poems by Nicanor Parra

Five Poems by Aimé Césaire (trans. by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman)

To Brooklyn Bridge by Hart Crane

In the forest of symbols

2009-11-23T08:18:00.000-08:00

Are poets synesthesiacs? I do know that “To taste the wine of speech” (as one poet put it) helps to describe our world in a way that illustrates the gray areas of experience—a memory is often collage. It’s a rinse cycle in the mind of every available sensory detail regarding a person, event, or period in time.

Hey, you’re doing it, like I didn’t tell you
to, my sinking laundry boat, point of departure,
my white pomegranate, my swizzle stick.
We’re leaving again of our own volition
for bogus patterned plains streaked by canals,
maybe. Amorous ghosts will pursue us
for a time, but sometimes they get, you know, confused and
forget to stop when we do, as they continue to populate this
fertile land with their own bizarre self-imaginings.

—John Ashbery, “Mottled Tuesday”

The Sufi poet Attar to describe Rumi said …"There goes a river dragging an ocean behind it." So, poets are used to using figurative language to describe and bring new life and interest to the mundane. And poets have been writing of memory throughout the ages. As Ana Akhmatova wrote in her poem “Lot’s Wife.”

There are three periods of memory.
The first of them is like a yesterday,
The soul basks in the blessings of their vault,
The body takes its glory in their shade.
Laughter has not yet passed away, tears gush,
The blot is not yet bleached out of the desk,
The kiss, like a heart's seal, is terminal,
Is singular and unforgettable...
But this does not last long before the vault
Has vanished overhead. And in some backwoods
Neighborhood, in a solitary house
Where summers leave the winters' chill warmed over,
Where spiders weave, where all things are in dust,
Where lovestruck letters lead a crumbling half-life,
Sly portraits change into their different selves.

And Emily Dickinson wrote “Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine.” I guess it’s always been this reorganization of the senses that interests me most about poetry.

Anne Salz, a Dutch musician and visual artist, perceives sound as swatches of color that she incorporates into her paintings. "The painting represents the opening of the concerto for four violins. I listen to the music while I paint. First, the music gives me an optimistic, happy feeling and I perceive red, yellow, and orange colors in a great variety with little contrast. It looks like a field of these colors. I perceive the color field as a musical chord. You can compare it with the colors of a blanket or cover made of autumn leaves." Her painting "Vivaldi" was a result of what she "saw" while listening to Vivaldi's music.

Neurologist Richard Cytowic identified synesthesia as meeting some of the following criteria:

1. Synesthesia is involuntary and automatic.
2. Synesthetic perceptions are spatially extended, meaning they often have a sense of "location." For example, synesthetes speak of "looking at" or "going to" a particular place to attend to the experience.
3. Synesthetic percepts are consistent and generic (i.e., simple rather than pictorial).
4. Synesthesia is highly memorable.
5. Synesthesia is laden with affect.

Some artists who also happened to be synesthetes include Duke Ellington, David Hockney, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Liszt, Wassily Kandinsky and the guitarist John Mayer. This claim might be a little more obvious as it relates to Kandinsky’s painting versus, say, John Mayer’s guitar playing, but the topic is intrinsically interesting. It may have been Charles Baudelaire, (first as he was in many things), to have first written in a modern way about the effects of synesthesia in his poem “Correspondences.”

Nature is a temple where living pillars
Let escape sometimes confused words;
Man traverses it through forests of symbols
That observe him with familiar glances.

Like long echoes that intermingle from afar
In a dark and profound unity,
Vast like the night and like the light,
The perfumes, the colors and the sounds respond.

There are perfumes fresh like the skin of infants
Sweet like oboes, green like prairies,
—And others corrupted, rich and triumphant

That have the expanse of infinite things,
Like ambergris, musk, balsam and incense,
Which sing the ecstasies of the mind and senses.

Arizona Fuzz

2009-10-29T11:48:00.001-07:00

The poem
does not lie to us. We lie under
its law, alive in the glamour of this hour

—John Wieners

Do roses skipping in the
Glass make great gifts, I mic
Their contours, wipe innocence
From the window, these milk
Mansions. Arizona fuzz catches
Green fish coming up
From

Being hunted, her
Devouring dawns, within
Gnawing hiatus shed. This
Glamorous tongue noticed,
Will arrest all secrets.
We stash strange

Butterflies are
Puzzles of our former lives.
But he is elephant. That
Exception and the
Surrounding meadow
Its tender symmetry.

On repeat, the choral
Stillness, yet the siren’s panache
Makes stew of our excuses
Launches enemy submarines
Who looks with astonishment upon
Its maize

My happiness.

Series A, mini-conference, "Poetry and Place"

2009-10-28T13:03:00.001-07:00

I had an opportunity to discuss new Chicago poetry at a recent conference with Garin Cycholl and Ray Bianchi as part of Bill Allegrezza's Series A poetry reading series at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Click here to access the sound file. Frank O'Hara's work loomed large in my mind as I considered how to respond to the idea of Poetry and Place.

Myopic Books Poetry Schedule

2009-10-13T07:36:00.000-07:00

We've updated the Myopic Books Poetry Series calendar ... please note that the Kent Johnson/Linh Dinh reading occurs on a Saturday~! Myopic Books has the widest selection of used books in the city.

All readings begin at 7 pm. Thanks,

Larry

UPCOMING

Saturday, October 24 - Kent Johnson
& Linh Dinh

Sunday, November 1 - Roberto Harrison, Tom Hibbard
& Chuck Stebelton

Sunday, November 8 - Matthew Klane & Jennifer Scappettone

Sunday, November 15 - Eileen Myles
& Guest

**************************

THE MYOPIC POETRY SERIES — a weekly series of readings and occasional poets' talks

Myopic Books in Chicago — Sundays at 7:00 / 1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue, 2nd Floor

773.862.4882

Contact curator Larry Sawyer for booking information and requests.
E-mail: larrysawyerpoet@yahoo.com

Myopic Books — 17 years of innovative poetry in Chicago

::::THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING THE MYOPIC POETRY SERIES::::

On the New Chicago Poetry

2009-10-06T09:09:00.001-07:00

The quote by Reginald Shepherd included by Robert Archambeau on Adam Fieled’s blog in an old blog post gave my morning a jumpstart, along with my morning cup of sacred bean squeezings

“T. S. Eliot said that the poet must be as intelligent as possible; Wallace Stevens said that the poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully. It is in the play between the intelligence of language and the resistance to intelligence of language as an object that poetry occurs. What matters is not what a poem can say, a preoccupation Harold Bloom shares with the multiculturalists he so despises, but what a poem can do. I look to poetry for what only poems can do, or what poems can do best–to alienate language from its alienation of use (the phrase is Adorno’s), to treat language as an end-in-itself rather than a mere means: to communication, expression, or even truth.”

Although Shepherd passed from this earth on Sep. 10, 2008 he was described by Lawrence White as “born and raised in Bronx projects, exiled to Macon, Georgia, then rising up to Bennington and Brown and beyond—was the stuff of an Oprah-list memoir. The motor of that progression, his adamantine integrity that would not swerve nor stoop, was heroic in the old-fashioned sense: it brought him to glories and it brought him to calamities. But he was no cliché. His friends, and those students and readers who were drawn to him, knew he was a rare spirit.”

In thinking about what’s "new" about the poetry being written right now in Chicago (dubbed by Kent Johnson recently as the New Chicago School and by Adam Fieled previously as the Chicago Eliotics, and even earlier by Tim Yu as New Prairie School), I came upon Shepherd's quote, which posits an idea that has a different drift than Auden’s famous “Poetry makes nothing happen.” And it’s worth reading Poetry magazine senior editor Don Share’s post against the holding up of W.H. Auden’s line as evidence of anything when taken out of context, being that the line was written to describe a poet whom, according to Auden, did/does make things happen—William Butler Yeats.

Although Share comments that Auden’s line isn’t necessarily a declaration of poetry’s inutility, in my experience, proving the utility of poetry, as absurd an idea as that may seem, comes up frequently when one applies for a grant or funding of any kind, either for the monetary means to travel in order to write poetry, or to take time off of work to write poetry, or to host a poetry event. Often questionnaires include a line or two asking “how will this serve the community.” In other words, why is poetry on a different side of the line than, say, fiction (or painting or film)? Does Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds serve the community of Los Angeles, or did William Faulkner somehow serve his community by writing The Sound and the Fury? In the case of Faulkner, the folk of Oxford, Mississippi grew to dislike the novelist in their midst, after they'd read his books, because they claimed that Faulkner had presented an unflattering portrait of what went on there. These two examples are perhaps polar opposites of a sort, but I still hold to the notion that an artist creates because he/she must. I’m pretty sure that authors of fiction who receive grants or endowments aren’t asked whether the new novel that is in the process of being will somehow serve the community.

This “newness” has come into being largely on a completely parallel course to the course that is being charted by the Poetry Foundation. Perhaps two or three of the younger poets that I know have been published in the pages of Poetry magazine, but none of the other 30-40 other amazing younger poets living in Chicago who are all writing what could be called experimental poetry (I would call it contemporary) have been published there and it could be that the editorial board of Poetry is simply not able to hit that vein, whether that’s intentional I have no idea.

Another recent foray into publishing Chicago poetry has been Granta’s (which is financed by a Swedish billionairess who purportedly doesn't like Americans) recent Chicago issue that includes virtually none of the many younger Chicago writers of this newer poetry who frequent venues, bars, and bookstores such as Danny’s, Myopic Books, Elastic Arts, Red Rover, and Series A in Hyde Park.

I was surprised to receive a near-immediate response from the American editor of Granta John Freeman, after I originally criticized Granta's odd editorializing of the Chicago scene and he stressed via e-mail that it wasn’t the intention of Granta editors to “exclude younger poets,” but that he couldn’t find one whose work “bowled him over.” He concluded by commenting that many poets don’t know that Granta publishes poetry and that keeping track of new poets is daunting. My guess is that Granta solicited all the work that was published in their Chicago issue and that the net they cast to find these “Chicago poets” must have been a pretty small one. Ok, enough appetizer.

