Big Window

NYC, Anyone?

Who's going to AWP?  Please let me know.

 

Note:  This art = "New York is my Oyster" by Kay Rosen

Borges and Wii

This article by Noam Cohen published in the  New York Times suggests that Borges' fiction foreshadowed (if you will) the brave new world of the web. Cohen refers us to “Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds” by Perla Sassón-Henry, which I haven't read yet, but the idea sounds right to me.  I like it.

(photo by fuksija via flickr)

Dusting for Prints

The subject is distant from and dark.
The subject is seen through glass.
The subject reflects, or has a luminous body.

If you feel you can no longer pray, care less, don't be selfish.

Was he an artist?
I remember him cutting a sword out of wood, and painting it gold.
"Arms" seems wrong. It's their nearness.

Sometimes it's you and I'm calling to you but I say the wrong name.

Several glass ashtrays, the panther lamp. The light  bent toward the map.
I spent a long time under the table, learning to recognize wires. How we would change        
her. How the bullet is scraped as it moves through the barrel.

The subject is distant, and dark.
Each instance has its rewards. Sex can't explain it.
Their goal is to empty themselves."

If you feel you can no longer pray, personally, I like trees, birds.

Personal & unintelligible, my addiction bores me.        
We still need spoons, plates, and knives. Bowls. Your star sign.
Those weeks with you?       

I remember driving you somewhere. Driving, and it was snowy.
Nothing was figured out.
You said redemption looked like a painting of fire, after a fire.

by Kate Greenstreet

published in Diagram

 

 

 

 

(photography of California wildfires by Richard D S via flickr)

No one belongs here more than you

Check out this website promoting Miranda July's new book, No one belongs here more than you.  I laughed my way through the whole thing.  (via Brent Goodman)

New Poet Laureate

Congrats to Amy King, who has just been elected the 2007 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere!  Amy does a lot to create community in the poetry world, and I admire her.

Thanks, also, to Billy Jones for organizing the election. 

The Numbers

Tonight on Technorati's list of the top ten searches for today, AWP is ahead of American Idol.  How is that possible?

Reporting AWP

I find it difficult to write about the AWP conference, even though I've been many times.  Not everyone is as stymied as I am though.  Check out Laura Moriarity's post,  La Bateau AWP, on A Tonalist Notes.   She hits the perfect pitch, quipping:

"Many were overwhelmed by little things like the 40 person coffee line and the bazillion poetry books and magazines, and I saw a lot of examples of people being way too perky"

and

"Luckily, being from the Bay Area, I am used to missing a lot a great readings every night."

If you'd rather see AWP than read about it, Amy King can help you with that.

The Be Blank Consort

In the "Cross Media" issue of Unlikely 2.0, you can find five compositions by the Be Blank Consort.  The Consort is a collaborative group of experimental writers dedicated to the creation and performance of sound-texts.   You can see their compositions and  listen to them performed as well.

Here's some of their self-description:   'The Consort was formed to perform various kinds of texts, many of them created collaboratively, in ways that would reveal new resonances and possibilities in them. Some of the pieces are poems that were written by one of them and scored for multiple voices by another. A few are entirely written and scored by one person. Many more were written in collaboration between one or more of the performers and others. The goal is to highlight language as music and sound, in addition to its function as a carrier of meaning, and to this end, they have devised various strategies of simultaneity, breaking up of lines,

stretching out of words, choral arrangements, and many others. All of them are also visual poets, and many of the pieces designed for performance are also visual poems.    '

Visual artists and poets of the Be Blank Consort include: Harriet Bart, John M. Bennett, Michael Basinski, Kathy S. Ernst, Philip Gallo, Scott Helmes, Carlos M. Luis, Michael Peters and Wendy Collin Sorin.

Contest: The Poet Webby Award

Which poet has the coolest website?

To jump start the process, I will nominate Eileen Myles.  This website, it is hip.   Your turn.

Oulipo: A Story of Three Peas

Your irony doesn't please me a bit, replied the other, and you'll not learn a thing.

Check out Raymond Queneau's  tale about three alert peas.  Yes, peas.    "A Story as You Like It" meets hypertext here. 

Read/create/enjoy.

A "Best of" for the 21st C

The annual Best American Poetry series is one of those publications that most poets I know love to hate.  Check out a new "best of" book that chooses work published only on the Internet.  I found favorites of mine, such as  Peter Jay Shippy and I also "discovered" poets new to me, such as Anne Boyer.

 

You Will Want Like Cowboys

I will want like splinters,
astonished spit, also like alphabets and minnows.

You will want at smallness,
also squirreling across the wire.

Wantings in the wilderness!
What did you think,

words?
You've seen it all before.

That's my last duchess—
all I want I've learned from her.

I want all I've learned from her.
Like Goya and church

you will fever like derangement.
You will lick no less

the ecstatic, and you will grow no more
accustomed to this dirty purse

than I to breathlessness
or pavement.

There is Kansas in the wilderness.
There is not cloudy.

All day the fingering, there your gaze,
there I will saddle up

the pillow, buckle, bobbin, tongue
I wanted from.

-Anne Boyer (Coconut)

All Things Fluxus

It is with great glee that I recently discovered the

FLUXLIST.  (Click here for a previous post on Fluxus.)

