Swamplot notices some poetic signs in the First Ward in Houston.

A little Googling finds the artists responsible.

The artists are on a Mission Year, a "year long urban ministry program focused on Christian service and discipleship." As they put it, "we want to document what we make, what we learn, what we teach, and what God does through our service and creativity."

Ah, Houston: where avant-garde artistic practice meets Christian missionary practice.


Cy Twombly Dies

From the NYTimes:

In the only written statement Mr. Twombly ever made about his work, a short essay in an Italian art journal in 1957, he tried to make clear that his intentions were not subversive but elementally human. Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Years later he described this more plainly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.” The process stood in stark contrast to the detached, effete image that often clung to Mr. Twombly. After completing a work, in a kind of ecstatic state, it was as if the painting existed and he barely did anymore: “I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days.”

More here.

Three for the coming weeks



I like a folkloric relationship with the avant-garde. This is a thing our people do.

- daniel lang / levitsky


and


But some are twisted with the love of things irreconcilable / The slant moon with the slanting hill.

- Hart Crane as quoted by Eileen Myles in Inferno


and


I am awaiting, eternally and forever / a renaissance of wonder.

- Mr. Cohen quoting Mr. Ferlinghetti


Review of Dog Ear by Erica Baum

I became a member of the amazing and incredible Ugly Duckling Press this year. I'm happy. I got Dog Ear in the mail a few weeks ago. I'm even happier.

The concept behind these dog ears is clear from the outset. Someone (that someone being Erica Baum) has decided to take photos (or scan?) dog-eared pages of books. Out of these small squares of bisecting text emerge small puzzles, small challenges to the reader to re-learn how to read.

Initially, I found the squares curious. I was drawn into looking at them, attempting to read them or to decipher them. Should I read the words that were cut in half? What if the majority of the word was there, but just a piece of it was missing but I still felt like I could reasonably infer what the word would have been? Did the word exist then? How to read the tiny tips of a serif l or the squiggly lines and dots of the remainders of letters? I was puzzled, unsettled, put off, intrigued.

Kenny Goldsmith's introduction (which is (fittingly for Goldsmith) partially plagiarized from Dick Higgen's 1987 book on pattern poetry) helps us navigate the poems with his reference to the traditions of leonine verse. Higgins points out that this kind of poetry is difficult to define (Goldsmith says it's difficult to "explain") and then they both provide the same example of this sort of verse:


We are immersed in a world of choose-your-own-adventures, Goldsmith says. And I would add that they seem like small mindtwisters, mindteasers, prodding us on and poking us out of a passive reading position. Reordered or re-read in multiple ways, each text has a seemingly infinite number of readings, which made me think about the way this is a facet of most of the poetry that engages me (and the same is true for other forms of writing and art as well). We've stumbled onto an axiomatic truth about the multiplicity of possible readings of a literary text. However, Baum pushes us to think about this in an even more extreme, deranged (rearranged) kind of way. Whenever we read, we are forced to make decisions: in a long novel, we skip paragraphs or skim sections, breezing past character or situations we'd rather not dwell on. Perhaps there is a particular kind of writing or language we like in a particular book and another kind we are not so fond of, well, this propels us to make decisions as we read about how we are to read. Baum makes this process visible, forcing us to reconsider, rethink and reanimate our reading experience. With the turn of each page, we're confronted once again with the doubt: how is this to be read?

The books Baum has chosen to dog ear are hardly random. Goldsmith recommends trying to do this process with other books around you in your home in order to quickly realize just how difficult it is to make something provocative. Hopefully, this will help you to understand just what Baum's "accomplishment" really is. Baum has chosen what are all prose books (actually mass-market paperbacks) for her dog-earing. So there are words which are broken in half by dashes due to prose conventions about typesetting. How do we read these words in this poetry when necessarily they are not continued on the next line? How does this help us to think about the gap between prose and poetry? How does it make us aware of the very conventions of prose and poetry?

