It's a little after 9am. I'm submitting work this morning to journals. Which also means I am reading journals. Mainly from this list by Afton Wilky. I can't help but read them when I start looking up how to submit, if I can submit, the dance required for submission. It's a morning of submission.

 From the Lana Turner: "we are employed as “professional” poets and believe that our very institutional affiliations make us uniquely qualified to recognize and condemn institutionalization."  - Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr in an open letter, attempting to be president of the Poetry Foundation

 It's 9:30am and I still haven't found journals that want submissions. Bomb doesn't. Seems like ActionYes, doesn't. Pank doesn't right now either. Nobody wants submissions. 

 I remembered someone who personally asked me for a submission. So I sent some poems.

 Then I checked Fence again. Nope, not taking submissions. It's 10:11am. It's been more than an hour. One submission made. Hmmm.

Trickhouse? Not open for submissions, but they are open for receiving submissions, sort of: "if you would like to send us work for consideration, please feel free to send it to . . . @gmail.com and we will hold onto it until we do open submissions (please be aware that unless we are officially taking submissions, we may not be able to respond)." So tricky these Trickhouse folk. I submitted to them. It's 10:40am.

 Hmmm. More? Got lost in Trickhouse for a while. Loving Jen Bervin's work. And Bhanu Kapil's. And Akilah Oliver's.

 Ok, now it is 12:10pm. I just submitted some other work to the Chicago Review. I'm done. About three hours and three submissions made. Intense.

Let Walkers Rule Once A Week

The Houston Chronicle backs the drive for a walkable street once a week in Houston:

On vacation, we gravitate toward street life - spots with shop windows, sidewalk cafes, street musicians and people-watching galore. And we always wonder: How can we get more places like that in Houston?

 In this car-dominated, city, it's hard to know where to start. But we like the idea floated in a new on-line petition. Why not, it asks, open one city street to pedestrians once a week? Why not, one evening out of seven, ban cars from one stretch of pavement, and let bikes and street life rule?

 Read the whole editorial here.

And sign the petition on SignOn.org!

Streets for feet!





...there's something going on here

I don't know what it is

but it's interesting.


Why You Truly Never Leave High School

Whenever I spoke to sociologists who specialized in the rites and folkways of this strange institution, I’d ask some version of this question: Why is it that in most public high schools across America, a girl who plays the cello or a boy who plays in the marching band is a loser? And even more fundamentally: Why was it such a liability to be smart?

 The explanations tended to vary. But among the most striking was the one offered by Steinberg, who conjectured that high-school values aren’t all that different from adult values. Most adults don’t like cello or marching bands, either. Most Americans are suspicious of intellectuals. Cellists, trumpet players, and geeks may find their homes somewhere in the adult world, and even status and esteem. But only in places that draw their own kind.

 - From Why You Truly Never Leave High School at the New York Magazine.

On Beauty, David Hickey and his Retirement from Art Crit

Dave Hickey is, to put it mildly, saddened to see the small circle of beauty within which he's spent most of his life—contemporary art—decay into a predictable, safe, formulaic money-driven enterprise. His many essays on beauty add up to a valiant attempt to rescue the contemporary art world from self-inflicted self-satisfaction. If he really has abandoned the ship of art criticism, the beauty for which he's battled will be the lesser for it.

- Full article by Laurie Fendrich here at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

BIRI 2013 #3 Art Objects by Jeanette Winterson


Books I Read In 2013
#3

Art Objects
Jeanette Winterson
Knopf
1996

I got this book because I wanted to continue thinking about art criticism. Perhaps more deeply. The first essay, "Art Objects," was good for deepening my thinking about the art object (and how art objects). The rest of the book was a whole other beast.

"Art is intimacy, lover's talk, and yet it is a public declaration."

This grappling between the most intimate and the most public.

"There are plenty of Last Days signposts to persuade us that nothing is worth doing and that each one of us lives in a private nightmare occasionally relieved by temporary pleasure.  / Art is not a private nightmare, not even a private dream, it is a shared human connection that traces the possibilities of the past and future in the whorl of now."

This idea that art should do more than provide us with a window into our private nightmares.

"Art is not documentary. It may incidentally serve that function in its own way but its true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit and of the self that normally lie smothered under the weight of living."

But this documentation could also open us to dimensions of the spirit that normally lie out of reach of each of our own particular small worlds.

