Once you're done at this Saturday's amazing Houston Indie Book Fest, mozy a few blocks over to The Joanna for a killer FREE event!
You'll hear readings from OH NO contributors Jesse Donaldson, Greg Koehler, Ben Pelhan, Becca Wadlinge, and yours truly. Check out the main page of Houston's Indie Book Fest to read more about OH NO in the exhibitor spotlight!
You'll view a screening of BEBE ZEVA, a documentary (mdmafilms.org)!
You'll take part in a Q&A with directors Megan Boyle and Tao Lin!
See you there? See you there.
The Joanna
4014 Graustark
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
light to light
If you missed my reading & interview with Renee Alberts on Prosody, (WYEP 91.3) it is now available for free on iTunes, (or here ).
Cool ass literary shit happening this spring. In Pittsburgh, a pop-up bookstore is taking over an abandoned Borders books. In Houston, around the corner from my house this weekend is the indie book festival.
All's a blur these days, chickadees, a blur.
Cool ass literary shit happening this spring. In Pittsburgh, a pop-up bookstore is taking over an abandoned Borders books. In Houston, around the corner from my house this weekend is the indie book festival.
All's a blur these days, chickadees, a blur.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
[artist friend spotlight] : Dorothy Hoover
My oldest friend, Dorothy Hoover, happens to be a crazy-talented artist. You are not surprised? Neither am I. Dorothy was my first introduction to all kinds of culture - I took ballet lessons because she was, got interested in theater because she took acting classes, started listening to music other than Seal & No Doubt (cringe) because one day she brought me an Ani DiFranco tape. We used to be mistaken for (and say we were) sisters. So now, she is a mega-artist living in Los Angeles, studying set design at CalArts. Being mainly a poet, I'm consistently amazed when artists put their imaginations into 3 dimensions. Dorothy's work has been seen in a number of venues in LA - most recently she designed the set for A Theatre@Boston Court's production of Camino Real and was a major player in the design of the wish-I'd-been-there art happening Sneaky Nietzsche. Dorothy's work is especially resonant with me because it's so literary. She's not just an "Oh, this play takes place in a field, so let me paint a backdrop with a field" set designer. She's sensitive to language, she doesn't leave it all up to the actors, but creates something like a visual language, letting the script itself resonate within the form of the set. Don't ask me to explain this further, just think about following her blog from now on, (which she runs with our friend Phil, also an artist & smarty) which I hope & pray she will fill with more pictures of her work. Or, better, check out her most current project, an adaptation of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red. Here's a peek:
Also, Dorothy is classy. She is classy cook and a classy dresser, & the last time I saw her, she was wearing gold sneakers. Now that's classy.
Also, Dorothy is classy. She is classy cook and a classy dresser, & the last time I saw her, she was wearing gold sneakers. Now that's classy.
Oh No ? Oh Yes!
Yesterday I received my contributor's copy of Oh No magazine. A great looking magazine for a first issue. While it's the habit of some writers to send young magazines writing they consider to be of a lesser quality, saving the big guns for more established publications, I have to speak up for the benefits of submitting work you really like to newly born magazines. They may, in fact, be more likely publish darlings that you'd be surprised to place anywhere else. I'm super pleased that Oh No has published my poem "River-heart Radio" which came out to 8 (count it, 8) pages. The poem is an experiment of 100 fragments after Michael Palmer, but that's all I'll say. If you want to know more, you can keep an eye out on the Oh No website - magazines will soon be available for purchase online.Hope all of you chickadees are having a pleasant Tuesday. I'm off to a new coffee shop in the neighborhood to read Emerson. Houston is kind this season, open windows, the air with a slight warm wind. I'm filling my apartment with plants. It finally feels a little bit like I live here.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
GIGANTIC SEQUINS KICKSTARTER : GO!