Some of the plates are easier than others to read. One of the more "transparent" ones is Plate XVI, Differently:


This small piece is strangely satisfying, pleasurable, even calming, mainly because there are so few extraneous bits of words: "174," "175," "MI," plus a strange squiggly shape next to "MI" and then a tiny little serif tip next to how. In comparison with all of the other dog ears, this one seems plain and clean. It's as close as we get to easy reading in the book, I think. And yet, even this one can be read in so many different ways, as Goldsmith points out in the introduction and Eileen Tabios points out in her engagement with the book.

Other squares are more dense, more crowded and more full of bits of words that stymie easy reading. Compare the experience of reading that first plate with this one, Plate VI Fallout:


Clearly this one is more of a struggle, more of a puzzle, more of a challenge for reading. "It" is cut off. A parenthesis is closed but never opened. Dashes lead into the ehter. A half "C" at the very bottom threatens. The serif tip of a "t" morphs into a bit of an "e" and then "d." But yet the title of the poem, Fallout, alludes to this kind of breakdown, this lingering radioactive cloud post-explosion.

The book is a joyful kind of hard reading, a kind of difficulty that challenges, the kind of difficulty Charles Bernstein has written about in the Attack of the Difficult Poems. I think Dog Ear is a perfect book to learn how to find the fun in reading poems that ask the reader to work, poems that ask the reader to participate, engage, judge, decide, involve themselves. Poems that force the reader to do more than simply sit back smugly in their chair and delight in a singular revelation.

Five Best Gay Books

The Good Men Project has a whole slew of queer authors naming their own five best gay books of all time. I'm not going to read all of the authors' best books, but I was into Eileen Myles' list:

The Hotel Wentley Poems by John Wieners
La Batarde by Violette Leduc
Wrong by Dennis Cooper
Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution by Jill Johnston
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

Seem worth checking out. And Sarah Schulman's:

Koolaids: The Art of War by Rabih Alameddine
“The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action” from Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw
Funeral Rites by Jean Genet
The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers

Koolaids is one of my favorite books ever. I was happy to see I had read all of Rigoberto Gónzalez's books:

Another Country by James Baldwin
The Rain God by Arturo Islas
My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel
Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me by Jaime Manrique
City of Night by John Rechy

Sometimes I feel like I am not well-read. I think I'm just well-read in certain traditions (like anyone else, one has to focus or narrow down somehow). Now back to reading.

An interview of J. Michael Martinez by Craig Santos Perez just came out on Jacket 2:

In addition, I’ve said this elsewhere, at the time I was writing the work I searched for Chicano writers who were employing formal restraints in the vein of the Language poets and other late 20th century poetics. I couldn’t find any one. This is not to say they weren’t out there, but I didn’t have access to that work. Now, I know Chican@s (as friends and colleagues) that were out there: Roberto Tejada, Gabe Gomez, Carmen Gimenez Smith, et al.

and:

I’m uncomfortable naming the work of a certain generation of writers as “avant-Latin@” writing. If anything, I think the Chican@s who are pursuing a broader aesthetic in their work have a chance to move beyond the “avant-garde” and its historical framing of literary history.

Just bought my copy of Heredities. (Feeling strange about linking to the Beast but the book is super cheap there.)

A Report from the Scene: UCSD MFA First Years on May 25, 2011


So in line with this continuing series of "reports" from the events, I took notes at the recent end-of-the-year performance for the students finishing their first year at the UC San Diego MFA in Creative Writing.

My idea is to become more of an active listener-participant at events that I attend. Appropriating words from readings and performances and making a kind of listening poem or participative, collaborative text. Moving away from listening perhaps towards writing. Trying to redefine listening as an active act that implies writing as well. Writing moves closer to listening and makes the listening an act of copying and recycling. And since I am often copying in the dark or writing quickly (so as not to be noticed and given judgmental stares), I make mistakes, I rearrange, I mess up. Then when I am trying to turn my handwritten notes into a computerized blog post, another layer of trouble arises. So much troublein the world (Bob Marley dixit). In the end, they are pieces of a moment, a bit of an experience of listening (Dolores Dorantes dixit). The spirit of recycling.