"I do not think it is possible (or moral) to write a book that is made to affect others without being affected oneself."

This is the question.

"It is to poets that I turn for the lessons I need and the lesson seems to be to use a variety of moood and tone to make way for those intenser moments where the writer and the word are working at maximum tautness."

This turning to poets.

In this book, Jeannette Winterson is given to grand pronouncements, large declarations. Much more so than I would have expected. Somehow, I thought her ambitions would be smaller, more contained. I was wrong. I learned something about her, I guess.

Magnitud/e


Thursday, January 31 - 6-9pm
Fotofest - 1113 Vine Street Houston TX 77023

A Literary Event Presented in Conjunction with the FotoFest Exhibition Crónicas

Magnitud/e is one of the major programs for FotoFest’s new original multi-media exhibition "Crónicas," showcasing seven contemporary Mexican visual artists who are interpreting, rather than documenting, the violence of the Mexican drug war.

This bilingual poetry event features three acclaimed poets from Northern Mexico and two from the Houston area. The work of each of these poets creates a dialogue around the on-going violence in Mexico using a variety of techniques from appropriation to translation, from slam poetry to post-conceptual writing.

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Un evento literario presentado en conjunto con Crónicas, una exposición de Fotofest

Magnitud/e es uno de los programas principales que forman parte de la nueva exposición multimedia de FotoFest, Crónicas. Esta exposición muestra el trabajo de siete artistas visuales contemporáneos de México, quienes interpretan, no solo documentan, la violencia provocada por la guerra contra las drogas en México.

Esta evento bilingüe de poesía muestra el trabajo de tres poetas reconocidos del norte de México y dos poetas de Houston. El trabajo de estos poetas crea un dialogo acerca de la violencia en México usando una variedad de técnicas desde apropiación hasta traducciones, de poesía slam hasta escritura post-conceptual.

(El resto de la versión en español sigue abajo.)

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FEATURED POETS:

Marco Antonio Huerta (Cd. Victoria, Mexico) - Translated by John Pluecker

Lupe Méndez (Houston)

John Pluecker (Houston)

Minerva Reynosa (Monterrey, Mexico) - Translated by Stalina Villarreal

Sara Uribe (Cd. Victoria, Mexico) - Translated by John Pluecker

Magnitud/e is co-sponsored with Make.Play.Speak and John Pluecker.

Special support Nuestra Palabra. This event is supported by a grant from Poets & Writers, Inc.

BIOS OF WRITERS:

Marco Antonio Huerta is a Mexican translator and post-conceptual poet, currently living in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas. During the summer of 2009 he decided to kill his own lyrical self. Part of his work has been published in the first international Conceptual Writing Journal Crux Desperationis 1, Luvina, and in Public Interest (LACE) in the Not Content section. His book Magnitud/e (2012), in coauthorship with Sara Uribe, was recently translated to English by John Pluecker. His tweets can be read at @moteltampico.

Lupe Mendez is a poet and educator (Galveston, Guadalajara, Houston), who works with Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say, the Word Around Poetry Tour and the Brazilian Arts Foundation to establish workshops and free poetry events. Lupe’s recent work is now part of Norton's newest anthology Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories From The United States and Latin America, Flash (University of Chester, England) the international forum for flash fiction, and Huizache, the magazine of Latino literature. Lupe is hard at work on an MFA through the University of Texas at El Paso.

John Pluecker is a writer, interpreter, translator and co-founder of the language justice and literary experimentation collaborative Antena.His texts have appeared in journals in the U.S. and Mexico, including The Volta, Mandorla, Aufgabe, eleven eleven, Third Text and Animal Shelter, among others. He has translated numerous books from the Spanish, including most recently Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border (Duke University Press, 2012). More info at his blog johnpluecker.blogspot.com.

Sara Uribe is a poet, originally from Querétaro, living in Tamaulipas since 1996. She has received numerous awards and grants including the FONCA and PEDCA grants from the Mexican government. She has published "Lo que no imaginas" (2005), "Palabras más palabras menos" (2006), "Nunca quise detener el tiempo" (2008) y "Goliat" (2009), among other books. She recently published the hybrid book Antígona González with Editorial Sur + in Mexico City. Her poems have appeared in periodicals and anthologies in Mexico, Peru, Spain, Canada and the United States.