The poets here aren’t necessarily anti-confessional (and I’m really speaking only for myself). In fact, I love Anne Sexton’s work (who lived in Boston and died in 1974), for example, but what I love about it isn’t its juicy confessional details or risqué (for the time) subject matter—reading Sexton is like watching fireworks. She wrings language into new meanings, which is what’s always excited me about poetry—old or new, whether it was written in Chicago, Boise or Khatmandu.

(Even stranger: A recent addition to the Granta Web site under the “Chicago-issue” banner includes a piece by Milwaukeean Bruce Olds titled “Leaving Chi-Town” that wistfully illustrates the memories that he still has of the city, although presumably he moved away. He even mentions Al Capone—pow, pow, pow, but no Michael Jordan? Ok, to be fair he does include the words “at risk of cliché.”)

As Roland Barthes said, (to paraphrase in a meathanded way and bend the quote by Barthes from a separate discussion to suit my own) I believe that readers of this new Chicago poetry to some extent help “generate the texts they are reading.” So, the poetry here does something, even if it's only the impetus for the creation of new and multiple meanings in the mind of the reader. This open ended poetry that kicked out closure and didn’t even give it cab fare exists because there is a confluence of poets who have either relocated here from elsewhere or returned after stints at Brown, Iowa, or other major schools and what had been known previously as a fly-over city is now a cultural blender par excellence where, if one has an active interest in poetry, there is a genuine sense that something is happening. These poets all seem to have a sense of this kind of awareness. These poems do enact, rather than describe or list in the sense that New York School poems, especially evidenced by the timing in the moment-to-moment sensibility of Frank O’Hara as it comes through in his writing, list or map the consciousness of the author as it splattered against another day living in New York.

So, I’m here to say, too, that it matters not what a poem can say, but it’s what a poem does that makes one want to inhabit it by participating in its meaning. It’s not that some of these Chicago poets have some programmatic impulse to create poetry that narrowly adheres to these sort of strictures regularly—but the awareness of this as an aesthetic option (of many on the menu) and a certain brand of extroversion of personality gives the writing being produced here a genuinely wide-ranging quality that is unique. Despite the quibbling over who is or isn’t a “Chicago poet” as if one would have to live out an expiration date from a previous existence to be granted the nameplate and plastered with the title of “Chicago poet”, from where I’m sitting what’s happening here is galactic. Paul Hoover’s words on the topic of Chicago poetry from an old blog post sum it pretty well “perhaps the usual thing had happened, a revolution of the word.” If all this is so, there is definitely evidence here of the orbit of a number of “heavy planets” (Paul’s words), and I’m happy to drift among them.

Thanks, Daily Reviewer

2009-09-23T08:20:00.000-07:00

Thanks Daily Reviewer for picking Me Tronome as one of the top 100 poetry blogs on the Internet.

Chicagoland

2009-09-22T08:08:00.000-07:00

Adrian Brody in Hollywoodland is perfect as a PI in a noir thriller with his mussy hair and charming quirks (he's a private snoop who doesn't smoke, he chews gum), but here in Chicago we have our own mystery brewing.

Apparently Granta magazine, which is published in England, recently visited a Chicago of which I've never heard.

Their recent "Chicago Issue" features much mention of Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow (why Hemingway's name would be mentioned in an issue of Chicago writing is a head-scratcher, he wrote not-so-favorably of Oak Park) and even includes Roger Ebert (thumbs up) but the plot thickens as one scans the contributors' list. It seems that none of the huge number of younger poets who are now living and writing in Chicago are given any mention.

And, Granta, no one thinks that James Schuyler is representative of Chicago. The man was a roommate of John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara in New York. Have you heard of them?

We can't wait for Granta's New York issue. I hope Hillary Clinton will get a centerspread. I mean she's so New York, I mean Arkansas, er Chicago.

RIP Jim Carroll

2009-09-10T08:33:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Kent Johnson for mentioning this humble blogger at digital emunction .

Still up: Evidence of my past stint as Chicago Poetry Scene Examiner , with reports on Myopic Books, the Hopleaf, Bookslut, Adam Fieled, Bill Allegrezza and one of the most underrated poets of all time, Lorine Niedecker.

Word / for word, issue 15

2009-08-18T12:32:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Tom Hibbard for including some of my work in the new issue of Word for / word.

Poetry by Cindy Davett, Brooklyn Copeland, Mg Roberts, Marthe Reed, Joshua Butts, Marcia Arrieta, Nicole Zdeb, Julius Kalamarz, Trina Burke among others.

Visual poetry by John M. Bennet, Scott Helmes, Kristin Hayter, Sheila E. Murphy, K.S. Ernst, Nico Vassilakis, Ray Lam, Andrew Topel among others.

Political poetry feature (guest-edited by Tom Hibbard) with Jim Leftwich, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Mark Wallace, Roberto Harrison, Eileen Tabios, Mary Woodbury, Michael Basinski, Chuck Stebelton, Buck Downs, Larry Sawyer, David Meltzer, and Tom Hibbard et al.

Essays/Notes: Interview with C.S. Carrier and Elizabeth A. Hiscox, “Heritage Like Money Then” by Arpine Grenier, among others.

Save Michael Reese Hospital reading

2009-07-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

When: July 25, 3-6 p.m. at St. Paul's Art Center
Where: 2215 W. North Ave.

Poetry readings by Larry Sawyer, Charlie Newman, & Al DeGenova
* * *
David Boykin -- solo percussion
* * *

Paul Hartsaw -- tenor saxophone
Dan Godston -- trumpet
Alex Wing -- drums
Jerome Bryerton -- drums

As part of its bid to the Olympics committee, the city of Chicago has decided to build an Olympic park on the south side in conjunction with their plan to make the city accessible for visitors and athletes should the city win its proposal to host the 2016 Olympics. The only problem is that the site of the future Olympics village is also home to Chicago architectural landmarks, including Michael Reese Hospital, which was designed by the legendary architect Walter Gropius with Reginald R. Isaacs. Gropius founded the Bauhaus School in Germany that was a lightning rod for new ideas regarding architectural design worldwide from 1919 to 1933. The influence of Bauhaus ideas on art of all genres is inestimable and continues to this day.

The city of Chicago seems very eager to raze Michael Reese Hospital to the ground whether the Olympic bid is ultimately successful or not. If it is successful and Chicago is chosen as the host city, the Olympics will come and go, and an important piece of Chicago history will be lost forever as a result. This seems like a very large price to pay for a temporary event, even for an event as illustrious as the Olympics.

The Save Michael Reese Hospital group his been organized to address this threat to a Chicago landmark.

Chicago is known for its architecture if anything, and the work of Walter Gropius in the city is an important piece of a puzzle that includes many other skilled architects who made Chicago what it is today, including Louis Sullivan, George W. Maher, Mies van de Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright. The work of these architects and others who made Chicago an architectural landmark that is visited by tourists from all over the world should be respected and the idea that the work of Walter Gropius should be destroyed to pave the way for the Olympics, a temporary event, is profoundly disrespectful to the memory of Gropius as well as to the citizens of Chicago.

Visit the Save Michael Reese Hospital Web site for further information now.

Also see Lynn Becker's, Writings on Architecture for more information.

grüp

2009-07-15T11:44:00.001-07:00

The Group resurfaces.

grupo, groupe, gruppe, gruppo, группа, groep, ομάδα, grupp, مجموعة

“Collaboration”: An Official Printers’ Ball Lead-up Event

2009-07-01T08:49:00.000-07:00

“Collaboration”:
An Official Printers' Ball Lead-up Event

When: Sunday, July 12, 2:00 PM
Where: Woman Made Gallery
675 North Milwaukee Avenue

Free admission.

For this event, writers’ work and/or performance will involve interaction with other writers, performers, art forms, media, maybe even with the audience. Participants in the event include Simone Muench and Philip Jenks, presenting collaboratively written poetry; Mars Gamba-Adisa Caulton, working with her own music; performance poetry duo Marty McConnell and Andi Strickland just back from their Wandering Uterus tour; Jennifer Karmin, in a live improvised collaboration with Chicago writers; Carrie Olivia Adams, Daniel Godston, Laura Goldstein, Amira Hanafi, Coman Poon, and Larry Sawyer performing the text-sound epic Aaaaaaaaaaalice; and curator Nina Corwin in collaboration with Janice Misurell-Mitchell, internationally known improvisational flautist.

More information at Woman Made.org

Reading at Michael Reese Hospital

2009-06-25T09:08:00.000-07:00

What: Save Michael Reese Hospital reading
When: July 25, 6 -11 pm
Where: 2929 S. Ellis Ave.

[pictured: Bauhaus, Dessau]

As part of its bid to the Olympics committee, the city of Chicago has decided to build an Olympic park on the south side in conjunction with their plan to make the city accessible for visitors and athletes should the city win its proposal to host the 2016 Olympics. The only problem is that the site of the future Olympics village is also home to Chicago architectural landmarks, including Michael Reese Hospital, which was designed by the legendary architect Walter Gropius with Reginald R. Isaacs. Gropius founded the Bauhaus School in Germany that was a lightning rod for new ideas regarding architectural design worldwide from 1919 to 1933. The influence of Bauhaus ideas on art of all genres is inestimable and continues to this day.

The city of Chicago seems very eager to raze Michael Reese Hospital to the ground whether the Olympic bid is ultimately successful or not. If it is successful and Chicago is chosen as the host city, the Olympics will come and go, and an important piece of Chicago history will be lost forever as a result. This seems like a very large price to pay for a temporary event, even for an event as illustrious as the Olympics.

The Save Michael Reese Hospital group his been organized to address this threat to a Chicago landmark.

Chicago is known for its architecture if anything, and the work of Walter Gropius in the city is an important piece of a puzzle that includes many other skilled architects who made Chicago what it is today, including Louis Sullivan, George W. Maher, Mies van de Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright. The work of these architects and others who made Chicago an architectural landmark that is visited by tourists from all over the world should be respected and the idea that the work of Walter Gropius should be destroyed to pave the way for the Olympics, a temporary event, is profoundly disrespectful to the memory of Gropius as well as to the citizens of Chicago.

Visit the Save Michael Reese Hospital Web site for further information now.