Here are my notes from the event:


Here are the retypings/rewritings of the notes:


From Amy Forrest

1. Gin rummy picks a
blemish, fiercely .
2. Edie watered a
fluid arc an orb.
3. Susie the organist plays a
other wife and second grade teacher.
4. Pill box hat fucked a
secretary with blank eyes.
5. Frostie freeze frowns a
pushed back chair.


From Kara Ford-Martinez

Take a Sentimental Journey. Go away, I'm getting out. The urine soon. Her children carry her to her clatter as she tried to raise her old pickle jar. I have my glass of wine and disleveled hesitantly. The crowd was cheering wildly.


From Jennifer Lorene Ritenour

What do I need gold for? Pearls made me young again and kiss me first. What does it feel like? Swim up to the beach in the sand. Toes shaken with a knife. She doesn't like him floating inside of her. The bleeding head hung low. A nuisance making her hungry and sick while holding her. Screech.


From Allie Moreno

To take to steal
to move to probe
to explode my name
muddies the hurt
untitled hold sky.
To broom the want
roof drink like
the pillows. I read
her I do that I
didn't no capital
the traded lemon
conditions buckle
the broke rewrites
wasted uncomfortable
munching cuddly
deamon we often
conjure spearkly peeling
the river spools.
I want to, my voice.


From the Franolous Voeltz

Borders rip blanket
still over your fingers
snow tacky flake
all six kilometers
jerry canned game.

Today people live in rooms never touched by death.

A seagull found
shimmering geese
safety time one
tell me one third
boot dance duck
shape juice out.
A river jump
off naked flesh.
Never asked blood.


From Sean Ryan

Bermless friesling cocktail erasable flowers
grass the gripping receptacles ontics the Camry
the joists and drusses migrate erasing relations
curving concrete un-self-yielding to images
of signals worn carpet ashtrays signals toilet
paper ownedness crashes ontics douchebag's
sarong its sari assasin to its own visibility.


What Fences Us In





Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Waiting room at the gastroenterologist's office.
Facts: Two female patients talk about the nervous indigestion they're suffering from. One of them, the older woman, tells the younger one about her day-to-day concerns (the kids, money, health), and now the additional issue of avoiding getting hit by a bullet. The younger one tells her that the other night she felt sick and had to go to the hospital at dawn, that she lives with her mother, she didn't want to wake her up so she wouldn't insist on going with her, not only because of the inherent risk involved, but also because if her mother went, she wouldn't have anyone to leave her son with. The older woman says, you were really lucky, because if you'd run into the bad people they could've cared less you were feeling bad. The younger woman shook her head, yeah, I was really lucky, I didn't run into anyone and they took care of me at the hospital.


Time: 6:20 p.m.
Location: Waiting room at the gastroenterologist's office.
Facts: The younger woman goes in to see the doctor, and the older woman talks to the receptionist. The older woman asks her if she's received any phone calls, like extorsion attempts to get money. She tells her the story of her neighbors, a couple of elderly people who were kidnapped by phone. On the phone, they gave instructions for them to leave their house and they went to a hotel and there, under threat of death, didn't answer any calls from their children. The kidnappers called their children and got a large sum of money from them. The elderly couple was later found at the hotel. Next, the receptionist tells her that a few moments before she received a strange call from an educated man asking her for the doctor, which seemed strange to her and she said he wasn't in, and that that same man then started asking her what kind of work she did there and other strange things. The receptionist was so scared she hung up on him.


Time: 6:50 p.m.
Location: Inside the gastroenterologist's office.
Facts: I go in and sit down on one of the seats in front of the desk, I listen to the doctor talking on his cell phone, it's clear he's talking with some family member, since he's tell them them about how he's been receiving strange phone calls. He asks them to tell his siblings to be on the lookout.


Time: 7:25 p.m.
Location: My house.
Facts: As soon as I get home from the doctor's office, I start to hear sirens. I run to check Twitter. Apparently a man's body is sprawled out on the street. On the same street I just came from, which is about two blocks away and where the doctor's office is. At an intersection close by. That all this had just taken place and that the police were showing up.


