Articles of interest (to me, in the very least)

Helen Adam and Jack Spicer on the Harriet blog

Against Readings (and okay article on how literary criticism isn't doing itself any favors)

End of the University?

Today's me mum's birthday

and my dog is very excited. Standing on the couch excited. She knows that tonight, my dad take my mom out to a cheap Chinese restaurant with paper place mats and plastic on the seats and a Spanish speaking man who was taught to write tickets in Chinese, she assumes, not knowing any Chinese herself, because that is exactly what my mom will want. Then sometime after that at least one, if not all her sons will call her to wish her a happy birthday and carry on about other, non-birthday topics, which will also be what my mom wants.

My dog loves when my mom gets what she wants because my mom always gives my dog what she wants, like bacon, eggs, steak, or whatever else my mom has cooked and my dog can smell.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

I have a tendency to save up all my errands for nice days...

Joshua Beckman...

...read last night at the New Wave Cafe here in Chicago. It was really pretty rad. The place was packed, phones were ringing, machines were machining and at one point JB mentioned that he felt more like he was on the set of a "coffee shop" than an actual coffee shop..."or maybe a brain," he said. This was the third or fourth time I've seen him read, but the first I've gotten the chance to chat with him for few minutes afterwards (I gave him a copy of the JMW/LBP chapbook, I hope he likes it).
JB's new book, Take it, totally kicks ass and for me is a kind of return to the Beckman that I fell in love with in, Your Time Has Come...equally reliant on both image and language, those devices build each other up, rather than stand in opposition to one another. I honestly wasn't going to buy this book, but after the reading I felt as though I had no choice...best 10 bones I'll spend this week, unless I end up going to the Empty Bottle on Friday to see Noah and the Whale, in which case it will easily be a toss up.

Is it just me, or has "novelist" become one of the grossest words you can possibly hear in a day? It's the Las Vegas of words; conceptually not that bad, but practically, the absolute last thing I want to hear anyone talk about. I hate it, I really do. I don't want to hear about your novel, about how you're writing a novel, about your ideas for a future novel and never, never read from an early chapter in your latest novel...especially if you've published absolutely no novels to date. Guess what? Anybody with a word processor can be a "novelist," all it takes after that is the clueless chutzpah to talk about it in polite company.

Also, here is a list of things I don't want to hear about when you get back from Las Vegas: gambling (every story is exactly the same and ends in only one of two ways), the clubs (they're designed to be the coolest place you've ever been), the strip (same as the clubs), the word "Vegas," all the things you had comped, the heat, and finally, the shopping.

Anyway...you should come to see Joshua Beckman tonight.

An old favorite of mine, W.S. Merwin, just won his second Pulitzer Prize. The value of the Pulitzer in contemporary poetry (the persons they choose, the works those persons write and how well those works represent the others being created around it) seems low, but who wouldn't want to die as a two-time Pulitzer winner?

A few quick hits:

• Joshua Beckman Reading in Chicago -- RLL

  Tuesday April 21st 2009 8pm

  Host:

  Rabbit Light Movies

  Location:	New Wave Coffee
  Street:	2557 N. Milwaukee Ave.
  City:	Chicago, IL

• I've been growing increasingly excited about moving out of Chicago, not really because I have beef with the city, but...well, after two years I feel like we've fought to a draw and it's time to call it.
  
• That said, I'm beginning to freak out. Not just about moving, but about my writing, the workshop, my age...everything. As Jack Spicer once said, "I am dissatisfied with my poetry./ I am dissatisfied with my sex life./ I am dissatisfied with the angels I believe in." I think I get that, really, for the first time ever.
  
• I need to call my friends, I've been really bad about that lately, but it's time to be good.
• I want to see this show: Your Pal, Cliff: Selections fromt the H.C. Westermann Study Collection.
• I've been writing a lot lately, but as I mentioned, am not into it at all. I think I need to go back and just revise the shit out of my last two years worth of poems and try to envision where and how it can make a difference.
  

Would you take this course?

Creative Writing (08C:023:SCC), Wednesday, 7:00 pm - 9:30 pm in 424 North Hall.

Do you like your art a little rough around the edges? Uncomfortable even? This course focuses on the poems, fictions and non-fictions that are hard to swallow. Through reading, writing and discussion (lots and lots of discussion) we will tackle the places and spaces our writing veers towards when no one else is looking. Using Frank Stanford’s epic masterpiece “The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You,” as a source text, we will learn to control these urges and to use them in artful and insightful ways while also discovering our unique voices and the methods with which to insert them into the wider conversation that is creative writing. Grades will be based on participation and final portfolio.