Also see Lynn Becker's, Writings on Architecture for more information.

Why hasn't poetry disappeared?

2009-06-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

[pictured: The "poet" tags a train in Slovakia.]

Every so often, I get excited about the discussions that wax and wane regarding the cultural relevance of poetry. This
article has more to do with globalization, but it had me thinking again about poetry's cultural relevance. Lately, it seems that national newspapers and magazines have been chiming in with articles about the disappearance of poetry and nearly the same few names are always mentioned (i.e., Remember John Ashbery? He’s the one who writes the cryptic poetry that still confuses all the critics. Or, what about Bob Dylan, wasn’t that poetry? Wait, Bob Dylan is still around. He just came out with a new album. Or, didn’t Jewel and Billy Corgan write poetry too? Didn’t Byron get his cousin pregnant? Remember suffering through The Waste Land in college?)

Well, why hasn’t poetry disappeared? Good question. Does it still have cultural relevance? Yes. Answering why it has cultural relevance isn’t easy.

It’s easier to make the case why poetry doesn’t really matter, in the sense that fiction matters or popular music matters. Namely: Poetry cannot truly be sold. This, paradoxically, is "good" for poetry.

It isn’t a commodity, although it does have an aesthetic weight. It can’t be sold for much more than the cost of its materials. Rare first editions of select books and folios notwithstanding, poets are not working for the marketplace. Fiction authors who are successful receive large advances and enjoy commissions based on book sales. Painters and photographers, even, are producing new works and hope to sell their work for huge sums of money. Artists like Jeff Koons even take orders from benefactors and tailor commissioned works so that the final product is more pleasing to the buyer. Koons is a visual jukebox and that’s why I have no respect for his work. Collectors now pay millions for paintings. Painting as an art form is gaining in value as it becomes an anachronism while other art forms that are more ubiquitous are becoming less appreciated. Video art, which seemed so novel 20 years ago, is now becoming devalued as the technology to create it becomes available to everyone.

In June 1855, Walt Whitman presented his brother George with a newly published first edition of Leaves of Grass and his brother stated flatly that he just “didn’t think it was worth reading.” Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet... He is America."

However, poetry does serve a function that is crucial to society because poets are the Geiger counter that registers the fallibility and the struggles of the human race. Poets create imaginal language that portrays abstract thinking in vivid visual descriptions. Poetry is also supremely portable. The best poetry has the power to transcend cultural differences and national borders. The best poetry defines human consciousness in such a way that the universal nature of our existences comes into clearer focus. Poetry introduces us to ourselves.

Poetry resists commodification because it cannot be quantified. Its value is fleeting and indefinable. I would say that this is a best-case-scenario for poetry, because its nebulous qualities ensure that it will never gain mainstream popularity of understanding. In this age of information the need for understanding our surroundings hasn’t disappeared, although most get it from other sources. Resonant themes and problems that were first presented as poems filter into resonance through movies, television, and the Internet. A popularizing of poetry wouldn’t help it become more relevant or alter its function.

As we look back into history, the lens through which we view literature has led us to make an error in judgment. Poetry has never been popular, so it can’t be “less” popular now. Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman, or Emily Dickinson were relatively unknown to the masses during their lifetimes. Only succeeding generations recognized that their work had any cultural relevance.

Although there has been a boom in creative writing programs nationally since the 1980s, emerging poets find that what they take so seriously is received with indifference but this is not dissimilar to the reception that ground-breaking art has always received. It’s the perception on the part of those creating the art that has changed. College students now can decide to become poets, much like someone might decide to become an engineer or a physical therapist.

In this world that’s drowning in data, abstract written thought that represents a synthesis or a culmination of information into a digestible form is in short supply. That’s always been the prescription for poetry that matters.

Unable to Fully California

2009-05-29T09:16:00.001-07:00

I stare up at the sky and notice Orion, the
Big Dipper, the North Star, and see Venus on the horizon.

On my sleepwalk

this dark-purple lacquer, a sudden comforter, this
night,

French kisses me
while the trees just stand there serenading.

We really can’t trust this nocturnal sightseeing

but the climb does sweeten, as the air thins ever higher
toward some point we try to make.

Words bake in that hot moonlight.

Beastly pinecones have a conversation with me.

Save us from this poem. We need to tell you something.
We’ve been watching you try to
write your way out of it and we’re tired.

I’m tired too, but I look out at the edge of this
paper and see some mastodons there, I say.

The next morning I can’t remember a thing, overhear something about a
bad dream.

Life goes on. We live a life of itineraries.

I’m glad, however,
that together we can open a colorful brochure for some

new world called hope.

Nietzsche as Ashtray

2009-05-26T21:21:00.001-07:00

Filled with revolution.

Is nothing more delightful than the wind,

perhaps a kite-full

should the last page never return

be an attaché, diplomat.

Just as amber preserves

arm yourself with dreams.

At a minimum love it in the night.

The museum inside the eye wide

open.

There on a tiny barren island our

big dark universe,

(but maybe you were thinking about the country).

Crawlspace Tango

2009-04-29T07:32:00.001-07:00

On a bench my newspapered nerves flutter.
Bloom of a dark, wide silence, the human
Tether keeps pulling. Like a snake bisected
Some hypotenuse out of sight, caffeinated.
The rejection of the forest floor, therefore
Is, in its elevator, a wordless weight, while
Originality convalesces in a retirement ward.
Can you see them? Festooned with teenagers
These quixotic gymnasia replete with audits
Move, slender and klutzy, as if incomplete.
But when the revolver of Indianas reloads
Accomplished summers annex talismans.
Every piñata from my childhood owes
Me a climax or a switchblade. What
Thumbnail December powered the twittering
Machine of our darkest months, yet kept me
Sheathed in the comfort of that celestial
Grinding? Do the cement notes of Orpheus still
Drip from the trees where the laundry
Of our lives waits in such rustic quarters?
Neither, say two final gondoliers ad infinitum.

(on the occasion of Kenward Elmslie’s 80th birthday)

.

2009-04-23T08:14:00.001-07:00

The Bullfighter's Secret

2009-04-17T07:44:00.000-07:00

It’s been a while since Simon Pettet read at Myopic Books, but I remember the night well, because Pettet’s poetry was a subtle revelation, so I was glad to see his recent interview in Brooklyn Rail . Pettet is a poet who is comfortable in his own skin, and seems to address his own philosophical world with a understated bravado that is no less weighty for being inherently likable, which is no small task. Pettet excels at setting up an expectation in a poem, rhythmically or via imagery, then gleefully confounding that expectation. I was honored to publish some of his stuff in milk magazine . Here's Simon with the poet George Wallace (r).

Bushwhackers. Guerillas. Wizard of Oz, Kansas.

2009-04-07T13:06:00.000-07:00

Dylan sounds off on his new tunes, Barack Obama, Chicago, and Ulysses S. Grant.

Tomorrow Night

2009-04-02T12:23:00.000-07:00

First Friday Poetry Series
Friday, April 3rd (8 p.m.)

Jennifer Karmin
Elizabeth Harper
Larry Sawyer
&
Dan Godston

St Paul’s Cultural Center
2215 W North Avenue
2+ blocks west of the Damon Blue Line stop
Street parking available
Beer, wine, soft drinks available @ cool-low prices
Free Admission
Donation Requested
The First Friday Poetry Series is a Poetry Green Zone.

Poetry RIP

2009-03-28T07:56:00.000-07:00

Once again, poetry is
dying. This oft-repeated prognosis always surprises me here in Chicago, because we are rife with magazines and reading series. Whatever your malady if you need some resuscitation stat, call in the life suport with these links. Newsweek didn't do its homework on this one.

Chicago Review

Another Chicago Magazine

After Hours

Poetry

Make

Book Slut

The Myopic Books Poetry Reading Series

Series A

milk magazine

Woodland Pattern Book Center

The Danny's Reading Series

The Poetry Center of Chicago

ChicagoPoetry.com

ARS NICE POETICA

2009-03-25T10:56:00.000-07:00

a poem must
be not mean

-Ken Mikolowsky

look/ out where yr going

2009-03-16T07:11:00.000-07:00

Coming up on 4 years now--since Robert Creeley’s passing (March 30), which has me thinking again of what a vacuum exists in his absence. Many poets champion or cheerlead only the work of other poets most similar to their own, but Creeley had a reputation for being much more magnanimous. He would respond to an e-mail in a kindly and forthright way that not only answered the questions at hand but also provided new avenues of consideration -- this is something I had heard about him from other poets and then I also experienced it myself. Being one whose writing doesn’t resemble Creeley’s in its brevity, I marvel over what he accomplished (and in such few words). One gets the sense that each and every syllable in a Creeley poem is absolutely crucial to the poem’s construction. In the alchemical sense, all dross in his work was melted away and nothing but the gold remains -- wit and wisdom that doesn’t seem didactic. Creeley’s Wikipedia page is a useful start.

Paraskavedekatriaphobia

2009-03-13T06:30:00.000-07:00

James Joyce, in "Finnegans Wake," coined the word Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntu
onnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoo.

Aristophones, in his play "The Assemblywomen," coined the word lopadotemakhoselakhogameokranioleipsanodrimypotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakek
hymenokikhlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptokephalliokigklopeleiolagōiosirai-
obaphētraganopterýgōn.

Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism: The longest nontechnical word in the OED

Antidisestablishmentarianism: The longest noncoined/nontechnical word

Of which, Wikipedia provides the agglutinative origins:

establish (9)
to set up, put in place, or institute (originally from the Latin stare, to stand)
dis-establish (12)
to end the established status of a body, in particular a church, given such status by law, such as the Church of England
disestablish-ment (16)
the separation of church and state (specifically in this context it is the political movement of the 1860s in Britain)
anti-disestablishment (20)
opposition to disestablishment
antidisestablishment-ary (23)
of or pertaining to opposition to disestablishment
antidisestablishmentari-an (25)
an opponent of disestablishment
antidisestablishmentarian-ism (28)
the movement or ideology that opposes disestablishment.

Honorificabilitudinitatibus is the longest word in all of Shakespeare's works.

One of the longest place names is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokai
whenuakitanatahul. (It's a hill in New Zealand.)