The Poetics of Uncertainty by Hazel Smith

Hello. My name is Hazel Smith. I am not a talk-show host, poetry's answer to Oprah Winfrey. I don't like public speaking and I can't crack jokes. I am probably not even your idea of a poet, since I can't hang onto metaphors or hold a monolithic voice.

I was born in Britain but I am not quite British, I have sojourned in Australia but I am not quite Australian. My grandparents left Lithuania in a hurry and I am often in a rush, but that doesn't make me Lithuanian. I am not a violinist though my violin sleeps in a cupboard, I am not an academic though I have a PhD, and I am not a poet though I am often held to ransom by the metonymic. But there have to be some putative commitments, some concessions to containment, some gatecrashing of normality. And so it seems I am Hazel Smith, British-Australian, a search term on the internet, a candidate for lunacy, no more, no less.

My grandfather was one of the first Zionists, which probably makes me a Palestinian.           

Those who have served their time sometimes have their biographies managed for them. Their address books rubbed out, their photo albums morphed. Your memories turned to manure, imagine that! And there you are, a prisoner of alien fantasies, a swerve on the ice-rink of identities, a winter born on someone else's summery breath.The Brits usually send their reinvented killers to Australia because they think Australia is a convict colony. So much for the British grasp on history.       

Hello, hello             

I forgot to add a few more notes to my list of not ams. I'm not David Antin though I might like to be, nor Spalding Gray who tragically but understandably suicided.       

This is my elegy.                

Sometimes when I'm buying a washing machine, or booking a hotel I'm known fleetingly as Hazel Dean. I'm not ashamed of it either. It takes more than marriage to wash away a face       

I think

therefore I am                             

Hazel Smith. I was born somewhere in the middle of the last century, and ever since I have been bobbing and berating at the interfaces of massacre, violence and exclusion. You can smell me in the smoke at Auschwitz, hear me in the voices of the Taliban, find me amongst stolen Aboriginal children. But I am as much predator as prey. Everywhere I see fires I have carelessly lighted, evictions I have callously condoned. In these contexts I would rather not be than be, but I am terrified of dying and would like to postpone it for as long as possible, so mostly I would rather be than not.

If I could be a witness without eyes, a listener without ears. If I could be, as I have said before, a poet without language.                                 

To continue — My name is Hazel Smith and I have written a script that I can speak from. And as you can see I am reading from it, which you are not supposed to do if you want to be successful in the theatre. So I am already a poet who has lost her way, a performer without a stage, a has-been that never could act.In fact it is impossible to keep to what is written on my piece of paper. The more I still the words the more they relocate.                                      

You see there are two types of improvisation pure and applied, and there are two types of talk primary and secondary, and any poem worth talking about has multiple addressers and addressees

which reminds me: I'm Hazel Smith. I am your lecturer for today. I am from the School of Creative Communication and my topic is the erotics of the inexact. It is hoped that you will learn something however intangible, however crass, however profane, however illegal. You will learn but by the most round about of routes, I will hang myself with academic ropes, and we will talk and laugh and shout and shit until at last we swoop on the ultimate and life-defying question       

you know the one: whether or not I am what I pretend to be or whether I am simply a landfill of fallen states, the bone of irrelevant contentions. Despite my initials, my hold on history has slipped. I do not know why I am speaking to you, and it seems like a senseless exercise in performative execution.

At such moments I am unlikely to be myself, which in these days of audience participation and writerly intent begs another salient question:       

if I am not, who is Hazel Smith, since she is definitely down to speak on this occasion. Are you Hazel? Or you? Or you? Or you? Come on my dear audience, own up. Despite all our claims neither of us is what we deny or seem. No, I am not Hazel Smith, I am not Hazel Smith,

but I can spot all the Hazel Smiths amongst you.

written by (yes) Hazel Smith

Published by TinFish

Remembering Kari Edwards

The poet Kari Edwards passed away on Saturday.  In memory of Kari, here is one of her poems.

read my lips: subtitled

take off your coat

that was the illusion

 

take off your coat

that was a short trick

containing three kilograms of space

 

yes

with the mice

yes

with the rats

yes

with spiders

yes

with deranged imagination

against a slimy wall

at will

at the door

with folded arms

a thousand eyes

evil eyes

devil eyes

veiled eyes

like birds that have died

double locked clumps

of cold laid steel

 

remember how you use to say

remember glass

and cooling secrets

at the back of my hands

 

I would stop imprisoned in smoke

blue creatures

imprisoned in a cage saying

yes

take a little sip

take a sip

take another day

a pair of unlovely smudges

 

the telephone rings

royal words

locomotive giacomettis

 

fizzy mental chain

past present imitating names

neat lines

neat with the word thief

switchboard and silence

orchestration and armored skepticism

I drown in tallow

drown in the sounds of lilacs

rubbed out telephones lines

I fuse an adjective into a van gogh

how could I fuse a week into a clover?

or maybe just wait

for the dew to settle on the sea

© kari edwards

1954 - 2006

A Wave to the Bus

Last week Houston waved hello and goodbye to the Poetry Bus (sponsored by Wave Books) as it swung through the lone star state. 

I saw their poetry "happening" at The Menil Collection on Thursday.
It was billed as a Surrealist Lunch so it happened at noon, naturally.  The event drew a big crowd of non-poets and poets alike.

Like other "happenings" that I've seen in the past, it was considerably more amusing than profound.  But I will say that for that kind of thing, it was very well done. 

I borrowed these photos from Andrea of The Aurora Picture Show. (Thanks, Andrea!)