Reading this Sunday

This Sunday, at 2 p.m., Jennifer Karmin and Andy Gricevich will give a poetry reading at Avol's Bookstore. It will be a blast.

Jennifer Karmin is the author of the text-sound epic Aaaaaaaaaaalice (Flim Forum Press, forthcoming 2009). She curates the Red Rover Series and is a founding member of the public art group Anti Gravity Surprise. Her multidisciplinary projects have been presented nationally at festivals, artist-run spaces, and on city streets. Jennifer teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and works as a Poet in Residence for the Chicago Public Schools. Recent poems are published in the journals Cannot Exist, MoonLit, Otoliths, and anthologized in Come Together: Imagine Peace (Bottom Dog Press), Not A Muse (Haven Books), and The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books).

Andy Gricevich is uncomfortably writing this in the third person. He's a poet, actor, theater director and musician whose work occasionally finds the time to get itself published here and there. He spent much of the last four years melding political theater and experimental music with the Nonsense Company, and performing satirical cabaret songs with the Prince Myshkins. Andy edits Cannot Exist, a print poetry magazine put lovingly together in his living room in Madison, Wisconsin. He very rarely, and with extensive discomfort, blogs at ndgwriting.blogspot.com.

http://www.avolsbooks.com

I got way behind on the posts here while preparing for my April 25th reading in the Red Rover series (Chicago--more on it later). I have, however, kept the read-a-book/write-a-poem -a-day project up to the extent that I read 23 books in April, finishing all but 3--and wrote well over 26 poems, some of them, I think, pretty decent. I'll be trying to post the poems and blurbs (backdated) on the books here over the next week or so, but for now, here's the list of N-Z:

Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions
Ovid, Metamorphoses (didn't quite finish)
Bob Perelman, 7 Works
[no Q]
Kit Robinson, Covers
Ron Silliman, VOG
Rodrigo Toscano, Collapsible Poetics Theater (didn't quite finish)
[no U]
Cesar Vallejo, Spain, Take this Cup from Me
Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, Flat With No Key
[no X]
William Butler Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds
Louis Zukofsky, 80 Flowers

All in all, a fine trip through a bunch of mostly great stuff I hadn't read before.

Red Rover Series
{readings that play with reading}

Experiment #28:
It's Voyeuristic

SATURDAY, APRIL 25th
7pm

Featuring:
Carrie Olivia Adams & Andy Gricevich

NEW LOCATION
at the Orientation Center
2129 N. Rockwell -- Chicago, IL
corner of Milwaukee/Rockwell
left side of the Congress Theater building
http://orientationcenter.wordpress.com
suggested donation $4

CARRIE OLIVIA ADAMS lives and works in Chicago, where she also serves as poetry editor for Black Ocean and Hunger Mountain. Her poems and reviews have appeared in such journals as Backwards City Review, Cranky, DIAGRAM, Lilies and Cannonballs Review, and Verse. She is the author of Intervening Absence, published by Ahsahta Press and the chapbook, “A Useless Window.”

ANDY GRICEVICH is uncomfortably writing this in the third person. He's a poet, actor, theater director and musician whose work occasionally finds the time to get itself published here and there. He spent much of the last four years melding political theater and experimental music with the Nonsense Company, and performing satirical cabaret songs with the Prince Myshkins. Andy edits Cannot Exist, a print poetry magazine put lovingly together in his living room in Madison, Wisconsin. He very rarely, and with extensive discomfort, blogs at ndgwriting.blogspot.com.

Red Rover Series is curated by Lisa Janssen and Jennifer Karmin. Each event is designed as a reading experiment with participation by local, national, and international writers, artists, and performers. The series was founded in 2005 by Amina Cain and Jennifer Karmin.

UPCOMING
May 9th - Lisa Fishman & Aurora Tabar

Email ideas for reading experiments
to us at redroverseries@yahoogroups.com

The schedule for upcoming events is listed at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/redroverseries

things keep turning
into other things
such as lots

in which you
can turn on
a dime (barring

inflation) I'm
still wearing
my helmet



****

quoth the raven nearly nightly
"I'm a bird of some repute.
If you from my mouth won't take it
You will find it on your suit."