And I'm left thinking to myself: all this happened as I was walking around that area. Minutes before. Minutes after. A body in the street.


The metal fence. The tension. All of this that fences us in. And some of us insisting on jumping all the damned barriers.



Finished my studies in Tijuana/San Diego. Finished my thesis. Finished reading at the final event for us graduates. Gracias a Abraham Ávila por haber grabado esta presentación final y por animarme a seguir superando mi enemigo interior (dixit Lola). Finish line.

Just beginning to plant my feet on the ground anew. Ford me over.


Ten years after I moved back to Texas, I find myself moving back to Texas.

Both times I left California, set out from the glistening, gleaming, glinting green-infested coastline and rode over the mountains into the gray harsh lines of the desert, wondering what the hell I was doing. What makes a person go from such a spoiling landscape into such a trying one.

Ten years ago I stopped the car to take pictures as I crossed the line into Texas from New Mexico. A huge stone monument there with a lone star on the top. Then after it a sign of welcome. Today I took the same picture, but this time I didn't stop. I just slowed the car down and snapped the photo at just the right moment. The photo worked:

After crossing, piles of tumbleweeds gathered under a highway overpass on I-10. Three huge piles on each side. Like an intergalactic superhero or TXDOT had raked them into orderly piles awaiting pickup by the highway tumbleweed patrol.

Almost all of the palm trees in El Paso have died. A long freeze this past winter killed most of them off. Barrelling down asphalt, the post-like, previously-palm sentries are another welcome sign to add to the first. This ain't California no more, they say. Winters freeze the leaves off palms. Summers scald their dead fingers into crusty, crackling gray. Extremes. The way things collapse.

Essays have a function. An essay is an invitation to think about a particular something from a different vantage point. An essay argues or expounds or explains or thinks through a particular something. I am always shocked when I hear people read this blog, this old form of communication, this old man's internet game. This isn't a Tumblr or a tweet. Let's write essays that invite people into the game, posts that allow us to explore together, explode old ideas together. Let's write essays that think through things in writing, evidence of my thinking through things in writing. So that you can think through these same things in reading.

Beginning in Arizona, huge smokeclouds rose up from the mountains in the distance. Plumes of white (or green? or brown?) rising up like some kind of strange bomb had gone off on the other side of the blue-brown range. The color of the smoke changed as it floated out and dispersed over the flatlands. Darker, dustier, sandier. Mixing with dust devils. The sky became divided in two: the green, brown chalky grey on one side, Martian and desolate and eerie:



On the other the mountains gold and green and dead-grass yellow set off from the blue, blue sky blue. The highway cutting down the middle.

Colors are a challenge for me. How do I write about colors when I don't even know what each one is called? You have a different name for these colors than I do. My words for colors are bulky and primary, rough and preliminary. I'm constantly unsure of these words I put to color, the names I come up for them. A certain kind of blindness. Steadily wondering if the color I have named is not the one you would pick for it. And you are correct. I am wrong usually.

How do I write about feelings when I don't even know what each one is called? The same thinking-through goes here. I make up names for emotions, yet your happy is not my happy. Your sad isn't my sad. You are correct. I am wrong usually.

These words are bulky and primary, rough and preliminary.

As the Franklin Mountains rose up on the horizon, I knew I'd stumbled back to an intimate space, a familiarity. Sitting on the patio with a hot wind blowing down on me. My lips chapped. My mouth dried out. My I made different by this searing wind.

Maybe ten years from now I will be moving back to Texas again.


(Este es el tipo de post "personal" de blog que me hace sentir sumamente incómodo. Ni modo. Ahí le voy publicando más cosas en este espacio. A veces me vienen unas ganas y qué le puedo hacer.)

Assorted Items of Much Interest

1.

Erica Mena write about choosing only books published in small presses for her new Translation and Art class:

Teachers are in positions of power, too, because we can create a (sometimes minor) demand for certain kinds of texts, and use our assigned books to support independent presses who are more likely to publish works in translation, and works in translation that challenge the market-based norms for translation. So I decided, back in October, that I would only assign books that were published recently by small presses.

