Thursday, December 16, 2010

"Let's be close..." / Book Just Out


"Let's be close Rope to mast, you Old light," is now a wad of actual mass, externalized brain, a commodity into the world. One may find/purchase it at the Blue & Yellow Dog Dog bookstore, here, or at Better Homes Through Poems here. It's also listed, floating forever, over there on the right-hand side of this page.

My thanks to poet-artist-friendo Meagen Crawford for doing the cover, and to the man in the director's chair, Raymond Farr.


Some magic tid-bits to entice:


/"I bet you drive all the dry riverboys wild..."


/"A space is by fierce influence..."


/"The people are savage about
the symmetry withdrawing into its sky a star's
bones are savage
about their night."


/"...boredom on the rock,
Boredom in the stars of neckline."


/"We are animals because the sailors never see us
spit out on the shore..."


/"...I don't tell you let's
not try to be the dead."


/"Then I fell into the rosebushes,
about the green ones:
they were looking at the red ones."




Tuesday, December 14, 2010

"Being someone who still dies in fires, All has the hour..." / Winter Poems Up at Blue & Yellow Dog


The Winter 2010 Issue of Blue & Yellow Dog just went up today. New work by Sheila Murphy, Joel Chace, and Philip Byron Oakes. Grab a scoopful of barnuts and read it here.



Also blowing wind at Silliman's writings on the substance and significance of the sentence. In his collections of essays, The New Sentence (Roof, 1987), Silliman characterizes his sentence, what he determines to be the primary unit of meaning not a fragment. Working toward contextualizing the sentence, not the poetic line, he takes into account the sentence as explored by Stein, Marx's ideas on exchange-value/use-value, and Derrida (even providing a point by point breakdown of his sentence's qualities). A heavy but nutritious dose: "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World."

A magnificent piece on the matter is over at The Reading Experience 2.0: "The Horizon of The Sentence."


Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Get That Loot Kid, You Know My Function / Insulation Poems



As per the title of this venue, I've been chewing the fat of the voice. The assumed/conjured voice, rather. If agency is nowhere, or with the spooks (Spicer), or with me, who am I to unfold? If the "me" is not I, if the "I" ain't me, is a trick being played? Do we not enjoy tricks?


As a response to the charge that contemporary American literature is simply too insulated (Click-Me), I placed myself firmly within the equation of utility (user+subject=used subject) that develops away from utility toward exploitation. To see what's what, and... who's what. Stories of platform (you know, for conjuring over) I stuck with:


-33 Chilean miners trapped a half mile underground for 70 days.

-Red toxic sludge flood in Hungary.

-Mexican bicentennial amid nationwide drug war.


My response (American, to be sure) was firstly in the very approach. My efforts to keep informed of the Chilean miner situation involved simply reading the paper and collecting clippings, eyeing the telly, catching online updates (as they arrived at me, akin to how an average (?) American might've stumbled to them), discussing the stories with friends and strangers.


Secondly, the method of composing a response was a sort of conjuring, allowing the writing to respond for and about itself: several references to purchasing. Mentionings, also, of the agony of citizenship, beer, significant periods of time spent in alleys, fog horns, solitude, colonialism, blind dogs, elections, outsourcing dangerous industrial practices, crooked politicians, general and acute paranoia, rejection of the body as representative shell of character, insomnia, wondering where they buried Garcia Lorca.


I stuck with these stories for as long as they were carried by The NY Times, SF Chronicle, and USA Today.


What is ultimately, though not solely, fascinating is the fact that in the case of the miners, they began to exploit the system that championed their story, then marketed themselves to become compensated through it. Holla.


They became agents of their own exploits. Kardashians without ever having to... do whatever the Kardashians did to become The Kardashians. Had they and their dyer situation not been utilized, exploited to sell papers ( comment on mining conditions in the country, reflect the efficient leadership of the Chilean president, even showcase the global engineering technologies industry to the whole wide world ) they would not now have the opportunity to utilize, exploit that same audience to get that chedduh by selling interviews, sponsoring themselves out to various causes/products, signing autographs at malls, appearing on Letterman.




Friday, December 3, 2010

"I am a perfect cornfield I am a perfect cornfield..." / 'Baseball' in the next Otoliths



The next volume of Otoliths will feature a healthy sample from my long poem "I'm sorry , about Baseball." This extended piece commemorates my re-acquaintance with the game of baseball during the Fall of 2010, the second half of The Giants' World Series winning season. So there's fervor.

Otoliths is a quarterly e-zine that presents a varied and international cast of writers and artists that I've been eyeballing for some time. Due out in February, issue #20 is sure to be gansta, east and west coasts, no matter how you roll.




Wednesday, December 1, 2010

(Blue & Yellow Dog Titles)


Available soon: Matthew Johnstone’s Let’s be close Rope to mast, you Old light,
Adam Fieled’s Equations, and
Richard Kostelanetz’s chap book FICT IONS.