But if we're talking about paraskavedekatriaphobia "the origin of the link between bad luck and Friday the 13th is murky. The whole thing might date to Biblical times (the 13th guest at the Last Supper betrayed Jesus). By the Middle Ages, both Friday and 13 were considered bearers of bad fortune. In modern times, the superstition permeates society.

Five Friday-the-13th facts:

1. Fear of Friday the 13th - one of the most popular myths in science - is called paraskavedekatriaphobia as well as friggatriskaidekaphobia. Triskaidekaphobia is fear of the number 13.

2. Many hospitals have no room 13, while some tall buildings skip the 13th floor and some airline terminals omit Gate 13.

3. President Franklin D. Roosevelt would not travel on the 13th day of any month and would never host 13 guests at a meal. Napoleon and President Herbert Hoover were also triskaidekaphobic, with an abnormal fear of the number 13.

4. Mark Twain once was the 13th guest at a dinner party. A friend warned him not to go. 'It was bad luck,' Twain later told the friend. 'They only had food for 12.' Superstitious diners in Paris can hire a quatorzieme, or professional 14th guest.

5. The number 13 suffers from its position after 12, according to numerologists who consider the latter to be a complete number - 12 months in a year, 12 signs of the zodiac, 12 gods of Olympus, 12 labors of Hercules, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 apostles of Jesus, 12 days of Christmas and 12 eggs in a dozen.

Pythagorean legacy

Meanwhile the belief that numbers are connected to life and physical things - called numerology - has a long history.

You can trace it all the way from the followers of Pythagoras, whose maxim to describe the universe was "all is number.'" (Livescience.com)

However, there are also those who have no hesitation in using the number. "In the Great Seal of the United States there are 13 olive leaves (with 13 olives), 13 arrows, and 13 stars. These form a triangle over the eagle with the number 13 on each point. On the reverse the pyramid has 13 levels.

The number 1138 (1+1+3+8=13) is scattered through many of George Lucas' films, namely owing to the fact that one of his early films was THX 1138. In fact it is represented in all six of the Star Wars movies.

Ozzie Guillén, manager of the 2005 World Series Champion Chicago White Sox, has worn the number throughout his baseball career. Alex Rodriguez began wearing it upon joining the New York Yankees (three, the number he had previously worn, is retired by the Bronx Bombers to honor Babe Ruth). Dan Marino, an American football player known for passing the 2nd most yards in NFL history, wore the number 13, although pundits in the sport have often cited him as the greatest quarterback never to win an NFL championship. Basketball great Wilt Chamberlain wore the number 13 on his jersey throughout his NBA career." (Wikipedia)

In Italy, 13 is considered to be a lucky number. Ciào.

Readings at Myopic Books

2009-03-12T14:18:00.000-07:00

Readings are free in the Myopic Books Poetry Series, and there are exciting upcoming events on the calendar. Hope to see you.

Sounds Good to Me

2009-03-12T13:04:00.000-07:00

To ridicule the nonsensical rules of English pronunciation, George Bernard Shaw demonstrated that the word fish can logically be spelled ghoti:
gh as in laugh
o as in women
ti as in nation

Homophonic translation means translating not the sense but the sounds from one language to another, or even within the same language.

___________

Charles Bernstein on the homophonic translations of Celia and Louis Zukofsky in Jacket #30: “Zukofsky’s iconoclastic approach to translation would flower with Catullus, which he wrote with Celia Zukofsky, working on it from 1958-1966. For Catullus, the Zukofskys developed a technique that has come to be called homophonic translation – translation with special emphasis to the sound rather than the lexical meaning. Since Latin and English share many cognates, the results are sometimes uncannily resonant, even passionate, versions, of the original poems.”

“Leading with the sound, homophonic translation reframes what is significant in translation, challenging the idea that the translation should focus on content or create poems that sound fluent in their new language. Zukofsky insists that the mark of the translator be pronounced, and that in making the translation strange, we may provide a way to come closer to its core.”

Here’s the first chunk of Pablo Neruda’s “Gentleman Alone” followed by my homophonic translation:

Caballero solo/Pablo Neruda

Los jóvenes homosexuales y las muchachas amorosas,
y las largas viudas que sufren el delirante insomnio,
y las jóvenes señoras preñadas hace treinta horas,
y los roncos gatos que cruzan mi jardín en tinieblas,
como un collar de palpitantes ostras sexuales
rodean mi residencia solitaria,
como enemigos establecidos contra mi alma,
como conspiradores en traje de dormitorio
que cambiaran largos besos espesos por consigna.

El radiante verano conduce a los enamorados
en uniformes regimientos melancólicos,
hechos de gordas y flacas y alegres y tristes parejas:
bajo los elegantes cocoteros, junto al océano y la luna
hay una continua vida de pantalones y polleras,
un rumor de medias de seda acariciadas,
y senos femeninos que brillan como ojos.

El pequeño empleado, después de mucho,
después del tedio semanal, y las novelas leídas de noche, en cama,
ha definitivamente seducido a su vecina,
y la lleva a los miserables cinematógrafos
donde los héroes son potros o príncipes apasionados,
y acaricia sus piernas llenas de dulce vello
con sus ardientes y húmedas manos que huelen a cigarrillo.
________________

Lost, jubilant homophone, errant amour
My largess, so viable, suffers delirious insomnias
And my jovial woman, prescient with hours,
You lose rancheros and cats, cruise tardy and blasé
Comely in your collar of palpitations. Sexual ostrich
Rodeo solitary residences,
While enemies establish alma maters
And conspire in trial dormitories,
Cakes large as waking kiss wives on consignment.

Radiant veranda, conducive to enamel
Wear the regimented uniform of melancholy
Etched with gorgeous flame, allegories and trysts parry
Bars with elegant cacophonies, jump oceans in the moon
Hide continuous lives, as if pantomimed and pollenized
These rumors of medicinal aviaries, sane and
Feminine, keep brilliant company amid eyes.

Piquant employee, despair is mocha
Destined for tedium, seminal novels leaden night
With roads and definitions, seducing vaqueros
Who lay in wait for miserable cinematographers.
Done are the years, and their sons poach principals’ passions.
Why carry such piers? Lead us, dulcet violins
Con sunlight ardently, as humid men walk cigars.

DFW

2009-03-02T07:46:00.000-08:00

Word is that Little, Brown is to publish posthumously David Foster Wallace's novel The Pale King next year. Illinois is getting even more attention of late: The setting for the book is an IRS office in Illinois in the 1980s. Thanks to The New Yorker for the excerpt.

New Sound Files at FoggedClarity.com

2009-03-01T15:03:00.000-08:00

Two of my new poems are up at Fogged Clarity with corresponding sound files, too.

Vanitas

2009-02-28T12:40:00.001-08:00

Tom Clark is now blogging at Vincent Katz's new Vanitas blog. It's good to see Vanitas running strong and Clark's running commentary.

Extra

2009-02-23T08:36:00.000-08:00

Are we on the verge of witnessing the death of the newspaper?

Colophon

2009-02-03T08:20:00.000-08:00

Milk magazine is included in the Colophon International Magazine Symposium in Luxembourg.

Sayonara, Rod.

2009-01-30T07:20:00.000-08:00

I once thought I caught a glimpse of ex-Illinois governor Blagojevich sprinting the sidestreets of Lincoln Square in his black running gear and wanted to say thanks for the helicopters. There's nothing like being awakened by the sound of a swarm of helicopters, because you happen to live too close to a disgraced politician on the morning when the story breaks. Sayonara, Rod.

The good news is that Chicago is really heating up in the next few weeks. Thermometers aside, the city will be a hotspot thanks to the upcoming AWP Conference in the coming weeks. These are only some of the events in store. Hope to see you.

February 2, Andrew Terhune, David Trinidad, & Jan Beatty @ ELBOWING OFF THE STAGE reading space, 1278 N. Milwaukee 4W.

February 4, A.D. Jameson & Philip Jenks @ Series A. 7:00-8:00 p.m. At the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Avenue

February 11, Rebecca Wolff, Simone Muench, Philip Jenks, Ish Klien & Lewis Warsh @ Danny’s Tavern, 1951 W. Dickens, Bucktown, Chicago.

February 13, Red Rover Series presents Experiment #26: Friday Night in Chicago: A Small Press Showcase with Switchback Books, Action Books, Flood Editions, Futurepoem Books, Les Figues Press, Ugly Duckling Press and more @ Link’s Hall, 3435 N. Sheffield, #207.

February 13, Kevin Coval, Simone Muench, Larry Sawyer, Ray Bianchi, Chris Glomski, Jennifer Scappettone, William Allegrezza, Melissa Severin & Jackie White read @ School of the Art Institute Ballroom, 6:30pm, 112 S. Michigan Avenue (sponsored by the Poetry Center of Chicago).

February 14, Denise Duhamel, Jenny Boully, Susan Wheeler, Daniel Nester, Prageeta Sharma, Gene Tanta, Jen Tynes, Lea Graham, Reb Livingston, Mirela Ramona Ciupag, Gina Myers, Natalie Lyalin, Emily Kendal Frey, Zach Schomburg, Larry Sawyer & Bruce Covey @ Myopic Books, 8:00 pm, 1564 N. Milwaukee, Wicker Park, Chicago.

A Writers' Congress

2009-01-11T09:41:00.000-08:00

California sounds nice about now, because we're getting a lot of snow. I'm glad I'm in Chicago, though. There's a lot going on. Look out for the new anthology edited by Chris Green titled A Writers’ Congress: Chicago Poets on Barack Obama’s Inauguration with contributors including:

Christian Wiman, Josh Corey, Jan Bottiglieri, Brandi Homan, Larry Janowski, Tony Trigilio, David Trinidad, Arielle Greenberg, Richard Jones, James Shea, Elise Paschen, Rachel Webster, Francesco Levato, Alice George, Mary Hawley, Mike Puican, Cecilia Pinto, Eileen Favorite, cin salach, Anna Marie Craighead-Kintis, Liam Heneghan, Ralph Hamilton, Virginia Bell, Jackie White, Simone Muench, Haki Madhubut, Deborah Rosen, Helen Degan-Cohen, Charlie Newman, Allan Johnston, Garrett Brown, Maureen Flannery, Chicu Reddy, Suzanne Buffman, Susan Hahn, Reginald Gibbons, Calvin Forbes, Mary Kinzie, Judith Valente, Kevin Coval, Li-Young Lee, Julie Parsons Nesbitt, Dina Elenbogen, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Vicky Anderson, Ray Bianch, Bill Allegrezza, Ed Roberson, Kathleen Kirk, Maureen Seaton, Barry Silesky, Jeff Schiff, Susen James, Brenda Cardenas, Christina Pugh, Max Barry, Patty McMillen, Michael Watson, Stuart Dybek, John Keene, Marc Smith, Lauren Levato, Luis Alberto Urrea & Larry Sawyer.