We have 30 days to raise AT LEAST $500,so please, spread the word about this thing! You will have our undying love.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
If you happen to be in Baton Rouge, LA tomorrow, come to this small press panel & reading:
The Delta Mouth Literary Festival is a two-day event on Thursday, March 17, and Friday, March 18, 2011, presented by LSU's New Delta Review. For more information, visit the DELTA MOUTH event page at http://tiny.cc/be5zp
Saturday, March 12, 2011
It wasn't just that you were just waving to me, but that we were waving to each other
Good afternoon, Chickadees, I'm on spring break and have spent the entire day so far indoors making art and thinking about art.
Example 1: new page in "The Humanity of Words," the collage book I have been making for almost ten years:
example 2:
This poem Anastasia and Sandman by Larry Levis makes me stop breathing a little bit.
example 3:
Listening to a very disembodying track by Patti Smith from Wave.
Here's the latest poetnews:
-- You can now order the latest copy of Lo-Ball, in which my work appears alongside that of folks like Steve Almond, Bob Hicok, Fanny Howe, Honorée Jeffers, Paul Lisicky, Cate Marvin, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Matthew Siegel, and David Trinidad. Honored to be in such good company.
-- Next Friday I'm driving to Louisiana to be part of a small literary festival called Delta Mouth, hosted by LSU. I'll be reading at Highland Coffee, after sitting on a panel discussing small journal publishing, alongside Adam Atkinson (OH NO books), Johannes Goransson & Joyelle McSweeney (Action Books), Blake Stephens (Delta Magazine), and Lauren Tussing-White (New Delta Review). And then I might drive to New Orleans for a night, if someone will feed my cat.
That's all. Hope you're having a good weekend.
Monday, March 7, 2011
On the line : movement in Anne Carson's poem “Water”
Any line of poetry is a risk. As in painting or dance, there is no room for a movement to be separated from intentionality. Poetry and dance are inherently linked, as beneath an articulation of a physical movement, and beneath the articulation of the content of a poem, there lies energy in the form of sound and rhythm, and, at a further depth, the unteachable -- impulse and instinct. Each poetic line depends on the “success” of the line before – if the line prior has energy, if it draws in the reader, if it moves the poem, we read on. When given the assignment to consider the poetic line, I thought immediately of the poet Anne Carson, who has habitually (and successfully) pushed form in both line and margin. The entire form of her novel-in-verse, Autobiography of Red, is composed of very long lines and rather short lines knit together. Part of why this alteration works is that the book swings between conversation, omnipotent narrative, and lyric. The movement of her lines frequently embodies the consciousness of the protagonist, Geryon, and the emotional or physical action of the present. This is clearly seen, for example, in the opening lines of “Water”:
It was raining on his face. He forgot for a moment that he was a brokenheart
then he remembered. Sick lurch
downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock
to return to the cut soul. (70)
Part of the success of Carson’s narrative is her sensitivity to where punctuation is and is not needed within her lines; the only punctuation in the four lines I’ve quoted, composed of four heavily enjambed sentences, is the period. For the second sentence of the above section, “He forgot for moment that he was a brokenheart / then he remembered,” to be grammatically proper, a comma should be inserted between “brokenheart” and “then.” Carson decides to put grammatical rules aside, punctuating with a line break instead of a comma. Additionally, the emotional content of the sentence is mirrored by the line break. In the sentence there are two types of past temporal awareness – “forgot” and “remembered”. Geryon only remains in forgetting until the description of his emotional state (“ a brokenheart”) arrives, and immediately, the line breaks. The next line, beginning with “then,” is a movement through time into consciousness, into the present, and physically, on the page, has been a move into the next narrative space. The long, somewhat loose, scenic line is followed by a sharp five-word line in which a difficult emotional state is not only “remembered,” but, snapped into, by the syntax that the line breaks. This sharp line -- “then he remembered. Sick lurch”-- also pushes forward emotionally. After the snap into the present with “then”, immediately followed by knowledge -- “he remembered” – Carson chooses to end the sentence. She has already told us that Geryon is “a brokenheart” in the previous line, and instead of expanding upon how, or further describing the emotions, Carson both keeps us at a momentary linguistic distance from the inner life of Geryon, and allows our imaginations to move towards the him with a sense of catharsis.