****


Today I tried to finish Ovid's Metamorphoses and failed. I've been reading it for a while. It's as good as it's supposed to be. The best poetry, I think, is in the descriptions (the place where a thing occurred). Weird stories.

If you are some kind of wind--and you probably are--some kind of partnership is forming with the jealous tendons, see the bulb filament its way out hat. I stopped it here because it could not. Every poem is an instance of memory, also of getting in the way. The yaks wanted their revenge on the world through linebreaks. I will give up all my bulges for you, but not the gnawing insect of my heart. Its bell rings always at horizons without register. A package awaits me under the empty sign, should I die a cushion or the persistent narrative manner of a polluted stream. Question.


*****


Today's reading: Pablo Neruda's The Book of Questions. I still haven't read much Neruda, and this late book piques my curiosity. Something a bit like an alternate Whitman in the use of repeating form (each poem composed of four or five questions, each question almost always a couplet), though the alternative is extreme (the question as contrasted with Whitman's declarative mode). Each poet employs constancy to get a wider range of possible material in than might seem possible without the formal strategy--the poem would "break" (which has an interest of its own). Neruda's questions range from jokes to childlike playfulness to surrealist impossibility to existential and political crisis. Why do I so rarely hear anyone talk about his work in the circles to which I pay attention? That fact, as well, makes me curious.

TWO MINUTE POEM

Some kind of artifact in a
suit walks in
around the wall where Hikmet
is held
shackles are a coconut
without amusement
without amount
for no particular reason
a raisin in the sun
explodes
songing weaves
abolish the heated sun


For today I almost finished the Mayer book. It's the first volume I haven't managed to complete this month, and I'll have to come back to it in what I expect to be a few "free days." Everyone who's read Mayer knows how good she is. My favorite pieces are the verse poems, many of them, especially toward the middle of the book. I like, in the prose works, the places where she, in the midst of immense catalogues of dailiness, hits on an extended historical or literary anecdote or description of a plant, etc.--the way those extended passages alter the rhythm of the work. Nearly everything about this writing is inspiring in the best sense: the palpability of the language, the stunningly prolific writing life, the devotion to it and the acceptance of poverty and uncertainty as part of that devotion. There's no better example.

impatience

impatience impatience

i should learn
to recognize it
like a botanist

plants need attention
they have no eye

*

cows rub up against ogam inscriptions
erasing their dumb letters lowing

*

A poem should not bean
but me
Claudius
carving meself
of wood
a hole
to try
rye
in


I'm reading the Bernadette Mayer Reader, but didn't finish it today. April, fortunately, has more days than the alphabet has letters, so I can take an extra day once or twice to get through a book--especially when it's longish.

where to house
that lone thought

little pieces of hail
--memory slips--

fall on
and on

an un
finished basket

like a big spider

neither will ever
be a bone

people I know are going
are a loss of stories

big wars
with dumb drones

cover over
the daily thirst

to live between
moments of thirst

and state

over the dead
who've stopped
wanting

Machaut, though
seems a guarantee

or a promise
without guarantee

as the thought is a promise,
the thought that

got lost.


2
Then there's the thing I said
instead of asking how you were
when I knew the answer was "bad,"
though it's not the answer you'd have given
had I asked. Accidentally
I pushed the button in my pocket
and Machaut burst into my ear
as if someone were calling from
an impossible distance, near and far,
in which the thought got lost.


Today's reading: Andrew Levy's Memories of My Father, another book whose excellence I'm not sure I can explain here. The book centers doubly around memories belonging to and memories about its main subject. When it's closest to literal description (especially of the hospital as the father is dying), the point of view seems to shift between that of the author and that of the father (tilting, for example, around the "gaze" and the father's complaint (?) that everyone is looking at him). The main thrust of the book, however, is the enactment, in poetic thought, of Levy's father's ethical nature, of the relation of memory to ethics, the taking in of ethical substance through memory and the process, through writing, of keeping memory active, preserving its verbal sense (remembering, an ongoing reincorporation and renegotiation) against its freezing into a noun (a container for past images). This ethical memory spreads to address economics and war, the resonances between the Depression and the war the father was in and today's circumstances. And, returning again and again, there's the question of why one writes, and what, and how. The doubt contained in this question is a positive doubt; Levy's book is, among other things, composed of answers.