Required texts:

The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Frank Stanford, ISBN 0-0918786-50-9.

Additional handouts supplied by instructor.

*They decided to go with option 1-------------------------------------------------------------------------

8C:098 Poetry Writing (rejected)

…and reading, and re-writing, and dialogue, and finally, poetics. This course is designed around the idea that poetry isn’t just the poem, but an on-going conversation. We will read books. We will discuss books. Then, we will write books. Over the course of the semester you will be asked to write, shape and present you very own chapbook. Also, you will be asked to assist others in writing, shaping and presenting theirs. Ultimately, this course will help you to enter the conversation, not with a series of disconnected interjections, but with a sound, cohesive statement. Grades will bases on participation and chapbook.

Required texts:

The Singing Knives, Frank Stanford, ISBN: 978-0-918786-55-5.

Creation Myths, Mathias Svalina, ISBN: 978-0-9791501-9-7.

Twentieth-Century American Poetics, Dana Gioia, David Mason, ISBN: 0072414723

Additional handouts supplied by instructor.

U of I asked to come up with a few course descriptions...these are the classes I've been dreaming of teaching, and teaching in my dreams.

*update

Review: Zachary Schomburg's The Pond

Ponds serve as a marker. A marker of wealth. A marker of geography. A marker of personal history. But in the case of Zachary Schomburg's "The Pond," it is a marker of a clear, but subtle shift in one of contemporary poetry's most exciting voices. Where Schomburg's first full length collection, "The Man Suit," reappropriated James Tate for the wandering and curious, "The Pond" reads more like a discovery, albeit one you'd only share with your best friend/lover. There are moments in this book that are so bold and yet so innocent your face blushes as a sense of embarrassment creeps into your toes;

I'll show you the cave
where all the bats come from.
You'll show me that place
between your knees
where my hand goes.

The single most amazing aspect of this book though, is Schomburg's awareness of that fact...and his subsequent use of this awareness to turn you from voyeur to active participant.

Where many other poems by many other poets would place the audience in their usual role as onlooker, Schomburg's poems pull out the chair for you, invite you to sit, and the invitation is so cordial that every time he mentions "you" or "we" the reader is almost made to squeal with excitement. You are the one chosen to hear all these secrets, you are the one he loves, we are going to have quite the adventure figuring this world out. And though it has never been Schomburg's tenor to alienate the reader with dense language and general poet's trickery, the simpleness of these poems increases your need to connect with them...their eagerness to speak to you demands an equal eagerness to listen attentively, caringly.

It's in this way that "The Pond" becomes more like a reflecting pool. This collection is decidedly Zachary Schomburg and yet, it is decidedly me, decidedly you. The magic of these poems doesn't necessarily take place within the printed words, but in the space between what those words are meant to symbolize and how those symbols are acknowledged in the brain. Meaning, when Schomburg mentions "the pond," I envision a specific pond (it's the one in front of my aunt's house), as do you, and Schomburg does nothing to stop it, in fact, these poems only work when you imagine that pond, at which point, you are no longer being asked to play in Zachary Schomburg's world, rather, you unknowingly invite him to play in yours.

You spend most of the day in the pond.
Every time you blink your eyelashes fall out
and then quickly grow back.
I spend all day collecting them.
They're what I make boats out of.
We like to ride bikes and fly kites together.

It's in these spaces where our brains infuse Schomburg's lines into our actual memories, like a lie you've told one too many times, and though it might feel a little creepy to admit, isn't this what we all really desire in our poetry? To have it be lived by someone? To be a marker of some kind somewhere? Jack Spicer used to mention magic everytime he talked about poetry, and "The Pond" is as close to a magical experience as I've ever had reading poems. To be honest, it is the book that made me reconsider my stance on both magic and poetry...

Congratuations Zach, James Tate might be the master illusionist, but I'll take the wonder of a good coin-in-the-ear any day. Besides, you can only see illusions so many times before you figure them out, but done right, when a magician holds that coin to your eyes, your first instinct will always be to reach back into your ear.

I've been trying to think of reasons to go to the lumber yard

Build your own press...check it!

Because I thought this was pretty rad

I Am In the Air Right Now from Greg Lytle on Vimeo.

Though it is Poetry Month, I seem to be hearing and reading a lot more grumbling about poetry than I do hurrahs...which is okay. I grumble about poetry all the time and have been for years, so its good to see a community of grumblers sprouting up at long last. After all, ever major movement (or political revolution, it I may) began with a quiet, but passionate grumble.