Minerva Reynosa is a poet and essayist from Monterrey, Mexico. She has recently published Fotogramas de mi corazón conceptual absolutamente ciego (Consejo Estatal para la Cultura y las Artes/El Tucán de Virginia, 2012) and Atardecer en los suburbios (Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes/Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2011). She has participated in literary festivals in Mexico and abroad; her work has been translated into German, French, Russian, Swedish, and English. She has a blog with Benjamín Moreno that contains visual, technological and textual experiments: BENERVA: http://benerva.tumblr.com/

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Poetas presentados:

Marco Antonio Huerta (Cd. Victoria, México) - Traducido por John Pluecker

Lupe Méndez (Houston)

John Pluecker (Houston)

Minerva Reynosa (Monterrey, México) - Traducido por Stalina Villarreal

Sara Uribe (Cd. Victoria, México) - Traducido por John Pluecker

Magnitud/e es copatrocinado por Make.Play.Speak y John Pluecker.

Apoyo especial de Nuestra Palabra. Este evento es patrocinado por Poets & Writers, Inc.

Sobre los poetas:
Marco Antonio Huerta es un traductor y poeta post-conceptual de México, vive actualmente en Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas. Marco Antonio ganó el Premio de Poesía del Noreste 2005. Es el autor de tres colecciones de poesía: La semana milagrosa (Conarte, 2006); Golden Boy (Letras de Pasto Verde, 2009); y Hay un jardín (Tierra Adentro, 2009). Durante el verano de 2009 Marco Antonio asesinó a su 'yo' lírico.Sus textos han aparecido en antologías y publicaciones periódicas de México, España, Uruguay y Estados Unidos. Ha participado en foros de escritura experimental como “Not Content”, curado por Vanessa Place y Teresa Carmody (Los Ángeles, California, 2010), en el foro “Los límites del lenguaje” (Monterrey, NL, 2012) y en el “& Now Festival” (París, 2012). Tuitea desde http://twitter.com/moteltampico

Lupe Mendez es un poeta y educador (Galveston, Guadalajara, Houston). Lupe trabaja para las organizaciones Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say, Word Around Poetry Tour y Brazilian Arts Foundation ayudando a organizar talleres de poesía y eventos de poesía gratuitos. El trabajo reciente de Lupe es parte de la nueva antología de Norton Suden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories From The Unites States and Latin America (University of Chester, England), Flash, The International Forum for Flash Fiction, y Huizache-the magazine of Latino literature. Lupe esta hacienda una maestría en la Universidad de Texas en El Paso.

John Pluecker es un escritor, interprete, traductor y cofundador del grupo Antena, un grupo de colaboración por la justicia literaria. Sus textos han sido publicados en periódicos de los Estados Unidos y de México, incluyendo The Volta, Mandorla, Aufgabe, eleneleven, Third Text y Animal Shelter, entre otros. Ha traducido numerosos libros del español al inglés, recientemente tradujo “Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border” (Duke University Press, 2012). Para más información visitar su blog johnpluecker.blogspot.com

Sara Uribe es una poeta, originaria de Querétaro, desde 1996 radica en Tamaulipas. Sara ha recibido varios premios y becas, incluyendo las becas FONCA y PEDCA otorgadas por el gobierno Mexicano. Ha publicado: Lo que no imaginas (CONARTE, 2005); Palabras más palabras menos (IMAC, 2006); Nunca quise detener el tiempo (ITCA, 2008); Goliat (Letras de pasto verde, 2009); Magnitud –en coautoría con Marco Antonio Huerta– (Gusanos de la nada, 2012); Antígona González (Sur+, 2012) y Siam (FETA, 2012). Poemas suyos han aparecido en publicaciones periódicas y antologías de México, Perú, España, Canadá y Estados Unidos.

Minerva Reynosa es una poeta y ensayista de Monterrey, México. Minerva publicó recientemente Fotograma de mi corazón conceptual absolutamente ciego (Consejo Estatal para la Cultura y las Artes / El Tucán de Virginia, 2012) y Atardecer en los suburbios (Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes/Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2011). Minerva ha participado en festivales literarios en México y otros países, su trabajo ha sido traducido al alemán, francés, ruso, sueco e ingles. Minerva escribe en varios blogs, entre ellos esta http://ladoncelladilatada.blogspot.com/

BIRI 2013 #2: A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon by C.A. Conrad


Books I Read In 2013
#2

A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon
C.A. Conrad
Wave Books
2012

(This is a book of C.A. Conrad's (Soma)tic Exercises with the poems he wrote after doing the exercises. I read the book and got increasingly enthused and ended up writing an exercise in tribute. Here it is.) 