(It's especially moving for me to read it as part of the sequence of books from the last few days, to connect and contrast its humanity with the kinds of humanity in and behind Iijima, Jeffers, and Koch, their different kinds of attention and their relations to the living and the dead, these embodied social presences. Something about love.)

stick not,
little tots

(pint error)
(lobed stump)

races expel
or insert rats

plat maps
to a cinder

expensive friends
latrine orchestra

hornets scrape

___________________


THE REDNESS EXPERT

sometimes it's messy
sometimes it's May [Mary?]

there is a curved [carved?] dark lie
where prisons have been won
in the "heart"

scrap, or
chin rattler
expenses

eat your inner orchestra
return to cinder

we advocate renown
via experiences in date race

cud hat seen in finest places
(crass resin expert love)

secret rat pulses
hated since 1957


Today's reading: Kenneth Koch's The Pleasures of Peace. What an antithesis to Robinson Jeffers, especially in the concluding title poem. Koch's poetry will never be a model for me, but his glee in writing, his energy--well, everyone who's read him knows about it. He is an inspiration as a writer. I love the moments in the list poems (like "Faces") where he seems to realize he can write anything he wants, and then does it--he can refer to anything as having a face, and say anything he can think of about it. And why not have a poem like "The Pleasures of Peace," which itself exemplifies one brilliant set of facets of the humanism we would like to have? His writing, which I've not been strongly attracted to for some time, keeps taking me by surprise in how far from shallow it can really be.

Moments hang,
linger

to return.
Each chair is a gift.

The sun
we'll turn
from

in passion

curves wood
to make the string
like speech

--which these
people pour

"that they may hear."


This is simply a bit of notation made while waiting for a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, a great thing to hear live, on period instruments, with two small orchestras, two small choirs plus a small children's choir, organ, and harpsichords. The introductory lecturer claimed that the baroque bow, with the curvature of its wood away from the strings--the opposite of the modern bow--mimics the consonant-vowel sequence of speech (since it produces a strong initial articulation, immediately tapering into smoothness--as opposed to the modern bow's "all-vowel" character, which matches the irritating lack of diction in most operatic performance). The music was magnificent, especially the extraordinarily strange, sparse arias in the second half, which I'd never really dug into. I thought, of course, of Louis Zukofsky, though I didn't come home and start writing "A."

Today's reading: Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems, the small, older edition published by Vintage. I've been meaning to read Jeffers for some time. I think he may be the most depressing poet I've ever read. Over and over there's the assertion that humankind is done for, and good riddance, the urge that we not speak about atrocity, but merely observe the idiocy of slaughter, starvation and willful ignorance as dispassionately as possible. Where many poets during and since the second World War have written that we can't speak about atrocity--that language can't encompass its magnitude--and many poets today say that we shouldn't because "it's bad for poetry," Jeffers urges us not to out of an ethical (though highly misanthropic) conviction. His most positive thought is the assertion that new culture can only arise from the burning and bloodbath of a decaying civilization. In contrast to the sarcasm and the ultimately bored, cynical jokesterism that usually accompany the antipolitical in the poetry world, Jeffers is dead serious, facing horror in poems that are often very good, nearly always gripping.

I wrote three "mirrors" in opposition to this stance, but they didn't turn out well, and so their implicit argument seemed to be "don't waste time writing against other writers who say we shouldn't, or can't, speak out." Maybe that's right, in some sense.