In many ways, contemporary poetry works like a Ponzi scheme operated by the academic world. We keep investing all our energies with the promise of a lasting payoff only to see our overall wealth of talent drained completely dry and for the benefit of just a few. The problem, though, is that we have no other options; if you want to write poetry in America you are inescapably linked to academia (the only other option being arts communities, but even then, good luck getting those folks to a poetry reading). I want to write poetry, and so I bought into the system, and am now, or will soon be, rather, in pursuit of that big, promised payoff.

Where will poetry be in 10 years? Who can say...my hope is that grassroots movements like the small press revolution will keep growing, that people like Janaka Stucky will keep finding new and innovative ways to fund and promote the art, that poetry will become a little dangerous again. I think that there are enough of us who have decided to make our own fortunes that this just could happen. There are scads of poets living and working outside of academia, and these voices are quickly becoming the voices recognized as contemporary poetry. They are voices that aren't being called upon to fill job requirements, in fact, they are voices that exist despite job requirements, motivated by no other desire than to make poetry that people want to read, or, in the very least, that we want to read again later. They are voices that don't have to exist, but do, and its these voices that I hope will shape the poetry our children read...that is, if our children will read poetry: Poetry dies in latest U.S. culture

This dream wasn't as random as some of the others I have. I've been writing poems about fixing pigs like old motorcycles. I usually write just before and just after sleeping. Dreams about pig building seem inevitable then, I guess. This picture is kind of gross. Really gross. I like drawing gross things. It's easier than drawing pretty things. Clean things.

I read this today in CA Conrad's "the Book of Frank," and it reminded me of what I was drawing at the time (I was drawing this, by the way):

"no blood flowed
so he gained little satisfaction
ripping off her head"

I'm glad that I looked for those lines. I've been meaning to swap this book out of my bag for about 2 weeks now, but kept on forgetting. I've read parts of this book 3 times. I've read the other parts 4-5 times. About every third page (on average) is now dogeared. I really liked it, which I've mentioned earlier, but think it could have been only about 2/3 as long as it is. So many of the poems are so tight, so forceful, that ones that fall just left really stick out. But don't let that sway you from reading this book immediately...I found great guilty joy reading it, especially surrounded by all the suits at the U of C business school (which is where I go for lunch).

It's dark out, but still feels cloudy...

I'm pretty sure I'm doing this on Friday

A Special Reading with Raul Zurita and Daniel Borzutzky

Start: Friday, April 3, 2009 - 7:00pm

Time: Doors open at 7:00PM, Reading begins at 7:30PM.
Cost: Free admission, all ages.
Location: Instituto Cervantes, 31 West Ohio Street, Chicago

Raul Zurita was born in Santiago, Chile in 1951. He started out studying mathematics before turning to poetry. His early work is a ferocious response to Augusto Pinochet's 1973 military coup. Like many other Chileans, Zurita was arrested and tortured. When he was released, he helped to form a radical artistic group CADA, and he became renowned for his provocative and intensely physical public performances. In the early 80’s, Zurita famously sky-wrote passages from his poem, The New Life, over Manhattan and later (still during the reign of Pinochet) he bulldozed the phrase Ni Pena Ni Miedo (Without Pain Or Fear) into the Atacama Desert, where it can still be seen because children in the neighboring town bring shovels into the desert and turn over the sand in the letters. For fifteen years, Zurita worked on a trilogy which is considered one of the signal poetic achievements in Latin American poetry: Purgatory appeared in 1979, Ante-paradise in 1982, and The New Life in 1993. Raul Zurita is one of the most renowned contemporary Latin American poets, and he is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Poetry Prize of Chile. Translations of Purgatory and Anteparadise were published in the United States in the 80’s. Three new books, INRI, translated by William Rowe, Song of the Disappeared Love, translated by Daniel Borzutzky, and Purgatory, translated by Anna Deeny, are forthcoming from, respectively, Merick Press, Action Books, and The University of California Press. His books of poems include, among others: El Sermon de la Montana; Areas Verdes; Purgatorio; Anteparadiso; El Paraiso Esta Vacio – Canto a Su Amor, Desaparecido, El Amor de Chile, La Vida Nueva, In Memoriam

I heard DB read some of these translations last summer and they were fucking A-mazing. I've never been to a reading with both translator and translated before, though I always thought it would be cool to see one where they stand side by side and read the poem simultaneously (just like in the books). Zurita's been on my need to buy list for awhile, making clear the major design flaw in said list (it's in alphabetical order). This should be totally rad and I'm totally going.

It's True