Plus the technologies are breaking down, a comma is decades in own of its making. It is dragged, when a thing is highlighted it is not remembered.
Haven't the energies to much so will get it in here as much as I can.
Krill.
Amy Wright Zinefest thing at Watkins, a very nice piece with Kaaren Engel called "Specimens, Mount 4," "…blazon bright as sunlit / off of exhumed gold…" / "…Light gobbled by amber…" / "Pierced with a gold pin… miniatures intimidate smally / those who fear astronomic catastrophe."
The Southern Festival of Books happened with standouts by Kevin Powers, Bill Brown, Deborah Bernhardt, Adrian Matejka, Kendra DeColo, Patricia Lockwood.
I think I've seen K-pow read before, his even, concentrated, direct treatment of the indirect things ( "...war is making little pieces of metal pass through each other…" ) orbiting violence, that seems like the impulse to seek within the writing, in the relations, the concern in a non-bodied origin toward bodies destroying among each other, ideas of world replacing the world itself, articulations amongst/by/from a complex of obscurities ( "…I can tell you exactly what I mean, I can tell you exactly what I mean…" ), the body is obscure when / how it is built and learns to be unbuilt, language and poetry with Powers' work too, clarifying the questions when the answers seem finished, the beginnings of silences ( 'in order to achieve a war-like state language has to fail,' war is the breaking down of language between ), the reading was "Destruction & Creation: Inspired by War."
Billy Brown, had his gentle, healed, old-school-grey poetics working, everything he said was true or rather correct from lives, them life muscles, lives that even though we don't know we know and the things in them are dedicated to us, BB brought out instances of grief and trauma in such graceful manner, imploring, letting ( which is something to admire in the writing ) as in from his own certainties he wanted to be ours too, his event was "Portraits & Voices".
D-Bern was her rad reading self, considered, diction-level operations tying to Silliman's New Sentence parameter, playful and propulsions through by the inquisitiveness of the poem itself to arrange itself, align its own parts to completion and point ( wrote "bring yourself to points" ), the breaking in of for a reassembleage back out, MORPHEMICS, PHONEMICS, the deception of layers to the words ( got a big laugh from an end of "… not my name when you are on" ), attentions heaped to its own being read and presented to the reader ( in "texture… text her" ), processual then projection, "exquisite factoid," a narrative sketched in them, at "What Stays and What Goes: Longing, Loyalty, Loss".
Adrian Matejka read on the boxer Jack Johnson in series of cool engagement, Jack in black & white playing behind him on a screen beating white men, the continuing myth, historian and project of one of creative's first american athletes ( "We eat cold eels and thing distant thoughts…" ?-! ), the enlivened history, the Bukowksi, the poetry of movement, ego, resistance and pressure, as Judo and Sambo, paradox and imposition, the event was the old "Boxing: Poems of The Pugilist Journey".
KenCo read perhaps the best reading of the event, evoking her poems with a sensational vibrance and validity, have seen before, but she is stapled ( as has been previously said ) to this Nashpo and to the body in the work ( at one point says that a teacher had upon reading the poems that would become the book Thieves in the Afterlife, that these are poems that require a measured and careful execution, the third word was "pussy" ), the augmentation of body and the relation of body to anxieties, ego, force of it pushing through the world with/into all the other ones, concern of the primary way into the world - that dermis we got ( of which for many sex is pinnacle, exacting, bonus ), "spunk," "Wendy's fish sandwiches," a great exchange on what "tone" means, those exact moments that are the authors, those difficult to cut, those that seem embedded from the start, those lines or words that seem to be about/for/with the author and not the poem.
An especially interesting thing I found in Language In Society - Sexist Discourse in Men's Health and Cosmopolitan.
PLock was the most followed online persona at the fest ( "...do you know who I am?" ), got there early enough to get in casual visual range, was hopped up or down on meds and assisted into energy to read, instead of reading 'poems' she read a series of poetic essays ( themselves poetic and damn well comedic, for which I began thinking of her as a comedian-poet because she pushes objects, associations, tangents, examples further than we see them in non-surrealist poetry, this is an especially fantastic portion in the work, leading to astonishing positions that seem not exploratory but landed, fable not story, bits on Frost and collecting leaves and neighbors building a wall for every time they see him collecting his leaves ), carnivalesque, a diatribe on names "Gary," "Orville."
The ridiculousness of the lady body, "juggy," new brutalism, weight or volume, celebrity mag, the nobility, absurdity, indifference, oppositions, intuitions/counter intuitions, fixations, wry, transparency of, these , how these formations of / composed gender perfomativity further a deep and ubiquitous inequality, sectionalism, anxiety, oppressive tendency, whose trajectory is this / these bodies, how fix, deter, grant, ease, let.
How do I not agree that poetry is comedic or comic or funny, I don't know, is comedy not poetry after something else, concept ( ? ), most comedy is not poetry, how does one laugh at ( can one laugh at anything ? ) poetry, how does one assume voice with fervency? Bringing a great certainty about to the uncertainties?