In the second part of second line, we arrive at one of the more obvious places in Carson’s work where physicality, sound and rhythm are inextricably intertwined. Following the moment of memory, in the first half of the line, there is a “sick lurch” – these two stressed, monosyllabic words, a one-two punch. This “sick lurch” presents an uncomfortable, immediately understandable image – we might imagine someone physically ill, drunk, or less than fully in control, as lurching. Again, Carson breaks the line where emotion and consciousness change. The full third sentence of this section – “Sick lurch / downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple” – has a type of unnerving placelessness, a heavy metaphor, a interiority that the omnipotent narrator chooses to translate in the most raw way possible. This language, as before, does not follow the rules of grammar, nor of sense. Placing “downward” as the beginning of the fourth line, Carson repeats the device of using emotion or knowledge to move her lines physicality, as we see in lines 1-2, when Geryon moved from a state of hooded consciousness into a state of knowing the present.
In the third line, reading “downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock”, there is the embedded cliché of a “bad apple”. Carson re-energizes this cliché by using maneuvers based on physical space, sound and emotional reasoning. Firstly, Carson places “bad apple” directly in the middle of the line, at the end of a sentence. The phrase is physically confined; there is a sense of the phrase “bad apple” being landed upon with a thump, partially because the line begins with the directive “downward”. This sense of a thump, of bumpiness, is assisted sonically by being embodied in the long ‘A’ vowel sound that is repeated in “trapped”, “bad”, and “apple”. Aside from these sounds, on a more surface level (it’s debatable, I suppose, if sound or reason is the surface), Geryon is described as being “trapped”. A lesser writer might have come up with something like the phrase, “Geryon was trapped in the feeling that he was a bad apple”. However, Carson complicates the “bad apple” cliché; Carson doesn’t make Geryon a bad apple, she puts one inside of him. This decision turns the cliché from a derogatory label towards someone thought to be a source of moral corruption, into a more abstract, condensed idea that indicates something like a psychic wound.
Another fragmented sentence ends the selection from “Water”, again engaging and balancing sound, emotional movement, and physical space. In the sentence “Each morning a shock / to return to the cut soul”, sound is doing much of what we would colloquially call “the heavy lifting”. Alliteration appears between “Each”, “shock” and “cut”, as well as between “shock” and “soul”, and also quietly between “morning” and “return”. The overlapped alliteration on “shock” directs the reader purely by sound to the emotional heart of the four lines I’ve selected from “Water”. At the point when this particular poem appears in Autobiography of Red, Geryon, our protagonist, has just been pushed away Herakles, his first love. The relationship itself – as all first loves are – has been a shock into delight, and so the sudden and cool truncation of the relationship creates a full inversion of that joyful shock into a previously unknown type of pain. By starting with the directive of “downward”, the third line has built momentum towards “shock” as its last word, despite the period appearing in the middle of the line. In a sense, Carson inverts the usual way we might imagine the passage of sleep into wakefulness; instead of using images or language surrounding rousing oneself from sleep (for example, “get up” “wake up” “arise”), Carson envisions Geryon’s gradual wakefulness “each morning” as a descent. “Shock” is left hanging at the end of the third line, as the rest of the sentence – “to return to the cut soul” – is enjambed to create the fourth line. By splitting this last sentence, Carson sets up a question: What is a shock each morning? The answer is: “to return to the cut soul”. Carson gives this phrase its own short line, leaving the image to resonate. The idea of “cut soul” is not alone, however, it has, gathered into it, the verb-noun constructs that have appeared before it. The syntactical echoes of “brokenheart”, “sick lurch” and “bad apple” inevitably rattle within “cut soul”.
These four lines from “Water” function like gears interlocked, moving through emotion, through syntax and enjambment. A mentor once asked if I’d rather that my poems be animals with mechanical hearts, or machines with animal hearts. Reading Carson’s work, it strikes me that perhaps when poets are most successful, the poems they create are equal parts machine and animal, equally invested in music, emotional truth, and structure.