Here's Yusef Komunyakaa's blurb for the book...

"This anthology of varied voices feels like a single praise song, in the spirit of a larger democratic project, with varying pitch and tone, and this nuance is accomplished without sacrificing the uniqueness of each poet. The reader actually encounters an element of the Barack Obama phenomenon; the philosophy of a shared experience at this poignant juncture in the life of America seems to focus the collection. At times, candid and truth-seeking, personal and public, entertaining and meditative, urban and suburban, imagistic and indebted to orality, these wonderful poems not only convey the complexity of Chitown, but they also unmask the nation's soul, without being nostalgic or overly whimsical. We all can embrace this Obama-inspired anthology of timely praise."

2009-01-04T15:11:00.000-08:00

I'll read some new poems at the Poetry Center of Chicago, AWP Off-site Reading. Hope to see you there.

What: Chicago Poetics Reading, sponsored by the Poetry Center of Chicago
When: Friday, February 13, 2009 - 6:30pm
Where: SAIC Ballroom, 112 S. Michigan Avenue

I Got Silver by Your Hives

2008-11-26T07:31:00.000-08:00

Pero los ramos son alegres,
los ramos son como nosotros.

-Lorca

So, we left the artillery
Blooming in the fields of blight
And crept along that music
As flower architects.
My fried rabbi, gloating,
Combs the night’s hair?
Father, you are my triple tomb and
No cherry blossoms in the
Graffiti ward, as the metaphors
Lounge upon that bricked
Naiveté. I have only one life and
Wear a sweater of shadows,
But my mouth seeds forever
Autumn’s hopeful decrees.

2008-11-26T04:45:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving to you.

2008-11-21T10:01:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Katy Lederer for the great reading at Myopic and the blog mention.

2008-11-19T14:29:00.000-08:00

Poets have to self-publicize. Marilyn looks shocked, but here's another milkmag mention.

Also, I made the "Sexy" issue of MiPoesias . Issuu is such an incredible publishing tool and the magazine looks really cool. Check it out.

If you're in the neighborhood of Evanston, Illinois this Friday, I'll be reading some of my new poetry at Brothers K. coffeehouse, 500 Main St, 6:30 pm.

2008-11-14T11:35:00.000-08:00

My chapbook Disharmonium was mentioned in the new issue of Arthur . Now it's official thanks to Byron Coley and Thurston Moore.

"...got a very nice new book of poems from longtime milk magazine editor Larry Sawyer. It's called Disharmonium ( Silver Wonder Press), and is a funny, surreal collection that combines mundane imagist language into a rich new mofungo."

Woof woof woof

2008-11-13T06:30:00.000-08:00

Look, fried chicken, a lonely moon
With fey eyes, electric women
Wearing windows and nothing else
A crazed prisoner, perhaps flying,
With a mouth like a cavity, these
Jaws of Nebraska, faux natives,
Slander and oceans, tourists jiggly in the
Distance. Who texts such punks with
Shibboleth diction? What divine blackboard
Triple dunks boldly whose fairy?
Were there ghosts, dismal and grinning?
At the mall were no clichés or surgeries
But a sick levity and ticking quicksand.
Dogs selling bags of imaginary gravity.

2008-11-06T08:21:00.000-08:00

It was great to bring On the Road out of the display case and read a section from the scroll edition at Columbia last night as the el rolled by outside the big window on Wabash downtown. Kerouac’s large-hearted open letter to America still has the power to inspire and it was interesting to hear the inflections given the words by the readers as they stood in front of the large triple-screen flashing scenes from classic road movies. Thanks to Columbia College for sponsoring such a well-orchestrated event.

Of Tchaikovsky

2008-11-04T09:15:00.001-08:00

Laughing, my sense
Of humor came to visit me in
The middle of the night. War
And famine jumped out the
Window. I pulled out a chair
For my sense of humor and
Then yanked it away at the last
Second, allowing my sense
Of humor to fall on its ass.
My sense of humor thought
This wasn’t very funny, so I
Attempted to make amends.
I cooked the most elaborate dinner.
There was a lit candelabra. The sounds
Of Tchaikovsky, D Major, Op. 35,
Like a sloppy kiss, laid its sticky notes upon
The air. Later I discovered that
Nothing would ever make the
Seasons change any faster and no
One would ever explain to me how those cars
Could slide past the window outside
Filled with such private
Catastrophes.

Benevolent as Gold

2008-10-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

derelict page an in
vitation to grace, thus we ga
ther innocence almo
st tangential, a high minde
d echo, like a silo or dyna
mite. the eye must be
a salesperson to marry
these hours, their signifiers

Ti Jean

2008-10-24T07:30:00.000-07:00

Jack Kerouac's On the Road works best when read aloud ... quickly, slowly, with a careful mind paid to the sounds and rhythms of the words as they loiter and rush across the page. The [. . . scroll of paper three inches thick made up of one single-spaced, unbroken 120-foot-long paragraph . . .] was written by Kerouac in three weeks in a marathon series of day and night writing as Kerouac transformed himself into the American Balzac. Because On the Road rolls outward in a torrent rather than _____ in stasis like a carefully crafted sculpture, the writing style and method of composition is American in the sense that the emphasis is on timing and production.

Kerouac churned out the novel like he laid it on an assembly line and the speech patterns of the sentences when read aloud have an obvious connection to jazz ... America’s only indigenous art form. When reading this mountain for the first few times, it’s nearly impossible for the reader not to feel swept away by the exuberance expressed by the book and the obvious reverence that Kerouac endearingly held for his subjects. The author, as Sal Paradise, casts out doubt and ventures in the Wilderness to find the elusive truth that he feels bubbling inside him. Certain aspects of On the Road give it a spiritual quality; as heroes Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty race back and forth across the country searching for what it means to be alive in various cars that are nearly like ships slicing the waves of farmland that crisscross middle-America. Kerouac’s bookish alter-ego Sal Paradise, even in name, jumpstarts a journey of discovery that leads none know where. Submerged in the book one also experiences catalogs of details of a 1950s America that Kerouac so lovingly documented. Kerouac also framed the downbeat characters in the novel unabashedly. His polyphonic portraits were nothing more than thinly veiled representations of his own inner-circle, which sometimes gives the book a feeling of inspired gossip. It was enjoyable for me to discover who each subject was and to eventually read their work. This has led many to claim that On the Road is the novel that set them on a path toward an active interest in many other artistic and cultural rivulets and streams. The characters, Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac), Rollo Greb (Alan Ansen), Old Bull Lee (William S. Burroughs), Jane (Joan Vollmer), Damien (Lucian Carr), Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), Chad King (Hal Chase), Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg), Ian MacArthur (John Clellon Holmes), and Elmer Hassel (Herbert Huncke) all seem on the edge of something: But what that something is doesn’t resonate completely. It’s a feeling being expressed in these pages, not a dismal or defeatist existential problem. The book celebrates life and emphasizes the journey (versus the destination) in a wholly unique way. Kerouac’s oratorio hums in the imagination and lingers in the mind. There’s something singular and elemental about this book like the smell of a winter fireplace, or sighting a planet in the night sky, or watching a dog catch a Frisbee in the park, or the sound of a lonely ship’s horn enveloped in mist, or gazing down on a panoramic view after hiking a woodsy hillside. Kerouac’s deft timing and sincerity reaches out through the page and grabs you by the arm, pulling you along for the windswept cinematic ride. [Pictured: Neal Cassady, circa 1955]

Columbia: On the Road Reading

2008-10-24T04:22:00.000-07:00

Come hear me read a portion of Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road, Wednesday, November 5, at 8pm in the Conaway Center, 1104 South Wabash, on the Columbia College Chicago campus. Here's how I answered the introductory question of what On the Road means to me.

"On the Road was one of the first books I read that really ignited a sense of the passion that I hold for words. The musicality of the language was such an inspiration at a critical time in my life. Seeing the world through Kerouac's eyes in this book gave me hope for my own journey down life's proverbial 'road.'"

Get Your Yeats On

2008-10-22T10:52:00.000-07:00

A rare, first edition of a poem by William Butler Yeats, "Easter 1916" , is sold at auction for $9,600.

Here's the poem in its entirety.

___________

Image: William Butler Yeats, by Louis le Brocquy, 1994

(This has always been my favorite WBY poem.)

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Scroll Down

2008-10-20T07:53:00.000-07:00

Amy King and Vincent Katz at milkmag.org

The blood, sweat, tears of Jack Kerouac: The scroll of On the Road .

The passing of a saint: The death of Sister Emmanuelle .

John Ashbery's "intentional unmeaning" ?

The last voyage of Captain Shock ?

The Chicago Tribune endorses Barack Obama?

Michele Bachman: still stuck in the Fifties.

A postcard from Japan.

Alan Kaufman's Outlaw Bible online.

Judge orders excavation at Lorca's grave.

Jackie Lalley's economic stimulus package.

McClure's Rich Silence

2008-10-16T09:39:00.000-07:00

It was really something to hear Michael McClure read his work the other night at Columbia College here in Chicago. I'd never heard him read before, although I'd spent a few hours with him at his home years ago, which is a great memory. Reading from Plum Stones and other books, McClure used his voice to really awaken a sense of wonder in the audience by offering rich silence in equal measure to the words themselves. Each was like a Calder mobile-sculpture that hung in the air until McClure moved along bringing the audience with him--marvelous to hear his "beast-language" poems too. There was something expressed therein that is inexpressible with poems that rely on a literal meaning. Peering inside each poem presented by McClure was a real gift.