THE DEER AND DAISIES

"the / deer and / daisies are / not why it's / remembered"
- C.A. Conrad

Exercise: Find a site of dehumanization and trauma or violence or warfare. It can be something recent or something in the more distant past. Something close by or something you have to travel to. Terrorist attack. Drug violence. Perhaps a murder site. Perhaps a battle site nearby. Perhaps your own home. The thing is you should know right where it happened. Or have a good idea of right where it occured. You are going to go there.

As C.A. Conrad says, "The exercises are designed to fling us OUT OF our routines. Routine is what puts a cap on the imagination. [...] So the exercises give EVERYONE—no matter who—the frame to bust out of that routine, if only for a little while. The exercises get us to deliberately engage the world in unexpected ways."

Sit down in a spot where you can feel comfortable. First record the sounds of that particular place for a while. Like a few minutes. Or ten minutes. All the while take your notes. Just notes and notes. Think about what happened, but don't write about it. Feel your body in the space. Feel the fear of something bad happening to you in that same place.  Was the site a place where recent violence happened? Are you afraid something could happen to your body? Think about the ghosts that might run through that place, afraid. If you feel afraid in the space, write in that fear. If you don't feel the fear, then write in the feelings that you do have. Write what you see, what you observe, what you feel, taste, smell. Write down all of that. Try to make your writing of these notes match the rhythm of the scene, write notes with the same rhythm of the noise around you. Don't turn away from that noise. Stop and deeply listen to it. Let the writing of notes flow out of the scene in front of you. Don't feel bad about the writing not being good. Don't stress yourself in that way. Just write what you are able to write in that particular moment. Let the writing occur without getting in its way too much. There is a poem in there somewhere. Try to tease it out later.

This process of teasing out can be dicey. As C.A. Conrad says in an interview at the end of the book: "In shaping the poems there are often lines that jump out and present themselves as lines for the poem, yes, but very often lines present ways to entire new structures that were not even considered at the time of doing the exercise. Trusting the notes. Trusting too that at the time of carrying the notes around to form the poem is its own kind of exercise, BEING in the world with the notes. Does that make sense?"

If you lose hope, here is another quote from C.A.: "But WHY DO THIS? Because the world is beautiful, and I'm here, knowing its beautiful, and I'm tired of some people having money to BREATHE while others suffer. Suffering is a big part of what I look to for guidance. Suffering and love. Resistance is most urgent. Resitance is the real magic. As you soon as you set yourself down thte path of NOT being agreeable to the directives of others your poetry becomes THAT LIFE! It becomes YOUR POEMS, YOUR LIFE!"

And remember: "I never want to be anything but a student of this world who travels with other students, anxious, disturbed, always eager to imagine yet another kind of handle on the door."

BIRI 2013 #1: Green-Wood by Allison Cobb

Books I Read In 2013
#1

Green-Wood
Allison Cobb
Factory School
2010

Something about the way trees talk or don't talk. About how graves talk or don't talk. About how poetry talks or doesn't talk. "Shards of poetry glint from the prose like the pieces of metal — commemorative “dog tags” offered to soldiers, their bodies returned from Operation Iraqi Freedom for burial — that lie beside some of the graves." The poetry pierces out, like the first mention of gayness on page 124 of the book (it ends on page 131). Reproduction and the failures of reproduction. A moment when Walter Benjamin suggests that women did not walk erect, that they only learned to walk on two feet in order to have face-to-face intercourse. The way Benjamin fades. A way of thinking about history and the body, the body within history. The "I" piercing through the frame of the text as well, through the repeated fragments: saying no to poetry and still making it. Allowing poetry to filter through a bit. A sense with this book that I could read it again and again and find something brilliant again and again. Or open it to any page and read one sentence and it would be brilliant: "where light makes us, even / us, its face." How to gather things up in the face of death and war launched in the name of that death. How to listen to trees, or at least channel them through the books surrounding us. Also, the birds: faraway birds in Papua New Guinea recovered through colonial, Linnaean botanical expeditions and birds closer to home in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. 600,000 bodies feeding the trees and the land. The poetics of etymology: "Paradise comes from ancient Iran, a compound of pairi- "around" + diz "to make or form (a wall)."