There's a powerful respect for nonhuman nature in Jeffers' work, but--in contrast to Iijima (see yesterday's post)--the gulf between the human and the nonhuman is vast, and the idea of crossing it is both dismissed and condemned. The radical indifference of hawks, stones and especially the ocean to our humanity is essential, for Jeffers, to what's powerful in it. It's a radical nonhumanity that I find philosophically attractive, except that I also see it as liberating, instead of connected to nihilistic misanthropy. I can certainly see what Jack Spicer saw in Jeffers. This is a poet whose work should, I think, be read by anyone who feels a crisis in relation to the question of political poetry--he presents problems to be dealt with. A worthy adversary.

1
you never even hear about ford anymorelock
fjord
dam (a bird just fell
lock
ford
ford
afford
afford
can't afford
can't afford to eat
little light speckled the wall
the bay
leaves in the light
logic without body
can handle this
two dollars
a day
would make it moot
moat
afloat
float
not drown

in the absurdity of starvation,
which no-one can acknowledge.

Starvation isn't hunger.
Not required.
Unrequited.
A diamond
Day
Has emerged around the nests
And sticks
To the bricks
Blinds hang
High

Somewhere there are birds
Looked to for longing
When length is a dash
then another dash, the punct

uation
of unshelter


2
A small bunny goes by in a red car
collaring any attention like a flag
then sinking in the waves

It made us laugh:
a day of invisible stars
jammed into series
by the girl whose sweaters,
flying around the room to dry,
were unemployed as she


In that uselessness
lies
turn true

or something like true
would be
were there no lies.

lies are grains cast
by tons into the sea.


3
their
boats
I
read
of
fires
dumb
flame,
name

them.



That's another improvisation, certainly in need of revision, or discarding. The point, I remind you, is to write a poem a day, and to post it in spite of embarrassment.

Today's reading: Brenda Iijima's Rabbit Lesson. It's good political poetry. Remarkable what she does, starting with the scared rabbit and the fox, wolf, bird of prey, leading from that into war scenarios and then on into strange and complex territory. The book takes animality seriously, never demoting the rabbit/predator situation to the status of metaphor for war. Each not only illuminates, but interpenetrates the other. It's about the body, with its guts, gaze, attention, response. It's not protest poetry; its compassion is in giving each thing it examines its due, trying to see clearly what it is. (This is all pretty vague--I'm in a hurry today). Iijima's use of the page is magnificent: lots of sculpted space, the density of text varied with thoughtful composition, and here and there light grey words in a much larger font floating near or behind the main text, variations on certain of its moments or beginnings of thought that would move in a different direction. It's very precise: neither the open fields of "vispo" nor the page scoring of Charles Olson or Susan Howe (where we seem to get fragments of something lost), but the movement of attention coming repeatedly into being--and an ethics of attentiveness that comes along with it.

AGAINST SPECIAL MOMENTS

Why I wake Mary O early
I will never know

I do not--for enrichment--own
the slightest view, nor its

window


*

fulfillment capital

surplus enrichment


*

(two poems that each need a second section)

1
Lobed, mellow
agreement.

Three shots
"rang

out." Blue
corps.

Add the
"e"

of the
air.


2
"More to be revealed"
said the white block
in the dark pool

You have to watch
reruns

for that.
The organizational

functions.
Loss on the vertigo-

danced horizon
of calm.


*

addenda

says the chimera

_______

laced
..........tide

_______

show your stock
a good time

bond, age, cow
(tick) talk

_______

feed us this crow
.
we don't know stones


***********

Today's reading: Carla Harryman's Open Box (improvisations). It's a great book. The form is highly liberating, and suggests valuable possibilities for writing to me. Each page consists of two four-line stanzas, with plenty of white space around them. The pairs most often seem like independent poems, but often the last line carries over syntactically into the first line of the next page, and themes recur at various points, so the book ends up reading like a very loose set of serial poems of varying lengths--or one book-length work. The way it can function formally in multiple ways thrills me--particularly the way this allows multiple simultaneous scales to work, often in friction with each other. The details (individual lines and stanzas) are generally stunning. The poems above, aside from being improvisations, have little to do with Harryman's book.