[meditation written for a course in Poetic Forms, 5 March 2011]
It was raining on his face. He forgot for a moment that he was a brokenheart
then he remembered. Sick lurch
downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock
to return to the cut soul. (70)
Part of the success of Carson’s narrative is her sensitivity to where punctuation is and is not needed within her lines; the only punctuation in the four lines I’ve quoted, composed of four heavily enjambed sentences, is the period. For the second sentence of the above section, “He forgot for moment that he was a brokenheart / then he remembered,” to be grammatically proper, a comma should be inserted between “brokenheart” and “then.” Carson decides to put grammatical rules aside, punctuating with a line break instead of a comma. Additionally, the emotional content of the sentence is mirrored by the line break. In the sentence there are two types of past temporal awareness – “forgot” and “remembered”. Geryon only remains in forgetting until the description of his emotional state (“ a brokenheart”) arrives, and immediately, the line breaks. The next line, beginning with “then,” is a movement through time into consciousness, into the present, and physically, on the page, has been a move into the next narrative space. The long, somewhat loose, scenic line is followed by a sharp five-word line in which a difficult emotional state is not only “remembered,” but, snapped into, by the syntax that the line breaks. This sharp line -- “then he remembered. Sick lurch”-- also pushes forward emotionally. After the snap into the present with “then”, immediately followed by knowledge -- “he remembered” – Carson chooses to end the sentence. She has already told us that Geryon is “a brokenheart” in the previous line, and instead of expanding upon how, or further describing the emotions, Carson both keeps us at a momentary linguistic distance from the inner life of Geryon, and allows our imaginations to move towards the him with a sense of catharsis.
In the second part of second line, we arrive at one of the more obvious places in Carson’s work where physicality, sound and rhythm are inextricably intertwined. Following the moment of memory, in the first half of the line, there is a “sick lurch” – these two stressed, monosyllabic words, a one-two punch. This “sick lurch” presents an uncomfortable, immediately understandable image – we might imagine someone physically ill, drunk, or less than fully in control, as lurching. Again, Carson breaks the line where emotion and consciousness change. The full third sentence of this section – “Sick lurch / downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple” – has a type of unnerving placelessness, a heavy metaphor, a interiority that the omnipotent narrator chooses to translate in the most raw way possible. This language, as before, does not follow the rules of grammar, nor of sense. Placing “downward” as the beginning of the fourth line, Carson repeats the device of using emotion or knowledge to move her lines physicality, as we see in lines 1-2, when Geryon moved from a state of hooded consciousness into a state of knowing the present.
In the third line, reading “downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock”, there is the embedded cliché of a “bad apple”. Carson re-energizes this cliché by using maneuvers based on physical space, sound and emotional reasoning. Firstly, Carson places “bad apple” directly in the middle of the line, at the end of a sentence. The phrase is physically confined; there is a sense of the phrase “bad apple” being landed upon with a thump, partially because the line begins with the directive “downward”. This sense of a thump, of bumpiness, is assisted sonically by being embodied in the long ‘A’ vowel sound that is repeated in “trapped”, “bad”, and “apple”. Aside from these sounds, on a more surface level (it’s debatable, I suppose, if sound or reason is the surface), Geryon is described as being “trapped”. A lesser writer might have come up with something like the phrase, “Geryon was trapped in the feeling that he was a bad apple”. However, Carson complicates the “bad apple” cliché; Carson doesn’t make Geryon a bad apple, she puts one inside of him. This decision turns the cliché from a derogatory label towards someone thought to be a source of moral corruption, into a more abstract, condensed idea that indicates something like a psychic wound.