Several different manuscripts happening in this book at once. A treatise on a cemetery. An exploration of trees and birds. A foray into Thoreau, Emerson, Benjamin. The history of Cleaveland. An investigation of private space, colonialism. An attempt to have a child. These fragments create a latticework; one string wandering away and then another suddenly showing back up to pick up where we left off. The latticework or the weave in the narrative. The mixing of poetic line and prose sentence. The use of the three asterisks to mark the sections off from one another. The way lists of objects appear and re-appear.

Today, the Poetry Foundation highlighted Antena and our new chapbook entitled "When We Said This Was a Space, We Meant We Were People: Antena @ Project Row Houses," which deals with our 2012 installation at Project Row Houses. As they say:

 Their contribution to the The Conversant is a collaborative multimedia chapbook about the installation at Project Row Houses. Part dialog, part documentary, part reading list and part poem, it makes the reader want to revisit the relationship between her own aesthetic and social practices. 

 It's available to read & download at The Conversant on The Volta.

I think I tend to be [...] an advocate for the invisible. The reason I write poetry rather than fiction is because I don't want to talk about the homicide that's going on in the middle of the room, I want to talk about the dust bunnies underneath the table, because they're what's not seen. So much of the world is not seen, is not acknowledged. And I grew up in a family that for reasons of religion and history and family dynamics, I had a grandfather whose first demand of his grandchildren was that we be invisible so I have a lot of solidarity with dust bunnies and with the gunk underneath my fingernails and the stuff that sort of forms a filter on the windowsill and I really do want to call attention to that over and over again as much as I humanly can because I think of it as being unbelievably important to our lives and our souls, but the only way to get to it is through poetry.

- Ron Silliman at the UCSD New Writing Series: Podcast Available Here


What if the homicide is not in the middle of the room?
The majority of homicides are not in the middle of the room.
Only a rare homicide is in the middle of the room.
Only the rarest of homicides is in the middle of the room.
One lies to say the homicide is in the middle of the room.
One body lies; the homicide is in the middle of the room.
The dust bunnies emerge to dance.
The gunk under my fingernails is still there.
The filter on the windowsill.
And the body was never in the center of the room.
And the body was quickly removed from the center of the room.


I mean this might sound really maniacal or something but I'm not I think there is a sense in which I have to claim Kant as an ancestor but only insofar as the way that that relationship would work is if in the end it would turn out that I'm his ancestor. It seems to me that first of all the Kantian construction of race is important for us to know something about precisely because it is bound up with the very constitution of the modern subject. [...] That moment where one can really see the convergence of the eruption of a theory of modern subjectivity, the emergence of a discourse on race and the emergence of a certain discourse on the aesthetic: that convergence is a fateful moment and I think it's worth paying some attention to. 

- Fred Moten in Black Kant (Pronounced Chant): A Theorizing Lecture at the Kelly Writers House, February 27, 2007: Podcast Available Here


And then I read Samuel Delaney's The Motion of Light in Water. How to chart the progressions, how to make room for change, how to recognize anxiety. How to have a nervous breakdown.

Something about all of these men together clashing up against each other.

Recent Work on the Internets

In the last few months, I've published a lot of new work on the Internets.

I've added links on the Writing page, but I thought I'd mention some of the highlights here:


The Volta/Evening Will Come: "These Little, Little Men"
+ An essay, three poems, a meandering, a wondering, a questioning, a queering.

Hear Our Houston: "That Idea of Everything"
+ An audio-poem made out of a twentyish-block walk with my father from my house to the house he grew up in the East End in Houston.

+ A visual poem built on top of a drawing from Juan Luis Berlandier's journals.

+ A short essay on a weekly street fair in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, Mexico.

+ A review of an art exhibition at the Glassell School of Art featuring the work of three African diasporic women video artists.

Turntable + Blue Light: "Last Lines"
+ A series of poems constructed out of re-, mis- and un- translated final sentences of Pedro Lemebel's crónicas.

Magnitud/e


Announcing Magnitud/e by Marco Antonio Huerta and Sara Uribe, translated by yours truly. 

Published by Producciones Gusanos de la Nada in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, Mexico.

Copies available for a limited time. Send an email to me at plujo7 at gmail dot com.