Here's a link to an interesting renku and some of McClure's haiku followed by a few of mine.

coven of leaves
how hot is the breath of
tomorrow’s fires

jet insect above
make thick trails of smoke
of our hasty goodbyes

drop of honey
sweet golden lightshow
drown on my tongue

Some Vague Attention

2008-10-13T11:31:00.000-07:00

Some vague attention
of wind stirs the golden oats
-Joanne Kyger

Desolate film,

haunt that totality
where we opera.

The size of Finland
my invisible alto.

Dream-starve the
metallic gauze of permanence.

A stethoscope heard itself,
left us thumping.

Drenched in owls,
these mysterious data.

Forests allow themselves that exact tangle.

Thax Redux

2008-10-13T07:03:00.000-07:00

[Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips and Thax Douglas discuss the merits of giving senior citizens a free ride on the CTA.]

Sunday, Oct. 26
Reading: Thax Douglas and friends
Location: Myopic Books, 1564 N. Milwaukee, Chicago
Time: 7 pm

Contact: larrysawyerpoet@yahoo.com

2008-10-09T11:24:00.001-07:00

Issue 1 is back up. Make up your minds.

2008-10-08T12:39:00.000-07:00

Luckily I saved the PDF of Issue 1 before the "editors" took it off the Internet. Like all good pranks, it's now just a memory. Thanks to Gary Sullivan for mentioning my review of John Ashbery's and Joe Brainard's The Vermont Notebook in his Oct. 8 blog entry .

2008-10-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

Being included in Issue 1 is like one more chain letter, but it's interesting to browse through all the names. It raises questions of authenticity and identity, being assigned a "poem" without knowing the author. Then, finding out, (surprise), it's supposed to be me. The concept pokes holes in the ego. Someone, somewhere has a lot of free time. Here's the poem I "wrote." I wonder what Pablo Picasso thought about when he read the issue. I never thought I'd be published with Osip Mandelstam or Isadore Ducasse. Hey, he once wrote "plagiarism is necessary." Maybe that's what Vladimir Zykov, Stephen McLaughlin, and Gregory Laynor (the three responsible) had in mind by listing themselves as "researchers." More than 3,000 pages? I'll need an intermission.

Like a Spot

Frown
Depend

In heaven
Throwing trust

Your impetuous existence
A spot
Restraining
New as coming
Of lightning

@ Myopic Books

2008-10-03T13:49:00.000-07:00

Chicago is the place to be next weekend. Four Beat poets will be in town next weekend for readings and talks. This is a unique opportunity to see these talented authors read their work and share their experiences. [Pictured: Joanne Kyger]

Oct. 10
Reading: Joanne Kyger
Location: Columbia College, 600 S. Michigan Ave.
Time: 7 pm

Oct. 11
Reading: Michael McClure
Location: Columbia College, 600 S. Michigan Ave.
Time: 7 pm

Oct. 12
Readings: Michael Rothenberg & David Meltzer
Location: Myopic Books, 1564 N. Milwaukee
Time: 7 pm

A leading poet of the Beat Movement, David MELTZER was raised in Brooklyn during the War years; performed on radio & early TV on the Horn & Hardart Children¹s Hour. Was exiled to L.A. at 16 & at 17 enrolled in an ongoing academy w/ artists Wallace Berman, George Herms, Robert Alexander, Cameron; migrated to San Francisco in l957 for higher education w/ peers & maestros like Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Joanne Kyger, Diane DiPrima, Michael McClure, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, Jack Hirschman, a cast of thousands all living extraordinary ordinary lives. Beat Thing [La Alameda Press, 2004] won the Josephine Miles PEN Award, 2005. Was editor and interviewer for San Francisco Beat: Talking With The Poets [City Lights, 2001]. With Steve Dickison, co-edits Shuffle Boil, a magazine devoted to music in all its appearances & disappearances. 2005 saw the publication of David's Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer by Viking/Penguin, a collection spanning over forty years of work that paints a vivid portrait of Meltzer's life as a poet through poems taken from thirty of his previous books of poetry. With a versatile style and playful tone, Meltzer offers his unique vision of civilization with a range of juxtapositions from Jewish mysticism and everyday life to jazz and pop culture.

Michael ROTHENBERG is a poet, songwriter, and editor of Big Bridge magazine online at www.bigbridge.org. His poetry books include Man/Woman, a collaboration with Joanne Kyger, The Paris Journals (Fish Drum Press), Monk Daddy (Blue Press), and Unhurried Vision (La Alameda/University of New Mexico Press). His poems have been published widely in small press publications including, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Berkeley Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse, First Intensity, Fish Drum, Fulcrum, Golden Handcuffs Review, House Organ, Prague Literary Review, Tricycle, Van Gogh's Ear, Vanitas, Zyzzyva, JACK, and Jacket. He is also author of the novel Punk Rockwell. Rothenberg's 2005 CD collaboration with singer Elya Finn, was praised by poet David Meltzer as "fabulous-all [the] songs sound like Weimar Lenya & postwar Nico, lushly affirmative at the same time being edged w/ cosmic weltschmertz. An immensely tasty production." He is also editor for the Penguin Poet series, which includes selected works of Philip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, David Meltzer and Ed Dorn. He has recently completed the Collected Poems of Philip Whalen for Wesleyan University Press.

O, Whiplash Nation

2008-09-28T15:39:00.001-07:00

fortune smiles on the unwilling/ My line beckons

What of Julius Caesar

Above us a pox of stars / he led his men to victory.

Look/ Make toast properly.

My fragile exotic tapestry / clean as a shiny chromed fender

Look to the high moon driving.

2008-09-28T04:15:00.000-07:00

Happy birthday, Black Mountain College .

2008-09-24T12:48:00.000-07:00

Lorca was everyone, they say.

This Sunday @ Myopic Books

2008-09-18T09:04:00.000-07:00

Sunday, September 21 – Mark Yakich & Johannes Göransson

Myopic Books in Chicago -- Sundays at 7:00 / 1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue,
2nd Floor

Johannes GORANSSON is the author of three books of poetry and prose and the translator of Remainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg, Ideals Clearance by Henry Parland, Collobert Orbital by Johan Jönsson, and With Deer by Aase Berg (the last two forthcoming later this year). He is also the co-editor of the press Action Books and the online journal Action, Yes.

Mark YAKICH is the author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (National Poetry Series, Penguin 2004), The Making of Collateral Beauty (Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo 2006), and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (Penguin 2008). He is an associate professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. Mark divides his time between the bedroom and the kitchen.

Upcoming

Sunday, October 12 / Michael Rothenberg & David Meltzer (In conjunction with the Poetry Center of Chicago)

Sunday, October 19 / John Tipton & Brenda Iijima

Sunday, October 26 / Thax Douglas, Jason Pickleman, Tim Kinsella & Elizabeth Harper

Sunday, November 9 / Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Lisa Janssen, & Jennifer Karmin

Sunday, November 16 / Katy Lederer & Special Guest

Sunday, December 7 / Sunday, December 7 - Daniel Borzutzky, Kristin Dykstra & Gabriel Gudding
2009 Schedule

Sunday, January 11 - Dan Godston & Special Guest

2008-09-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

A new literary art form has been discovered ... That's Tom at the beach.

Seeing what it pleases

2008-09-04T06:32:00.000-07:00

Seeing what it pleases—
Dirt of the path making
A final net, or sleep,
And in that choosing sees
What? Which path
Chooses, to me,
What cannot be—
As if a snake snaking
Outside what darkness
What eye, in seeing
This life, but a seeming; no
Meaning, bites the
Mind from being.

Two Old Poems

2008-09-02T07:08:00.000-07:00

Dressed in silence
—Emptiness Wind Street Birds—

The day arrives hanging
by a thread of sleep
Applauding the sky with
Their wings birds shrink
Clouds cloak the

ii.

Woman’s voice in the distance, sounding
like a coin dropped into a wishing well

Trees speak in shadows, nor do you hear
The sky clearing its throat

Will your shampoo protect us from these
Realizations, or will we sink into them?

Equal ourselves in this summer equation.

iii.

Any body in balance available as the earth
Revolves begrudgingly.

Unelectable, we visit yawn the peninsula.

Stars are bright wounds threading moments.

Title appropriated from “Draft 85: Hard Copy” by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

________________

All-Terrain Pastoral

The aggressive tread pattern of your voice
left a welt upon the air. My aftermarket love

you are night’s chassis, shit-friendly, but
outfitted, too, for the street’s bleeding feedback.

Crush me, model, with options and leave
utility lacking. Scion of speed, most

happily, I found your gears screaming.
I crave your power, analyze your finishes.

Perhaps I’m not so performance oriented,
or better suited to those more street capable.

My responsive companion, will you "hold your
own"? Keep cranking when the heat is on?

What Stygian chasm best suits our deep-water
crossing? What rough landing claims us?

Barack Obama: It's About Time!

2008-08-29T08:16:00.001-07:00

Barack Obama is as "American" as a political candidate can possibly be and painting him as anything other than a patriotic American is a blind alley. His story is an American success story because of his varied background and heartfelt desire to help the underdog. Republicans, no doubt, will attempt to portray him as something other than one who intends to preserve the rule of law as expressed in the Constitution, although he has sworn to do so. He took the oath as did John McCain.

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."

I’ve heard that after a presumptive candidate accepts a party’s nomination he or she is subject to a briefing that outlines party goals and reveals certain details regarding national security that aren’t provided beforehand, because the candidate is considered officially in the game and therefore provided with a higher security clearance. This is conjecture, but the rationale that a candidate should be as knowledgeable as possible before the debates is a no-brainer. Often I’ve heard friends or relatives comment that political figures cannot reveal their true intentions because they have the national security of the United States to consider and nothing is more important, and that average citizens would not understand. We’ll never have a truly transparent government, but the level of contempt for honesty shown by Bush and Cheney reached new lows. As we’ve all seen with Iraq, when the American people are misled then our “blood and treasure” is squandered, which destroys our credibility and hinders our ability to drum up support among our allies when we truly need their help in a genuinely dire situation. This is what has nearly run us aground. Obama seems ready to provide new solutions to the disproportionate influence of the military-industrial complex that put us into a situation like Iraq and nearly crippled our economy. It may be years before we really understand the billions lost in Iraq on a nation that doesn't even appreciate, or want, our influence.