Another fragmented sentence ends the selection from “Water”, again engaging and balancing sound, emotional movement, and physical space. In the sentence “Each morning a shock / to return to the cut soul”, sound is doing much of what we would colloquially call “the heavy lifting”. Alliteration appears between “Each”, “shock” and “cut”, as well as between “shock” and “soul”, and also quietly between “morning” and “return”. The overlapped alliteration on “shock” directs the reader purely by sound to the emotional heart of the four lines I’ve selected from “Water”. At the point when this particular poem appears in Autobiography of Red, Geryon, our protagonist, has just been pushed away Herakles, his first love. The relationship itself – as all first loves are – has been a shock into delight, and so the sudden and cool truncation of the relationship creates a full inversion of that joyful shock into a previously unknown type of pain. By starting with the directive of “downward”, the third line has built momentum towards “shock” as its last word, despite the period appearing in the middle of the line. In a sense, Carson inverts the usual way we might imagine the passage of sleep into wakefulness; instead of using images or language surrounding rousing oneself from sleep (for example, “get up” “wake up” “arise”), Carson envisions Geryon’s gradual wakefulness “each morning” as a descent. “Shock” is left hanging at the end of the third line, as the rest of the sentence – “to return to the cut soul” – is enjambed to create the fourth line. By splitting this last sentence, Carson sets up a question: What is a shock each morning? The answer is: “to return to the cut soul”. Carson gives this phrase its own short line, leaving the image to resonate. The idea of “cut soul” is not alone, however, it has, gathered into it, the verb-noun constructs that have appeared before it. The syntactical echoes of “brokenheart”, “sick lurch” and “bad apple” inevitably rattle within “cut soul”.
These four lines from “Water” function like gears interlocked, moving through emotion, through syntax and enjambment. A mentor once asked if I’d rather that my poems be animals with mechanical hearts, or machines with animal hearts. Reading Carson’s work, it strikes me that perhaps when poets are most successful, the poems they create are equal parts machine and animal, equally invested in music, emotional truth, and structure.
[meditation written for a course in Poetic Forms, 5 March 2011]
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Oh Absence & a poem by Jean Valentine
Absence in the shape of faith. I stopped trusting what looked stable, what called itself stable, and started to trust those people that owned their failings, that said those failings were inherent, that joked at the idea of their own perfection, their own completion. This tack seemed more real than anyone who said things like "I'm living the dream," or "I've been rocketed into the fourth dimension." This seemed more real than anyone who said, "this is a simple program for complicated people." The thing was - the idea of completion began to seem so entirely false that I started to let myself hang on the edge of things. The air was clearer there, because fewer people were willing to stand straddled between two lives, which was different than the illusion of balance, for this place acknowledged the continual potential a crash. The air was clearer, the sky was wider, the fields looked like I thought Texas would look - desolate, unexpected, small towns rising and disappearing as quickly into the land. Dry fields of machinery, a path of cacti and fossils, a creek bed and beetles, the living wind.
This following poem by Jean Valentine made me cry, albeit very quietly and shortly, in my poetic forms class:
X
I have decorated this banner to honor my brother. Our parents did not want his name used publicly. --from an unnamed child's banner in the AIDS Memorial Quilt
The boatpond, broken off, looks back at the sky.
I remember looking at you, X, this way,
taking in your red hair, your eyes' light, and I miss you
so. I know,
you are you, and real, standing there in the doorway,
whether dead or whether living, real. --Then Y
said, "Who will remember me three years after I die?
What is there for my eye
to read then?"
The lamb should not have given
his wool.
He was so small. At the end, X, you were so small.
Playing with a stone
on your bedspread at the edge of the ocean.
This following poem by Jean Valentine made me cry, albeit very quietly and shortly, in my poetic forms class:
X
I have decorated this banner to honor my brother. Our parents did not want his name used publicly. --from an unnamed child's banner in the AIDS Memorial Quilt
The boatpond, broken off, looks back at the sky.
I remember looking at you, X, this way,
taking in your red hair, your eyes' light, and I miss you
so. I know,
you are you, and real, standing there in the doorway,
whether dead or whether living, real. --Then Y
said, "Who will remember me three years after I die?
What is there for my eye
to read then?"
The lamb should not have given
his wool.
He was so small. At the end, X, you were so small.
Playing with a stone
on your bedspread at the edge of the ocean.
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