So smart this decision. Go here to see the list of incredible books she is teaching at Iowa.

+++

Need to read this book on Tim Dlugos.

From a review on Bookforum:

It might seem, on opening A Fast Life, that Tim Dlugos was born fully formed from the head of Frank O’Hara. Dlugos was undeniably an original, but his sophistication and finesse—acquired while he was still a student at La Salle College and immersing himself in the work of the New York School poets—showed from the very beginning, when he started writing at the age of twenty in 1970.

+++

Eliot Weinberger at the Quarterly Conversation talks about translation and wars and writing serial poem-essays hybrids:

Well, that statement was made twenty years ago, during the time of ethnic wars and before the rise of the unimaginable Internet. And, in American poetry, a time when the poets—with the exception of a few old hands like Rothenberg—had more or less stopped translating poetry. As I’ve written elsewhere, translation flourishes when there is a national inferiority complex or national embarrassment, and in the sense of the latter the Bush years saw a boom in translation. (Though shockingly not a boom in political poetry—another topic.) Intellectuals finally became sick of their American selves, and started wondering what other people were thinking.

+++

Counterpath in Denver seems like an awesome place. And awesome model for lit-art space.

And super cool Open Door series on the Harriet blog "showcasing performance, scholarship, and engagement outside the usual boundaries of slams, workshops, and book publications."

+++

Neo-benshi goodness.

The Morning News is Exciting

A review I wrote of The Morning News is Exciting by Don Mee Choi just went live at the Quarterly Conversation. This book moved me in so many ways to rethink issues of translation and political engagement and poetics:

Translation is at the center of the whole text. It becomes a means of searching for home, of narrating the inability to find a home: “What is truly home? I am here, but I remember there.” For Choi, translation has become an activity inseparable from her own writing; in fact, Choi seems to be questioning this very duality of translation vs “one’s own work.” Her work provokes questions: what is the difference in process between translation and writing based on appropriated text? How does collaboration and miscommunication come to form the basis of a poetics that can no longer distinguish clearly between the original and the derivative? Translation is a necessity to communication, especially due to the continuous repetition of scenes of leaving and returning. In this process, translation is at once mundane (“Translation must remain as ordinary as the bed” in “Petite Manifesto”), but is also not to be trusted—an inscrutable tool of imperialism and colonialism ( it is, in fact, the bed, “where I am likely to die”). In “Diary of Return” Choi boils it down to: “Translation for me is a form of exile and empire.” Choi is able to contain both of these realities of translation in her own writing: translation as liberatory both creatively and politically and also translation as contaminated by imperial conquest and contemporary power imbalances.

Read the whole review here.

Don't cross me. Or at least if you cross me, take pictures. Or at least if you cross me, cross me backwards. Flow upstream into my rank intestines. Snap photos and videos the whole time. This would be the colon. An ultimate expression of dirty, messy privilege. Or is this the rectum. And the fetid stream of dank and dirt. A tidal pool of waste. One of the tourists was one of the crossers and he accidentally dropped a water bottle in the brown liquid and left it there, hurrying off into the culvert. The weather balloon launched to take photos every fifteen minutes from the air, but quickly wrapped around a surveillance tower. No, it wasn't a water bottle, it was a bottle of grape-flavored clear liquid. The Mexican migra pronounced my name correctly. Pluker. Could we respell all words to make them more phonetical in all languages. What would phonetical mean in all languages. When you die, everyone agrees you should head into the light. The light represents the better place, the heaven. The performative moment that captured the imagination of the news stream. We massed in neat lines, organized by the alphabet, ordered by our first names. James, Jen, Jen, Jennifer, John, Josh, Julie. The J's. The discomfort of privilege. The grasping of it. The impossibility of losing it. The constancy with which we mourn privilege. The challenge to it. Feathery cobwebs in the corners. A medium-size carapaced beetle wandering between our feet. Does physicality accomplish anything in the end. How do we dress up the disaster, ready it for the party, fund its every need, nourish its every whim. On the other side, in the light, a tiny campsite. I love you, the teddy bear's stomach says.