In his speech last night Obama proved to be sympathetic to the plight of middle-class Americans struggling through recession by providing real-life examples. This is a great thing, because for the last eight years it’s been obvious that George W. Bush, with trickle-down economics, is not sympathetic to the needs of those who aren’t millionaires. McCain seems poised to take up this myopic neo-con mantle by his recent comments that those who make $250,000 a year are still middle class. This puts him in the category of those who are completely blind to the struggles of average people in this country.

What Obama seemed to focus on the most was the idea of restoring “America’s promise.” He’ll be attacked by the Republican smear machine on his perceived lack of experience (although Bush had zero experience in Washington before his presidency, a fact that doesn’t seem to be heralded often enough by Democrats) and he may be able to defend himself against that by the force and experience of Joe Biden. By choosing Biden, Obama bolstered his position in that department and it seems certain that Biden will bring a working-man’s perspective to the ticket, as well as years of hard-won, foreign-policy experience.

The real question is how Obama will sell the idea of change to the American people. His die-hard supporters seem ready for an Obama presidency no matter what that might mean, but those on the fence are listening closely to the details offered. Middle-class, Bible-belt Americans for example who have experienced the downside of Bush’s misguided policies would seem to be an easy sell, but they will not like the idea of any government interference in their daily lives. The key issue raised by Senator Clinton--healthcare--seems to have been put on the back burner somewhat by Obama. This may work in his favor because, although it’s obvious that change is necessary to jump start the vitality of our economy and to bolster our position on the world stage, middle-class Americans will not appreciate a government program that doesn’t allow them to choose healthcare providers. When Obama says

“Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who’s willing to work.”

I’m glad to hear that someone who may possibly win the presidency is attuned to the needs of regular people, but it will be difficult for him to sell the idea of change to fence-sitters if he presents his idea in a way that can be labeled as “big government” by his opponent. It’s ironic that the Republicans gleefully strip away our privacy rights while championing themselves as supporters of small government, but that irony is lost on the masses. Obama will probably defend himself well against accusations that his perceived inexperience is a liability, but he should tread very carefully when explaining how his brand of change would affect average Americans in their day-to-day lives. Tax cuts are a great start, as long as Obama repeats this mantra tirelessly--that he won’t raise taxes on the middle class. This illumines the fact that there is a huge chasm between how the super-privileged (e.g., McCain) perceive the definition of what’s “middle class” and how Obama perceives it. Obama’s version rings true, while McCain is living in a fantasy land of the fabulously wealthy. McCain can't remember how many homes he owns. Where Obama could lose much ground, however, is in the area of social programs. If he hammers home the idea that conversion to green energy will create job growth through “green collar” jobs then he’s got a winner. That would involve a transition that would be somewhat painful but entirely possible. Any job losses experienced as fossil fuel companies switch to promoting wind, solar, and electric power could be balanced by new jobs created as a result of these new technologies. And it’s clear that we must get out of Iraq--a huge money pit. The Iraqis themselves are clamoring for our departure.

It’s the idea of change that could present the real problem, which is another irony. It’s obvious that we are in need of change, but middle America is historically resistant to it, unless they’ve witnessed it and can see that it works. Convincing this huge cross section of voters that Obama's brand of change is what’s needed will be difficult, and last night’s speech probably wasn’t the appropriate time to do so, but I hope that Obama and his advisers realize that there are probably many of those suffering from the economic aftershock of eight years of a Bush presidency who would vote for him if his plan provides genuine relief--without government intrusion. Younger voters embrace change but older voters on both sides of the aisle typically won’t.

Obama’s vision of America might put us on equal footing with the European Union who realized early on that social programs can help workers, but the wealthiest 2% of America, with their deregulation and hands-off economic policies will do what they can to stop the leveling of the playing field because they are directly profiting from the policies that have created our current economic fiasco. By “closing corporate loopholes and tax havens that don’t help America grow”, Obama is putting himself in direct opposition to corporate America. (Although it’s been so bad lately that Wall St. has embraced Obama knowing that change of any kind is needed now.)

So, Obama 1) is a patriotic American, 2) with Biden he has the experience necessary to do the job, 3) he was right on Iraq from day one, and 4) he’s sympathetic to average Americans.

It will be how he explains his plan to change America that will either give him the momentum to win or sink his aspirations entirely. He made it clear last night that he is decidedly pro-choice, which was no surprise. Expect McCain to use this as a wedge as he caters to the evangelicals who already dislike him intensely. So, that point can’t be used to persuade any fence-sitters. Once again, it’s the economy, stupid. If Obama can find some middle ground on issues like abortion (implement a plan to reduce teen pregnancy) and gun control (by considering the issue on a case-by-case basis, what works for Cleveland might not be necessary for Scranton, Penn.) and present himself as tough on national security with a genuine intent to “cut taxes for 95% of all working families” then we may be on the verge of witnessing the election of the first African-American U.S. president.

It’s about time!

2008-08-27T06:37:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Kate Switaj comments on Rob McLennan's poems up at milk magazine.

Thumbs up or thumbs down for my Urban Dictionary entry?

Francesco Levato designed a wonderful page for the Meltzer/Rothenberg reading coming up at Myopic . Many thanks to the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Celebrating Larry Rivers .

____________________________
What's my favorite Ashbery line? "In a far recess of summer/ Monks are playing soccer." Now you know.

2008-08-18T09:09:00.000-07:00

Maybe we should ask the Most Trusted Man in America .

Have you tried the Word Cloud Generator ?

Bill O'Reilly, back to school? Great idea.

More on the strange world of Francis Bacon .

BlazeVOX books needs help.

Bill Knott is still pissed.

Theories and explanations about the much debated [sic] .

Scientists say we can "see" sound and "hear" light.

Are you an apple or a pear ?

Feel the love: Celebrities and John McCain .

2008-08-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

Once again milkmag.org will participate in the Poetry Foundation's Printers' Ball at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. Thanks to Fred Sasaki for making this happen.

2008-08-14T08:42:00.000-07:00

Amy Winehouse and fake authenticity pay a visit to my other blog ... Environs. [pictured: "Jazz" by Karel Appel.]

"Art is a secret script that you can only read with your instinct."
Karel Appel, 1962

Spliced Suddenly to a Closeup

2008-08-13T10:17:00.001-07:00

What happens in poems
trains graze upon the prairie,
hours fall from the sky,

which is unlike anything except
horses speaking in autumn voices.

Beheaded table littered with night
into the mirror swim.

Our Meanwhile

2008-08-07T17:08:00.001-07:00

If I were missing a hooray, saying
wake up and car it, you’d gaze a map of
moments and explore the thick foliage of
sleep. Who sent a laugh wrapped in morning?
Under the cypress trees a compass dreams.
Plot caught us deadpanning about the
after and grackles upon pine needles cackle.
But we are thoroughly neither where the
pointing shadows undress themselves and
sway. Our meanwhile, which made one so
Copenhagen, dealt us a pocket of knives.
Have you seen the horizon, without its
Lacan, giving birth to light? Wretched and
magical we return to conquer happy.

2008-08-05T08:16:00.000-07:00

“I was astonished at the closeness of his speech with its hesitancies word by word the forms of his writing. It seemed that, in his specialized – i.e. personal, unique, home-made, close to the nose, close to the grain, actual – world of writing and speech, the forms he wrote were precise notations of the way his mind thoughts occurred to him, as he noticed them, and the way they’d be uttered out loud. ... The main principle seemed to be that his mind moved syllable by syllable – as if his basic unit of thought was the syllable – as if thought-forms could be broken down further than picture image, further than thought-breath or whatever larger unit Kerouac or Olson or Duncan or Williams or others have used, could be broken down below words themselves even, to syllables, one by one moving forward in time, one by one at a time left on the page to tell what change mind went thru in the head at the desk or with pen in hand on the lap on a ship or a plane or in bed, slow as a live clock, monosyllable by monosyllable ... here Creeley was exhibiting his own personal objective yoga as it were of speech-mindfulness, a completely unique universe uncovered by awareness of the syllable as basic atom or brick of poetic mind. What was rare to experience was how much the entire set of mind, the set up, represented in the beginning of the poem, was modified by each new single-breath’d syllable. So each one word syllable modified by hindsight all the previous words. Of course that’s universal in speech, but to hear speech so bare that the modifications of mind syllable by syllable were apparent, were the theme and play of the poem, was like raw mind discovery to me anew, like rediscovering Cezanne’s method of creating space, or Poussin’s arrangement of planes or Pound’s quantity of vowels.” (‘On Creeley’s Ear Mind’, 414)

—Allen Ginsberg

___________________________________________________

Hearing Robert Creeley read at the University of Chicago years ago is one of the high points of my time spent as an audience member at poetry readings. It was only after hearing Creeley read that I began to fully understand the pacing and musicality of his poetry. I understood the importance of the parts to whole as never before. Because of his relatively simple diction my previous tendency was to read the poems quickly and then to reread them as quickly. After hearing them presented by Creeley himself, I slowed myself down and thought of their timing as I hadn't before. Creeley seemed more attuned to this than most other poets I've heard——famous or otherwise. After hearing the intonation of Creeley's poems I realized that many of them are brief enactments of a human drama, re-lived in the telling. They seemed to be less of a language experiment and more of a lyrical document of a psychological gesture. As Ginsberg hints above, Creeley was the master of set up.

His asides also provided such monumental context that I literally forgot where I was while listening.

2008-08-04T07:18:00.000-07:00

Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died.

Along with Elie Wiesel's book Night, Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch showed the horrors of Hitler's and Stalin's regimes to the world. After criticizing Stalin in a letter in 1945, Solzhenitsyn spent 8 years in a Russian gulag as punishment. He was a literary celebrity after publishing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch but then found himself out of favor again and by 1974 he was stripped of citizenship and expelled from Russia. His death yesterday was heralded as a huge loss for literature worldwide.

And here’s the TIME magazine story and the The New York Times obit.

2008-07-31T09:10:00.000-07:00

I just found out that my letters to Cid Corman are now archived at Indiana University , which reminds me of my usual rant about the advent of e-mail and how it has contributed to what probably amounts to the loss of a large portion of the recent historical record of poets in correspondence. Cid’s responses were brief of course but filled with such incredible insight; I can’t imagine that we would’ve labored over e-mail the way we obviously gave thought to writing letters. I’m glad the letters exist now somewhere for safe keeping. In an extreme example, I used to get letters from Charles Henri Ford painted on rice paper. Painting letters on paper made of rice made opening them an occasion that can’t be compared to receiving e-mail. Convenience has cost us something and this is another instance when it seems that technology has trumped posterity. It's interesting to see who else Cid was in correspondence with and when.

drive—he sd

2008-07-31T06:30:00.000-07:00

Aram Saroyan's memory of a conversation with Robert Creeley about his poem "I Know a Man" casts the poem in an entirely new light (and shows us the importance of punctuation).

I Know a Man

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.

—Robert Creeley

Cathedral

2008-07-30T08:07:00.000-07:00

—after Nichita Stãnescu

There is magic in the wolf

who stares up at the flooding moon.

Whose light is a sling for stones,

a worm's pocket filled with eyes?

My heart is elastic, waits for

the gondola bearing god.

We are entranced by every Vesuvius.

The idea of it gnaws the mind.

And look, your frail teeth

put the moves on a cabbage.

What fugitive cathedral

exhales its pious cargo?

Only the grass can know

the rabbit’s mathematics.

2008-07-29T12:08:00.000-07:00

It’s interesting to find out that former Jane’s Addiction frontman and Lollapalooza creator Perry Farrell is still going strong. The first two Jane’s Addiction albums made up part of the soundtrack of my senior year of high school and I have a distinct memory of listening to their first album and thinking “I like this but why does everyone keep talking about some band called Guns n Roses?” As a poet, I’m sometimes mistaken for an important person, so I got e-invited to the Lollapalooza After-Hours Party at Golan Studios Saturday night. Perry Farrell, my high school memories thank you.

2008-07-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

iv.

cloud capsule

sleeping forest of why

stone
boat

through summer’s sieve
float across
a high-wired silence.

v.

one who sighs
this is for you

the oatmeal oars
mowing the sea of yes.

2008-07-25T12:39:00.000-07:00

I'm looking forward to the David Meltzer/Michael Rothenberg reading at Myopic on October 12. Thanks to the Poetry Center of Chicago and Francesco Levato for co-sponsoring (scroll down). This comes at the end of a weekend-long symposium at Columbia College on the Beats with readings by Diane DiPrima and Joanne Kyger.

What: David Meltzer/Michael Rothenberg poetry reading
When: October 12, 7 pm
Where: Myopic Books, 1564 N. Milwaukee, Chicago

2008-07-25T07:51:00.000-07:00

This is a fascinating page about Thomas Merton's Red Diary. It's interesting to see what Merton was reading at the time and the quotes he held dear--I'm still amazed by the possibilities of the Internet. I love stumbling across pages like this.

For example, I otherwise would not have found this quote, of which Dostoyevsky wrote "All the essence of Christianity is contained in this prayer."

"O Lord and Master of my life, give me
not a spirit of sloth, of despondency, of lust or
of vain talking; but bestow on me thy
servant a spirit of chastity, of humility,
of patience and love. You, O Lord and
King, grant to me to see my own errors
& not to judge my brother, for blessed
art thou unto ages of ages."

St. Ephrem

2008-07-22T06:59:00.000-07:00

I'll bet you didn't know that Henry David Thoreau has a blog. He must be pretty old by now, but he still makes a lot of sense. (Pictured: Woods near Walden Pond)
____________________

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

“In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.”

“Men are born to succeed, not fail.”

“If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.”

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

2008-07-21T08:36:00.000-07:00

To bolster his standing in the polls and to appear ready to tackle the world’s toughest issues, John McCain in a bold move meant to grab the headlines made his first visit to the Internet today. His sweeping tour of the region will find him visiting sites such as Amazon.com, Slate, Wired, Google, and perhaps even Facebook, although McCain’s top advisors admit that a visit to Facebook may be too much for the aging McCain to tackle in one afternoon. Joking with blushing Cindy that he may have to IM her later, a term she was seemingly unfamiliar with, McCain appeared relaxed and self-assured as he emerged to face the cameras outside his home before beginning his historic tête-à-tête with “the Google.”

--Me Tronome News, 7-21

To them in the observatory

2008-07-21T08:09:00.000-07:00

That mind and I survive
together and I lust harmlessly the
cross of schedules.

With a heart full of groceries

I wander appetite roads
wearing an enormous blue
mustache like a dessert.

Perhaps you have seen her
indeterminate No
from where she reigns
atop the mosque of sleep?

I’ll continue to prism
the vast outer centuries
until the gavel comes down
upon my conscience.

Who's purring genius,
so thoroughly sidewalk,
climbing what's rafters.

Tomorrow @ Brown Rice

2008-07-20T05:24:00.001-07:00

@ Brown Rice
Come out tomorrow night to hear my collaboration with musician Dan Godston.

Monday, July 21, 8 p.m.

1st set
Larry Sawyer — poetry
Dan Godston — trumpet, small instruments

2nd set
Laura Emelianoff — open harp
Eric Leonardson — springboard

B r o w n R i c e !!!
4432 N Kedzie Ave
Chicago IL 60625

Doors open 30 minutes before the show begins. Brown Rice is a half block north of the Montrose / Kedzie intersection, close to the Kedzie station on the CTA brown line. The entrance is below a sign that reads "Perfect".

2008-07-19T09:27:00.000-07:00

New poetry up at milkmag.org: Steve Timm and Jessica Baron.

Plus some greatest hits:Clayton Eshleman, Dana Ward, Sheila Murphy, Bill Berkson, Amy King, and Laura Sims.

Michelle Malkin on Obama's "Delusion"

2008-07-18T08:14:00.001-07:00

“In this struggle, scholarships will be far more important than smart bombs.”

—John McCain

“We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”

—Barack Obama

An argument devoid of logic or coherence usually begins with an ad hominem attack. Neo-conservative commentator Michelle Malkin who has made a name for herself by appearing on Fox News, is adept at that type of attack, which is probably rewarded at media conglomerates like Fox, who pad every broadcast with a virulent array of every type of logical fallacy. The sad fact of the matter is that using logical fallacy does in fact work on voters. Appealing to history, appealing to popular opinion, the red herring, ad hominem attacks, and use of straw man tactics and overgeneralizations are the foundation of each and every Fox news broadcast. Malkin’s latest flimsy whinefest attacks Barack Obama (not his platform, or his arguments) as well as John McCain (somewhat indirectly).

Her mention of “Kumbaya Liberalism” further distorts the facts involved and also turns a blind eye to the gravity of our situation. It’s easy for me to remember that the promoters of the Iraq War reminded the American people that the effort would involve “shock and awe” but also the “winning of hearts and minds.” Any educated person realizes that the yoke of tyranny breaks most easily when the common citizenry have changed their minds about a situation involving repression and decide for themselves to take action against their oppressors. There is no more effective weapon, if this process can even be called a weapon. In its plainest terms it is a war of propaganda. It’s apparent that Malkin not only is incapable of remembering her American history, but that she’s also engaging in a war of propaganda against a large segment of the American population who does in fact now agree that the war in Iraq should be reaching its conclusion and that it wasn’t so much a war of winning hearts in minds, but a war to protect our economic interests in the region. Weapons of mass destruction were never found. Malkin doesn’t allow herself the foresight necessary to realize that the weapon that must be used against future enemies of the United States must be the “war” involving diplomacy. The United States doesn’t have the necessary resources to wage a worldwide battle on multiple fronts indefinitely, so Obama, and to a certain extent John McCain, understand that speaking softly and carrying a big stick only serves us up to a point. Both candidates have weighed in on this topic and stated that military muscle needs the support of a progressive diplomatic effort. The real tragedy is that understanding is not fashionable and many are mired in their selfish interests. Fox News has helped to quash the idea that understanding our enemies is worthwhile. The act of understanding or evaluating does not mean that the idea of the use of force has been taken off the table.

Malkin’s selfish interests probably involve working her way up the ladder at Fox News, but in the meantime she is spreading the kind of misinformation that worsens our situation. Both Obama and McCain are correct in their realization that we need to think of a way to stop the self-perpetuating cycle of hatred that is the cause of these horrific acts of violence. The jihadists who committed the terrible deeds she mentions are too far gone for rehabilitation but our only way out of the costly efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan is to use all methods at our disposal—military might as well as diplomacy. We have proven that we have the muscle but attempts to add some brains to the equation are routinely demonized by fanatics like Malkin. Her knee-jerk response is the type of absurdity that got us into a situation where we are spending trillions of dollars rebuilding another country at the expense of the economic health of our own.

2008-07-16T08:14:00.000-07:00

This Sunday at Myopic Books, 7:00 pm – Evan Willner & David Welch

Myopic Poetry Series/1564 N. Milwaukee Ave
Chicago, IL 60622/Contact: 773.862.4882

David WELCH has published poems in New Orleans Review, Pleiades and the 2007 edition of the Best New Poets anthology, with new work forthcoming in Ninth Letter and Salt Hill. He is set to receive his MFA from the University of Alabama this August, and will begin teaching at DePaul University in the fall.

Evan WILLNER is the author of (Blazevox, 2007). These days he teaches literature at DePaul University and is hard at work on Pirke Avot, Book of Fathers, a new redaction of the Talmud.

And here’s a pic of the Poets’ Loft in Marshall, California (for the quietly indulgent).

Um, Mr. Bush

2008-07-15T07:33:00.000-07:00

Re: Offshore drilling

"The lifting of the moratorium — first announced by Mr. Bush’s father, President George Bush, in 1990 and extended by President Bill Clinton — will have no real impact because a Congressional moratorium on drilling enacted in 1981 and renewed annually remains in force. And there appears to be no consensus for lifting it in tandem with Mr. Bush’s action." AP News/7-15